Oscar Gauthier

Composition , dated 1952
Oil on canvas
Signed and dated lower right
Features a sketch on the back of the canvas.
Size: 73 x 60cm
With frame: 99 x 86 cm
Price: 28000€

Oscar Gauthier delivers a dynamic painting, populated with vibrant colors. Described as a color craftsman, he is above all a master of the line. In this Composition , the artist holds the attention of the spectators in the foreground. The geometric shapes are punctuated with points of force, and rhythm with dexterity on the surface of the canvas, which one would think was a musical score.

Oscar Gauthier, one of the leaders of lyrical Abstaction, is an abstract landscape painter, preoccupied with light and movement. His work from the 1950s, using a thick and structured material, is to be situated in abstract expressionism.

Born in Nièvre, Oscar Gauthier moved to Paris at the age of ten. Around the age of twenty, he trained at the Beaux Arts in Paris and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (Othon Friesz’s studio). His studies were disrupted by the Second World War, he joined the Resistance. In 1947, he obtained a scholarship to stay in the United States. He travels to Mexico, discovers pre-Columbian art and Mexican muralists, is greatly inspired and sells a few paintings.

Back in France in 1948, he was supported by the Colette Allandy gallery. He left her to join the group of the painter John-Franklin Koenig in Saint-Germain-des-Prés around 1952. They are supported by Jean-Robert Arnaud who, associated with the painter John-Franklin Koenig, opens a gallery at 34 rue du Four. For ten years, the place was the crossroads of Lyrical Abstraction, or “Lyrical Landscaping” (or according to Michel Ragon’s term).

Bibliography :

• Lyrical Abstraction, Paris 1945-1956, Paris, Skira editions, 2006.

See also all the publications of articles by Roger van Gindertael, painter then art critic between the 1950s and 1960s in Paris.

Museums :

• National Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris

• Nantes Museum of Fine Arts

• National Center for Plastic Arts

• Contemporary art fund of the city of Paris