Paul Colin (1892-1985) Art Deco Cubist Portrait

Table painting from the Art Deco period around 1925-30 large oil on panel by the French painter, engraver, scenographer and poster designer Paul Colin (1892-1985) signed lower right. Refined portrait of a female figure representing a young woman with a bowl of fruit personified among an elegant arrangement of geometric patterns developing a powerful combination of the Cubist Art Deco technique marked by an intense gesture punctuated by expressionist brushstrokes with kinetic energy that come ally with a fairly generous material giving birth to primitive almost wild marks in which the artist assembles the colors of a fawn palette which participate in the manual translation to form a poetic density which unfolds in a constructivist scenography with a slightly plan inclined enhanced by the material in order to harmonize the geometric planes. -Interesting subject of her Joséphine Baker period- Period frame in carved wood covered with old gold with a stepped pattern. Dimensions: 81cm high X 66cm wide. Paul Colin was born in 1895 in Nancy, he grew up there and was imbued with the creative effervescence which then animated this city which embodies one of the centers of Art Nouveau, apprenticed in a printing house in 1907 he quickly understood, in contact of the artists whose printing works publishes, that he wants to be a creator and he enrolls at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nancy. Student of Eugène Vallin in 1910, his inventive spirit was then developed by Victor Prouvé, the pioneer of Art Nouveau who taught him a taste for efficient lines but also the aspiration for novelty. Later Paul Colin will assert himself as the head of the modern school of lithographed posters. He will be the author of more than 1,400 posters and, according to Gérald Schurr, of more than 700 theatrical sets and costumes. In 1925 Paul Colin was revealed by his poster for the Revue de Joséphine Baker, made up of fifteen musicians including Sidney Bechet. Having become the fashionable poster designer, Paul Colin will work for nearly forty years for the performing arts and the performing arts, designing the poster as a closed composition and punctuated by a simple geometric system that easily catches the eye. His former friend André Daven, who became deputy director of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, appointed him poster designer and decorator, the theater then hosted the Swedish Ballets by Rolf de Maré, leading Paul Colin in 1925 to create the poster for René Clair's film Le voyage Imaginaire. . His style, at the beginning very marked by both Art Deco and New Objectivity, quickly became very personal and difficult to fit into a simple category: efficiency in the analysis “the poster must be a telegram addressed to the spirit ”he himself sums up, the synthetic accuracy of his portraits, the evocative force of his posters for great causes make him a master of visual communication whose work remains exemplary today. very current. Her album Le Tumulte noir (1927), also magnifying Joséphine Baker "Under her eyes, for the first time, I felt beautiful" she writes. He is in 1929, at the same time as a member of the new Union of modern artists, the founder and director of a drawing school, the “Paul Colin” school, on boulevard Malesherbes in Paris. There he trains students of all nationalities, for example the German Ruth Bess, who has become a recognized artist, and more particularly the famous poster artist Bernard Villemot. In 1931, he drew a portrait of Suzy Solidor at the request of Jean Mermoz, then her lover. Next to show posters, he created a poster for the 1937 Universal Exhibition or advertisements for Saint-Raphaël Quinquina. He also made sets for films (Liliom by Fritz Lang in 1934) and opera including Ravel's Child and Sortilèges in 1939 at the Paris Opera. If, after the armistice of June 1940, the artist created several posters with humanitarian themes, he refused to work for both the German occupier and the French state and thus returned to easel painting by brushing Bouquets of flowers. In 1945, Paul Colin created legendary posters, from the Liberation of Paris to the elections to the Constituent Assembly, painting became essential for him. He participated in the Salon of painters witnesses of their time and is increasingly identified as both a painter and a poster artist. Numerous personal exhibitions, such as at the Galerie Drouant-David in 1953, are devoted to him. He turns a page when he sells his workshop in Drouot in 1970. In the evening of his life, Paul Colin expresses himself through sculpture, finding the inspiration of the advertising objects he had sculpted in the thirties. He died on June 18, 1985 at the Maison des Artistes in Nogent-sur-Marne.