Formed at the Free Academies of Montmartre, Marcel Gromaire very early on developed a figurative style to which he remained faithful throughout his career: forms reduced to the essential, sculptural and powerful, a chromatic range often limited to earthy colours, underlined by a powerful black ring.
As early as the 1920s, Gromaire enjoyed success, particularly with his paintings that refer to the painful episodes of the First World War for which he had fought. Gromaire also benefits from the support of important collectors, such as Dr. Maurice Girardin, who bequeathed a hundred of his works to the City of Paris (Musée Municipal d'Art Moderne). Dating from the post-war years, Gromaire's series of Parisian canvases testify to a desire to return to his roots. In fact, after spending some time in the United States (where he was named Carnegie Prize winner in 1952), the artist returned to Paris and painted many of the capital's high places, as shown in our painting "Paris, la Cité" (1956), which represents a view of the Ile la Cité and more particularly the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, while in the distance emerges the Sacred Heart.
Marcel Gromaire
« Paris, la Cité » (1956)
The style of Gromaire perfectly marries the monumentality of Gothic art. Under his paintbrush, the Cathedral is restored in all its grandeur: the artist has favoured a view of its façade, and in the background we can see the pointed arches and other elements of its architecture (spires, transept, rosettes...). The whole gives rise to a powerful graphic play of lines, curves and counter-curves, to which the arches of the bridges that punctuate the whole composition with their powerful piers respond.
The palette, predominantly brown, is brightened, as is often the case in the works of this period, by shades of blue and a few touches of green. In the preface to the catalogue of the exhibition held at the Musée national d'art moderne in 1963, Jean Cassou summed up Gromaire's pictorial talent in these terms: "Everything in Gromaire's art contributes to giving this reality such an intensity of presence that it becomes hallucinatory.
His stocky objects and characters quickly grew to monumentality, and everything was done to give everything its stature and deployment. Its arrangement too, for if there is monumentality in Gromaire's paintings, there is also machine and a robust organization of distinct elements, each saturated with its colour, inflated with its volume, carried to the extreme of its energy" (1963).