Galerie des Modernes

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Raymond Legueult

Poetic realism

(Paris, 1898 - Paris, 1971)

Raymond Legueult was born in 1898 into a family of Parisian artists. His vocation was hardly upset. After an attempt in business school, he was, from the age of 17, a student of the School of Decorative Arts in Paris. Mobilized in 1917, he attended again this school in 1920, where he found his comrade Brianchon. A travel grant allowed him to study during the year 1922-23 in Spanish museums. 

In 1925, he was appointed a professor at the School of Decorative Arts and in 1952, he was appointed a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Since 1923, he exhibited in Paris at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, before taking part in the Salon d’Automne and Salon des Tuileries.

In 1925, he took a joint workshop with Brianchon, at Avenue du Maine, then in the 30s, with Roland Oudot. In 1925-1928, Legueult Oudot asked him to compose the sets and costumes for Griselidis and La naissance de la lyre, at the opera in Paris. They were the main representatives of the "Poetic Reality" movement that gave free rein to the poetic subjectivity and affirmed the dependence of the paint to the appearance of reality, excluding any kinship with research on abstraction. He is the affirmation of a painting in agreement with the tastes and needs of the bourgeoisie. Essentially a painter of light, he gave a continuation to the work of Bonnard. In the years of the postwar period, his sensitivity and understanding of the evolution of taste made him deviate strongly from the narrow representation of the outside world, and turned his painting into a poetic atmosphere.

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