KunstenaarFrench
Francis De Lassus Saint-Genies
3 actieve items
Francis de Lassus Saint-Geniès was born in 1925 in Val André, a coastal village in Brittany. He came from a family deeply entwined with French cultural life: his great-grandfather was the composer Charles Gounod, whose son-in-law Pierre de Lassus Saint-Geniès appears in a photograph at the Musée d'Orsay taken around 1890. That musical heritage shaped the artist's sensibility throughout his career - he himself described his canvases as spaces where "all is music."
After finishing his academic training at the Académie Julian in Paris, Saint-Geniès devoted the early part of his career to portraiture, developing a meticulous technique for capturing the inner life of his subjects. Over time, his work shifted away from strict likeness toward something more overtly symbolic. The outer world in his paintings is frequently inverted or refracted, functioning as a mirror for psychological states rather than a faithful record of appearances. His palette settled into a refined, luminous range - soft flesh tones, muted blues, and pale greens - that gives his canvases a quality of arrested time.
Woman became his central and sustained subject. His female figures are large-eyed, tender, and placed within dreamlike settings where mythology and personal fantasy overlap. The works occupy a space between post-war French Surrealism and a more intimate symbolism, drawing on classical figuration without committing to academic realism. Critics and gallery texts sometimes cluster him with the mid-century Fantastique tradition that included painters working in the orbit of Paul Delvaux and the later Mellen group, though Saint-Geniès remained outside any formal movement.
His exhibitions were held across France, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, and Sweden - the last of these being particularly significant for his posthumous market profile. He showed at the Hedens Konstgalleri in Helsingborg, a connection that helps explain the strong concentration of his work in Swedish auction records. Galerie Sophie Boulan in Paris represented him, and his prints circulated widely in limited-edition lithographs, signed and numbered in pencil by the artist.
Saint-Geniès died in 2018. On the Nordic auction market, his work has appeared primarily at Helsingborgs Auktionskammare and Södermanlands Auktionsverk, which together account for more than two thirds of his 37 listings on Auctionist. The items are mostly colour lithographs and figure compositions, with top recorded prices of 673 EUR for a signed composition with a female figure. His prints appear regularly at modest estimates, making them accessible to collectors at the entry level of the French figurative market.