Jules Oury Dit Marcel-lenoir (1872-1931) Still Life With Pots

Jules Oury dit Marcel-Lenoir (1872-1931) Still life with pots Oil on paper mounted on canvas Bears the stamp of the workshop 45x65cm Former collection Madame Marcel Lenoir
Still Life with the Laughing Cow (1924-31), La Maison de La vache qui rit, Lons-le-Saunier.
Born into a silversmith's family, Marcel-Lenoir went to Paris in 1889. There he attended the School of Decorative Arts, and the courses of fresco artist Paul Baudoüin at the National School of Fine Arts, then discovered the artists from the French and Italian Middle Ages at the Cluny museum then at the Louvre museum. Passionate about symbolism, he frequented the poet Paul Fort and the Rose-Croix circles, he discovered at the same time the works of the Swiss Arnold Böcklin, the Englishman Edward Burne-Jones and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. He abandoned symbolism around 1902-1903 for an inspiration closer to nature: the material of his works becomes more impasto, the colors more vivid, the perspective is gradually deformed, the color is laid flat with an effect of vertical arrangement of the composition, formal daring imagined by the Nabis twenty years earlier. Powerful colourist whose material effects evoke the Fauves, in particular from Central Europe. In perpetual search for new stylistic solutions, his work is a search for a golden age that has not ceased to run through French painting since the end of the nineteenth century.

Having achieved notoriety during his lifetime, he is today one of these neglected artists, it is true that his uncompromising and even provocative attitude to the point of excess will not favor its dissemination. Practicing material austerity and even poverty with sincerity in his personal life, he never ceased to mock critics and official institutions [1].

An eccentric character walking a silhouette of Christ in Montparnasse for an artistic cabaret, he was of an ambition beyond his strength and haunted by inaccessible grandeur [2].

In 1908, appeared in the presses of the Abbey of Créteil, a work entitled Reason or unreason of the painter Marcel-Lenoir; no doubt he frequented this artistic phalanstery. In 1913, he moved to Bruniquel, renting a barn, set up a team of six masons to work on his large-scale frescoes. He produced 27 frescoes there during the year 1916. He changed his technique and the composition of his mortar, which gave his work a great softness in tones.

In 1919-1920, Marcel-Lenoir founded the “Institute of contemporary aesthetics” in his studio at no 115 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs in Paris and produced an exhibition-manifesto there the following year, publishing a catalog showing on the cover her portrait by Chana Orloff. He transferred this workshop to 86 on the same street in 1928, just next to Fernand Léger's one. He taught the art of fresco there and entrusted that of engraving to Paul Bornet. Many creators will receive quality education there, such as Pierre Claude Dubois, Jean Charlot who will export his knowledge of fresco painting to Mexico, the Yugoslav Licenoski-Lasar, the Croats Jozo Kljakovic and Ivo Resek, the Brazilian Antonio Gomide [3].

In 1920, he received the order for the Coronation of the Virgin (1923) for the Catholic Institute of Toulouse, on which he worked with his students. He incorporates a series of portraits of the city's notables, as well as his own portrait and those of his wife and son. Monsignor Germain Breton is represented there as a priest, leading the procession. Other personalities of Toulouse or of his acquaintances like Camille Soula, Count Henri Bégouen, Henri de Lingua de Saint-Blanquat or Jacques Adrien Crouzel, appear there.

He died on September 6, 1931 and is buried in the cemetery of Pechcausen. He was married and the father of a family [4].

The Marcel-Lenoir museum at the Château de Montricoux in Montricoux (Tarn-et-Garonne) retains an important collection of his works.