Fritz Vanderpyl, Poète And Art Critic, 1950 By Ferdinand Desnos Art Native Outsider Art

oil on hardboard panel, signed and dated 1950 lower left, limed oak frame.

In spite of poor health, Ferdinand Desnos had a happy peasant childhood with parents who were bakers and then winegrowers. His taste for drawing and painting was encouraged by his mother who gave him, at the age of nine, his first box of colors. He flourished during adolescence, dividing his time between making music in a jazz orchestra and painting, practising both day and night. His first oils on canvas, scenes and landscapes of the Touraine countryside, date from 1919. In 1923, the year of his marriage, he moved to the small town of Montrichard. He was forced, by his precarious health, to lead an unstable life, working various odd jobs. His move to Paris in 1930 followed a period of poverty and illness; he worked for a while for a toy merchant (of whom he created a beautiful portrait on hardboard) then worked as an electrician at the Petit Parisien. There, he met the art critic Vanderpyl thanks to whom he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants. The years 1933 (date of his return to Touraine due to tuberculosis) to 1939 represent a series of miseries, the loss of one of his daughters, and search for employment. The war period inspired him to produce tragic works; in 1942 and 1943 the La Boétie gallery devoted two personal exhibitions to him and all his production was purchased by a rich industrialist. The immediate post-war period was no happier. Desnos was affected in 1945 by two successive bereavements: that of his older brother, who inspired him to create an exceptional work produced on May 8, Victory Day, and the death of his cousin, the surrealist poet Robert Desnos. T
he work of this visionary painter, at the limits of the fantastic, unfolds on a very varied register. From his radiant palette of colors - used straight out of the tube - emerge landscapes of his native Touraine, scenes of mythological and animal inspiration but also religious compositions. He was also a talented portrait painter. Undermined by a life of hardship, illness and incomprehension, Desnos died of a serious operation in 1958.
He who during his lifetime only interested a tiny circle of collectors is today the subject of studies, catalogs, retrospectives, and has entered museums. Personal exhibitions: Galerie La Boétie, Paris, 1943.
Fernand Desnos retrospective, Tours Museum of Fine Arts, 1963.
Fernand Desnos, paintings, Tavet-Delacour Museum, Pontoise, 1980.
Third International Salon of Naive Art - Tribute to the painter Ferdinand Desnos, Paris, May-June 1986.
Fernand Desnos retrospective, Anatole Jakovsky International Museum of Naive Art, Nice, 1993.
The museum, Pontlevoy, 2004.
Ferdinand Desnos in the plein air, Pontlevoy, 2012