Boxer - Luc-albert Moreau (1882-1948)

A very fine oil on canvas
re-canvassed painting
signed lower right “Luc-Albert Moreau”
countersigned, titled and dated on the back “Luc-Albert Moreau – L’Abandon – 1929”

France
1929
view: height 55cm; width. 38 cm
frame: height 75.5cm; width. 58.5 cm
subject: boxing, boxer, sport

After the war, Luc-Albert Moreau devoted himself to the art of lithography and composed the suite entitled Physiology of boxing (1926-1929), which is a landmark in iconography athletic. Luc-Albert Moreau then painted a series of paintings whose subject was boxing: including “Knock-Out”, oil on canvas, around 1927, now kept at the National Gallery of Ireland, or this painting “Abandonment” oil on canvas from 1929.

Biography:
Luc-Albert Moreau (1882-1948) is a French painter, engraver, lithographer and illustrator, close in his early days to the group known as the Black Band, then the Golden Section. After aborted law studies, but graduating from the School of Oriental Languages, Luc-Albert Moreau entered the Julian Academy in 1905 and attended the workshop of Jean-Paul Laurens where he became friends with André Dunoyer de Segonzac. Two years later, he joined the Palette academy, near the Montparnasse district: in addition to Dunoyer de Segonzac, he was close to Jean-Louis Boussingault, and the trio went on vacation to Saint-Tropez during the summer 1908 and painted together. Luc-Albert Moreau lived at this time at 15 rue du Cherche-Midi. He exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants for the first time that year. The painter Valdo Barbey is also his friend. In his early days, he was close to the group known as the Black Band (painters which brought together artists around 1900, rejecting the light tones of the post-impressionists then fashionable).

From November 20 to December 16, 1911, Luc-Albert Moreau exhibited as part of the Norman Society of Modern Painting which organized its first Parisian exhibition, at the Gallery of Ancient and Contemporary Art located at 3 rue Tronchet, then, in 1912, alongside the Cubists, at the Salon d'Automne, then at the Section d'or (The Puteaux group or Section d'or are the names given to a group of artists and critics closely linked to Cubism), and finally, he was invited by the members of the Blaue Reiter to exhibit in Munich. Mobilized in August 1914, appointed infantry lieutenant, Luc-Albert Moreau was seriously injured in June 1918 in Compiègne: during these years which marked him terribly, he executed numerous drawings, from which he took the War Suite, one of his most beautiful engraved works. In 1919, Luc-Albert Moreau was elected vice-president of the Society of Independent Artists. In 1925, he bought Charles Camoin's house in Saint-Tropez with André Villeboeuf and André Dunoyer de Segonzac and renamed it “Le Maquis”.

Through Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, his companion, who was the widow of the painter Jacques Jourdan, he became friends with the musician Maurice Ravel, the engraver Daragnès and Colette. The couple, living in Paris, regularly go to what Hélène Jourdan-Morhange calls "Luc-Albert Moreau's little cottage", Le Petit Moulin or "Manigot" in Les Mesnuls, near Montfort-l'Amaury where they found Ravel's home, the Belvédère. At the beginning of 1947, he designed the costumes for Khamma by Claude Debussy, given at the Théâtre de l'Opéra-Comique at the end of March. Luc-Albert Moreau died on April 29, 1948 in Paris. He is buried with Hélène Jourdan-Morhange in the Mesnuls cemetery. In June-July 1949, the National Library paid tribute to him by hosting an exhibition bringing together his prints and illustrated books, where Claude Roger-Marx placed him in the lineage of Honoré Daumier and Odilon Redon. Colette published in 1949, with the publisher Manuel Bruker, “In known country”, illustrated with 31 lithographs by Moreau.