Yves Brayer (1907-1990) - Promenade à cheval

Yves Brayer (1907-1990): Horseback Ride

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

Work never framed, in very good condition.

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Biography:

Painter who bore witness to his time, Yves Brayer revealed himself as one of the masters of the School of Paris. Theater, literature, landscapes of Camargue or the Baux de Provence, and his travels were sources of continuous inspiration. Representing the figurative art movement, 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 reality surrounding them. Those who, without denying them, rejected the painting movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, sought to be more the disciples of Vuillard and Bonnard, such as the group of Poetic Reality, or admirers of Courbet, like the Forces Nouvelles movement. If Brayer remained independent, he counted among his friends Francis Gruber, who was at the origin of French Nouveau Réalisme in the 1950s, and whom Bernard Buffet would later exemplify brilliantly.

Yves Brayer was born in Versailles in 1907, but most of his childhood took place in Bourges. Upon his arrival in Paris in 1924, he headed for the Montparnasse academies, then the École des Beaux-Arts. Very young, he showed his personality, and older artists like Jean-Louis Forain encouraged him. Still a student, he exhibited at the Autumn Salon and the Salon des Indépendants. In 1927 a state travel grant enabled him to go to Spain, where the encounter with the masters of the Prado had a decisive influence on 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 regretted Spain, then he was swept away by the richness of Italian life in the 1930s.

Returning to Paris in 1934, he gathered his harvest in a major exhibition at the Charpentier Gallery, 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 base, and after living in the Panthéon district, he settled, from 1935, at rue Monsieur le Prince in the 6th arrondissement. At various times, he painted in Paris, even while a student, from 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 tasked him with designing his first stage and costume maquettes for a ballet at the Paris Opera. He remained there during the occupation and painted the snowy city, then the liberated city.

The year 1945 marks a new stage in his work. In Provence, he realized that there are harmonies beyond those created by man’s architecture, those of pure and wild nature, and he was soon fascinated by the diversity of the Alpilles and their calcareous folds, then by the expanses of the Camargue inhabited by white horses and black bulls. He soon fixed himself in Provence for several months each year.

After his Spanish dark period, then ochre and red Italian periods, he diversified his palette by introducing greens, pale yellows, and some 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 trips to Mexico, Egypt, Iran, Greece, Russia, the United States, and Japan. Quickly seizing the light and rhythms of these countries, he brought back numerous drawings and watercolors.

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

Yves Brayer was also the author of mural decorations, tapestry cartoons, and stage and costume models for the Théâtre Français, and for the Paris, Amsterdam, Nice, Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux, or Avignon Operas.

His solo exhibitions made his works familiar in many countries: in Paris first, then throughout France, Europe, and the United States. The Bibliothèque Nationale presented in 1977 “Yves Brayer, Engraver” for his seventieth anniversary, and the Musée Postal devoted an exhibition of his works at the time of the issuance 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 many collections in France as well as abroad. He was a professor at the Grande Chaumière Academy for fifty years, President of the Autumn Salon for five years, and, as a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, curator of the Marmottan Museum in Paris for over eleven years.

(Source www.yvesbrayer.com)