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Description

Lucien Coutaud (1904-1977)

Surrealist composition 1968 Oil on canvas signed and dated lower left 58 x 70 cm Provenance: > Private collection, Paris Condition report : Framed "Lucien Coutaud is little known. Yet he was one of the most singular and prolific painters of the 20th century. He mastered every technique and excelled in every field, as his work testifies, comprising almost two thousand paintings and gouaches, as many drawings, twenty-nine tapestries (as part of the first generation of artists involved in the revival of Aubusson tapestry, Coutaud occupies a singular place, by his deliberately limited production, his refusal of numbering, his large-scale cartoons, always done in gouache, and his choice of subjects always in keeping with his pictorial world, inspired by music, games and magic), nearly one hundred copper etchings, twenty-nine lithographs, twenty-five set and costume designs for theater and opera (from his first collaboration with Charles Dullin, in 1928, until 1972, Coutaud never stopped working with the greatest directors and choreographers of his time, who called on his sense of the magical and the monumental, his attraction to the baroque and onirism), forty-three illustrated books, from André Fraigneau, in 1925, to Pauline Réage and her Histoire d'O, in 1972, via Voltaire, Alfred Jarry, Arthur Rimbaud, Maurice Blanchard, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, Gilbert Lely, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Claudel, Hemingway, Proust and Jules Laforgue. Lucien Coutaud invented Eroticomagie, a form of painting that is the direct language of the mind, activating both our consciousness and our emotions. The images present themselves to us charged with desires and anxieties, demanding a dazzling materialization of space; they break through the worn-out frames of reality... (...) It has to be said that Coutaldi's work, like that of the Surrealists, is a continuous exploration of the dream state, in order to discover its true limits, which are far too blurred in literature and painting, and too restricted in psychology. The real does exist for Coutaud, as Alain Bosquet would later point out. The sea is a sea, the beach is sand, the bread is yeast, the bull bleeds, the houses resemble those of Nîmes; but the dream never ceases to develop at the same time, to impregnate, to merge with reality; the dream with its procession of adorable obsessions: superimposed flowers form beings between woman and idol; mirrors and shells change function, some retaining a beloved landscape whatever the object reflected in it, and others hesitating between metamorphosis and perpetuated enigma. From this kind of dream we can deduce a kind of rule, of which Coutaud is the master in his own right. It is possible, for example, to deny gravity, the constitution of matter, universal gravitation, when observing a figure whose torso is detached from the rest of his body. Through dreams, reality is rehabilitated. Let's not forget either that Coutaud drew and painted Dormeurs throughout his work: figures whose eyeless heads, in 1946, came to resemble melocactus (melon-shaped cactus), as if to insist on the omnipotence of dreams understood as absolute reality and protected from the outside world by powerful thorns...". (Christophe Dauphin, excerpts from Lucien Coutaud, le peintre de l'Eroticomagie, ed. Rafael de Surtis, 2009)

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Lucien Coutaud (1904-1977)

Estimate 2 500 - 3 500 EUR

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For sale on Saturday 13 Jul : 10:30 (CEST)
paris, France
FauveParis
+33155288090
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