Jacques Démoulin, Homage To Picasso, Indian Ink

This rare sheet encapsulates the essence of Jacques Démoulin’s research: a rigorous cubist language (fragmented planes, broken lines, interlocking volumes) deployed in service of a charged motif—the bull/Minotaur—so central to Picasso. Working solely in black and white, the artist deconstructs then recomposes the figure into a network of axes and facets, staging a dialogue between archaism and modernity. The work stands at the crossroads of the great movements of the twentieth century—Cubism, then Neo-Cubism and transitions toward Abstraction—while bearing the personal stamp of a creator trained in Paris, conversant with the avant-gardes, and nourished by his career as a dancer (Ballets Russes, Paris Opera under Lifar), which lends a distinctive sense of rhythm and movement.
Its historical interest also lies in the circulation of ideas that mark Démoulin’s trajectory: engagement with avant-garde circles and, from 1953 onward, close attention to the megalithic engravings of Gavrinis, whose spare ideography surfaces here in the power of the line. At the confluence of Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Léger, the sheet is not derivative: it condenses, in a personal idiom, the cubist ambition to conceive the figure through structure.
A unique testimony to the dialogue between myth and modernity, this ink drawing fixes a pivotal moment in French art: the reactivation of an ancient symbol by means of a fully mastered modern plastic language. A collector’s work, it sheds light on the posterity of a “discreet genius” and, with uncommon force, documents the vitality of graphic cubism beyond its heroic age.

A catalogue entry is available on request.