Jean Bazaine and Jean Tardieu
Jean Bazaine at Saint-Guenole.
Jean René Bazaine, 1954.
Jean Bazaine, in his office in 2001.
Jean Bazaine by Doisneau, in his office of Clamart.
Jean Bazaine and Jean Tardieu
Jean Bazaine at Saint-Guenole.
Jean René Bazaine by Ida Kar
Jean René Bazaine, 1954.
Jean Bazaine, in his office in 2001.
Jean Bazaine by Doisneau, in his office of Clamart.
Mr. Bazaine was born in Paris, France, on December 21, 1904. He was the great great grandson of the English Court portraitist Sir George Hayter. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Paris and in his country house in Forges-les-Bains, in the Chevreuse Valley. Jean Bazaine's father, Roland-Garros Bazaine, worked in the air force.
Jean René Bazaine studied sculpture at the Académie Julian after a brief passage at the École des Beaux-Arts. He also studied philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne in Paris starting from 1921. In 1924 Mr. Bazaine undertook two study trips to Italy and began to paint there. He obtained certificates in art history and philosophy in 1925. During his studies, he met numerous major French cultural figures of the time, such as Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Pierre Bonnard.
Mr. Bazaine's first exhibition took place in Paris in 1932 as a group exhibition together with the artists Jean Fautrier, Jean Pougny and Marcel Gromaire. Since then he enjoyed the promotion by Pierre Bonnard.
Jean's first paintings were figurative, but they evolved towards abstraction after the Second World War. His beginnings in this new pictorial language were linked to a Constructivism that developed out of Cubism, though gradually the lines of that language became blurred and more dynamic during the 1950s. Nonetheless, although his paintings became dominated by color and gesture, they never completely lost their connection to the real world.
In 1941 he organized Vingt jeunes peintres de tradition française, the first modern art exhibition held without official approval in Nazi-occupied Paris. In Notes sur la peinture d’aujourd’hui, published in 1948, Bazaine expressed his rejection of the traditional opposition between the concepts of figuration and abstraction. For Bazaine, the act of painting was an experience similar to the creative force of nature; artists should “be possessed by the same forces and the same currents” as nature, and they should abandon mimetic representation to instead emulate nature’s modus operandi. His works from this period carry titles that refer to natural phenomena, at a time when Monet’s late works played a fundamental role in Bazaine’s own creations. Monet’s use of color and above all the movement that was evident in his works, led Bazaine to affirm that all modern painting had its origins in the works that the elderly Monet had executed in his garden at Giverny.
After the German occupation of France in 1949-1950, he had a first major solo exhibition in the gallery of Aimé Maeght where he exhibited regularly until 1977 and was one of the artists of the École de Paris.
In addition to his paintings, he created large mosaics, for example for the UNESCO building in Paris, in Lund in Sweden and for the University of Metz. From the late 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Bazaine's works were exhibited internationally, for example in Germany, the Netherlands and Norway. In Germany, Jean René Bazaine was seen as a participant in documenta in 1955, II. documenta in 1959, and documenta III 1964. In Paris, an exhibition was held in 1965 in the Musée National d'Art Moderne. In 1967 he went to Canada. The same year Jean René Bazaine exhibited watercolors and drawings in Amsterdam.
In May 1968 Mr. Bazaine organized a sales exhibition for students and made a poster for the defense of the ORTF. This year he made a second trip to Prague for an exhibition at the National Gallery. In the 1970s, Mr. Bazaine illustrated a series of books by French writers, such as Raymond Queneau, Jean Tardieu, Marcel Arland, Jean-Claude Schneider, Claude Esteban, Pierre Oster Soussouev and Eugène Guillevic. His stained-glass windows for the Église Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce in Passy, the Parisian church Saint-Séverin and the church Sacré-Coeur in Audincourt are well-known.
In 1977 was organized a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Rouen. In 1978 and 1979 Mr. Bazaine received the order for six stained glass windows for the Notre-Dame de Lépine church in Berlens (Switzerland), the only panels that he created without gray background. And between 1979 and 1980 he creates six stained glass windows for the chapel of "la Madeleine" in Penmarch.
A retrospective exhibition in Galerie Maeght, Musée Matisse, took place in 1988, and the Exposition Bazaine in the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris in 1990. Among other exhibitions were: the exhibition Bazaine and the theater at the House of Culture / National Scene of Bourges; the municipal museum of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges and the Skissernas Museum in Lund, Sweden; Bazaine and his friends poets at the Toulouse-Lautrec museum in Albi, etc.
Starting from 2000 his health no longer allowed him to work in his studio but Jean Bazaine did't stop, and continued to invent completely new forms. He also produced a series of small paintings on his favorite themes: the sea, the waves, the rocks.
Couple au bord de l'eau, le soir
Figure et Paysage
Jeanne d'Arc
Hollande
Houses in Saint-Guenole
Fuite d'Actéon
unknown title
The Diver
The Harbor Station
Composition abstraite
Untitled
The Sky and the Sea
The Big Tree in the Country - Trees and Plains
L'automne en Virginie
Figure sur fond d'arbre
Marriage from The Seven Sacrements
lecielduplicate
The Actors
Chicago (detail)
Aquarelle
The Street Child
L'Orage à Ostende
Composition
Rocks, Trees and Plain
Girls with Bare Breasts
Untitled
Marée haute à midi
Soir à Veere
Composition en 3 couleurs
Vorzugsausgabe 'derriere le miroir' Nr. 197
Sea Wind
On November 23, 1943, Mr. Bazaine married his first wife, Micheline Fumet. However, the couple divorced. On January 24, 1990, he got married to actress Catherine de Seynes-Bazaine. They had two children, one of them was Jean-Baptiste de Seynes.
