Marc MÉTAYER * honorary member
CHARLES LAPICQUE AND HIS WORK
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Charles Lapicque - La Grille bleue, 1940, Oil on canvas, Ste Geneviève de Fierbois (detail), ill. Marc Métayer
The expert
“It was a very long time ago, more than sixty years ago, in the autumn of 1956. For the first time, I went with my mother Madeleine to 4 rue Froidevaux in Paris, where Charles Lapicque welcomed us into his studio. It was a magical sight.” Marc Métayer recalls, with wonder, that first meeting with the artist. He had then admired his canvases from the Venetian period. He had also noticed palettes that contained only a single pure colour and strokes forming the shades of a tonal gradient created by adding white. Years later, he understood that this scientific technique, of absolute rigour, was the keystone of a historic artistic innovation applied to part of the work that Lapicque described in 1959–1960 as “harmony in dissonances”. A true friendship was born from 1970 between Charles Lapicque, Marc Métayer, his friend Bernard Balanci and Régine Métayer, his wife, who devoted herself to the painter’s archives. In the years that followed, Marc Métayer gave priority to defending the authenticity of the work and detecting counterfeiting. This work led, as early as 1972, to the certification of pieces and the establishment of lists and archives. Today, Marc Métayer’s objective is to ensure, for the future, the lasting legacy of Charles Lapicque’s work through authentication. From the 1940s onwards, Charles Lapicque achieved the feat of combining theory (which, on its own, could be arid) with the essential quality of transcendence that all great painting must possess. A forerunner, he was also a leader, as the scholarly author, in 1938, of a doctoral thesis in physical sciences that overturned the Renaissance order by challenging Leonardo da Vinci, through “blue-structured” paintings set against flamboyant backgrounds. Lapicque’s demonstration also has a metaphysical dimension: his distances, through their clarity symbolising the light that opposes the darkness (of the classical painters), presuppose a desire for the absolute that enables human nature to taste the splendour of truth. This reversal of the gradation of colours in space had never been expressed before Charles Lapicque’s publications from 1935 onwards. Van Gogh defined the painter as a colourist; Lapicque is one—and one whom Marc Métayer supports with fervour.Contact
Marc MÉTAYER * honorary member
La Chataigneraie
26 allée Jules-Verne
78170 La Celle-Saint-Cloud
+33 (0)1 39 18 05 34
+33 (0)6 67 25 96 08 (Mrs Métayer for her husband)
mariegambus@orange.fr
[UFE number : 358]
