Henri Fauconnier

A French artist, art theorist and teacher. Henri Le Fauconnier was an active participant in the group of artists and poets “Puteaux”, and later became one of the founders of the first Cubist association “Golden Section”.

He was born into a well-to-do bourgeois family. In 1901, young Le Fauconnier came to Paris to study law, but soon became interested in fine arts and studied painting at the studio of Jean-Paul Lawrence, and later studied at the famous Academy of Julian. From 1904, the artist participated in the exhibitions of the “Salon of Independent”, presenting his impressionist works.

He exhibited his works at the annual Autumn Salon and the Salon of Independent, including the famous exhibition of Cubists at the Gallery 41 in 1911. The artist maintained close ties with his German and Dutch colleagues, was a part of the organization “New Union of Munich Artists” and organized the famous Bergen School in the Netherlands, which contributed to the dissemination of abstract painting in these countries. From 1912, the artist headed the Academy of La Palette in Paris, where his students, among others, were Marc Chagall and Marcel Gromer. Henri Le Fauconnier often visited Russia, where he exhibited his paintings at the Salon Golden Fleece, Salon Izdebsky in Odessa and at the exhibitions of the Knave of Diamonds in Moscow.

Key ideas:

– Despite the fact that Henri Le Fauconnier today is less known than his famous friends Robert Delone, Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, he was a real pioneer of Cubism, one of its first followers, who made a great contribution to the development of this style. His studio in Visconti Street was open to anyone wishing to learn Cezanne’s works and to experiment with new art styles. Avant-garde poets and artists who were destined to change the history of contemporary art and lay the foundations of an abstract style gathered here.

– The individual method of the artist, based on his early interest in the work of the Nabi group and the Pont-Aven school, is distinguished by a restrained color palette, simplicity and laconic forms. Most of the paintings of Le Fauconnier are made in shades of soft brown, green and gray, the author’s favorite colors, which have become a recognizable feature of his work.

– Le Fauconnier preferred the strict landscapes of Brittany and Holland to the beauty and richness of the colors of the south of France, depicting them in the Cubist tradition by means of geometric simplified shapes. In his landscapes, large masses are marked by large areas of color and are bounded by thick black lines, which is a distinctive feature of his style.

– Henri Fauconnier worked a lot on portraits and nudity, studying various ways of representing the shape and volume of the human body. In many works, including nu, his interest in depicting motion in paintings is noticeable. With the help of Cubist methods of fragmentation, he tries to express the energy of the moving object and the effect of this movement on the surrounding space.

– In the late period of Le Fauconnier’s work, he addresses a special form of expression, closely related to Cubism and Abstract art. He departs from the modern Parisian art movements, preferring to work in a quiet rural area. The pictures of this period had a great influence on the avant-garde painting of Holland, where the artist spent a lot of time working on his paintings and communicating with many Dutch avant-garde painters.