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LEON GARD
Biography and bibliography (click on the bonds in blue to reach the articles of Leon Gard)
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1901: birth with Tulle of Leon Gard.
1910: the Gard family settles in the XIII° district of Paris, with the 21 street of the Fields of the lark.
1913: Leon Gard draws at 12 years his self-portrait with the charcoal.
1915: at 14 years, he writes to the conservative of the Museum Decorative Arts, Louis Metman, who places it under the direction of Eugene Morand.
- attends the Ranson Academy.
1917: carry out copies of old paintings for the theatre of the Gymnasium.
- portrait of the actor Gabriel Signoret.
1918: portrait of Louis Metman.
1920: its "Portrait of Louis Metman", painted in 1918, is hung in line with the National annual art exhibition and a special encouragement of the State will be worth to him. Gard will be ironical later : "was My work so bad, or these Messrs of the jury they were upset by the wine of a banquet? Who will never know it! In any case, if they made an error this day there, they were well corrected since."
1921: present at the "National" a portrait of Mrs. Imbart of the Tower.
1922: between at the Higher National School of the Art schools of Paris (workshop of Ernest Laurent), which it will judge severely: "agitated, noisy, débraillée, giving itself airs of ruer in the stretchers, of chambarder the authority, but actually destroying only art that, nobody, in this majestic enclosure, thinks of defending, punctuating all these earth tremors for plant louses by the song of the" Fireman ", the only really major principle of this academy of mediocrities.".
- exposes to the gallery Reitlinger, street Boëtie.
1925: tie a contract with the merchant of Chéron paintings.
1926: from February to July, remains in Toulon where it paints dead natures and landscapes (seen Roads, theBrown one, of Faron, Maghaud and Bourgarel).
1927: expose to the Chéron gallery.
- January 10: visit the exposure Claude Monet in Durand-Ruel and note: " research of luminosity of Claude Monet, with those of some painters of its time, represents a capital effort, which causes the shock of what it can y of have been appropriate without reason in the representation of the colors and the light. "
January -16: visit the Delacroix exposure and note : " Delacroix studied nature makes masterpieces. If it entrusts to its imagination, it does not leave any more a its ciels too green and of its virtuosities with the bitumen. "
Self-portrait 1927
1928: receives the Fragonard Price.
- from May to August, remains in Toulon where it paints the naked ones and dead natures.
1929-1930: stays in Toulon.
1931-1932: retrospective with the Chéron gallery.
- has a second "Portrait of Louis Metman" and a great still life at the "National".
1934: to ensure its subsistence, it accepts, with back-plate, an use of restorer of tables in the workshop of the street of Bourdonnais.
1935: send two natures died to the "National" .
- portrait of the collector George Renand, director of the stores of "Samaritaine".
1936: send to the National "Glassmakings and Earthenware in white harmony".
1936-1938: painted sights of the countryside surrounding Paris (Stamps, Morigny, Monfort-l' Amaury). "That I like, says it, these withdrawn villages where the humble but healthy odors of the farm and the house reign. Work is remained honest and simple there, almost primitive industry. They know science neither pride materialist nor the moral decline."
1939: expose to the Bernheim gallery, street of the Saint-Honore Suburb.
1940: meet Sacha Guitry and binds friendship with him.
1941: expose to the gallery Jeanne Castel, which occurred Matignon.
- portrait of Lucien Daudet (son of Alphonse Daudet), of the Count Doria.
Lucien Daudet by Leon Gard
1942: expose ten paintings to the gallery Jeanne Castel. The booklets of invitations are accompanied by a virulent satire "Cheatings of Painter or the Daring ridiculous ones " where it is caught à.la.mode of it tyrannical painting known as "daring" and with criticisms of art. The tone of the future newspaper "Apollo" is posed.
Portrait of Sacha Guitry out of red dress by Leon Gard (oil on fabric, 92 X 73 cm, 1942).
The painter still saw many things to be done in this portrait, but Sacha Guitry which liked the draft says him suddenly: "do not touch there any more!"
1943: take part in the exposure of the Charpentier gallery "Parisian Figures" with its portrait of Sacha Guitry.
- exposes to the gallery Jeanne Castel and gives in foreword of its catalogue a satire on the Living rooms: "the Great Illusion " , which it defines : "a company of hiring of walls which can really thrive only by calling upon the crowd of nullities."
- takes part in an exposure of group to the gallery Corot, Haussmann boulevard.
- portrait of the countess of Anselme, the Hottinguer baroness, Charpini, the actress Lana Marconi (Mme Guitry)
1944: writing "five articles for the weekly magazine" PANORAMA ", of which " Heritage of Gauguin ", where while recognizing that" the majority of its beautiful works its "and its remarkable ideas " and always containing an invaluable share of truth ", it reproach Gauguin its easy formulas ", grandiloquentes, childishly revolutionists , which flatter this leaning men for the mirific receipts, at the same time as their instincts of unchained young imps who saoulent indiscipline ".
"Indigestion of vertebrae ", where it is ironical about the legend which allots a too great number of vertebrae to odalic of Ingres.
"Plurality of exactitude in painting ", where it affirms that exactitude in the imitation of nature does not prevent the originality: "without ceasing being exact, each artist can express an aspect of the things that no artist expressed before him".
- exposes 10 paintings to the gallery Jeanne Castel, with in foreword of its catalogue: " the artist in front of the company ", where it affirms the right and the duty for the artist to be informed of the state of the company and where it concludes by " the need for gathering the real aristocracy of the country from which the natural role is to distinguish the talents and to protect them from the attacks from the mediocrity whatever it is ".
1945: its exposure to the gallery Jeanne Castel is accompanied by a new satire on the Criticism of art.
1946: the semi-monthly review "Apollo melts" where it brings the majority of the Leitartikeces under its name or the pseudonym of Elie Bertrand as well as a signed chronicle "the Watcher". It denounces the criticism of art there monopolized by people whose competence on the matter is at the very least debatable, the living rooms which pile up without understanding, the spirit of lucre and the abuses the modern publicity who cant a crowned field; it affirms there its design of art inseparable from the imitation of nature by reproaching its adversaries their absence of valid arguments.
Specimen of the Apollo newspaper
1947: writing "Responsibility for Apollinaire ", where it shows the poet Guillaume Apollinaire like one of the principal inspirers of the Cubism and pushed by a morbid desire of destruction,
"a great painter, an example not to be followed: VAN-GOGH". ,
" the Advanced ones advance in the vacuum ",
" the Art schools should be discouraged" ,
"Nature is infallible ", where after having reviewed the lesson of freshness, coloured vibration, life of the Impressionists, then the beginning of slip of the Deer, and, finally, the fall of Cubistes, it calls some more than ever with nature to give art in the good way.
Leon Gard, self-portrait (charcoal, 1947)
1948: expose to the gallery Jeanne Castel.
- takes part in the festival of painting of the gallery "Knew", boulevard of the Madeleine, at the sides of Van Dongen, Vlaminck, Utrillo.
- writing "the PRESS, cancer of modern civilization", "the School of the Art schools or when the fireman takes fire", "Love of Art, bastion against the robot ",
"Two large poets, Two bad critics of art ", where it questions the perspicacity of Baudelaire and Theophilus Gautier as regards criticism of art.
1949: expose to the gallery Jeanne Castel.
- writing: "sick Animals of the plague ", satire where it denounces the devastations caused by publicity, which are the death or the anguish of all that there is of nobler in the human society ", publicity that it compares with" large in addition to full with a repugnant pus, which one pours on poor humanity, and which represents the law of the money."
- writing: " Of the role of the School of the Art schools ", where it expresses that l"Ecole of the Art schools has place to be only insofar as it transmits tested principles: however, it does not appear that it transmits anything similar, nor that, moreover, its leaders are capable to define what they teach ".
1950: take part in the International Festival of Painting of Brussels with "Accoudée Woman".
At that time, a certain number of its tables, natures died in particular, express in Leon Gard a concern of reconciling two of its inclinations in art however not easily reconcilable: love of precise contour, the weight of the things, the detail, and the love of the atmosphere, the coloured vibrations. Usually, it inclines sometimes towards one, sometimes towards the other, in different tables and where, sometimes, the two tendencies fight, one yielding to the other in turn; it then tries to pose one of the more gands problems of painting: to melt these two tendencies in only one in the same work.
Still life in the copper Cauldrons and the oranges (65 X 54 cm, 1950)
- writing: "It is necessary to remove Artistic Education ", where it affirms that "the initiation with the fine arts, to which one affects today to give such an amount of importance by an army of initiators of all kinds, is a nonsense and a deception", and preaches a "detoxication" of the public.
1951: writing" the Fable of the blue time " : "the" Master "of" the blue "time," the pink "time," the ingresque "time, etc, equalizing Ingres and Raphaël, is a legend given birth to by publicity..."
1952: writing "Meissonier and Picasso ", where the large celebrity of the XIX° is put in parallel with the large celebrity of the XX°, and considered both as opposéees errors and as far away from the truth one as the other,
"does Impressionism exist?", where it supports, thus denying the concept of progès in art, that" the impressionist impertinently baptized painters did not invent anything nor revolutionized: they did nothing but incline more towards the luminist part and atmosphérienne of the eternal problem of painting ".
1953: writing "To help the artists ", where it states all its reasons to be against a special help of the state granted to the artists.
- tries to create a new monthly review, "the Anonymity of Art", anonymous review, without publicity, nonillustrated, which it only writes, and whose publication seems to be blocked. The articles of the two published numbers show the topics headlights of the "Apollo": "False prestige of the artistic deformation", "the Imitation of nature is selective", "Uselessness of initiation in the Art schools", "On Publicity", "the Press and the Truth ".
1954: writing "Required of the Rules " in the "Apollo", from which control escapes to him more and more.
1955: writing "Speculation and Fine Arts", "Nature or Nothing", "Trade of the Genius ".
1956: writing "Beauty, Ugliness, Misfortune", "Figurative deforming " (published in the opinion column of L'Amateur d'art).
1957: died of Sacha Guitry.
- writing "Non-figuratisme is anti-plastic ", for the opinion column of the L'Amateur d'art.
1959: beginning, in the park of the Catches in forest of Isle-Adam, of a series of landscapes which will extend on ten years.
1960: acquisition by the State of "red Pinks in a vase of blue and white Gien".
1963-1973: expose regularly to the gallery Des Capucines, boulevard des Capucines.
1972: It announces its exposure to the gallery of the Capucines : "fifty years of Painting", as "a form of demonstration against the abstract in the sense that I see the art of painting such as one always saw it and that one will find no innovation compared to the past here." It adds : "the abstract is not art and could not be given for such."
1976: it writes to his son: "I had hoped that in the trade of art that I make, I would meet some true art lover: I gave up this idea because I found only speculators or people anxious to maintain the portraits of family by vanity."
1979: painted its last painting, "red Géranium".
- on 12 November, died in Paris of Leon Gard in his studio of the quay des Grands Augustins.
(Click on the bonds in blue to reach the articles of Leon Gard)
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