Emile Lafamé (1934-2017) Festalemps, The Dordogne Lapicque Elm

Emile LAFAMÉ (Emile Bogaert said)
(Hazebrouck 1934 – Le Bouscat 2017)
Festalemps, the elm
Oil on canvas
H. 65 cm; L. 54 cm
Signed lower right. Titled and dated on the back, 1983

Provenance: Private collection, Biarritz

Born in the north of France, he left his homeland to go to Paris at the age of 18 where he met big names in painting. Among these big names, that of Picasso, whom he met regularly and who forced him to study in order to best master the technique. A student at the Beaux-Arts in Lille, he regularly worked with his classmates with charcoal, blurring the lines with breadcrumbs. He swallowed the remaining crusts greedily and was given the nickname “the hungry one”. What's better for an artist's name? Exhibiting at the Salon des Artistes Français, des Indépendants, he fluctuated from an expressionist style at his beginnings, towards abstraction, to conclude his career towards fauvism, applying large flat colored areas to the canvas, giving his compositions an air of paintings by Charles Lapicque. He died in Le Bouscat on the outskirts of Bordeaux, after having painted numerous landscapes of France and scenes of life of all kinds. In 1983 he visited the north-west of the Dordogne, producing several works in Festalemps and Ribérac. Our painting dated October represents a large elm tree stripped of its leaves, perhaps dead, lacking its bark given the gleaming whiteness of its trunk. The main subject of the vertical composition, it stands in a glowing landscape, which changes from the view of the Périgord painters on their own territory, generally more sedate.