Artwork information

Category

Painting

Technique

Oil on canvas

Date

1963

Dimensions

73 cm x 92 cm

Signature

Signed lower right

Proof(s) of authenticity

The work is traceable in several exhibitions including Nogent le Retrou (Les peintres franco-canadiens, 1965) as well as the Museum of Pau in December 1978.

State of conservation

Very good

Framing

No

Location

Paris, France

Description

The work is characteristic of James Pichette in his lyrical period, one of the artist's most sought-after, while being realized in an oval format quite rare in his production. It is part of a series of paintings done in this format between 1962 and 1963: as such, it should be compared to a work acquired by the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and still in this public collection, executed in the same format, with similar shapes, tones and colors.

The artist

Painter

James Pichette

Born in 1920
France

Bio

James Pichette is a French painter associated with the post-war revival of non-figurative painting in Paris and the currents of lyrical abstraction and informal art. He began painting his first abstract pictures in 1942, during a stay in Haute-Savoie where he found rest despite the war, which he carried out in the air within the reconnaissance group of the French army's infantry division.

After arriving in Paris at the liberation, and having served in the ranks of the resistance, he exhibited for the first time in the capital in 1947 on the occasion of the Salon des Surindépendants. He then met famous Italian Futurist painters such as Alberto Magnelli, Gino Severini, then the Frenchman Jacques Villon, whose repeated exchanges nourished in him a taste for movement and speed, and undoubtedly inspired the development of his geometric style towards more lyricism and gestural freedom.

He then exhibited at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1950, as well as at the Salon d'Octobre, among other important exhibitions, where his paintings participated in the assault on geometric abstraction by the critic Charles Estienne and the painter Georges Mathieu.

He moved to New York in 1960 where his style became even more lyrical as he became immersed in jazz music, which he also practiced. Pichette also made paintings as part of happenings and jazz-painting experiments during music festivals.

The musical inspiration leads him to make many paintings on this theme. The canvas is then a space conceived as a stage on which a visual music made of rhythms, colors, and gestures is improvised, similar in every way to the sound poetry of jazz. The compositions can be calm, close to ballads with piano and saxophone, or they can be performed in the ardor of Free-Jazz, a musical type that Pichette particularly appreciates. Nevertheless, they are always lyrical in their gestural freedom and the expressiveness of the colors that render all the joy and vitality that animated this painter in his practice.

We are pleased to present two works of this painter dating from this beautiful period that was the 1960s and his involvement in this painting-jazz.

Other artworks by James Pichette

See all artworks by James Pichette