"still Life With Fish" By Bernard Lorjou (1908-1996)

Bernard Lorjou, born September 9, 1908, in Blois, Loir-et-Cher, France; self-taught; began painting in 1922; worked as a fabric designer for a silk manufacturer in 1925; devoted himself exclusively to painting in 1940; died on January 26, 1986, in Saint-Denis-sur-Loire. He painted with the force of a cymbal crash. He is one of the masters of protest figuration. He does not limit himself to countering abstraction*, he is a moralist who paints history as it is made and denounces it, from the conquest of Abyssinia by the Italians to the assassination of John Kennedy in 1964, and a series inspired by AIDS in 1985. The pessimistic view he casts on the world leads him to confine himself, from 1938 to 1949, to black and grey, browns too, of a vengeful but not emaciated miserabilism against that of a Gruber* or a Buffet* *, The Hunt (ca 1944), to angular objects, to the dull palette, to the flattened perspective, The Atomic Age (1949, MNAM, Paris). However, color appears in the early 1940s. The Ladies' Rest (1943), in the manner of Guttuso*, with its grouping of figures in a daisy-petal shape, or Horseman Against Lion (1947), with its horse akin to the one in Guernica. The composition of the large canvases is dramatized and ironic, as in The Massacre at Rambouillet (1957), where the hunter, lying down, dying or dead, is devoured by birds of prey. He is an attentive animal painter, from the owl to the elephant. From the second half of the 1950s onward, color takes on a more defined form, abandoning the border that previously surrounded it. The drama remains present, even if it becomes colorful, and the expressionist* force of pain is omnipresent, as in these two portraits, Young Odette and Mad Odette (1959). Then, in 1962, came the lunar figures with Harlequin heads, similar to those created by Somville* in 1957. He devoted himself primarily to the figure, and his landscapes are rare, such as Place de la Concorde (1965). From the second half of the 1960s onward, his palette consisted only of vivid, strident, aggressive hues: dominant blues, or reds, or greens, situated between two colors, which explode and prevent him from being overly charming. He worked using reverse stencils, so that the form stood out, white, against the bright colors that surrounded it. In the firework display of his figures, fruits, and flowers, he retains some Cubist reminiscences: a distorted eye, a triangular hat, geometricized sections, winkingly reclaiming what he concedes, and culminating in a syncretism of tradition and avant-garde. Yet he also knows, especially in the early 1980s, how to dissolve his colors in a figurative Tachisme*. Exhibitions: 1928, Salon d'Automne, Paris; 1939, Rio de Janeiro; London; Du Bac, Paris (P): 1946, Anglo-French Art Center; Retrospective: 1985, Palais de l'Europe, Menton. MUSEUM: Museum of Hunting and Nature, Paris, numerous animal works and three ceiling paintings for the Salon de l'Afrique (1967). HE SAID: "Abstract art makes hens swoon, monkeys yawn, and donkeys bray." IT HAS BEEN SAID: "The Tartarin of painting" (Bernard Dorival). Oil on canvas, signed lower right: Size: 73 x 92 cm. With contemporary gilt frame: 76 x 95 cm