Jean Rustin

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Jean Rustin

Jean Rustin (born March 3, 1928 in Montigny-lès-Metz , Moselle department , † December 24, 2013 in Paris ) was a French painter .

Life

Jean was the youngest of five siblings. At the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, his family fled with him, first to Berry and later to Poitiers . There he completed his secondary school education, learned to play the violin and began his first attempts at painting.

In 1944 the family returned to Metz. There he completed his baccalaureate and created his first paintings. In 1948 he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. There he studied until 1952, according to his own words without enthusiasm. He made derogatory comments about the "hundreds of female and male nudes" that he painted and then destroyed. He preferred painters like Jean Fautrier , Jean Dubuffet and Antoni Tàpies to the academic teaching of his professors.

In 1949 he married his wife Elsa. The marriage resulted in two sons, François and Pierre.

In the early 1950s he turned to the new action painting coming from New York . In the 1950s, the direction developed that finally established itself as the École de Paris . Reluctantly they made themselves familiar with Paul Klee ; some of Rustin's early works evoke his style. At that time he worked intensively with watercolor painting . He used this technique to fluidly and quickly throw abstract compositions of spots, pictograms, crosses and hatching in strong, biting colors onto paper. In his oil painting he tried to repeat these easily thrown, sharp and clear eruptions.

From 1959 to 1969 he put his work for sale in the Galerie La Roux. From 1967 he formed more stable, calmer forms on the canvas: gear trains, tubes, mechanical elements. La Machine infernale and La Machine électrique, for example, are the titles of his works. In 1971 the ARC department of the Musée d'art moderne in Paris dedicated a retrospective to him.

Daring to break with his collectors, he took a radical turn that year: he began to paint objectively, his pictures now told stories, often in satirical form. Elsa au chat , Un crime , L′instant fatal and La Nuit des longs couteaux are titles of paintings that play with historical, literary and biographical references. He did not shy away from strange, even repulsive topics, for example the depiction of a woman urinating.

The body eventually became his only subject. He depicted him horribly compressed or cut, completely naked, hairless, observed in the cold light of windowless bathrooms or dormitories. Often the head or gender of the figures cannot be recognized; this makes them appear even more miserable. An exhibition of these pictures in the Kulturhaus von Créteil led to a public scandal in 1982.

In the last three decades of his work he developed his realism into a more objective, yet clinically cool image of the human being. In 2001 the Halle Saint-Pierre in Paris dedicated a retrospective to him. There were further exhibitions in Athens in 2005 and in Legnano in 2007 .

Jean Rustin led a withdrawn life and avoided the public with the exception of his appearances as a violinist.

literature

  • Philippe Dagen: Jean Rustin . Le Monde , December 27, 2013, p. 16
  • François-Marie Deyrolle, Jean Clair, Ludovic Degroote, Henri Cueco: Jean Rustin . Besançon 2011: Éditions Virgile. ISBN 978-2914481892 .

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Unless other sources are expressly stated, this article follows the presentation by Philippe Dagen in Le Monde.
  2. ↑ a b c Mort du peintre Jean Rustin. Le Figaro , December 26, 2013, accessed December 30, 2013
  3. ↑ des centaines de nus féminins et masculins , quoted from Philippe Dagen, Le Monde
  4. ↑ The department is responsible for contemporary art; the acronym stands for animation, research, confrontation
  5. ↑ Elsa with the cat
  6. ↑ A crime
  7. ↑ The fatal moment
  8. ↑ The Night of the Long Knives
personal data
SURNAME Rustin, Jean
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French painter
DATE OF BIRTH March 3, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Montigny-lès-Metz
DATE OF DEATH December 24, 2013
Place of death Paris