Portrait Of A Cubist Man By Jan Darna

Period: Circa 1960 Style: French School Condition: Good condition Technique: Oil on canvas Other: Signed lower right Dimensions: 65/81 cm Dimensions with frame: 88/72 cm JAN DARNA 1901 - 1974 Painter Charles Taddéi, known as Jan Darna, was a painter of the 1950s. Of Corsican origin but born in Paris in 1901, he completed brilliant studies at the Lycée Henri IV and then attended several art academies, notably the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Between 1927 and 1929, he worked with the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. He became a professor at the Grande Chaumière, where he taught painting and sculpture in an academic style to mostly foreign students. In 1938, he participated in an exhibition at the Petit Palais with Fautrier, Méla Muter, Davidson, Chastel, and Van Dongen. In 1944, his students dispersed, and at the age of 43, he decided to embark on a personal and original body of work, characteristic of his time, through which he expressed an authentic gestural abstraction. Between 1953 and 1965, he exhibited in Zurich. In 1955, he left his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir, where he lived, to build a studio of his own design in L'Haÿ-les-Roses. He lived there in seclusion until the end of his life. For him, creation is only possible in isolation. Invigorating, both cerebral and eruptive, his painting reveals a fiery, passionate, mysterious personality, where bursts of joy are tempered by the contradictions of a philosophical and poetic mind.