Jean VILLERI (1896-1982) - Lot 56

Jean VILLERI (1896-1982) Le Repos sous les arbres. Watercolor on paper, signed lower right. 26.7 x 34.7 cm. Jean Villeri was born in Oneglia, on the Italian Riviera, in 1896. Giovanni Domenico was ten years old when his father decided to settle in Cannes, France. This geographical move made him an "immigrant", but had a sweet compensation: he never again left the Mediterranean shores he loved so much (Le Cannet, Cagnes-sur-Mer, Saint-Tropez, the Var region, etc.). And Giovanni will always be Jean. In 1912, at the age of sixteen, the young self-taught artist made a timid entry in the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris. At the time, he was a plein-air painter who sold - and quite well - to foreigners living on the Côte d'Azur: landscapes, seascapes, market scenes... At the time, the quality of his street scenes was already being noticed. In 1916, at the age of twenty, he "went up" to Paris and learned about art history by visiting museums. But it was on the Côte, in Cagnes, the "little Montmartre of the Côte d'Azur", that he rubbed shoulders with the painters Soutine and Kikoïne, as well as Osterlind (who hosted Modigliani for a time). He made a pilgrimage to the village of the master Renoir: "Cagnes!... this village I knew in Renoir's time and to which I owe most of my work. In 1922, he married Olivia Funk. The couple settled in Le Cannet, where Jean met Pierre Bonnard, whose artistic rigor and spiritual influence would profoundly influence his thinking. From 1923, he exhibited in the salons of the Côte d'Azur, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Menton, the Société des Beaux-Arts in Nice and the Maison des Beaux-Arts in Cannes, notably with Bonnard. His first solo show was in 1924, under the aegis of Galerie Allard, which had noticed him at various salons organized by the Société des aquarellistes (of which he had been a member since 1922). He mainly presented landscapes of Provence, Italy (especially Venice) and seascapes. In 1927, he decorated the bar at La Sarrazine in Saint-Tropez. He recalls a night-time world that was not his own, while he drank water and got up at dawn to go sea urchin fishing! He always held Saint-Tropez close to his heart, and would return there again and again for the rest of his life, as a regular visitor to the Place des Lices and an active companion to the pétanque players. In 1929, his meeting with Francis Picabia, Jean Crotti and Jacques Villon was decisive in his choice of a non-figurative path. They were regular summer visitors to Le Cannet. Under the impetus of his friends, Jean slowly prepared to enter the realm of abstraction. In 1934, he joined the "abstraction création art non figuratif" movement founded by Herbin, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Vantongerloo, and took part in the group's exhibitions. His break with figurative art was consummated by his extended stays in Paris. In Cannes, he became close to Paul Eluard and René Char. He developed a deep and fraternal friendship with the latter, to whom he owes his poetic training. A loyal complicity with Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry - whom he met at this time - also marked this flourishing period of his life. In 1940, he left Cannes to settle in the medieval village of Haut-de-Cagnes, where he organized his studio for good. In 1944, he took refuge with his new partner, Simone Bouvier, in Saint-Jean du Gard, where he met René Char and Michel Seuphor. He remained there until the Liberation. During this troubled period, he painted many watercolors on location at Boisset, near Anduze (Gard)... Jean Villeri gives a lecture for "Les Jeudis du Club 44" in Lausanne on April 19, 1949, at the request of his Swiss collector Georges Braunschweig. After this major lecture, a key moment in his career, entitled "Why should painting be non-figurative?", he deliberately concealed all public references to his earlier work. From then on, the artist's story would be written solely in abstraction, until he drew his last breath in 1982. "To express oneself pictorially is to gradually lose the initial notion of a visible reality, to arrive at that synchronous action of color tones which then becomes the painter's true subject." Fans of Jean Villeri's figurative period will find much to interest them in this body of work, which has remained in the hands of a private collector for many years. Few of these works circulate on the art market, and in such quantity! They were all acquired directly from the painter, which reinforces their rarity. Virginie Journiac, CECOA, FNEPSA and CEDEA accredited expert