ArtistFrench
Maurice Blanchard
5 active items
Maurice Blanchard was born on 14 January 1903 on the rue Berthe in Montmartre, Paris, and he died on 31 December 1969 at the place du Tertre - the same hill where he had lived and worked for the final decades of his life. Few artists are so thoroughly identified with a single neighborhood. Montmartre was not a backdrop for Blanchard; it was the subject, the community, and the condition of his art.
His early work in the 1930s and early 1940s shows a style with affinities to the Nabis - simplified forms, decorative color organization, and a concentration on intimate domestic and urban scenes. After the Second World War his painting shifted decisively toward naive figuration: brighter, less formally structured, populated by street musicians, cafes, the silhouette of the Sacré-Coeur, flaneurs on winding cobblestone streets, the Moulin Rouge, the place de la Concorde. This later style, colorful and deliberately unpretentious, is the work for which he is primarily known today.
Blanchard occupied a specific social world within Montmartre's bohemian milieu. He was close to Raoul Dufy, Gen Paul, and the writer Marcel Aymé, among others. In 1943, at the height of the occupation, he participated in "La Chignolle", a street band organized by Gen Paul. He was a regular at the restaurant of Pierre Manière on the rue Caulaincourt, where Mac Orlan and Aymé also gathered. In 1946 he helped introduce the playwright François Billetdoux to the Paris art world at the Société Art et Humour. In 1949 he exhibited alongside Raoul Dufy, Gen Paul, Antoni Clavé, and others in a group show at the Aquarium of Montmartre.
Around 1946, Blanchard began exhibiting in Sweden with some regularity, and he quickly developed a following there. The particular appeal of his Parisian scenes to a Swedish audience - the warmth of color, the legible, affectionate imagery of a city many Swedes visited or dreamed of visiting - translated into sustained commercial interest that outlasted his lifetime. His work circulates at auction far more actively in Sweden than in France.
At auction in Sweden, Blanchard's output appears exclusively as paintings - gouaches, oil on canvas, mixed media works, and watercolors, all depicting Parisian scenes. Houses across the country have handled his work, from Bukowskis Malmö to Kalmar Auktionsverk and Helsingborgs Auktionskammare. Realized prices at Auctionist range from around 1,900 SEK for smaller works to a top sale of 5,447 SEK for a street scene with flaneurs. His gouaches of Montmartre and mixed-media Paris scenes are the most actively sought, and with 5 lots currently active across Swedish houses, his work maintains steady market presence.