Meditate with Albert Marquet (1875-1947)

Let go of the beasts! After the impressionist wave which overwhelmed pictorial art at the beginning of the 20th century, a new generation emerged. Albert Marquet, from a working-class background near Bordeaux (Gironde), is one of them. Shy. Taciturn. Silent. Modest. The character, who suffers from a club foot and myopia, fades into the bustling Parisian environment which he joins on the advice of his mother. “I don’t know how to write or speak but only paint and draw,” he admits to his friends. “Whether you understand me or not, through your fault or mine, I can do no more. »

It was the meeting with Henri Matisse and a few others that gave him wings. And the confidence to recognize that you can’t do more. Returning to the places where the Impressionists made their mark – Provence, Seine, Normandy – these painters roar with an even greater freedom to paint. The color becomes raw, without concession.

Here, on the site of the “queen of beaches”, in Trouville-sur-Mer (Calvados) which for half a century has become a popular place for wealthy Parisian onlookers, Marquet turns his gaze towards an ocean of advertising panels which hide the city . Because other wild beasts are also at work in this euphoric pre-war society. Consumption opens up an ocean of artificial pleasures, reduced to a few easy slogans. Marquet represents them with illegible and angular touches of blue, white and red, drowned in the light of an out-of-frame sun. Two small bathers’ tents try to resist, trembling, the outrage, like jellyfish washed up on the beaches of reality.