Mansion House Antiques & Fine Art has dated this piece to the 1950s.
There are several annotations on the stretcher bars, and the previous owner had attributed the work to Franco-Spanish artist Juana Faure, although this remains unsubstantiated.
This painting is certainly the work of an artist who did theatre decors or murals.
A very decorative and original painting full of interest and colour, truely a stunning piece.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Son of a provencal goldsmith, Lucien Coutaud studied at the Beaux-Arts Academy in Nîmes from 1920, where he was a student of Armand Coussens, an excellent engraver.He moved in Paris in 1924, where he attended the free academies of Montparnasse.
The young Coutaud is interested in the Louvre Primitives, but also in the works of Chirico, Max Ernst and Paul Klee.
He was later admitted to the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in the same year.
In April 1928, he is back in Paris and in 1929 painted his first important paintings: La Bicyclette, Female and Soldier, Soldiers arresting a spy, Young Girl with three wheels. In 1930 he produced his first etchings, drypoint on zinc : Rhineland Souvenir, Three Amazons, The Cyclist, The Morning. He enters into relationship with the writer Jean Blanzat.
In 1931, the Quatre Chemins gallery in Paris organized his first solo exhibition. In 1932, he worked almost exclusively with gouache, painting many bouquets of flowers and large esoteric compositions. He also creates stage sets and costumes for Le Chateau des Papes.
He attended many events of the avant-garde group, alongside the surrealists. During these years he affirms his graphic style, close to surrealism, through the use of an unusual imaging where dreams and reality intertwine.
The characters represented in his paintings lose their flesh, reduced to the state of skeletons, then fragmented and deprivated of faces in the manner of mannequins or robots, only retaining their sexuality to keep a track of humanity. Reformed, he created sets,costumes for the theater, tapestries revives engraving.
His figurative style, evolving into oneiric abstraction, is close to surrealism, presenting with southern colors the bullfighting poetry, the drama of death. This painter-poet who was a friend of Jean Blanzat, Fraigneau, Marc Bernard, Jean-Louis Barrault, Oscar Dominguez, Paul Eluard, Picasso, Jacques Prévert, Boris Vian, Gilbert Lely, Jean Paul Sartre, Yves Tanguy, and Félix Labisse never ceased to assert his independence. Lucien Coutaud invented Éroticomagie, which is a painting of a world centered on an individual and his metamorphosis, but always with a sexual connotation, like the impressive series of "Taureaumagies" or the "Swans-People". The Éroticomagie is a carnal and dreamlike fusion of Eros and magic, a reflection of his inner world.
The painter's world, which he delivers through his paintings of dream fragments is completed steps by steps over them time. The artist paints indeed various subjects that populate his imagination: "Characters, vegetable and mineral houses, metamorphoses, large tracts of land and irons." He then appropriates these issues and transpose them into another poetic reality.
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Mansion House Antiques & Fine Art has dated this piece to the 1950s.
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Fine Antique Art Important Surrealist Oil Paintings Manner of Lucien Coutaud (1904-1977) 20thc French Oil Portraits Gilt Frames
