Misplaced Pages

Georges Bauquier

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
French painter (1910-1997)
You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (December 2024) Click for important translation instructions.
  • View a machine-translated version of the French article.
  • Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Misplaced Pages.
  • Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,695 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization.
  • Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
  • You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Misplaced Pages article at ]; see its history for attribution.
  • You may also add the template {{Translated|fr|Georges Bauquier}} to the talk page.
  • For more guidance, see Misplaced Pages:Translation.

Georges Bauquier (31 March 1910 - 2 April 1997) was a French painter.

He was a studio assistant to Fernand Léger, the French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker, and after the latter's death he and Léger's widow Nadia built and opened the musée Fernand-Légerin Biot, dedicated to Léger's work, which became a national museum in 1969 and of which he was director until 1993.

Life

He was born in Aigues-Mortes and during his childhood in Nîmes he showed a taste for drawing. In 1934 he joined the École des beaux-arts de Paris then two years later the École d'art contemporain headed by Léger (1881-1955), becoming its 'massier'. He joined the French Communist Party and the French Resistance, being imprisoned for the latter at the prison de la Santé in 1944.

Léger returned from the USA after the war and met Bauquier again. Early in the 1950s Léger acquired the farmhouse of Saint-André property in Biot, where he displayed large ceramic sculptures. After Léger's death Nadia and Bauquier decideded to build a museum not far from that farmhouse to display Léger's works - the first stone was laid in February 1957 and it was opened on 13 May 1960 by Gaëtan Picon, director general of Arts and Literature. He also married Nadia, as her third husband.

In 1967 Nadia amd Bauquier chose 348 important paintings, drawings, ceramics, tapestries and bronzes from Léger's studio at Gif-sur-Yvette and donated them to the French state. On 4 February 1969 André Malraux, minister for cultural affairs, opened the new "musée national Fernand-Léger" to house the works, with the two donors becoming its first directors and its collections later bolstered by deposits of works, paintings and drawings belonging to the pair. After Nadia's death in 1982, an extension doubled the museum's display space between 1987 and 1989.

Bauquier published Fernand Léger, Vivre dans le vrai (Paris, Maeght, 1987) and from 1990 edited the eight-volume catalogue raisonné of Léger's work. He retired as the museum's director in 1993. Seriously ill, he retired to Callian, where he died and was buried in 1997.

Work

Commentary

References

  1. Tome I, 1903-1919, Maeght, 1990 ; Tome II, 1920-1924, Maeght, 1992 ; Tome III, 1925-1928, Maeght, 1993 ; Tome IV, 1929-1931, Maeght, 1995 ; Tome V, 1932-1937, Maeght, 1996 ; Tome VI, 1938-1943, Maeght, 1998 ; Tome VII, 1944-1948, Maeght, 2000 ; Tome VIII, 1949-1951, Maeght, 2003.
  2. (in French) Pierre Barbancey, « Décès de Georges Bauquier », l'Humanité, 3 April 1997

Bibliography

  • (in French) Georges Bauquier : dessins – peintures, preface by Jean Lescure, Paris, Centre d’art international, 1971.
  • (in French) André Verdet, Georges Bauquier : De l'arbre…, preface by Michel Gaudet, Biot, Éditions du musée national Fernand-Léger, 1986, p. 84
  • (in French) Georges Tabaraud, Raphaël Monticelli, André Verdet, Jean Lescure, Jean Bouret and André Parinaud, Georges Bauquier : peintures, dessins, sculptures, Biot, musée national Fernand-Léger, 1992, p. 112
Categories: