“saint-pierre De Montmartre” Edgar Stoëbel (1909 – 2001)

Oil on paper mounted on canvas.
Signed lower left.
Dimensions of the work: 59 cm x 44 cm
Dimensions of the frame: 74 cm x 59 cm
Good condition. Shipping: France €30 / Europe €40
Between 1946 and 1950, Edgard Stoëbel produced many figurative views of Parisian places: Montmartre, Place Clichy or Pigalle.
Edgar Stoëbel was very young by music and graphic arts, these art forms having been closely linked throughout his life.
In Oran, he created a small conservatory with seventeen musicians, and conducted an orchestra.
In 1931, he moved to Paris to work on music. He studied with Professor Léon Eugène Moreau (Grand Prix de Rome), who taught him harmony, counterpoint, fugue and piano until 1939 and the declaration of the Second World War. Mobilized, he joined his infantry corps.
In 1940, faced with the rise of Nazism, he returned to Algeria where he painted and drew, then he conducted an orchestra until 1942. Figurative works from this period can be found in collections in Algeria.
After the German capitulation on May 8, 1945, he was repatriated to Paris. He then created Éditions Stoëbel, wrote music and songs that he produced in 78 tours until the arrival of the microgroove record.
From 1945-1946, he gradually abandoned music to devote himself only to painting and drawing.
Between 1946 and 1950, he produced in particular numerous figurative views of Parisian places: Montmartre, Place Clichy or Pigalle.
From 1950, he frequented the Montparnasse des artistes and became friends with the sculptor Anton Prinner, with Pierre Loeb and Picasso. He also became friends with artists from the rue de la Grange-Batelière: Henri Goetz, Mondzain, Michonze, Meyer Lazar.
In the 1970s, he met an Irish woman in Montparnasse who introduced him to the Pub Olympia. In the evening, he sang his songs there: Le Beau Paulo, La Fille du marinero, La Joconde à Paulo, which were very successful. During these years, he drew and painted in the afternoons.
Jacques Martin made a film about the life of Stoëbel, painter and singer at the Pub Olympia.
In 1960, he invented his own writing that he called "Figura-synthesis". "Figura-synthesis" is the image that we have of an object and not of the object in its form as it appears to us: it is subjective and represents only an unreal form on all levels. The relationship between the forms constitutes "Figura-synthesis".
This makes Stoëbel a painter with a recognizable style. Emmanuel David, art dealer and collector, speaks of it in these terms: "In front of a canvas by the artist, we are struck by the personality in the conception and execution of the work. The sincerity of the emotion, the height of the tone and color, the sensitivity and simplicity of the synthetic composition, create a balance of volumes, a poetry, where the dream and the musicality give this work all its originality and quality".
Stoëbel's painting of the 1960s is part of the movement of post-war concrete abstraction, or concrete art also called Constructive Art. Long confined by art critics to what happened in painting in Paris and especially in New York, concrete abstraction was in reality a movement of global scope that developed from South America to Northern Europe and could not be reduced to the French easel painting of Bazaine, Manessier, Hartung, Estève or Gischia alone.
This movement, as Véronique Wiesinger mentions in her introduction to Abstractions en France et en Italie 1945-1975 autour de Jean Leppien, catalogue of the exhibition at the Musée de Strasbourg from November 1999 to February 2000, "far from being the artificial echo of the pre-war Paris School, or a response to American abstract expressionism, […] was, until the mid-1970s, the last fireworks of the modern movement, lighting all the fires that still burn today".
Museums:
• Montparnasse Museum, Paris, France
• Beit Uri and Rami Nechustan Museum, Israel
• Dimona Museum, Israel
• Eilat Museum, Israel
Exhibitions and Salons:
• Member of the Association of Jewish Painters, Sculptors and Engravers of France
• Salon of French Artists
• Salon d'Automne
• Salon de l'Art Libre
• 1955: Selected for the Grand Prix international de Deauville
• 1958: Solo exhibition Galerie Briard, Marseille
• 1960: Villa Robioni, Promenade des Anglais, Nice
• XXXVIe Salon Berruyer under the presidency of Mr. Lucien Lautrec at the National School of Fine Arts in Bourges
• 1963: Galerie Bernard Chêne, Paris
o Galerie Montpensier at the Palais Royal, Paris
o Galerie Louisa Carrière, Paris
o Galerie Jory, Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris
• 1963 : Galerie La Galère, Paris
• 1969 : Galerie Waldorf, Copenhagen, Denmark
• 1972 : Jewish Art Cultural Center, Paris
• 1973 : Galerie Claude Jory, Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris
o Winner of the Wizo poster competition
1974: Beit Uri and Rami Nechusht Museum, Ashdot Ya’Aqov, Israel
Hakibutz Hameuhad, Israel
P.N Emek Hajarden, Israel
Dimona Museum, Israel
Eilat Museum, Israel
1982: Silver Medal of the City of Paris for a Figurasynthesis
2000: Galerie Le Musée Privé, Paris
2006: Galerie Daniel Besseiche, Courchevel
2007: Musée du Montparnasse, Paris
2007: Galerie Gérard Hadjer, Paris 8
2008: Retrospective Grande Loge de France
2009: Galerie Karine Marquet, Paris
2022: Salons Expo4Art, Paris
Bibliography
Lydia Harambourg, Edgar Stoebel, Paris, Éditions Cercle d’art, 2007, 199 p. (ISBN 978-2-7022-0806-9).
(en) Collective, “Stoëbel, Edgar or Edgard”, Benezit Dictionary of Artists, October 31, 2011