LAPORTE Georges
Georges Laporte was born in Montmartre, his father is a taxi driver. After studying international trade, he worked as a customs agent. His painting debut dates back to 1946. He married Mademoiselle Jeannine Schmitt of Chalonese origin and moved to Burgundy in Chalon in 1952 and then to Givry in 1959. Many views of this village and its surroundings, often under the snow, will be exhibited worldwide. In 1958, he won the Bastien-Lepage Prize at the Salon des artistes français. Guillermet, publisher in Villefranche sur Saône and friend of Colette and Utrillo encouraged him to exhibit in Lyon at the Petersen gallery. It will be a great success. That same year, L'Asile de Nuit de la rue aux Prêtres de Chalon won the Prix de la ville d'Aix-en-Provence in front of 300 painters from all over France. Florence Gould buys the canvas that she hangs next to Antoine Watteau and François Boucher that she collects. In 1960, the first reproduction of a work, Bidonville in Nanterre, was performed in Nomis editions by publishing his works in postcards collected by museums like the Louvre. Raphaël Mischkind, gallerist in Lille, notes this work. He will follow Laporte throughout his career. Georges Laporte truly discovered Brittany in the 1960s. The sea becomes its main theme. He set up a workshop in Quiberon. Armand Lanoux observes the artist and then talks about gesture painting in reference to Georges Mathieu, a parallel is also made with Nicolas de Staël. The thicknesses of materials characteristic of his canvases appear at that time. His painting evolved in the 1970s and his seashores were more complete. Armand Lanoux analyses them as follows: "His landscapes have become more friendly and the color more singing. The will to finish the canvas, to grow more than ever before is certain. When his wife Jeanine died in 1979, he multiplied his travels and his painting took on a new direction, Laporte renewed his painting and colours. He went to Corsica in 1987 and stayed there to create paintings that the Bastia Museum presented in the exhibition "40 Grandes Oeuvres Corses" in 1990. He loved Japan, which he visited regularly in 1983 and undertook a series of paintings from Japan. The following exhibitions devote its reputation10. Spring 198810 peaked at 80,000 visitors. Georges Laporte married Akiko Takao, first piano prize at the Tokyo Conservatory in 1991. Then Georges Laporte discovers Corsica... There, we find that Laporte renounces the rules of the traditional perspective; that he built his space on a system of superpostions of plans, a process that Othon Friesz used before but that he did not lead so far. Whether they originate in France or Japan, one feels that in his paintings now the mind joins the matter to accomplish what Charles Benharoum calls "the transmutation of the elements to make them perceptible to the eye and touch". Georges Laporte died in Paris on November 7, 2000.