Yves Brayer (1907-1990) - Le cirque

Yves Brayer (1907-1990): The Circus

Engraving on Japanese paper measuring 30 x 38 cm. Copper plate size 17 x 22 cm. Signed in ink at the lower right.

Work has never been framed, in very good condition.

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Biography:

A painter who bore witness to his time, Yves Brayer established himself as one of the masters of the School of Paris. The theater, literature, the landscapes of Camargue and the Baux de Provence, and his travels provided continuous inspiration. Representing the figurative art current, he founded “a sincere classicism,” recognized by the Académie des beaux-arts, which welcomed him in 1957 as a member of the Institute. Here is Lydia Harambourg’s view on sixty years of painting.

Yves Brayer was among the painters who, between the two world wars, felt the need to cling to the surrounding reality. Those who, without ignoring them, rejected the pictorial movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, styled themselves more as disciples of Vuillard and Bonnard, such as the Poetic Reality group, or admirers of Courbet, like the Forces Nouvelles movement. While Brayer remained independent, he counted among his friends Francis Gruber, who was at the origin of the French Nouveau Réalisme in the 1950s, and whose brilliant exemplar would be Bernard Buffet.

Yves Brayer was born in Versailles in 1907, but most of his childhood was spent in Bourges. Upon arriving in Paris in 1924, he pursued the Montparnasse academies, then the School of Fine Arts. Very young, he demonstrated his personality and was encouraged by seniors such as Jean-Louis Forain. Still a student, he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Indépendants. In 1927, a state travel grant allowed him to travel to Spain, where the meeting with the masters of the Prado Museum decisively influenced his future work. After a stay in Morocco thanks to a prize created by Marshal Lyautey, he won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1930. At first he missed Spain, then he let himself be swept away by the richness of Italian life in the thirties.

Returning to Paris in 1934, he gathered his harvest in a large exhibition at the Galerie Charpentier, Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where the public discovered the authenticity of this twenty-seven-year-old painter with a powerful and original temperament.

Paris remained his home port, and after living in the Panthéon district, he settled from 1935 at rue Monsieur le Prince, in the 6th arrondissement. At various periods, he painted in Paris even while a student, in the years 1926 to 1929. Demobilized in Montauban, he settled in Cordes-sur-Ciel in the Tarn in 1940. A museum would be dedicated to him in the finest room of the town hall as early as 1960. In 1942, he returned to the capital where Jacques Rouché entrusted him with imagining the first stage and costume models for a ballet at the Paris Opera. He remained there during the occupation and painted the snowy city, then the city liberated.

The year 1945 marks a new stage in his work. In Provence, he realized that other harmonies exist beyond human-made architectures—those of pure, wild nature—and he soon became fascinated by the diversity of the Alpilles and their calcite folds, then by the expanses of the Camargue populated by white horses and black bulls. He soon settled in Provence for several months each year.

After his dark Spanish period, then ochre and red Italian tones, he diversified his palette by introducing greens, pale yellows, and a few blues. Strongly drawn to Mediterranean landscapes, he returned to work in Spain and Italy, but Provence and the Camargue would remain his places of predilection until the end of his life.

He undertook various travels to Mexico, Egypt, Iran, Greece, Russia, the United States, and Japan. Quick to seize the light and rhythms of these countries, he returned with numerous drawings and watercolors.

His taste for graphic art naturally led him to practice copper engraving and lithography; thus he produced many prints and illustrated limited-edition books with texts by Blaise Cendrars, Henry de Montherlant, Baudelaire, Paul Claudel, Jean Giono, Frédéric Mistral, etc.

Yves Brayer also authored wall decorations, tapestry cartoons, and theater set and costume models for the Théâtre Français and the Opéra de Paris, Amsterdam, Nice, Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Avignon.

His solo exhibitions made his works familiar in many countries: in Paris first, then in France, Europe, and the United States. The Bibliothèque Nationale presented in 1977 “Yves Brayer, Engraver” for his seventieth birthday, and the Musée Postal dedicated an exhibition of his works upon the release of a stamp requested for him in 1978. Finally, the MUSEE YVES BRAYER was inaugurated in September 1991 at Les Baux-de-Provence.

He is represented in various museums and numerous collections in France and abroad. He was a professor at the Grande Chaumière Academy for fifty years, President of the Salons d'Automne for five years, and, as a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, was curator of the Marmottan Museum in Paris for more than eleven years.

(Source www.yvesbrayer.com)