Claude Venard

'Composition Bleu' Abstract Checkerboard Still Life interior painting, blue

Circa 1955

Claude Vénard has a distinct style — it’s post-Cubist in its composition and he progressively accentuated the chromaticism of his palette up to reaching the crudest of colors, which he used in very thick forms and sometimes applied with a pallet knife.

Vénard was born in France in 1913 and, dedicating himself fully to making paintings at the age of 17, he studied at the École des Arts Appliqués for six years, having fled the Académie des Beaux-Arts after just 48 hours. In 1938 he signed the Rupture manifesto and participated in the first exhibition of the influential group Forces Nouvelles, alongside Francis Gruber and Pierre Tal-Coat at the Galerie Billiet-Vorms. A close affinity subsequently developed among these painters and together they were instrumental in forging the aesthetic of the immediate postwar period of the Ecole de Paris.

Vénard quickly became known for his rich impasto and varying texture. He received critical acclaim and was personally championed by Andre Salmon and Waldemar George, who described his painting as “Apocalyptic art! Beings and everyday things suddenly regain their meaning. Emotional values are once more felt.”

Vénard’s distinct and alluring compositions developed through a post-Cubist system that oscillates between abstraction and naturalism. He opens up perspectives projecting spatial vistas into every part of the canvas, in accordance with an emotional rather than a physical order. Familiar objects arise in the midst of a network of striations and hatching. Colors grow more intense in certain zones to stress the solidity of the composition; in other zones the light is more tenuous and diaphanous, as if to indicate space of different emotional intensity.

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(Biography provided by Gallery of the Masters)