François Desnoyer (1894–1972). - Portrait féminin (Vendu sans prix de réserve)

We present to you this pencil drawing on paper depicting a young woman bust, by François Desnoyer (1894–1972).

The portrait shows a woman with short hair, slightly leaning forward, dressed in a dark garment.

Title: Female Portrait

Technique: Pencil on paper

Artist: François Desnoyer (1894–1972)

Overall size: 50 × 32 cm

Period: Around 1920–1940

Condition: Good condition, with some signs of wear on the paper

Provenance: Marcel Guiot gallery collection.

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 since childhood, he settled in Paris in 1912 to train in art, an impulse brutally halted by World War I where he was taken prisoner. After his release, in 1921 he entered the École des arts décoratifs before becoming a drawing teacher in the Paris region. From the 1920s, his works entered the great Paris salons and revealed a singular 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 Popular Front, he celebrated collective happiness and the emerging leisure society through large figurative compositions. A great traveler, he roamed North Africa and Asia, but it is mainly the light of the Mediterranean that transforms 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 Saint-Cyprien museum to which he bequeathed a major portion of his personal collection.