Marcel Pouget
Elegant in a hat in the Paris metro , 1947
Oil on canvas
Signed and dated on the left
Size: 73 x 60cm
With frame: 82 x 68.5 cm
Price: 3800 €
Marcel Pouget stages an elegant woman in a place of daily life for Ile-de-France residents, the Paris metro of the 1940s. The painting is dated on the design of the wooden seats and the two-tone green and red wagons. He plays with dazzling colors, in which we find the dark circles delimiting large flat areas of bright colors, typical of the painter’s style.
Biography :
Painter, poet, choreographer and filmmaker, after having studied and started painting at the Beaux Arts in Algiers, Marcel Pouget went to Paris in 1946, aged 23, thanks to the generosity of a group of amateurs.
He only made brief appearances at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, preferring to frequent the avant-garde artists of his time – those with ties to the international artistic movement, including Alechinsky, Appel, Lindström .
His paintings are described as “Abstract Expressionist”, a term rejected by Pouget who prefers that of “New figuration”. Back in Oran in 1947, Pouget disconcerted his patrons with his style. He returns to Paris on the occasion of 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.
Although Marcel Pouget is attached to the expressionist current of the new figuration, he quickly finds his own writing. Color is at the heart of his expressionist language. His characters are surrounded by a powerful line.
Solitary and tormented, Marcel Pouget died of Legionnaire’s disease on December 5, 1985.
Bibliography:
“The constant of his work, indicates Jacques Busse, is then that he contributed to the maintenance of figuration in a period of significant abstraction”
Museums:
• Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers; George Pompidou Center – Museum of Modern Art of the city of Paris.
