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Edouard Pignon

Nouvelle Ecole de Paris

(Bully-le-Mines, 1905 - La Couture-Boussey, 1993)

Contemporary of the First World War, Edouard Pignon's childhood took place in Marles, a small mining town in the north of France. At fourteen, after his certificate of study, he worked briefly - although his father tried to dissuade him - in the service of tracks in mine galleries. Hating the deprivation of light, he becomes a plasterer in the building. He begins drawing very early in the tavern his mother holds while portraying his relatives. On his return from military service in Syria, he decided to become a painter and left for Paris where he settled around 1926. While working in various factories, he attended painting classes at the Ecole du Boulevard Montparnasse , those of the Ecole Germain Pilon and enrolled at the Workers' University. This learning is done in parallel with a union and political commitment that allows him to get closer to intellectual circles, especially through the Association of writers and artists revolutionaries. During the 1930s, while earning a living as a retoucher in photography, lithography or page editor, he participated in numerous group exhibitions and deepened his knowledge of the great masters by regularly attending the Louvre Museum. In 1939, he shows his first personal exhibition in Paris at the House of Culture, rue d'Anjou, presented by Marcel Gromaire. Member of the "Young painting", supported by the gallery of France recently created by Paul Martin, he can, at the end of the year 1943, fully devote himself to his work which, since the post-war, knows a turning point decisive. Freed from the cubist grid, his work is now driven by the desire to define the real more deeply. Contrary to the prevailing trends of his time, he affirmed in the 1950s his attachment to figuration at the same time he favored a mode of serial production where the construction of space, the articulation of forms and the question of color remain his main concerns. Passionate about history, interested in aesthetic analysis, he published The Quest for Reality in 1966 and Contre-courant in 1974, interviews where he exposed his reflections and his artistic choices. Regularly exhibited in France and abroad, his work has benefited from a major retrospective at the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 1966 and a presentation of the works preserved in the national collections in 1980. On the occasion of his Eightieth anniversary in 1985, the National Center for the Visual Arts brings together in the national galleries of the Grand Palais in Paris one hundred and fifty paintings and seventy watercolors on three floors, an exhibition that contributes to the renewal of its audience.

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Work(s)