Pierre Montheillet (1923-2011) - Yellow And Black Composition

Pierre Montheillet (1923-2011)
Composition in yellow
Watercolor and gouache on paper
Signed lower left
Dimensions of the work: 50 x 65 cm
Dimensions of the frame: 60 x 80 cm

Lyonnais artist, son and grandson of art dealers , Pierre Montheillet initiates himself to painting in contact with the canvases exhibited in the paternal gallery on rue Duguesclin. He discovered with great admiration the works of the painter Auguste Ravier (1814-1895) of which he would become the official expert. For more than forty years, he occupied the forefront of the visual arts in Lyon.

Pierre Montheillet exhibited for the first time at the Salon d'Automne in 1939. At the end of the 1940s, he turned permanently to a non-figurative painting. It is a pictorial tendency which is distinguished from imitative art but also from abstraction and whose manifest exhibition “Twenty young painters of the French tradition” organized in 1941 by Jean Bazaine brings together artists such as Alfred Manessier or Charles Lapicque.

Defining himself above all as a landscape painter, Pierre Montheillet matures his plastic writing in contact with Hans Hartung whom he meets in 1948. He develops a very personal language and quickly becomes the Lyon master of abstract landscaping.

Pierre Montheillet maintains a close relationship with the landscape without however worrying about any resemblance to the reality offered to him. Through a clever play of rhythms and colors, his works express the emotions felt in the face of nature, of which he translates forces and structures. He transcribes on the canvas the sensations that the outside world gives him, thus leaving greater freedom of reading to the spectator.

Pierre Montheillet's works lose their figurative aspect while refuting the gratuitousness of the lyrical gesture proper to abstraction. The gouache watercolor that we offer consists of an alternation of large areas of light and shade in an order apparently more intuitive than reflected. The painter expresses there the spontaneity of the feelings felt in front of nature and the particular landscape which occupies him at this precise moment while retaining control of the gesture proper in his own way.