Georgette Agutte (1867-1922): Mountain Village. Gouache And Graphite On Cardboard.

Georgette Agutte (Paris, 1867 – Chamonix, 1922) was a French painter, sculptor and ceramist, close to the Impressionist and Fauvist movements, still less known today than she deserves. Daughter of a painter, she grew up in a bourgeois environment attentive to artistic education and began with sculpture before following the teaching of Gustave Moreau at the Beaux-Arts, alongside in particular Matisse, Rouault, Signac and Marquet. She began exhibiting in the late 1880s, participated in the Salon des Indépendants from 1904, and played an active role in the creation and life of the Salon d’Automne, where she became a committed advocate for modern art. After a first marriage to the art critic Paul Flat, from whom she divorced in 1894, she married the socialist deputy Marcel Sembat in 1897. Together, they formed a veritable circle of artists and intellectuals in Montmartre, Bonnières-sur-Seine, and Chamonix. A socialist activist, collector, and great promoter of the avant-garde, she participated in debates on modern art while the couple assembled a significant Neo-Impressionist and Fauvist collection, which was bequeathed to the Grenoble Museum. She experimented with innovative supports such as fiber cement panels, notably for her large Alpine landscapes of Chamonix. In September 1922, following the sudden death of Marcel Sembat, she committed suicide in Chamonix on the same day.
His views of Chamonix, preserved notably at the Alpine Museum and the Grenoble Museum, are part of the birth of modern art: where the mountain becomes a field of abstraction before its time. The work presented here has an unfinished quality that gives it all its gentleness.