François Desnoyer (1894–1972) - Portrait d’homme de face (Vendu sans prix de réserve)

We present to you a pencil drawing on paper depicting a young man in bust portrait by the famous artist François Desnoyer (1894–1972).

This frontal portrait shows a character with short hair, wearing a jacket, with features constructed by hatchings and shadows delicately worked.

Title: Portrait masculin

Technique: Crayon sur papier

Artist: François Desnoyer (1894–1972)
Unsigned (from a set of drawings by the artist)

Provenance: Fonds de la galerie Marcel Guiot.

Overall format: 50 × 32 cm

Period: Around 1920–1940

Condition: Good condition. Creases and stains.

François Desnoyer, born in Montauban in 1894 and died in Perpignan in 1972, is a major French painter, sculptor and lithographer of the 20th century. Passionate about drawing from his childhood, he settled in Paris in 1912 to train in art, a momentum abruptly halted by the First World War where he was taken prisoner. After being released, he joined the École des arts décoratifs in 1921 before becoming a drawing teacher in the Paris region. From the 1920s, his works entered the great Paris salons and revealed a distinctive style at the crossroads of the avant-gardes, oscillating between cubism, fauvism and social realism. His art is distinguished by a keen sense of geometric composition where form is born directly from pure and contrasted color. Close to the ideals of the Front populaire, he celebrated collective happiness and the emerging leisure society through large figurative works. A great traveler, he traveled through North Africa and Asia, but it is above all the light of the Mediterranean that transformed his intense chromatic palette. He settled permanently in the Pyrénées-Orientales, first in Sète then in Saint-Cyprien, a region he tirelessly painted—the beaches and ports. An artist engaged in local cultural life, he founded the musée de Saint-Cyprien to which he bequeathed a substantial part of his personal collection.