On the occasion of its next Modern and Contemporary Art auction on Wednesday 25 November 2020, the PIASA auction house honours the work of the tachism painter Maurice Estève through two of his watercolours.
conflict was over, he returned to Paris and, in addition to his apprenticeship with a typographer, took courses where he learned the technique of drawing and watercolour. He then discovered the great museums, the painting of Paul Cézanne and then that of Henri Matisse. In 1923, he took over the management of a shawl and fabric design workshop in Barcelona.
Back in Paris, Maurice Estève frequented the free workshop of the Colarossi Academy in Montparnasse. Marked until then by the painting of the Primitives and the Cubists, including Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, he was influenced by the Surrealist aesthetic, in particular by the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. It was not until 1930 that his work was the subject of his first exhibition. For the 1937 Universal Exhibition in Paris, he participated in the creation of wall decorations by Robert and Sonia Delaunay for the aviation and railway pavilions.
Maurice Estève (1904-2001)
Untitled, 1955
Estimation : 25000 / 35000 €
Mobilized during the Second World War until August 1940, he exhibited several times in 1942, and at the Galerie de France in 1943 alongside artists such as Jean Bazaine, Léon Gischia, Jean Le Moal and Alfred Manessier.
In the immediate post-war period, his work met with great success. In 1947, the series of his canvases around the Trades pushed him towards non-figurative painting freed from the naturalist straitjacket. The forms that emerge are intensely coloured.
Alongside a production of oils on canvas, the artist produced a large number of watercolours in which the subtlety of the line blends with elegance and mastery of composition. Several natural, even organic, brightly coloured forms are randomly but harmoniously intermingled.
"In watercolour, there is the transparency of the colour conveyed by the water, sometimes revealing the paper [...] and I pick up the parts that do not satisfy me. I work with watercolour as I work with oil for a long time and in periods of time "1
Maurice Estève (1904-2001)
Untitled, 1956
Estimation : 25000 / 35000 €
Like Pierre Soulages or Henri Matisse, Maurice Estève designed in 1957 the stained-glass windows of the church of Berlincourt, in the canton of Jura in Switzerland, as well as tapestry cartoons.
1quotation Catalogue with a study by Jean Lescure, "Estève ou les chemins silencieux de la réalité".
