Jeanne Coppel is also honoured in this broad female fresco. Born in Romania in 1896, she lived through the century and was equally in contact with the Berlin Expressionists of Der Sturm and with the Bauhaus school. In Paris, at the Académie Ranson, she was a pupil of the Nabis and it was Michel Seuphor (a theoretician of Neoplasticism) who prefaced her first exhibition in 1950, at the Galerie Colette Allendy. In her small oil on paper works, drawings and monotypes, she alternated an unruly lyricism with a strict geometric structure. In this incessant toing and froing in which she included wrinkling, colours and sometimes cut-outs of hardboard nailed on pictures, she was equally successful. The exhibition offers one of her famous small white gouache works that she composed using rubbings on a surface covered with graphite. Her oil paintings are also highly original: using an unusual technique, a new process, she would coat her canvases with several layers, washing them and then reworking them until she obtained the colour intensity that she sought. As can be seen in the exhibition, her large oil paintings are structured on rhythmic compositions. However, collage remained essential throughout her creative career, even if her choices evolved. She emphasized her pleasure in looking for and handling different materials which for her were of a disconcerting variety: wrapping paper, silver paper for light, pieces of cloth, velvet, metro tickets chosen for their yellow colour, a packet of Gauloises cigarettes to get azure… she worked from posters that she took down, used graphics collected from newspapers, wrinkled her materials to harmonize them in large compositions. What is striking in her artistic development is the eclecticism of her innovative formal study, the permanent perseverance in her quest for our pleasure. |