Lucie Cousturier

Lucie Cousturier: Self-Portrait

Lucie Cousturier (born December 19, 1876 as Lucie Brû in Paris ; † June 16, 1925 there ) was a French painter , art critic and writer .

Life

Lucie Brû was born in Paris in 1876 as the daughter of Léon Casimir Brû and his wife Apolline Manette Comyn. The father ran a toy doll factory and the family lived in a wealthy family. At the age of 14 she began to be interested in painting and initially taught herself the techniques on her own . She later became a student of the late impressionist painters Paul Signac and Henri Edmond Cross . She copied their style of painting and created pictures in the style of pointillism . Her work includes landscape paintings, still lifes and portraits. She often visited Signac in his La Hune house in Saint-Tropez . In 1894 she organized a retrospective for the magazine La Revue blanche with works by the late painter Georges Seurat . In 1900 Léon Casimir Brû acquired Seurat's major work, A Sunday Afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte, and passed it on to his daughter, who kept it until 1924.

Lucie Brû married the painter and art critic Edmond Cousturier in 1900. In the following year, she took part in the art exhibition Salon des indépendants for the first time, which was followed by further participation every year. She also exhibited works in Brussels, Munich and Berlin. Several solo exhibitions followed in Paris from 1906 to 1913. As an art critic, she wrote primarily about the work of close artists such as Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Henri-Edmond Cross, Ker-Xavier Roussel , Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard and published articles in several magazines, including L'Art Décoratif and Bulletin de la vie artistique .

In 1913 she acquired the Les Parasols house in Fréjus . Here she lived during the First World War and taught soldiers from Senegal who were stationed near the house. She gave French lessons to soldiers and organized literary classes in her home. The encounters with the soldiers inspired her to write the story Des Inconnus chez moi , which she published in 1920. In 1922 she traveled to West Africa and visited the French colonies there. She created various drawings and watercolors on site. She processed the impressions of the trip in the description Mes inconnus chez eux published in 1925 . She also worked for the Paria newspaper , which campaigned for the residents of the colonial areas .

Paintings in public collections (selection)

• Fleurs , Musée de l'Annonciade , Saint-Tropez
• Jardin , Musee de Grenoble , Grenoble
• Femme à sa toilette , MUDO - Musée de l'Oise, Beauvais
• Femme faisant du crochet , Musée d'Orsay , Paris
• Self-Portrait , Indianapolis Museum of Art , Indianapolis

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  Lucie Cousturier: Femme faisant du crochet

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  Lucie Cousturier: Fleurs

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  Lucie Cousturier: Jardin

Publications

• Des inconnus chez moi. Éditions de la Sirène, Paris 1920.
• Seurat. Crès, Paris 1921.
• P. Signac. Crès, Paris 1922.
• La forêt du Haut-Niger. Les Cahiers d'aujourd'hui, Bruges 1923.
• Mes inconnus chez eux. Rieder, Paris 1925.
• Mon amie Fatou citadine. Rieder, Paris 1925.

literature

• Cousturier, Mme Lucie . In: Ulrich Thieme (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists from Antiquity to the Present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 7 : Cioffi – Cousyns . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1912, p. 604 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
• Judith Cernogora: Portraits de femmes. Point de vues, Rouen 2016, ISBN 978-2-37195-009-2 .
• Adèle de Lanfranchi: Lucie Cousturier 1876–1925. Adèle de Lanfranchi, Paris 2008, ISBN 978-2-906130-03-6 .
• Roger Little: Lucie Cousturier, les tirailleurs sénégalais et la question coloniale. L'Harmattan, Paris 2008, ISBN 978-2-296-07348-7 .

Web links

Commons : Lucie Cousturier  - collection of images, videos and audio files