Oil On Canvas By Renée Beja 1905 - 1979 Pupil Of Fernand Léger Nude At Reading 1930-40

Oil On Canvas By Renée Beja 1905 - 1979 Nude Reading Circa 1930-40 dimensions 65 x 54 cm without frame Biography Renée Béja's father, Avram Béja (1863-1923), Jew from Thessaloniki, widower of Filor Rey with whom he has a son, Mathieu Béja, remarried Florence Dreyfus with whom he has two children, André (1902-1922) and Renée (1905-1979). Renée Béja was still a young child when the family moved to France, in Solliès-Pont where her father worked as a miller, at the current location of Crédit Agricole. In the 1930s, Renée Béja was a pupil of Fernand Léger and she married René Berco, a dental technician, to settle in the Paris region. Between 1935 and 1938, she exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries, presenting mainly Views of Périgord, to also participate in 1938 at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Indépendants. During the Second World War, Florence Beja-Dreyfus, Renée Béja and her husband René Berco, Mathieu Béja and his wife Nadia, were saved while being hidden by Eugène Viès, an SNCF executive in Solliès-Pont, the industrialist Étienne Arnaud and the secretary of the town hall registering them under a false name in the register of inhabitants, in order to give them the right to provide tickets. However, descendants of the Gestapo forced the Béja family to leave Solliès-Pont for Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux, again with the help of Eugène Viès and his wife Walda, to whom the Yad Vashem Institute has since awarded the title of righteous. Among the nations. Based at 41, rue Blomet in Paris, Renée Béja then also worked as a decorator for the theatre. She created the sets, costumes and masks for the play Les Choéphores by Aeschylus, performed in the large amphitheater of the Sorbonne in June 1949, then at the Palais des Papes as part of the Festival d'Avignon in July 1950. The works of René Béjà, including nudes, still lifes, intimate scenes, landscapes of Provence, Brittany and Paris, were then presented at the Salon du Gemmail in Tours, evoking, as with his colleague Andrée Bordeaux-Le Pecq, experiments post -cubist and abstract. , but also classifying him, along with Germaine Lacaze, Marguerite Bermond, Geneviève Gavrel and Guillemette Morand, among the heirs of the painters of poetic reality. Renée Béja's workshop was dispersed at the Hôtel Drouot on March 26, 1996 by M es Pescheteau-Gadin, Godeau and Leroy, auctioneers in Paris. The Taylor Foundation has established an annual award named after Renée Béja. Group exhibitions Salon des Tuileries, 1935-1938. Salon d'Automne, 1938. Salon des Indépendants, 1938. etc...