Marcel Pouget (1923-1985) Portrait, 1948

Marcel Pouget (1923-1985) Personage, 1948, oil on hardboard, cm. 72,5 x 54
Signed and dated lower left.
With frame: cm. 89,5 x 70,5 x 7

Provenance: Paris, private collection

In 1943, he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Oran, then spent a year in Paris where he later settled. Despite his difficult character, he still managed to integrate himself into the avant-garde artistic milieu of his generation, and in particular with the artists of the international expressionist movement, including Alechinsky, Appel, Lindstrom, Maryan.
Since 1947 he has participated in various group exhibitions, at the Salon des Indépendants, Salon d'Automne, Salon de Mai, Réalité Nouvelles. Since 1949 he has exhibited in groups and individually in galleries: Denise Breteau, Arnaud, Art Vivant, Claude Bernard, Ariel, L'Oeil-de-Boeuf, which in 1984 organized for him a retrospective of his thirty-five years of painting. His first "real" painting, The Drunken Boat, was produced in 1946, during his stay in Paris. Since 1947, his works have already been perfectly thought out and constructed. From the 1950s, although his works seem to tend towards an abstraction based on rigor, they show expressionist values ​​in content and colors. Despite the dominant tendencies towards abstraction at that time, Pouget contributed to the life of figurative art. From this perspective, his post-war art is very close to that of the Cobra group and to this art that will later be called “New Figuration”. Finally Pouget flourishes in a fully conscious expressionism, mastering his large format technique and alternating bands of black paint with vast backgrounds of violent colors in deliberate chromatic disagreement, tirelessly passing all the stages of human suffering. We have also been able to recognize, especially in recent years, a desire for symbology in his works, a claim of authorship of the “psycho-painting” which he calls “initiatory painting”. Some critics prefer to identify these works as "hallucinatory visions", referring to the title "rimbaudiano" of his first painting and it is not even difficult to see in him the "seeing" artist.


Museums: Belgium (Veranner Foundation); Israel (Tel Aviv Museum), Algiers, National Museum; Paris (National Museum of Modern Art, City Museum of Modern Art, FNAC National Contemporary Art Fund).

The painting is in good condition.

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