ArtistFrenchb.1920–d.1999
Olivier Debré
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In the winter of 1942-1943, a young Olivier Debré was invited to Picasso's studio on rue des Grands-Augustins after the older painter encountered his work in a Paris gallery. The meeting did not convert Debré into a Cubist - it pushed him further toward his own form of abstraction, one he would later describe as 'fervent abstraction': painting as the direct incarnation of emotion through sign.
Born in Paris on 14 April 1920 into a prominent intellectual family, Debré came to painting by a circuitous route. He first studied architecture under Le Corbusier at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1939, then read history at the Sorbonne. During the Occupation he joined the French Resistance and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. These years shaped a seriousness of purpose that runs through all his subsequent work.
His painting through the late 1940s and 1950s developed a vocabulary he called 'signes-personnages' - abstract signs retaining a ghostly human presence, worked in dense, textured matter on large canvases. Then, in 1953, Debré made a decisive turn. The human figure receded and the landscape entered: 'signes-paysages' replaced figurative signs, and his palette opened. A 1959 trip to Washington brought him into contact with Franz Kline and Mark Rothko, confirming the international ambitions of his project even as he maintained a distinctly French approach to painterly matter and surface.
From the mid-1960s, Norway became a recurring destination and obsession. Debré traveled to the fjords repeatedly, and the qualities of that light - grey, diffuse, vast - saturated his canvases. Works from Oppdal, Geiranger and Lofoten circulated through Nordic auction rooms for decades after his death, evidence of how deeply that geography had entered his visual language. The paint in these works is fluid, almost breathed onto the canvas; colour fields bleed and overlap without losing their structural tension.
Public commissions on an architectural scale came in the final phase of his career. In 1987 he created the stage curtain for the Comédie-Française in Paris; in 1989 a second curtain for the Hong Kong Opera House, commissioned by the Louis Vuitton Foundation; and in 1998 a third for the new Shanghai Opera House, measuring some 46 by 72 feet. In 1997, the Paris Opéra Ballet performed 'Signes,' with sets and costumes by Debré and choreography by Carolyn Carlson. Days before his death on 1 June 1999, he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
His work is held by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Phillips Collection in Washington, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the Fondation Gandur pour l'Art in Geneva, and the Olivier Debré Contemporary Art Centre in the Loire Valley. On the Nordic auction market, his Norwegian-period paintings are the most sought-after, with top results at Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner reaching 195,000 NOK - reflecting the particular affinity between his subject matter and the collectors of the region.