Marcel Loth (1919-2009) Negro Spirituals - Bissière

Marcel LOTH
(L'Aigle 1919 - Ajat 2009)
Negro Spirituals
Oil on canvas
H. 50 cm; W. 61 cm
Signed lower center, dated 1954 – Titled on the reverse

Provenance: Private collection, Périgueux

A self-taught painter, Marcel Loth began in the 1940s with street scenes, portraits, and urban or rural landscapes, often imbued with a precise, sometimes ironic, gaze upon the world. His early works are figurative, driven by a spirit of observation that does not preclude a certain formal detachment. But it was in the 1950s that his painting truly broke free: influenced by post-war artistic explorations, the School of Paris, and especially by the painter Roger Bissière, whom he met in the Périgord art scene, Loth gradually shifted towards a structured abstraction, where composition took precedence over representation. The connection to the Périgord, far from fading, became more subtle. Loth no longer painted recognizable landscapes, but rather transposed their rhythms, masses, and internal tensions. The limestone cliffs of Les Eyzies became vertical planes, the hills expressed themselves in taut curves, the villages in colored cubes. What the eye could no longer distinguish with certainty, the memory of the place recomposed. The Périgord region then becomes less a motif than a mental foundation: an inner geography. His palette, initially soft and earthy, has been enriched over the years with deep reds, saturated blues, and vibrant greens. Loth loves the material: he works it in impasto, scratching and structuring it. Each canvas is a construction, almost an architectural elevation. His dual background as an architect and painter is evident in a rare fusion of built and pictorial space. He never succumbs to the automatisms of lyrical abstraction or the rigidities of pure geometricism: his painting remains vibrant, balanced, and personal. Marcel Loth is not a solitary artist. In Périgueux, he associates with other artists who are prominent in the regional art scene: Jean Boyé, a painter and teacher, also influenced by Bissière; Guy Célérier, committed to a sensitive figuration; and François Augiéras, a writer and painter on the fringes of the mainstream. With them, Loth helped make post-war Périgord a laboratory for modern artistic experimentation, far from Paris but in constant dialogue with the major developments of his time. His works, long kept in the shadows of a discreet studio, are now being rediscovered for their singularity and coherence. Canvases such as Les Eyzies (1958), Abstraction No. 3 (1962), and Winter Triptych (1960) testify to a mastery of composition, a profound sense of color, and a visceral attachment to the mental landscape of the Dordogne. The strength of Marcel Loth's work lies in his ability to embody abstraction without ever breaking with reality. He does not paint "against" figuration: he extracts its essence, deconstructing it to better recompose it. He stands at the crossroads of two worlds: that of structure, line, and volume; and that of sensation, of light, of place. The Périgord region is thus omnipresent: not as a backdrop, but as a geological memory, a gravity, an architecture of perception. For Loth, painting becomes an act of rootedness and freedom—an abstraction that never forgets its origins.

Our canvas is one of those subjects where the tendency toward non-figuration is already evident. Forms are deconstructed and simplified, depth disappears, and it is the work on color and geometry that takes place. It is certainly the cliff overlooking the village of Les Eyzies that should be seen here, with a few houses below and trees in relief. Here, the jazz concert takes place under what one might assume to be a bandstand, crowned with a tricolor flag. The sun and spectators are present, bringing this composition to life.