Lively Harbor. Attributed To Jean-françois Liegme. Swiss School. Painting, Gouache.

A beautiful gouache depicting fishermen working on
the docks of a port.
The work is painted on cardboard mounted on wood.
On the reverse, it is inscribed “1955, ‘LIEGME’ Jean-François,”
a painter born in Geneva in 1922 (Swiss school). Died in 1977.
This artist is known as a painter of
mosaic cartoons, an engraver, an illustrator, a decorator, and an abstract landscape painter.
From 1941 to 1945, he was a student at the Geneva School of Fine Arts.
He then spent two years in Paris, working for a time with
André Lhote. In 1946, he stayed in Morocco, and in 1947–1948 in
Florence. In 1963, he visited Greece, and in 1967, Sicily, a place where
he would return several times thereafter.
He participated in various group exhibitions: the 1949 Salon
de l’Art Libre in Paris, the 1953 2nd Tokyo International Art Exhibition,
the 1957 Neuchâtel Museum of Fine Arts, the 1958 “Abstract Painting
in Switzerland” exhibition in Berlin, 1959 “Salon des Réalités Nouvelles” in Paris, 1960
“Salon des Comparaisons” in Paris and the Kunstmuseum in St. Gallen, 1974
Maison de la Culture in Châlon-sur-Saône, 1978 Kunsthaus in Munich, etc.
He has exhibited his works in solo shows since 1948,
in Geneva, Zurich, Paris, etc. His first major retrospective took place in
Geneva, at the Rath Museum, in 1986.
In 1955, he abandoned figurative art. He paints with broad brushstrokes, playing
with textural effects, alternately fluid and thick. He practices a
very free-style abstract landscape painting, seeking the extreme simplification
of the pictorial sign.
Our painting is in its original painted wooden frame, measuring 72 cm x 43.5 cm.
The painting alone measures 65 cm x 36 cm.