Georges Dayez

"Still Life with Onion"

1948

Georges Dayez was a well-known and prolific, mid-century French painter, who produced figurative and abstract compositions executed in his own unique modernist, Cubist-inspired style. Dayez was born in Paris in 1907 to a commercial printer, who moved the family to Vaires-sur-Marne in 1909. He received a traditional French education through which he was introduced to drawing, painting and fine art. Dayez worked with his father in a print shop and took evening drawing classes taught by the sculptor Henry Arnold (the future artists Yves Brayer, Robert Humblot, Raymond Corbin and Raymond Martin were his fellow students). Unable to afford the tuition of the academies of Montparnasse, the popular painter Lucien Smith permitted Dayez to audit his atelier in 1926. While in Paris, Dayez attended the prestigious yet free École des Beaux-arts. The artist debuted at the Salon d’Automne, the first independent and progressive exhibition venue in Paris in 1928, and exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon de Mai throughout his long and prolific career. Dayez also used his artistic proficiency in painting and drawing to design tapestries for the Mobilier National, which governs the Gobelins and Beauvais manufactories, and a vast mosaic for the Lycée Français in Lisbon.