Georges Valmier was a multidisciplinary French artist. At the beginning of his career, he painted in Impressionism and later shifted firstly to Cubism, then to Abstractionism. Valmier also worked in set decoration creating the theatrical and ballet costumes as well as the design for various objects, like carpets, for example. One more art field of Valmier was music – he performed the compositions of well-known musicians at various concerts.
Background
Georges Valmier was born on April 11, 1885, in Angouleme commune, France. When he was a five-year-old boy, his family relocated to Paris and settled down in Montmartre.
Georges was raised in the atmosphere full of art, painting and music. His father was a teacher of music and conducted the military band. So, Valmier revealed his passion and ability for drawing at an early age.
Education
Georges Valmier received the first art lessons, in music, from his father.
As to the painting, young Valmier produced his first paintings, portraits and landscapes, and began his training only after his military service.
So, in 1906, he enrolled at the Académie Humbert. The talent of a young man was remarked by its director, Ferdinand Humbert, due to whom Valmier became a student of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1907.
At the institution, the painter studied under Luc-Olivier Merson. Impressed by the style of Paul Cézanne, Valmier left the Academy in two years because the program seemed to him too formal and classical.
In 1904 Georges Valmier began his career went through the one-year military service.
After 1909, Valmier started to create portraits, still-lifes and landscapes of Montmartre using geometric forms typical for Cubism. The artist did it on his own without knowing yet about the cubist movement.
The first exhibition where the painter presented his artworks, including the landscape Vue du canal Saint-Martin, became the Salon des Independants in 1913. The following year Valmier demonstrated at the Salon a portrait of a nude, a still life and a Portrait of Madame Renaud. The canvases were well reviewed by the art critic André Salmon.
At the outbreak of the First World War, the painter joined the army as a nurse man. During the War, he painted the everyday military scenes with pencil, ink and watercolour in his sketchbooks. While serving, he met Albert Gleizes, Paul Colin, and the composer Florent Schmitt.
After the War, Valmier returned to his painting activity at the studio in Montmartre. He was introduced to Léonce Rosenberg, a head of the Parish gallery l’Effort Moderne, who liked the artist’s canvases and proposed him a contract. She organized the debut solo exhibition of the artist in 1921 when he also presented his canvases at the show called The Masters of Cubism.
The collaboration with Rosenberg provided Valmier with regular publications in Bulletin de l'Effort modern. In 1928, the painter decorated the art critic's dining room in Paris.
A year after the debut solo show, Georges Valmier tried his hand as a set decorator. He designed the sets and costumes for Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s performances at the Art and Action Theatre. Among other projects of the artist in this media were Cyprien or L’Amour à 18 ans of George Pillement (1923), Aucassin and Nicolette (1923), Isabelle et Pantalon (1924), a ballet La farce du Pont-Neuf (1926) and others.
Valmier’s ten-year theatrical experiments and searches of the new expression forms resulted in the collection of set decorative motifs Decorations and Colours published in 1930.
The last period of Valmier’s artistic journey was marked by the shift to the Abstract style. At the beginning of the 1930s, the painter took part at several expositions in New York City, Vienna, Warsaw and Paris (Galleries Effort Moderne, the Briant-Robert, the Gallery of Fine Arts and the Salon des Independants).
This time, Georges Valmier joined the group called Abstraction-Creation and became one of its leaders by taking an active part in its events till the dismission in 1936. Among his group colleagues were Jean Arp, Albert Gleizes, Jean Helion, Kupka, Leon Tutundjian and Vantongerloo; and the Hungarian painter Alfred Reth.
The last huge project of Georges Valmier became three major works for the decoration of the theatre of the Palace of Railways for the International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life in 1937. The work remained unfinished because of the artist’s death.
Quotations:
"I was a common man, and I will always remain a common man. No amount of stardom will ever consume my soul. Money comes, money goes. Fame comes, fame goes. I believe every human being is a celebrity in their own right."
Membership
Abstraction-Création Association
,
France
Connections
Georges Valmier married Jeanne Félicité Pessina in 1908. The couple had one daughter born four years after the marriage. She was named Marthe.