Marcel POUGET (1923 – 1945)

Painter, poet, choreographer and filmmaker, Marcel Pouget studied and began painting at the Beaux Arts in Algiers, before moving to Paris in 1946 at the age of 23, thanks to the generosity of a group of amateurs.He made only brief appearances at the École des Beaux-arts in Paris, preferring to associate with the avant-garde artists of his day – those with ties to the international art movement, including Alechinsky, Appel and Lindström.His paintings are described as “Abstract Expressionist”, a term rejected by Pouget, who prefers the term “New Figuration”. Back in Oran in 1947, Pouget’s style disconcerted his patrons. He returned to Paris for his first metropolitan exhibition.

The painter participates in a number of individual and collective exhibitions in Parisian galleries as well as in Europe. It appears at the Salons des Indépendants, Autumn, May and at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles.

He has acquired an international reputation, and his work has been included in numerous exhibitions abroad (Stockholm, The Hague, etc.) and in France (Galerie Claude Bernard, Galerie Ariel, and in 1966, Halle Saint-Pierre in Paris in 2016, etc.). One of his most important exhibitions, Lumière et Ténèbres, organized by Cérès Franco, took place in 1978 at Galerie L’Œil de Bœuf. This was followed by a retrospective exhibition in 1985.

Although Marcel Pouget belongs to the expressionist movement of nouvelle figuration, he quickly found his own style. Color is at the heart of his expressionist language. His figures are framed by powerful strokes.As Jacques Busse points out, the one constant in his work is that he contributed to maintaining figuration in a period of prevailing abstraction.

Solitary and tormented, Marcel Pouget died of Legionnaire’s disease on December 5, 1985.