Yves Brayer (1907-1990) - La famille

Yves Brayer (1907-1990): The Family

Engraving on Japanese paper measuring 30 x 38 cm. Copper plate format 12 x 18 cm. Bearing a signature in ink at the bottom right.

Work never framed, in good condition. Slight handling marks.

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Biography:

A painter witness to his time, Yves Brayer revealed himself as one of the masters of the School of Paris. The theatre, literature, the landscapes of Camargue or the Baux de Provence, and his travels provided a continuous source of inspiration. Representative of 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 attach themselves to the reality surrounding them. Those who rejected, without ignoring them, the painting movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, sought to be more the followers of Vuillard and Bonnard, such as the group of Poetic Reality, or admirers of Courbet, such as the Forces Nouvelles movement. Although Brayer remained independent, he counted among his friends Francis Gruber, who was the origin of the French Nouveau Réalisme in the 1950s, and whose brilliant example would be Bernard Buffet.

Yves Brayer was born in Versailles in 1907, but most of his childhood was spent in Bourges. Upon his arrival in Paris in 1924, he pursued the Montparnasse academies, then the École des Beaux-Arts. Very young, he demonstrated his personality, and older artists like Jean-Louis Forain encouraged him. Still a student, he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne 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 Museum 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 let himself be carried away by the richness of Italian life in the thirties.

On his return to Paris in 1934, he gathered his harvest in a large exhibition at 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 base, and after living in the Panthéon district, he settled, from 1935, rue Monsieur le Prince, in the 6th arrondissement. At various periods, he painted in Paris, even as 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 hall of the town hall as early as 1960. In 1942, he returned to the capital where Jacques Rouché entrusted him with imagining 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 marked a new step in his work. In Provence, he realized that there exist other harmonies than those of architectures created by man, those of pure and wild nature, and he was soon fascinated by the diversity of the Alpilles and their lime-stone folds, followed by the expanses of the Camargue inhabited 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 periods, he diversified his palette by introducing greens, pale yellows, and some blues. Attracted by Mediterranean landscapes, he returned to work in Spain and Italy, but Provence and the Camargue remained 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. 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 books in limited editions 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, set and costume maquettes for the Théâtre Français, and for the Operas of Paris, Amsterdam, Nice, Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux, or Avignon.

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

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

(Source www.yvesbrayer.com)