Oil Painting-achilles Zo-lunch Dancing Among Ambushes During The Great War

Henri-Achille ZO (1873-1933) Luncheon dance among the ambushed during the Great War Oil on its original canvas 46 x 61 cm Signed lower right Indication on the back: War 1914 1918 - Paris Beautiful 19th century wooden frame natural. Two pieces on the back, corresponding to occasional restorations Son of the great Bayonne painter Achille Zo, Henri Zo was first a student of his father in Bayonne, then of Léon Bonnat and Albert Maignan in Paris. He participated in the Paris Salon in 1895, exhibiting a bullfighting scene - one of his favorite themes, along with Spanish subjects - and subsequently continued to exhibit numerous works. He also created large sets, some of which were in collaboration with Albert Maignan, such as the Foyer de l'Opéra musicale or wall decorations for the Universal Exhibition of 1900. In 1914, he presented at the Salon des Artistes français an important triptych in the form tribute: Léon Bonnat and his Basque and Béarnais students, intended to adorn the patio of the Bonnat museum in Bayonne. And in 1925, then in 1927, it was the Basque Museum which honored him with major exhibitions of his paintings. Henri Zo died in 1933 in Onesse-et-Laharie, in a car accident. His works are present in numerous museums: Bonnat Museum, Basque Museum, museums of Bordeaux, Pau, Lourdes, Nîmes, San Sebastian, Philadelphia, etc. Brilliantly removed with a palette knife, our dance scene dazzles with its Boldini-style gestures and pushes the dynamics of the sketch to the point of abstraction. But the interest of the canvas is not only in its style. An indication on the back: War 1914 1918, gives it an unexpected moral significance at first glance. While the fighting rages and the poilus fall every day by the thousands on the front, this rage for pleasures at the rear seems indecent. In a passage from Time Recovered, Marcel Proust seems to give us a literary equivalent of HA Zo's painting: “At dinner time, the restaurants were full; and if, passing in the street, I saw a poor leaver, escaped for six days from the permanent risk of death, and ready to leave for the trenches, stopping his eyes for a moment in front of the illuminated windows, I suffered like in the hotel of Balbec, when fishermen watched us dine, but I suffered more because I knew that the misery of the soldier is greater than that of the poor, uniting them all, and even more touching because it is more resigned, more noble, and that it was with a philosophical nod of the head, without hatred, that ready to leave for war, he said as he saw the ambushers jostling for their tables: “One wouldn't say that it's war here. »