Oil painting on canvas by Edouard PIGNON

Oil on canvas - painting signed and dated 57 by Edouard PIGNON 1905 -1993

74 x 92cm - framed 100 x 120cm

Contemporary with the First World War, Edouard Pignon's childhood took place in Marles, a small mining town in the north of France. At the age of fourteen, after his school leaving certificate, he worked briefly - although his father tried to dissuade him - in the track department in the mine galleries. Hating the deprivation of light, he became a plasterer in the building trade. He began drawing very early in the tavern run by his mother, painting portraits of his relatives. On his return from military service in Syria, he resolved to become a painter and left for Paris, where he settled around 1926. While working as a worker in various factories, he took painting classes at the Ecole du boulevard Montparnasse and the Ecole Germain Pilon, and enrolled in the Université ouvrière. This apprenticeship was carried out in parallel with a union and political commitment that allowed him to get closer to intellectual circles, particularly through the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists. Over the years 1930, while earning his living as a retoucher in photography, lithographer or page designer, he participated in numerous group exhibitions and deepened his knowledge of the great masters by regularly visiting the Louvre Museum In 1939, he showed his first solo exhibition in Paris at the Maison de la culture, rue d'Anjou, presented by Marcel Gromaire Member of the "Jeune peinture", supported by the Galerie de France recently created by Paul Martin, he was able, at the end of 1943, to devote himself fully to his work which, from the post-war period, experienced a decisive turning point Freed from the cubist grid, his work was now driven by the desire to more deeply grasp reality Against the dominant trends of his time, in the 1950s he affirmed his attachment to figuration at the same time as he favored a serial mode of production where the construction of space, the articulation of forms and the question of color remained his essential concerns Passionate about history, interested Through aesthetic analysis, he published La Quête de la réalité in 1966 and Contre-courant in 1974, interview texts in which he expounded his thoughts and artistic choices. Shown regularly in France and abroad, his work benefited from a major retrospective at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1966, then from a presentation of the works held in the national collections in 1980. On the occasion of his eightieth birthday in 1985, the Centre National des Arts Plastiques brought together in the national galleries of the Grand Palais in Paris one hundred and fifty paintings and seventy watercolors on three floors, an exhibition that contributed to the renewal of its audience.

Édouard Pignon is a French painter of the new School of Paris , born on February 12 , 1905 in Bully-les-Mines ( Pas-de-Calais ) and died on May 14 , 1993 in La Couture-Boussey (.

His abundant work, difficult to classify, develops in series around various themes that follow one another or unfold simultaneously, sometimes intertwining: dramas of the working class condition, sails of boats and olive tree trunks, peasant work, cockfights, horror of wars, naked divers and sunny beaches. With Picasso , with whom he was close for three decades, he fought in the 1950s against the systematism of socialist realism , without however joining his non-figurative painter friends with whom he exhibited very frequently from the 1940s in France and abroad.