401 - Charles Georges DUFRESNE (1876–1938)

Charles Georges DUFRESNE (1876–1938) Dreamlike Scenes 2 mixed-media works on paper Signed lower right Approx. 29 x 35 cm (Wear along the edges) Description: Born in Millemont in 1876 to a family originally from Granville, Charles Dufresne first trained in medal engraving in Hubert Ponscarme’s studio, then as an assistant to the sculptor and medalist Alexandre Charpentier. His early pastels depicting café-concerts and circuses evoke the world of Toulouse-Lautrec. After a trip to Italy with the engraver Herbert Lespinasse and a stay in Brittany with Jean Frélaut, he won the Villa Abd-el-Tif Prize in Algiers in 1910, where he switched from pastels to oil painting. Drafted in 1914 and gassed, he spent the remainder of the war in the camouflage unit alongside André Dunoyer de Segonzac, a longtime friend, and Roger de La Fresnaye. Influenced by Cézanne and Cubism in the early 1920s, he later turned to Delacroix and Venetian painting, in a lyrical and decidedly imaginative vein to which these compositions belong. A co-founder of the Salon des Tuileries in 1923, he designed tapestry cartoons for Louis Süe and André Mare and contributed to the decoration of the Palais de Chaillot. The National Museum of Modern Art and the museums in Troyes and Grenoble hold works by him.