Lively Italian City. Adrien Holy. 1949.

A beautiful, lively view of a city in Italy. A vibrant and colorful composition. This is the work of Adrien HOLY. This Swiss artist was born in 1898 in Bern and died in 1979 in Geneva. He was a genre painter, portraitist, landscape artist, draftsman, and decorator. After studying in 1915-1916 in La Chaux-de-Fonds and then in 1917-1918 in Geneva, he came to Paris in 1920, where he settled until around 1939, while also traveling to Italy and Norway. Between 1961 and 1966, he taught at the Geneva School of Fine Arts. He exhibited primarily in Switzerland, notably in Geneva at the Musée de l'Athénée in 1940 and 1965 and at the Musée Rath in 1968, but also in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne, and in Norway, which he had visited regularly every year since 1930. In Paris, he was commissioned to paint decorative panels for the Théâtre Pigalle and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and to create sets for Gaston Baty and Louis Jouvet, demonstrating his prominent position within the School of Paris. In fact, he was adopted by Poncelet, Planson, and Chapelain-Midy into their group and cited by critics on the same level. Like them, in reaction against the complex experiments of Cubism, he set out in search of a directly realistic art, but one rigorous in its principles. What particularly distinguishes Holy's style is his unique feel for materials, which he employs through scraping and layering. The work is on cardboard. Dimensions alone: 59 cm x 38 cm. Presented in a modern stained wood frame, 75 cm x 54 cm.