René Brô Portrait

Portrait by René BRÔ oil on canvas signed lower right.. René Brô was born in Charenton near Paris. After completing his studies in 1944, at the age of fourteen, he began studying art in different art schools. At the same time, he supported himself as a commercial artist. In the late 1940s, he frequently visited the Musée de l'Homme and the Louvre. He was particularly attracted to primitive art and the art of ancient Egypt. Brô's works from this period – pottery, drawings and paintings – are close to the works of Paul Klee or those that Jean Dubuffet described as art brut. In 1949, René Brô exhibited for the first time, during a joint exhibition in Paris. He then hitchhiked to Italy. During this trip he met the Austrian painter Hundertwasser, two years his senior, who was also traveling; they were to be friends for life. Shortly after their return to France in 1950, they tackled together the mural painting on the walls of a Dumage family pavilion where Hundertwasser was staying in Saint-Mandé near Paris. Many years later, when this building was demolished in 1964, the two murals were saved from demolition. One of them, The Miraculous Catch, is now in the KunstHausWien, Hundertwasser's museum in Vienna. The other wall, Paradise - Land of Men, Birds and Ships, was installed at a synagogue on Long Island, New York, where it was removed in 2008. He produced numerous successful exhibitions in Europe and around the world in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1984, he spent several months in Tahiti, where he exhibited at the Gauguin Museum. He returned two years later then retired to his country house in Courgeron Normand, dying at the age of 56.