Project Description

Ink on paper

Dimensions : 21 cm x 32 cm

Signed lower right Yves Brayer : Gérard Singer 21 February 1938 Yves Brayer

Signed and located lower left by Gérard Singer : gérard singer, atelier 22 rue Mr le Prince

In my workshop with Gérard Singer 1938

Yves Brayer (1929 – 2007)

Born the 18 November 1907 at Versailles and died on 29 May 1990 in Paris, is a painter, engraver, French illustrator and theater designer.

Faithful to the tradition of figurative art, he is one of the masters of the School of Paris. Using a wide variety of techniques, he is the author of an abundant production of landscapes but also of large compositions, figures and still lifes.

His childhood,

Most of Yves Brayer's childhood took place in Bourges where his father, polytechnic officer and rider, transmits to him the passion for horses. A stay in Provence with his mother introduced him to landscapes that dazzled him and were reflected in his sketches.. Impressed, his mother enrolled him at the Bourges School of Applied Arts. While he is destined for a military career, a horse kick fractures his kneecap. It was then that he definitively turned to painting..

Upon his arrival in Paris in 1924,

where his father, who became a general, was assigned to the Ministry of War, he attends the academies of Montparnasse and the Grande Chaumière, then the Paris School of Fine Arts where he was appointed professor in 1926. He asserts his personality from his youth. Elders, like Jean-Louis Forain, encourage him, and the sculptor Robert Wlérick introduced him to modeling. Still student, he exhibited at the Salon d & rsquo; Automne and the Salon des Indépendants.

In 1927 a state travel grant allowed him to make his “Grand Tour” and go to Spain where the meeting with the masters of the Prado Museum in Madrid would have a decisive influence on his future work. After a stay in Morocco thanks to a prize created by Marshal Lyautey, he won the Grand Prix de Rome in painting by 1930.

First of all he regrets Spain, then he lets himself be carried away by the richness of Italian life over the years 1930 and the pleasures of life at the Villa Medici, then led by the sculptor Paul Landowski.

On his return to Paris in 1934,

he brings together his harvest in a major exhibition at the Galerie Charpentier, Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where the public discovers the authenticity of this twenty-seven-year-old painter with a powerful and original temperament. After living in the Panthéon district, he moved, from 1935, rue Monsieur-le-Prince, in the sixth arrondissement. Then 1936 at 1938, it bears witness to the work preceding the Paris International Exhibition, parties and receptions that he is allowed to attend.

Demobilized in Montauban in 1940,

he stayed during the war in Cordes-sur-Ciel, in the Tarn, where the architecture of the Albigenses reminds him of the colors of Rome. In 1942 he returned to the capital where Jacques Rouché commissioned him to imagine his first models of sets and costumes for a ballet at the Paris Opera. He stayed there during the occupation and painted the snowy city, then the city liberated.

The year 1945

marks a new stage in his work. He marries Hermione Falex (1921-2019) who becomes his model and support. In Provence he realizes that there are other harmonies than those of architectures created by Man, those of pure and wild nature, and he was soon fascinated by the diversity of the Alpilles and their limestone folds then by the expanses of the Camargue populated by white horses and black bulls. He soon settles in Provence for several months each year. At first his works disconcerted the public who kept the memory of Italian architecture, then fans will get used to its landscapes of Provence and Camargue which will ultimately make it famous. When he returned to Italy and Spain in 1948 and 1949, his vision and style will then be more stripped down.

In 1954, he holds the Grand Prix des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

In 1957,

he won the Grand Prize from the President of the Republic at the Menton Biennale.

He was elected a member of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1957, in the chair of Charles Fouqueray. The filmmaker Henri Verneuil succeeded him in 2000 and pronounces his eulogy under the Dome the same year.

In 1978,

he is guest of honor at the Salon of Norman Independent Artists in Rouen.

He works in Mexico, in Egypt, in Iran, in Greece, in Russia, in the United States and Japan. Quickly seizing the light and rhythms of a country, he brings back numerous watercolors from his travels.

He was a professor at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière for fifty years (he had, among others, Gabriel Dauchot as a student.), vice-president for five years of the Salon d’Automne from 1981 and, in 1977, as a member of the Academy of Fine Arts, curator of the Marmottan museum in Paris for more than eleven years during which he organized prestigious exhibitions.

Headwear collector, his relatives could see his home in the VI^e district of Paris : generals bicorns, Chinese mandarin caps, Far Eastern straw hat, military hats, Native American headdresses with hair or feathers, royal touches, as well as numerous paintings and watercolors : Cezanne, Degas, Derain, Duffy, Fairground, Laurencin, Renoir, Utrillo, Utter, Valadon, Vlaminck, most of them offered by his artist friends.

Came from his collection, among other lots put up for public sale in Rennes on 2/03/2020, a headless and armless statue of a female deity of the II^e century AD.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Brayer

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