Watercolor with pencil on paper. 1956, signed l.o. Dimensions image ca 6,5*24 cm, frame ca 9,5*30 cm.
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Biography
French artist Alfred Manessier studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Amiens. In Paris, where he went to live in 1929, he studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the same time at the Montparnasse Academy.
In 1935, he met Roger Bissière and worked with him in his studio in Paris; he also collaborated with Robert Delaunay for the pavilion of the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris.
Until the war, Manessier works in cubist and surrealist style. He was mobilized when war was declared and then demobilized. Manessier joined Bissière at his home in the Lot.
In 1941, Manessier participates in famous exhibition “Vingt peintres de tradition française.” The exhibition represents the first resistance by French avant-garde painters to the Nazi ideology of “degenerate art.” Most of the artists in this exhibition later develop non-figurative painting. Manessier gradually began to work more and more abstractly. His first solo exhibition took place at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris in 1949.
Manessier is considered one of the great painters of the Ecole de Paris.