Pierre Combet-descombes (1885-1966) - Female Nude, 1929

Pierre Combet-Descombes (1885-1966)
Female nude, 1929
Charcoal on paper
Signed and stamped and dated "9 Nov 1929" on the lower right hand side
Dimensions of the work : 33 x 45 cm
Original frame dimensions: 52.5 x 72.5 cm

Lyon artist born in 1885, Pierre Combet-Descombes received a brief training at the School of Fine Arts in Lyon, which he joined in 1902. He quickly turned away from official teaching and presented his first works at the Salon in 1905.

Pierre Combet-Descombes, a figure of the artistic avant-garde in Lyon, was one of the founders of the collective Les Ziniars: self-proclaimed ignares refuting academic teaching. They exerted a real influence on the artistic life of the inter-war period and participated in the blossoming of modern art in Lyon. Judging the Salon d'Automne to be too timid, they created the Salon du Sud-Est in 1925 where they compared their work with that of artists active on the Parisian scene such as Henri Matisse or Paul Signac.

However, Pierre Combet-Descombes, the singer of modernity, proved reluctant to abandon figurative art. Drawing on reality, his work deals with various themes in which the female body predominates. The feminine nude, given over to all excesses, haunts his work from his youth (the period to which our leaf belongs) before the artist's mind calms down.

He celebrates the female nude in all his work (paintings, wall decorations, illustrations) by attributing allegorical functions to it, oscillating "from the celebration of the Virgin with the lily to the dismemberment of the girl of joy "*. He carries out an expressionist work by distorting reality in such a way as to provoke an emotional reaction in the viewer. He stylizes and perverts the bodies of his models in suggestive and even erotic poses. Our sheet bears witness to a feverish line that runs along the voluptuous curves of the body he stages. The position of the model is not without evoking those of the figures in his painting Femmes nues dans la végétation (Naked Women in the Vegetation) kept at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon.

*Jean-Jacques Lerrant, Tribute to Pierre Combet-Descombes, Fiftieth anniversary of the death of the founder of the Salon du Sud-Est, 2016.

Public collections 
Paris, National Museum of Modern Art - Centre Pompidou
Lyon, Museum of Fine Arts
Villefranche-sur-Saône, Paul Dini Museum