Background

René Robert Bouché was born on September 20, 1905 as Robert August Buchstein in Prague, Austria-Hungary. He was the son of Siegfried Buchstein, a German-Jewish itinerant laborer who abandoned his family when young Buchstein was an infant.

Education

Bouche began painting at the age of five and "never did anything else. " When he was fifteen, Buchstein set out for Munich to fend for himself as an illustrator; there he studied art history briefly under Heinrich Wolfflin and began a lifelong friendship with Richard Lindner, a promising painter.

In Paris Bouché received his first significant formal training in oil painting, studying under Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Ozenfant during 1933 and 1934.

Career

In 1927-1928, Bouche moved to Berlin, where he worked as an advertising illustrator and sought a new persona by adopting the name René Robert Bouché. Increasingly uncomfortable with events in Berlin, Bouché and Schoenlank moved to Paris shortly before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933.

By the late 1930's, he had established himself as an artdirector and advertising and fashion illustrator in Paris.

Bouché was placed in a French detention camp, but he escaped before advancing German forces arrived and made his way to Biarritz, where he stayed for a year before managing to reach Lisbon. With timely funds from New York Vogue, he then secured passage on one of the last American ships to sail from Europe before the United States entered World War II. His wife and son remained in Paris for the duration of the war.

Scarcely settled in America, Bouché was drafted into the United States Army early in 1942, only to suffer severe head injuries in an accident immediately before he was to report for active duty. Following hospitalization, he was given an honorable discharge in 1943. He became a naturalized citizen and soon resumed in New York his career as an advertising and fashion illustrator.

Beginning with an assignment of fashion drawings for Paris Vogue in 1938, Bouché maintained a more or less uninterrupted relationship with Vogue enterprises for the rest of his life. In 1944, he taught at the Art Students League.

Although his later portraits were to benefit from this transitional period, he soon lost interest in the abstractionist style. By 1953, he was concentrating on what was to become almost a mission: to restore portraiture to its pride of place in art.

Bouché continued to exhibit his remarkable flair for advertising illustrations, as shown in his commissions for Schweppes and Jaguar in the mid-1950's. He also designed stage sets and costumes for the play Child of Fortune (1954) and the ballet Offenbach in the Underworld (1956).

Well before his first major show of portrait oils in December 1955, he had begun making portrait sketches of radio and television personalities for the Columbia Broadcasting System that became media trademarks. Indeed, the volume of portrait drawings he produced during the last ten years of his life may ultimately represent the most important testimony to his skills and talents as an artist, despite the attention he drew to his portrait oils.

During the two weeks before his death at East Grinsted in Sussex, England, Bouché began making charcoal drawings in which features emerged through agitated patterns of hatchings. Depicted as a "slight, wiry cosmopolite" and a "smiling Mephistopheles in spats, " Bouché moved easily between New York, London, and Paris, and was an occasional guest on television shows.

Bouché died, age 57, in East Grinstead, England.

Achievements

• Rene Bouche managed to establish his reputation as a an excellent artist by the late 1930's, and worked as an artdirector and advertising and fashion illustrator in Paris. His chief achievement was in his regular contributions to Vogue, during the 1940's. Bouche made advertising sketches for Saks Fifth Avenue and also handled most of Elizabeth Arden's advertising campaigns.

Works

More photos

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  • Buttons - Book V

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  • Buttons - Book III

    (Book III Buttons … Page 251 Lance and Emily are living i...)

Views

Except for an earlier flirtation with neocubism, Bouché's painting until the late 1940's was basically figurative, realistic, and clearly overshadowed by his magnificently free yet incisive drawings and fashion sketches. In 1949, however, he became absorbed in abstract expressionism, after becoming a member of the Eighth Street Avant-Garde Painters' Club.

In his canvases, Bouché usually combined "a free brush line drawn dynamically through thin washes of color and areas of empty canvas with details closely observed and precisely transposed in faces. " Poised against criticisms of his "soupy washes" and likenesses that were "caricatural, somewhat superficial and often cruel" were praises for his "lightly limned tonal style, " "quick, intuitive, and penetrating" insights into character, and evocative bodily gestures and original arrangements that lent an air of vivacity and "engaging informality" to his sitters.

Quotations: He usually enjoyed portraying the famous and fashionable with, in his words, "a kind of loving criticism. "

Membership

Rene Bouche was a member of the Eighth Street Avant-Garde Painters' Club.

Personality

Many of his best drawings and oils appear to have been inspired by subjects, often friends, in the arts: Jacques Lipchitz, Igor Stravinsky, Frederick Kiesler, Georges Braque, Truman Capote, Willem and Elaine de Kooning.

Connections

On January 12, 1935, Bouche was married to Margot ("Pony") Beate Schoenlank, also an advertising artist. The couple separated in 1949 and were divorced in 1954.

On June 28, 1962, Rene married to a former Vogue editor, Denise Lawson-Johnston.

Father:

Siegfried Buchstein

Wife:

Denise Lawson-Johnston

Wife:

Margot ("Pony") Beate