Georges Cyr (1880-1964) Still Life With Earthenware 1929. School Of Rouen, Lebanon, Beirut, Egypt

New oil on canvas by Georges Cyr representing a still life with earthenware and a bouquet of flowers from 1929, signed and dated lower right + countersigned and dated on the back. Size of the canvas alone without frame 46x55cm. This is therefore a new canvas by Georges Cyr who painted a still life here in 1929, in this favorite technique, a post-impressionism tinged with fauvism, he will even adopt cubism at another period. Here he represents a bouquet of flowers with gyroflées and earthenware, he uses a palette with a brown/chocolate background, then shades of yellow/orange, purple, green, white, pink.... Customers who follow me know my interest in this painter whom I adore, I regularly offer works, whether oils or watercolors, because he was also very gifted in water painting. Georges Albert Cyr, born in Montgeron (Seine-et-Oise), on June 3, 1880 and died in Beirut on July 4, 1964, is a French and Lebanese painter and watercolorist. Between 1914 and 1928, he lived in the Rouen region. He had a predilection for painting ports, quays, beaches, boats. He exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1927 the canvases La Jetée à Honfleur and Rouen: rue des Cordeliers, in 1928 Le Havre, les bassins and Port du Havre and, in 1929, La Seine à Caudebec-en-Caux and Le Port de Fécamp and, at the Salon d'Automne in 1928, two landscapes: Le Port de Rouen and Fécamp, les falaises. He also sent to various Parisian galleries, but a personal tragedy made him leave France in 1934. He chose, almost by chance, Lebanon, where he was to spend twenty-seven years. From the start, he had no problems adapting and was surrounded by a circle of close friends, Lebanese and French living in Lebanon: G. Schéhadé, A. Tabet, G. Bounoure, J. Chevrier, H. Seyrig, G. Naccache. He worked in a modernizing movement, an avant-garde with a local color, a restricted circle such as Lebanese society could create. Everything would become more difficult from the moment when, through his position - that of artistic advisor at the French embassy, ​​which he would occupy for a few years - he would be the unofficial mentor of a French-speaking public naive enough to believe itself at the center of intelligence and taste. There reigned, at least until the end of the Mandate, a hedonism of good taste. Cyr would also be identified with the society of the Mandate while he corresponded to the divide between Mandate and independence and had wanted to be a relay between the two periods. Like Seyrig, he had contracted the mysterious virus that is the taste for life in Beirut. But where Seyrig had found only a discipline and the imperative requirement of wanting to fulfill oneself in a desert, Cyr discovered a circle of ambitious young Lebanese, for whom he represented Paris and the avant-garde, or at least what they imagined to be Paris. He then had to play the role assigned to him. He became a part of the French presence in Lebanon and delighted the society that welcomed him because it found in him the mirror of what justified it. At the time, painters had to live from the sale of their paintings, and there was necessarily a part of craftsmanship in the production of representation. Cyr was a painter with more craft than profession, and more profession than creation, but he knew how to maintain the alacrity of this profession and its exercise. He transposed local color to his own dream, which ended up making his painting appear to him as a useless parody, a perpetually changing illusion. He sold watercolors, to live. This is what Onsi and Farroukh did, who also painted Lebanese landscapes or genre scenes for wealthy buyers. Cyr maintained friendly relations with Onsi, whose wife, an Alsatian and a gardener at the Protestant College, ensured that her husband could sell a watercolor from time to time to a professor or a tourist friend. Onsi was, for his part, relatively withdrawn from all social life and did not appear as a competitor in the circles that Cyr frequented. Onsi, Farroukh and Gemayel had studied in Paris, and Cyr therefore did not bring them lessons. He quickly integrated into the pictorial and social system of the cultured fringe of Franco-Lebanese society. Farroukh found himself at the point of cleavage between the Sunni Islamic society from which he came, and which assured him his clientele, and a French society with which he felt he had to deal, not because of his studies in Paris, but because it represented a public of potential buyers. As for Gemayel, active in intellectual circles, he was perceived by Cyr as a worldly painter devoted to the facilities of commissioned portraits. They did not frequent the same circle, and clearly, their worlds did not meet. Gemayel was the painter of a Lebanese bourgeoisie in whose eyes he personified painting. Gemayel was the painter of a Lebanese bourgeoisie in whose eyes he personified painting, unlike Cyr who was considered a Parisian bohemian. Cyr also saw in Gemayel the return to a pleasant impressionism, whose painting did not justify itself. Towards the end of the 1940s, Cyr went through a very violent crisis, a questioning of his place in the history of contemporary art. His great affair became his difficult dialogue with cubism, a shifted dialogue, cubist painting as it was understood in the 1930s, but which in his case, was continually whipped up by the heat and light of the Mediterranean, as well as by a sensuality that he could no longer translate into watercolors. Having exhausted the watercolor work of the Lebanese landscape and explored all the resonances of the genre at this level, he wanted something more constructed, which would have weight in relation to the history of painting. Once the chapter on watercolors was closed, it was Paris that interested him again as a necessary issue. He made a trip there every year, exhibited there in the wake of the questions of post-cubism. His sensitivity to light came from his old background as a painter of the guinguettes on the banks of the Marne, discovering the Orient and always keeping an eye on Paris, if only to appear to be in the know in the eyes of the Lebanese. However, unlike Onsi, he exhausted himself asking himself questions, and felt that he had obtained no other answer from watercolors than the nonchalant sensuality where painting ends up being nothing more than the exercise of a voyeurism exhausted by sensation. Cyr tried to protect himself from this by the forced rigor of a cubist construction perceived through his reading of the 1930s and the temptations, perpetually diverted, of an integration into an avant-garde which was, in fact, only the commercial showcase of a country under mandate anxious to imitate its metropolis. But his painting of the late 1940s was often of a high quality in the post-cubist current, constructed and clear, measured and elegant. Cyr's pictorial objects were typically French and he had recourse to what he had learned from painting. For him, cubism seemed to be the only possible structure, the only pictorial basis of modernity. Did he have the ambition to innovate in a synthetic cubism in relation to the successes of Lhote and the vogue of neo-cubism after the Liberation? In any case, he desperately wanted to be recognized in Paris, the only and necessary challenge, at the same time as he maintained in Lebanon, in a lively and fertile way, a French cultural presence that helped many young Lebanese painters, if only to stand out from him, after having passed through the often restrictive mold of his studio. After the Second World War, Cyr measured the anachronism of his situation and questioned the value of his own painting. He wanted to blend into Lebanese life. Whether he wanted it or not, he helped to pose and catalyze the idea of ​​a Lebanese painting made by the Lebanese. He can only have asked himself the agonizing question of his place in the history of painting and in that of painting in Lebanon. In fact, if one can say that he does not fit into it, it is only because this natural unfolding does not exist. Ultimately, every painter is an accident, a happy accident when he brings something new. Cyr undoubtedly had, because of his Lebanese pictorial experience, a real historicity due to his presence, his influence, his way of reacting to an atmosphere and a country, by participating in its cultural life for a period long enough to be significant. Georges Cyr exhibited in 1935 and 1938 at the Saint-Georges Hotel in Beirut; from February 11 to 28, 1949 and from May 10 to 21, 1950, at the Center for Higher Studies in Beirut; in February 1953, and from June 16 to 30, 1954, at the Art Vivant Gallery in Paris; in December 1954 at the Fritz Gotthelf Gallery in Beirut; from October 25 to November 12, 1955 at the Art Vivant Gallery in Paris; from May 13 to 19, 1956 at the Center for Advanced Studies in Beirut; from April 5 to 20, 1957 at the Perspectives Gallery in Beirut, in 1960 and 1961 at the Alecco Saab Gallery in Beirut. A Retrospective 1933-1962 was dedicated to him in 1962, at the Center for Contemporary Art in Beirut and, in 1963, an exhibition at the Journal L'Orient. This painting is in very good original condition, delivered in a very beautiful old Montparnasse frame. Work guaranteed authentic