Jean Ducel

French Watercolour and Gouache, The Harlequins

1992

A French gouache on paper portrait of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza by Jean Paul Ducel. The painting is signed to the back where there is another painting of a clown. A strong and co...

Late Mid Century French watercolour and Gouache on handmade paper of a pair of dancers by Damien Hermellin. Signed and dated bottom right. Pres...

French late 20th century watercolour and gouache study for the series 'Alexander and His Army' by Stephane Lovighi-Bourgogne. Presented in plain wood frame. A strong and forceful de...

Mid-century lyrical surrealist abstract watercolour on paper by French artist Jean Clerté, signed and dated bottom right. Presented in mid-century frame. Jean Clerté , born in 1930 in Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe in Vienne, is a French painter, engraver, draftsman, watercolourist and sculptor . This work is a great example of his more humorous and expressive work influenced by Alechinsky from the late 1960s onwards. There is a light playfulness and yet the watercolours are more vivid than his previous palette. Jean Clerté works in series. His sequential narrations testify both to a youthful spontaneity and to a perfect mastery in the distribution of forms and images on the painted surface. The narration is not only an accumulation of juxtaposed fragments and symbols, it forms a whole, it takes on and gives meaning. In general, we can say of Clerté that he practices an “eco-art” that feeds on primary hungers: the feeling of being united with nature, the vegetable, the mineral, the aquatic. In his colourful canvases, his inks, his boxes, his objects, like a shaman on the path of his dreams, the painter Clerté mounts an assault on beasts and demons, elves and gnomes. From the Poitevin marshes to the tropical forests emerges a fauna caught in the meanders of a design that marvels at the appearance of these grotesque idols. Jean Clerté began to draw and paint at a very young age, and at the age of 15 he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Poitiers. Then in 1949, curious about the capital, he moved to Paris. Having very few financial resources, he could not continue his studies at first, worked as a model to survive, and met other artists; he was then admitted to the studio of Ossip Zadkine and, from 1952, he was also able to study engraving at Atelier 17 of Stanley William Hayter, an English engraver and printer living in Paris associated in the 1930s with surrealism. At the end of the 1960s, he worked alongside Pierre Alechinsky, founding member of the Cobra movement, engraving Alechinsky's originals, benefiting from his advice, and discovering acrylic as a medium. From 1976, Jean Clerté became associate professor at Hayter. Clerté had taught previously, in 1971 at the Salzburg Summer University and in 1972 he gave courses at the Paris-Sorbonne University . In 1981, he was appointed professor at the School of Decorative Arts , where he had Maïlys Seydoux-Dumas as a student and, from 1983 to 1988, he was Alechinsky's assistant professor at the Paris School of Fine Arts. His first works are part of the current of lyrical abstraction, and are nourished by impressions of nature (landscape motifs, e.g. forest fires, waterscapes), then around 1968, encouraged by Alechinsky, he rejects abstraction, and his work becomes more figurative with expressive and humorous elements. From this period his colours are more subdued, often with pastel tones, he works on series. Jean Clerté has created a world in a space where drawing, painting, objects participate in a playful figuration. From his drawings were born sculptures and sometimes mobiles (Le Moulin à dessin). If it is the artist who makes astonishing, polychrome, whimsical “toys”, it is the painter who appeals to adults through his caustic and satirical humour. His first exhibitions in France took place at the Galerie Massol , then at the Galerie Pascal...

"A Sense of Balance" - Figurative Harlequin Clown Watercolor on Heavy Paper Watercolor of three clowns by Sefla Joseph (Canadian, 20th Century). Three clowns are standing closely to...

Celso Lagar 1891-1966 Spanish Personnages de Cirque (The Circus) Pair of Watercolors on paper Both signed lower right Both measures : Paper: 13 3/4" high x 9 1/2" wide Frame : ...

Dancers is an original drawing in mixed media on paper realized by Nicola Simbari in 1960 ca. In good conditions Nicola Simbari (San Lucido, 1927) was an ...

Hermann Rastorfer was a draftsman, painter, sculptor, illustrator, ceramist, designer, poster artist, developer of advertising concepts and communication campaigns, inventor, and architect. He began as a typesetter in Salzburg. In the mid-1950s, he moved to Germany, where he soon founded his own studio for graphic design and advertising. His goal was always to give each product a distinctive, highly recognizable appearance. He designed his own design line for the German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, artistic cover images for numerous paperbacks from renowned publishers, and packaging for well-known products such as Ferrero Küsschen, Mon Chéri, Martell cognac...