Cardboard Interior Drawings and Watercolors

This early 20th-century gouache by German artist, illustrator and interior designer, Ferdinand Götz (1870-1955) depicts a couple taking tea within a lavish interior. It was produced ...

French Mid Century work on card by Sylvain Vigny. Depicting an artist (self portrait?) in his studio with his subject and muses, like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Reminiscent of the drawings of Picasso and Matisse who were his contemporaries and neighbours on the Cote D'Azur at this period. The painting is signed and dated bottom left. In period chrome edged frame, currently under glass. If Sylvain Vigny had stayed in Paris in 1934 instead of moving to Nice on the Côte d’Azur, his highly imaginative and original work might be better known. Comparisons with better-known modernist artists including Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Rouault and Raoul Dufy set him in an appropriate and favourable context. A self-taught artist, he grew up in Vienna and emigrated to France in the 1920s, living in Paris from 1929 to 1934. After he had moved to Nice early in 1934, he exhibited in galleries along the Mediterranean coast and in Switzerland, with major exhibitions in New York in 1938 and at the Galerie Bernheim Jeune in Paris in 1948. Sylvain Vigny was part of an important artistic community in Nice, which included Jean Moulin who owned the Galerie d’Art Roman, the artist Jean Cassarini, writers Pierre and Jacques Prévert, filmmaker Nikos Papatakis, and jazz musician Django Reinhardt...