Olivier Debré
(1920-1999)
From density to transparency, from paste to fluid matter, from the vertical of signs-persons to the horizontal of signs-landscapes, to arrive at the sumptuous explosion of signs-spaces, Debré's entire pictorial approach thus moves from matter to the ineffable, from contained force to the delicacy of mental landscape."[1] ".
Olivier Debré is a French painter born in 1920. He began drawing and painting as a child. "As a child, I always painted and sculpted. It seemed my natural mode of expression. I was comfortable[2] ". In 1938, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in the architecture section, in the studio of his maternal uncle Jacques Debat-Ponsan. During the war, in the early 1940s, in his family's cradle in Touraine, he was drawn back to painting. "During this troubled period of the war, I was there, in this Touraine where I had always gone as a child, and I went back down into the field and painted, simply, like that. In painting, I had a need for direct expression and physical communication with nature.[3] ".
Debré exhibited for the first time in 1941. Some of his paintings, still figurative, were shown in the gallery run by Georges Aubry (Pierre Loeb had handed over the management of his gallery to Debré to prevent it falling under Aryan administration). Her painting was in the wake of Impressionism. He was noticed by Picasso, whose studio he visited several times in 1942-1943. During this winter, his work moved away from the representation of tangible reality. He developed a non-figurative style of painting based on emotion and in close connection with nature.
Vase 2, ceramic © ADAGP, Paris, 2024.
In June 1949, the Bing gallery offers him his first solo exhibition. During the same years, he met other painters of the lyrical abstraction movement, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung, Gérard Schneider and others. He began exhibiting at the Salons. In the early 1950s, he exhibited at the Salon de Mai, created by Gaston Diehl, to whom he remained loyal throughout his career, and at the Salon des Réalités nouvelles. His painting gained in substance. The artist worked with knives, building up his works with broad impastos that created a masonry surface. This was the period of his vertical Signes-personnages. At around the same time, Nicolas de Staël was also working in a very material way.
In 1959, he exhibited for the first time in the United States at the Phillips Gallery in Washington and the Knoedler Galleries in New York. While there, he met some of the leading lights of Abstract Expressionism, such as Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Jules Olitski, representatives of Color-Field painting. He returned to New York in 1963 for a double exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery (Paris and New York). The text of the catalogs is by Francis Ponge.
Debré's work took on its definitive form in the 1960s. At the beginning of the decade, landscapes became his preferred subject. Most of his work is done outdoors, in direct contact with nature, in full immersion. Debré's landscapes are those he encountered on his travels, and those more familiar to him in the vicinity of his studios: the "Madères" in Touraine at Vernou-sur-Brenne, near Tours; the Mediterranean at Les Salins, a wooded beach near Saint-Tropez; and Saint-Georges-de-Didonne, near Royan, on the Gironde estuary, where he created over two hundred canvases in almost thirty years. The expression of his emotion is expressed in broad fields of color, in a light, fluid material that creates transparency. In counterpoint, at certain points on the periphery of the canvas, there are clusters of matter. These are the horizontal landscape-signs, an exact reflection of the emotion felt during his communion with nature. His discovery of the fundamentally pictorial world of Henri Matisse's work left a deep impression on him. They shared the creation of a sense of infinite space through color, regardless of the actual dimensions of the canvas. During the same major decade, he turned to sculpture. He designed Signes-personnages, first small-scale, then larger, culminating in monumental works for public use.
The first retrospective of his work in a French museum was held in 1966 at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre: Olivier Debré. Peintures 1943-1966. Debré was increasingly in demand. He received numerous monumental commissions. In 1979, he was appointed head of the mural art studio at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, a position he held until 1985. His works unfolded in increasingly monumental formats, and his material became even more fluid and transparent. Among his most famous large-scale creations is the stage curtain for the Comédie-Française, commissioned by Jack Lang in 1985. With such a large surface to paint, the question of his gesture arose. He had to expand his gesture beyond the possibilities of his own body. Equipped with a long broom loaded with color as an extension of his arm, he painted as he moved across the canvas itself. In 1989 and 1998, he went on to create the stage curtains for the Hong Kong Opera House and the Shanghai Grand Theatre, both of even greater surface area. Another major creation by this total artist was the seven-piece set for Carolyn Carlson's ballet Signes, with music by René Aubry. Debré also designed the costumes. Contrary to usual practice, it was the sets that inspired the choreography. The ballet premiered at the Paris Opera in 1997. It was presented several times thereafter, and again in the summer of 2023.
In 1995, Daniel Abadie organized a major retrospective of his work at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. The artist died in 1999.
Following a donation of Debré's works by his heirs, the Centre de Création Contemporaine de Tours became the Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré.
Olivier's extensive engraving output spans more than forty years, from 1949 to the early 1990s. In black and in color, he worked in etching, drypoint, aquatint, lithography and silkscreen. In terms of iconography, his etchings, in all techniques, follow the same development as his paintings. His first etchings (around seventy), in drypoint and/or etching, were based on realistic subjects. Then, around 1951, a language of signs appeared, with Signes-personnages executed in etching and drypoint, then in 1958-1959 in aquatint, a more painterly technique. This was followed by Signes-paysages in 1970, executed in etching and/or aquatint. With the exception of a few earlier units, the first lithographs appeared towards the end of the 1950s, with the Signes-personnages. These were black lithographs. Color appeared at the beginning of the following decade, at the same time as the Signes-paysages. It was to dominate his work thereafter. Aesthetically, the lithographs and serigraphs are closely related to his paintings.
Debré has also produced illustration prints, notably for texts by Bernard Noël, Michel Butor and Pierre Torreilles.
Encre de Chine 2, 1988, Indian ink on paper © ADAGP, Paris, 2024.
