Background
Claude Viallat was born in 1936, in Nîmes, Occitanie, France.
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Claude Viallat was born in 1936, in Nîmes, Occitanie, France.
Claude Viallat studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier from 1955 to 1959. It was there where he made strong friendships with artists such as André-Pierre Arnal, Vincent Bioulès, Daniel Dezeuze, Toni Grand, François Rouan, and Henriette Pous, his future wife. From 1958 to 1961 he served in an army in Algeria and then was admitted at the National Fine Arts School (École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts) in Paris, where he studied from 1962 - 1963. There, Claude Viallat met Joël Kermarrec, Pierre Buraglio, and Michel Parmentier.
Claude Viallat discovered American art in Paris, notably the works of Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Sam Francis, and Mark Rothko. As soon as 1963, he was attracted to abstraction.
Claude was appointed as a teacher in the École des Arts Décoratifs (Decorative Arts School) of Nice in 1964 and decided to create a new formal language questioning the conventions of classical painting. He then started working systematically with one shape affixed on canvas without stretchers. His first personal exhibition took place at Nice’s Galerie A in 1966.
Claude also participated in several collective exhibitions that year. In 1967, he was appointed as a teacher in the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Limoges, where he met Raoul Hausmann. In 1968, in Paris, Viallat had his first personal exhibition at the gallery led by Jean Fournier – who remained his gallerist for nearly thirty years.
He then participated in an exhibition that arguably originated the “Support/Surfaces” movement at the ARC, in the Modern Art Museum of Paris. Although he initiated this group and influenced it aesthetically through his pictorial works, he resigned on May 3, 1971 as he disagreed with the political and theoretical orientations imposed by Louis Cane and Marc Devade. In 1972, during his first trip to the United States, he discovered Jackson Pollock's paintings and the art of Native Americans.
The same year, Claude participated in the “Amsterdam-Düsseldorf-Paris” exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York, and the “Douze Ans d'Art Contemporain en France” exhibition (Twelve Years of Contemporary Art in France) at the Grand Palais in Paris. In 1973, he was appointed as an instructor at the École des Beaux-Arts (the Fine Arts School) of Luminy (located at avenue de Luminy, in Marseille), and moved to Marseille. In 1974, the first ever Viallat exhibition in a museum was organised in Saint-Étienne's Musée d'Art et d'Industrie (Museum of Art and Industry).
In 1979, Claude Viallat became director of the École des Beaux-Arts (Fine Arts School) of Nîmes. He started collecting objects related to bulls. His collection was the starting point of the Musée des Cultures Taurines (Museum of Bull Tradition) of Nîmes, opened in 1986.
The Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou (the National Modern Art Museum of Paris) hosted a Viallat retrospective in 1982. He represented France at the Venice Biennial in 1988. The same year, he made the stained-glass windows of the Gothic Choir in Nevers Cathedral.
In France he is represented by Galerie Daniel Templon Paris/Brussels since 1998, in Montpellier galerie Hélène Trintignan. Claude Viallat is also représented internationally in Tokyo by Gallery Itsutsuji and in New-York by Leo Castelli.
Until 2010, Claude has been experimenting with painting on curtains, umbrellas, and sails. But, that year, Claude Viallat actually let himself into few collaborations directly with the world of fashion. He designed a small collection of boots for the prestigious brand Sergio Rossi, presented at that year’s Milan Fashion Week.
In addition to the success of Claude Viallat's exhibitions in France and abroad, he devoted himself to his work as a teacher. In 2006, he was awarded with the Fine Arts Academy's Fondation Simone et Cino del Duca (Simone and Cino Del Duca Foundation) prize for painting. In 2011, he became Chevalier de la légion d'honneur.
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1996Claude Viallat married Henriette Pous.
