129 - JEAN LEGROS (1917–1981) Striped Canvas

JEAN LEGROS (1917–1981) Striped Canvas Oil on canvas, signed and dated (19)75 lower right. Height: 185 cm; Width: 103.5 cm. This work belongs to the “Striped Canvases” series, in which the composition is reduced to a few horizontal bands of color. Here, a blue-gray sky frames a cluster of bands of varying widths (black, green, yellow, pink, orange, brown), whose rhythms and tonal contrasts create a vibrancy against the solid background. Inspired by the landscapes the artist loved to photograph, the composition evokes the earth and the horizon while remaining perfectly abstract. A French painter, Jean Legros (1917–1981) studied philosophy and psychology before devoting himself to painting in 1946.A student of Jean Dewasne, he abandoned figurative art in the early 1950s and developed a rigorous and unadorned geometric abstraction, close to minimalism, which makes color the true subject of the painting. Having deliberately kept his distance from the art scene, he is now recognized as one of the great abstract colorists of his generation.