19th Century Art

Claude Vénard was born in Paris in 1913 to an established, middle-class family from Bourgogne. Although he was a businessman, his father accepted and supported his devotion to the arts. The blossoming artist was accepted at the prestigious École des Beaux-arts but quickly rejected the formality of traditional academic art training. Instead, Vénard began attending night courses at the École de Arts Appliqués at age seventeen to supplement his independent education. After six years of dedicated study the painter was forced, due to economic difficulties, to withdraw from the school and seek employment. Vénard became a restoration specialist at the Louvre to support himself in 1936. The artist considered his experiences conserving Old Master paintings to be invaluable to the development of his style and technique. In the same year that he started working at the Louvre, Vénard participated in a group show at Galerie Billet-Worms. Respected art critic Waldemar George hailed the exhibition as an immense success, proclaiming, “Let’s be young again! Painting is not dead. Its course has not stopped. Forces Nouvelles is born.” The Forces Nouvelles movement, which included artists like André Marchand...