Alfred Courmes

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Alfred Louis Courmes (born May 21, 1898 in Bormes-les-Mimosas , † January 8, 1993 in Paris ) was a French modern painter . He is one of the most important representatives of realism in France in the 1920s and 1930s . His name is also associated with surrealism , of which he is counted as an important representative. Courmes mainly dealt with the painting of the Renaissance , Christian mythology and homosexuality . Because of his provocative reflection on this content, he was also referred to as “The Angel of Bad Taste” (French: l'ange du mauvais goût ). His best-known works include the portrait of Peggy Guggenheim , which he was allowed to portray in 1926, as well as the paintings with Saint Sebastian depicted in homosexual iconography as a partly naked saint: St. Sébastien from 1934 and Ex voto à St. Sébastien from 1935.

Life

Alfred Courmes was born into a family of officers and landowners near Toulon , in Bormes-les-Mimosas . At the beginning of his school days he attended some religious educational institutions, then a high school in Monaco . Because of his ailing condition, he often had to visit sanatoriums. In 1919 he met the cubist Roger de La Fresnaye there , who took him to Paris and taught there. Courmes lived in Le Lavandou between 1922 and 1925 . In 1927 he moved to Belgium . There he studied the Dutch Old Masters and came into contact with James Ensor , Constant Permeke and Félix Labisse . From 1925 he exhibited regularly in the progressive salons of Paris. In 1930 he finally moved to the French capital. The high point of his career begins with the purchase of two paintings in 1935: The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the painting Saint-Sébastien à l'écluse Saint-Martin and the French State, which is now in the Musée National des Beaux-Arts d'Alger located work Couple à Bicyclette . A year later he was awarded the Prix ​​Paul Guillaume for his provocative painting Ex voto a St. Sébastien . This drew further follow-up orders: in 1937 the French state commissioned him to design a painting for the Pavillon de Sèvres for the Paris World Exhibition . A year later, Courmes was commissioned to design a monumental, 120 m² mural for the French embassy in Ottawa , which he completed in 1939 and was supposed to depict the “joys of the French”. With the outbreak of the Second World War , his artistic activities decreased. During this time he expanded his activities as a lecturer and teacher for various organizations. On this occasion he met Pablo Picasso , Georges Braque and Fernand Léger, among others .

After the war, Courmes exhibited together with his friend Clovis Trouille and René Magritte and Paul Delvaux at the Exposition surréaliste de Lille . Many other exhibitions followed. The first monograph on him was published in 1973. He is buried in Boissy-Saint-Léger .

plant

Alfred Courmes œuvre is shaped by different art styles from different epochs. In 1919 he began to develop his own handwriting: in that year he met the cubist Roger de La Fresnaye , from whose post-cubist ideas and neoclassical theories he was inspired. This first phase of work ended around 1925. The most important evidence of his early engagement with the Renaissance is the portrait of his sister from 1921 and Peggy Guggenheim's from 1926. In the period that lasted until around 1929, but crept into Surrealism, Courmes integrated influences from Dutch and French Old Masters, such as Rembrandt , Raffael , Mantegna or Perugino . With the beginning of his surreal section, Courmes began to reflect on Christian mythology and homosexuality in a painterly way, sometimes combining both thematic areas in one painting. As a result of these considerations, for example, the paintings with Saint Sebastian, who is naked, dressed in clothes typical of sailors, in order to clarify the homosexual connotation, as the painting from 1934 shows, shows his genitals to the viewer. In doing so he ironized religion and reduced it to absurdity . After the end of the Second World War, and increasingly from the 1960s onwards, he took up the means of ironization again and incorporated elements from advertising into the paintings as an innovation. The painting Pneumatique salutation d'Angélique , a Bibendum greeting Virgin Mary , was also created during this period . From the end of the 1970s, he began to deal with ancient Roman and Greek mythology in his paintings.

With the exception of his portraits - apart from the depictions of saints - and landscapes, his works always have sexual connotations on the verge of pornography, which, especially in combination with the depictions of Mary, Jesus and saints, led to the sharp polarization of his work among the art public. While some felt his intention and presentation as "unimaginative and flat", others praised him for his cynical view of religiosity.

Awards

Exhibitions

Retrospectives

In addition to retrospective shows in the museums of the cities of Poitiers and Issoudun , the following institutions dedicated a retrospective exhibition to him:

Solo exhibitions

  • 1927: Galerie du Montparnasse
  • 1986: Les gravures , Berggruen Gallery , Paris
  • 2003: Alfred Courmes et son pays , Musée Arts et Histoire de Bormes-les-Mimosas

Exhibition participation

In addition to participating in the Salon des Indépendants , Salon d'Automne and Salon des Tuileries since 1925 and from 1957 in the Salon du Mai , works by him have been shown in the following exhibitions:

Works in museums

Works by him are in the possession of numerous important international and national museums and private collections. These include:

literature

  • Jean-Marc Campagne : Alfred Courmes: Prospecteur de mirages entre ciel et chair , Eric Losfeld Editeur, Paris, 1973
  • Julien Pierre : Note sur Alfred Courmes, la pharmacie, saint Roch et saint Sébastien . In: Revue d'histoire de la pharmacie, 72e année, N. 262, 1984. pp. 237-242.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Courmes, Alfred
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Courmes, Alfred Louis (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French surrealism and realism painter
DATE OF BIRTH May 21, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Bormes-les-Mimosas
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 1993
Place of death Paris