René Duvillier (1919-2002), Abstraction Intitulé Poursuites, 1961

René Duvillier (1919-2002)
Abstract composition entitled Poursuites
Oil on canvas signed lower left
Size: 73 x 91 cm

Bibliography

René Duvillier (1919, Oyonnax - 2002, Paris) entered the Ecole des Beaux- Arts de Paris in 1935. After five years of captivity and an exhibition within the walls of the Krakow stalag, he began to make a name for himself in the so-called "Nouvelle Ecole de Paris". René Duvillier meets the artists of the Nouvelle École de Paris: he rubs shoulders with Poliakoff and Hartung, but also with painters of his generation, such as Jean Degottex and Jean Messagier, with whom he is exhibited at the "À l'Étoile Scellée" gallery directed by André Breton.

Under the leadership of art critic Charles Estienne, this gallery brought together painters from the surrealist movement and the gestural or lyrical abstraction that finally triumphed in 1955. André Breton exhibited his work and Benjamin Péret praised his pictorial work, in which the movement of the brush animates natural elements "and gives them almost supernatural attributes" (1955). And while Breton may be moved by his gestural style, in which he finds a form of surrealist automatism, his lyricism is much more focused on Nature.

International recognition, from the Guggenheim in New York (1953) to the World's Fair in Montreal (1967), in no way prevented him from being deeply moved. It was the sea in Brittany that gave him "a terrible shock" when, in 1954, he was invited by Charles Estienne to this wild coastline in North Finistère. "I found movement and gesture. Everything moved, the waves, the shore, the sky, the birds. I was especially struck by the sight of the Breton horses, their manes blowing in the wind, rising from the foam. I also rediscovered the ancient Greek myth of the birth of the sea.
From then on, he never ceased to offer a lesson in the universal, based on the minute movements of waves and air. From the horses of the Argenton Sea to the planets, from the gaze to the whirlwinds, the world painted by René Duvillier links the intimate to the universal and the human to the cosmos. He was a man of myth and vertigo, between paradoxes and successive shocks, a generous humanist, both rigorous and instinctive. I'm emotional and passionate," said the painter. I'm not looking for a simplification or a synthesis; I'm leading myself head-on, I have to keep my totality." He confronted matter and his imagination fed on life. His dynamic, gestural painting combines near-monochrome with the most vivid colors.

His works are in museums:

Center Pompidou
Musée Beaux arts de Nantes
Musée Beaux arts de Quimper
Musée Beaux arts de Brest
Musée d'art Moderne de Paris
Musée Beaux arts de Lyon

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