Fountain In The Patio, Spain

Joseph INGUIMBERTY (1896-1971)
Fountain in the patio, Spain
Oil on canvas
61 x 78 cm

Provenance :
Atelier Joseph Inguimberty

Bibliography :
Giulia Pentcheff, Joseph Inguimberty, First catalog of the painted work, 2012, reproduced under number 010 page 104 .

Certificate of authenticity :
Michel Inguimberty, son of the artist. 

Certificate of authenticity: Michel Inguimberty, son of the artist. Joseph Inguimberty is originally from Marseille. However, his artistic journey quickly took him away from his native region. He first left for Paris where he continued his apprenticeship at the National School of Decorative Arts. Then in 1925, he followed Victor Tardieu who gave him a position at the newly created Hanoi School of Fine Arts.

He remained there for more than twenty years, living and working as close as possible to the young generation of local artists, accompanying through his teaching the beginnings of modern art in Viet Nam. Alongside Alix Aymé, he is at the origin of the revival of the lacquer technique, which will be taught by them at the School in a completely new way. The war puts an end to this long Indochinese parenthesis.

Returning to France in 1946, although he kept a foothold in Marseille, the artist set up his home in Menton, where his wife was from. It finds its motifs in the landscapes of the Provençal hinterland, the olive groves and the lavender fields at the foot of the Alpilles.

From Menton, he will also explore the villages of the Roya valley, on both sides of the Italian border. Everything is fogged by the torpor of Indochina. He paints the lavender fields as a reminiscence of the rice fields, always under the spell of elsewhere. His eye must reconstruct the western volumes, capture the light of the South. To achieve this, he recreates a dimension of his own, paints Provence but keeps the memory of Asia: flat areas, juxtapositions of colors creating volumes, slenderness of forms, serenity and elegance of the whole. He inaugurates an art which intelligently imbues the familiar landscapes of Provence with a feeling of distance, which seems to want to abstract itself from space and time. An art that ignores borders.

He regularly visits the quays of Joliette, which had inspired him in the 1920s to create monumental compositions devoted to the work of dockers kept at the city's history museum. He now paints bare moles, which give an overview of the immensity of the port area. He also walks the creeks, always accompanied by his painting kit.

Inguimberty never agreed to paint other than on the motif. Before his departure to Indochina as upon his return, Marseille is a constant reference in his work, even if the vision he gives has evolved significantly. The solitary young man who had decided at the end of his studies to experience the Far Eastern adventure has given way to an accomplished artist. Prestigious Parisian galleries such as Charpentier or Romanet show his work on a regular basis while the artist, who rarely frequents the Provençal artistic community, is relatively little known in the Marseille city.

In 2012, sixty years after the only solo exhibition devoted to him in Marseille (Moullot gallery), the Alexis Pentcheff gallery paid tribute to the artist in a retrospective exhibition: The South of Joseph Inguimberty. In Viet Nam, beyond the colonial controversy, Inguimberty is today hailed as one of the major painters in the country's history. In frank and direct compositions, he knew better than anyone how to tame the secrets of the Tonkinese countryside, the delta and its inhabitants. But even in Asia, the rest of his production is little known, as if there were a tight border between the works of Indochina and those of the return to Provence. As if two artists lived in Inguimberty, the traveler and the returning painter. The first catalog of the artist's painted work, written by Giulia Pentcheff alongside the painter's children, attempts to reconcile these two aspects of his life and career.