Portrait Of A Young Man By Walter Sauer

Superb pastel by the Belgian artist Walter Sauer. The frame needs to be restored. There is a small brown stain on the right, nothing serious. He is one of the great Belgian designers. With frame 45cm by 55cm. . In June 1911, the Charles Buls Foundation awarded him a grant of 1,000 gold francs4, a sum which would be doubled by his father to enable him to travel. A good part of the year 1911 was devoted to this trip which took the young man to France (Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Côte d'Azur), then to Italy. He went to the Vanden Eeckhoudts around March–April, where he met Victor Rousseau. In 1914, he participated in the Salon de La Libre Esthétique and the Brussels Triennial Salon, which revealed one of his ambitions: large-scale decorative painting. He won second prize in the Godecharle competition with the work L'Atlantide. The war led to difficult years for artists and Walter Sauer, exempted from all combat by his fragile health4, abandoned painting around 1916 to devote himself to drawing. He then freed himself from the stylistic influence of Vanden Eeckhoudt and gave free rein to his deep nature, nourished by the advice and spirit of Victor Rousseau as well as his love for oriental art. In July 1917, he presented several works at the Salon of Nude Painters and Sculptors organized by Isy Brachot with whom he had just signed a contract. The woman is at the center of her creation: a woman in all her states, from dream to laughter, from pleasure to intoxication, from naked to contemplation. Many papers that served as a support for the drawings have the particularity of being waxed by the artist in order to give an ivory tone to the models represented. Sauer developed, mainly after 1923, the work with gold or silver leaf by proceeding in two different ways: either he applied the leaves as a background to a paper and glued his drawing on it which he had previously cut out, or he surrounds his drawing with the metallic background.