Gabriel Spat Paintings for Sale

Gabriel Spat Paintings

Spat was born in 1890 in Kishinev, then a provincial capital of Russian Bessarabia and now Chișinău in Moldova, and left Russia in 1911 at the age of twenty-one. He trained first at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and then in Paris at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, the two open studios through which most of the foreign painters of his generation passed. After the First World War he worked at La Ruche, the ramshackle hive of studios in Montparnasse that had housed Chagall, Soutine, Zadkine and Léger, and he is consistently recorded as having moved in the circle of Soutine and Modigliani.

That company is worth noting chiefly because his painting took so little from it. Where the Montparnasse expressionists worked large, dark and raw, Spat worked small, bright and light-handed, and he held to the subject matter of the generation before his: the Tuileries and the Bois de Boulogne, the racecourse at Longchamp, the bandstand, the café terrace, the beach. He painted them in oil and in watercolour and gouache, frequently on panels or sheets only a few inches across, with a quick, broken, flickering touch — figures set down in two or three loaded strokes, parasols and hats registered as spots of colour, the whole held together by a high-keyed, sunlit palette. These are small-scale Impressionist pictures carried deep into the twentieth century, nearer in spirit to the boulevard and park painters, Béraud, Abel-Truchet and Loir, than to anything being made around him in the 1920s.

He remained in France for most of his working life. In 1945 he emigrated to the United States and settled in New York, where in 1946 the Carroll Carstairs Gallery showed his Paris watercolours; further exhibitions followed in America and in Paris. He went on painting French park and leisure subjects for the rest of his career, and these remain the pictures by which he is known — an American market built on a Paris painted largely from memory.

Gabriel Spat Paintings

Gabriel Spat Paintings for Sale