06/02/2024
Currently on view at the gallery is this unique piece by French Fauve Othon Friesz… ✨
Othon Friesz, like Braque and Dufy, was born in Le Havre. He was a childhood friend of Dufy, who moved with him to Paris to study fine art. It was there that Friesz met Matisse, Vlaminck and Marquet, with whom he exhibited at the watershed 1905 Salon d’Automne, in which the strictures of the Academy were broken, and Fauvism was given its name. Yet, he quickly tired of both Fauvism and Paris, and within three years was back in Normandy having abandoned pure colour for a more muted palette.
In ‘Nus dans un paysage’ Friesz subverts traditional stereotypes. While the figures adopt classical contrapposto, their flattened and heavily outlined figures have a modernist rhetoric. Friesz approaches the body with dynamism, depicting the bodies integrated within the landscape through echoing the shape of the hills and movement of the trees. Friesz’s use of earthy tones and angular figures in this period is no doubt influenced by Cézanne, whose own bather series was completed just a few years earlier.
Work featured:
Emile-Othon Friesz, ‘Nus dans un paysage’, 1909, oil on canvas
