“Le Moulin Rouge”

Medium	Gouache and watercolour on paper
Size	19.50" × 26.00" (49.5cm × 66.0cm)
Framed Size	25.50" × 32.00" (64.8cm × 81.3cm)
Dated	c. 1950
Condition	Very good condition
Provenance	The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Patrick Offenstadt and is included in his archives

Summary

Gen Paul (1895–1975) was born on the Rue Lepic in Montmartre — the same street where Van Gogh had lived with his brother Théo — and he never really left. The Moulin Rouge, the Place Pigalle, the Moulin de la Galette: these were not picturesque subjects to him but the daily landscape of his life, painted across six decades with a visceral energy that no outsider could have manufactured. The Moulin Rouge demands exactly the kind of painting Gen Paul did best. The red of the windmill against the Montmartre sky, the movement of figures below, the whole scene charged with the noise and light and slightly raffish glamour of the quartier — all of it called for rapid brushwork, dynamic angles, that sense of things in motion that defined his work at its most characteristic. His strokes are not descriptive. They are kinetic. The paint moves across the canvas the way the crowd moves through the street — with urgency, with pleasure, without apology. Largely self-taught, Gen Paul lost his right leg to a First World War wound and returned to painting during his convalescence, befriending Juan Gris, Vlaminck, Utrillo and Derain at Le Bateau-Lavoir. His peak years between 1925 and 1929 produced work that some critics consider a precursor of Abstract Expressionism — paintings so charged with gestural energy that the subject matter barely contains the force of the mark-making. He exhibited alongside Picasso, Braque and Soutine at the Galerie Bing in 1928. On his death in 1975, the art critic Jean-Paul Crespelle described him as "the last of the great painters of Montmartre." He was awarded the Légion d'Honneur in 1934.

£4,750.00

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