Marcel Gromaire (1892-1971) - Female Nude - Drawing On Paper

Marcel Gromaire (1892-1971) - Female nude - drawing on paper Pen drawing on paper representing a female nude Signed "GROMAIRE, 1958", lower left. The drawing is in perfect condition Visible at the Galerie Courcelles Antiquités, at 97 rue de Courcelles in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. Marcel Gromaire is a French painter, engraver, decorator, illustrator and cardboard maker. He abandoned his legal career to begin, in 1910, to attend workshops in Montparnasse. After being mobilized during the First World War, he returned to his studio, where he provided film criticism for Le Crapouillot. He thus exhibited "La Guerre" at the Salon des Indépendants in 1925. During the Second World War, residing in Creuse, he took part in the tapestry renewal movement alongside Jean Lurçat. He quickly gained recognition from galleries and In 1931, Pierre Matisse exhibited him at the inauguration of his New York gallery. was appointed professor at the National School of Decorative Arts, a position he held from 1950 to 1962. In 1963, a retrospective was organized by the National Museum of Modern Art, then in 1980, by the Art Museum of the City of Paris, (the museum now retains an important collection of drawings and watercolors. Like Rouault and Dufy, Marcel Gromaire is an artist who goes against the current, who evolves outside of groups and Freeing himself from the rules of realism, he was able to create its own uniqueness, its own style: between a delicate and poetic line and a geometric construction. We find about 700 paintings by this artist, most of which come from the collection of Dr. Girardin. Gromaire's watercolors, relatively few in number (produced, like the oils, at the rate of about ten a year), are as constructed, lyrical and "mural" (according to the expression that the artist liked) as the oils on canvas. On the still visible support of a drawing in India ink, Gromaire places the color with a very personal technique, playing with transparencies, rhythms, superpositions, so as to make the tones vibrate intensely. But the artist also left about a hundred notebooks of all sizes where simple line sketches rub shoulders with more advanced drawings, some of which become small black and white paintings.