Pierre Montheillet (1923-2011) - Composition In Gray

Pierre Montheillet (1923-2011)
Composition in gray
Gouache and wash on laid paper
Signed "Montheillet" lower right
Dimensions of the work: 24 x 32 cm
Dimensions of the frame: 40 x 50 cm

Artist from Lyon, son and grandson painting dealers, Pierre Montheillet was initiated into painting on his own through 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 appointed expert. He will occupy, for more than forty years, the front of the plastic arts scene in Lyon.

Pierre Montheillet exhibited for the first time at the Salon d'Automne in 1939 before turning definitively towards a non-figurative painting at the end of the 1940s. This is a pictorial tendency which is distinguished from imitative art. but also abstraction and whose exhibition manifests “Twenty young painters of the French tradition” organized in 1941 by Jean Bazaine brings together artists such as Alfred Manessier and Charles Lapicque.

Defining himself above all as a landscape painter, Pierre Montheillet matured his plastic writing in contact with Hans Hartung, whom he met in 1948. He developed a very personal language and quickly became Lyon's master of abstract landscaping. He thus maintains a close relationship with the landscape without, however, worrying about any resemblance to the reality that is offered to him. Pierre Montheillet's works lose their figurative aspect while refuting the gratuitousness of the lyrical gesture specific to abstraction. Through a clever play of rhythms and colors, his works express the emotions felt in front of nature. He transcribes on the canvas the sensations that the outside world gives him, thus leaving a great freedom of reading to the spectator.

The gouache watercolor that we offer consists of an alternation of large areas of light and shadow in an order apparently more intuitive than reflected. The painter expresses the spontaneity of the emotions felt in front of nature and the particular landscape which occupies him at this precise moment while maintaining the mastery of the gesture specific to his way.

© AB / AC art dealer