Maurice SAVIN (1894 – 1973)
A nude woman, circa 1920 by Maurice Savin, a timeless, sculptural work imbued with great poetry.
Oil on canvas
Signed lower right
Size: 81 x 65cm
With frame: 93 x 110 cm
sold
A poetic and dreamlike female nude
The treatment of the woman face suggests the dream. Its palette is limited. The purity of the decor, where walls and bed merge, highlights this female body as if in levitation, like a sculpture of a Paleolithic Venus.
A work with cubist and symbolist accents
This 1918-1920 painting, with its cubist and symbolist overtones, can be compared with works by artists of the Montparnasse school, such as Modigliani and Kisling, and more distantly with Odilon Redon’s Sleeping Women.
Bibliography
Maurice Savin, a native of the Drôme, is an artist of great sensitivity and a very personal poetry.
After studying in Valencia, he entered the School of Decorative Arts in Paris. Savin is a complete artist, he exercises his talents in a diversity of means of artistic expression such as ceramics, tapestry (a passage by the Manufacture de Sèvres), stained glass, wall decoration of public or private buildings (wall decoration for the town hall of Montélimar in 1936), and engraving. But he never abandons pure painting.
His iconography is characterized by a strong presence of genre scenes of the countryside, of seasonal work in the fields or orchards, but also of female nudes.
In his first studio, on the Champ de Mars, he already had a great deal of discipline and sought to refine his palette to retain only the six or seven colors he worked with and to obtain the “color of light” that would flood his future canvases. Very quickly, his oils on canvas sold well. The Parisian galleries expose it. His very first exhibition took place in 1921. He regularly exhibited at official salons. Numerous prizes, up to the Legion of Honor, punctuated his artistic career, which he led with perspicacity and tenacity.
During his lifetime, despite his legendary discretion, major retrospectives were organized at the Museum of Valencia (1955) and the Palais de la Méditerranée in Nice (1969), while the Museum of Modern Art in Paris paid him a posthumous tribute in 1979. And if some monographs are devoted to his work, his admirers regret that they have not yet allowed him to find his rightful place in the history of art of the twentieth century.
Public collections
– Wall decoration of the main staircase of the town hall of Montélimar . (Drome)
– La spiaggia a Sestri” 1952 prize of the city of Sestri Levante (Italy)
Museums
– Paris, The Petit Palais, the Museum of Modern Art
– Grenoble, Sèvres
•Internationally:
Stockholm, Gothenburg, Faenza, Cairo, Lausanne, London…
Sources
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Savin
https://www.expertisez.com/magazine/maurice-savin-bonnard-drome
https://www.docantic.com/fr/page/93/maurice-savin-1894-1973-biographie
