PRINTPROVENANCE:
Mallet Japan Inc., Tokyo, 24 April, 2015, lot 288
Private collection, Asia
Catalogue Note:
'' I like this animal [horses] very much, especially their natural sense of beauty and harmony. They exhibit a sense of scale in nature and show interesting proportions against the skyline or coastline.'' －ANDRÉ BRASILIER
André Brasilier was born in 1929 in Saumur, Anjou, France. Both of his parents were painters. In 1949, he entered the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in France and studied with Maurice Brianchon. In 1952, he won the Florence Blumenthal Prize Award and, in the following year, the Grand Prix de Rome of painting. In 1960, he held his first exhibition in Galerie Weil in Paris. In the following years, he was invited by various galleries and museums to hold exhibitions around the world. In 1980, he held his first retrospective at the Château de Chenonceau, France. In 2005, he held a grand retrospective in one of the four major museums in the world, the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, that lasted for three months.
Brasilier was influenced by ukiyo-e and expressionism. His creative concept focuses on conveying the spiritual perceptions accompanying objects and scenery. Throughout his life, he drew from his passionate worship of the beauty of nature. He has depicted vast ocean scenes and forests, using variations in color to express the changes of time and seasons. With interwoven heavy and light colors, he expresses different emotions in the pictures. He sought simplicity in form, simplifying detailed constructs and complexity to a great extent to bring a focus to the imaginations of viewer. What he portrays are often women, musicians, and horses—topics common in art history and familiar to the viewer—but because of his unique style, his paintings create profound mpressions that remain impressed in the minds of viewers. His romantic style is like the fragrance of flowers blowing into viewers’hearts, intoxicating them with his elegant art sentiment.
Human history is filled with the traces of horses. Horses symbolize power, speed, wealth, and status. Their noble significance has lasted for over a thousand years, leaving a profound influence on art history. Growing up in a country manor, Brasilier was in frequent contact with these noble and f r iendly animals. Masters of the previous era, such as Jacques-Louis David, who composed Bonaparte crossing the Grand Saint Bernard , and Giuseppe Castiglione, who painted Eight Horses , emphasized the magnificence and luxury of horses. In contrast, Brasilier reduced the grand sense of mass and the muscle texture to focus on the intelligence and agility of horses. He uses elegant and light touches to place horses in a freehand scenery.
Painted when Brasilier was in his prime, ''Hyde Park en Automne'' (1972) features the background and theme of Hyde Park in London, England. Staggered, towering trees and the increasing thickness of tree trunks from left to right create a sense of perspective in the scene. The trunks, though rigid in reality, are as supple as vines in the painting as they expand upward, creating a sense of fluidity throughout the picture. A group of horse riders passes through the woods. The artist uses the silhouette technique not to present details but only to depict outlines, which naturally formi the background. The vivid life force comes from the diffusion of oil paints and the painter’s proper control of the brushes, which paint, sway, and stack the layers of the trees and shadows. The seemingly random strokes are in fact the painter’s natural responses from internalized techniques and muscle memory after creating art for many years. This beautiful golden scene of Hyde Park with colorful foliage is indeed a representative painting of Brasilier.
Mallet Japan Inc., Tokyo, 24 April, 2015, lot 288
Private collection, Asia
Catalogue Note:
'' I like this animal [horses] very much, especially their natural sense of beauty and harmony. They exhibit a sense of scale in nature and show interesting proportions against the skyline or coastline.'' －ANDRÉ BRASILIER
André Brasilier was born in 1929 in Saumur, Anjou, France. Both of his parents were painters. In 1949, he entered the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in France and studied with Maurice Brianchon. In 1952, he won the Florence Blumenthal Prize Award and, in the following year, the Grand Prix de Rome of painting. In 1960, he held his first exhibition in Galerie Weil in Paris. In the following years, he was invited by various galleries and museums to hold exhibitions around the world. In 1980, he held his first retrospective at the Château de Chenonceau, France. In 2005, he held a grand retrospective in one of the four major museums in the world, the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, that lasted for three months.
Brasilier was influenced by ukiyo-e and expressionism. His creative concept focuses on conveying the spiritual perceptions accompanying objects and scenery. Throughout his life, he drew from his passionate worship of the beauty of nature. He has depicted vast ocean scenes and forests, using variations in color to express the changes of time and seasons. With interwoven heavy and light colors, he expresses different emotions in the pictures. He sought simplicity in form, simplifying detailed constructs and complexity to a great extent to bring a focus to the imaginations of viewer. What he portrays are often women, musicians, and horses—topics common in art history and familiar to the viewer—but because of his unique style, his paintings create profound mpressions that remain impressed in the minds of viewers. His romantic style is like the fragrance of flowers blowing into viewers’hearts, intoxicating them with his elegant art sentiment.
Human history is filled with the traces of horses. Horses symbolize power, speed, wealth, and status. Their noble significance has lasted for over a thousand years, leaving a profound influence on art history. Growing up in a country manor, Brasilier was in frequent contact with these noble and f r iendly animals. Masters of the previous era, such as Jacques-Louis David, who composed Bonaparte crossing the Grand Saint Bernard , and Giuseppe Castiglione, who painted Eight Horses , emphasized the magnificence and luxury of horses. In contrast, Brasilier reduced the grand sense of mass and the muscle texture to focus on the intelligence and agility of horses. He uses elegant and light touches to place horses in a freehand scenery.
Painted when Brasilier was in his prime, ''Hyde Park en Automne'' (1972) features the background and theme of Hyde Park in London, England. Staggered, towering trees and the increasing thickness of tree trunks from left to right create a sense of perspective in the scene. The trunks, though rigid in reality, are as supple as vines in the painting as they expand upward, creating a sense of fluidity throughout the picture. A group of horse riders passes through the woods. The artist uses the silhouette technique not to present details but only to depict outlines, which naturally formi the background. The vivid life force comes from the diffusion of oil paints and the painter’s proper control of the brushes, which paint, sway, and stack the layers of the trees and shadows. The seemingly random strokes are in fact the painter’s natural responses from internalized techniques and muscle memory after creating art for many years. This beautiful golden scene of Hyde Park with colorful foliage is indeed a representative painting of Brasilier.