Background
As a young boy, Lacasse worked alongside his father as a stone-cutter in a local quarry.
As a young boy, Lacasse worked alongside his father as a stone-cutter in a local quarry.
Born in Tournai, Belgium in 1894 in a working-class family, Lacasse started his apprenticeship to become a painter-decorator as early as 1905. He was accepted the following year as a free student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts of Tournai where he continued his training until 1921. His abstract pastels, dated 1910, were painted after a day of hard work, where the austere structure of the quarry fired his imagination.
These early pastels are completely geometrical, though not symmetrical, and their aggressive shapes are softened by rounded lines.
They are dominated by a powerful black construction, traced with great surety. After surviving the horrors of the First World War, Lacasse became a successful painter of figurative scenes illustrating the condition of the working classes, often depicted against a religious background.
Following several travels to Italy, Brittany and Spain, Lacasse finally decided to settle in Paris in 1925. Throughout the thirties, Lacasse turned to Abstraction for consolation from the disillusionment over the painting and the forced removal of his frescoes at the Dominican Chapel at Juvisy during 1931-1932.
The gallery played an important role on the Parisian art scene with exhibitions showing the works of many including Jacques Lipchitz, Moïse Kisling, Francis Picabia and Pablo Picasso.
Lacasse himself had a one-man show at L’Equipe in 1937 during which he showed some of his abstract work. Lacasse’s coloristic developments of the time also testify his great admiration for Robert Delaunay whom, according to Michel Seuphor, he met in 1931 and whose gatherings at his studio Lacasse attended during 1938 and 1939. Other artists he met included Serge Poliakoff, who then started visiting L"Equipe.
At the time of their meeting Poliakoff was still committed to figuration.
In 1939 L"Equipe published its first three magazines. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Lacasse decided to join General de Gaulle’s Resistance by moving to London with the Free French Forces.
During the five years of wars Lacasse seemed to have put aside painting while teaching sculpture and ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent. During this period he was totally cut off from his family.
His absence from Paris cost him dearly for the Parisian artistic community had continued without him.
In a moment of depression, he destroyed more than a hundred paintings. Until his death in 1975, Lacasse’s work became the subject of countless exhibitions abroad including United Kingdom, Germany and the United States of America.
In 1933 Lacasse founded the gallery L’Equipe inspired by his socialist ideas that artists of all disciplines should come together to exchange ideas and to fight for the right to be shown.