Lucien Mathelin (1905-1981), Self-portrait, 1925, Oil On Canvas Mounted On Panel

Lucien MATHELIN (1905-1981)
Self-portrait, 1925
Oil on canvas mounted on panel
Signed and dated “1925” lower left
Oval format 60 × 48 cm

French painter of Belgian origin, Lucien Mathelin was born in 1905 into a family of artists. Self-taught, he did not follow any academic training and exhibited his first painting at the Salon d’Automne in 1924. He enriched his palette during his travels to Morocco in 1925-26 and then to Greece in the 1930s.

In 1937, Lucien Mathelin worked for Raoul Dufy on the monumental work La Fée Electricité, designed for the Universal Exhibition and now preserved at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 1940, he moved into a studio in Montmartre and lived between Paris and Provence.

A free and mischievous spirit, he sometimes tackled serious subjects, sometimes lighter ones. A great master of diversion, he often treated them in trompe-l'oeil in a surrealist vein tinged with irony, although he always remained on the fringes of this movement. He maintained a certain taste for provocation and protest, as illustrated by his Monumentsonges. Two paintings from this series, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris in 1917, caused a scandal and were taken down. They are considered irreverent and detrimental to the Head of State and the Unknown Soldier.

His caustic compositions are produced in harmonious chromatic ranges and demonstrate a fine technical mastery, like the self-portrait we are presenting, a work from the artist's youth, produced at the age of twenty.

Museums : Paris, Musée d’art moderne de la ville / Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne / Paris, Musée de Montmartre / Dallas (U.S.) / Göteborg (Suède)