MARQUET Albert

Albert MARQUET (or Pierre Léopold Albert Marquet) was a French post-impressionist painter, born in Bordeaux on 27 March 1875, who died in Paris on 14 June 1947 and buried in La Frette-sur-Seine.

Albert Marquet's work is made of simplified plans, bright and degraded colours, worked quickly at the same time sketch and notation of light with an accomplished art of framing that favours diving. The characters present at the beginning of his career tend to disappear to allow only the effect of overall landscapes, harbours or maritime architectures in grey camaïeux to appear. A friend of Matisse and Derain, he preserved the sense of colour and light from his wild period. He painted Paris and its surroundings, the bridges of the Seine, the streets illuminated at night, Paris under the snow or under a sun of lead. His art is polite, soft and measured, without violence or pathos or expressionism and places colour without excess, in reserve, on the wall of an interior.

As Monet he creates series of studies of variations of light according to seasons, time of day, and time. Thus, between 1905 and 1906, he painted a series of urban landscapes on the theme of the Grand Augustine wharf, which he saw from the window of his studio at number 25, bought by his parents in 1905.

In 1905, he participated in the exhibition of the Fauves, which was scandalous by a brutal vision of shapes and colours. He later gave up this way for the search for tonal harmony, favoring more harmonious colors, less saturated in order to render all the nuances of light. Water is one of its favourite motifs, with the representation of the Seine and the docks, as well as the ports of North Africa: Algiers, Candle, Oran, Tunis, La Goulette.

Trained academically and classically for a decade, the young Marquet freed himself by practicing portraits, and very present female nudes, erotic drawings of brothels that will be reproduced in books. His drawings in ink from China, like those crunching Parisian passers-by, visible at the Malraux Museum of Le Havre, are drawn with an elliptical brush trait and stripped.

The separation of Yvonne and the marriage with Marcelle, seem to seal the abandonment of nudes and genre scenes in favor of an art of landscape that he enjoys practicing with his painters friends. As early as 1919, he travelled extensively, notably to Tunisia and Algeria, with Jean Launois and Étienne Bouchaud. He also travelled north of France, the Belgian coast and Holland, making ports his workshops. In the summer of 1920, Marquet invited Signac to join him in La Rochelle. On the spot, the rock painter Gaston Balande shows them the surrounding landscapes they paint together on the motif. From 1919 to 1939, he stayed, among others, in Poissy, Triel and Méricourt and painted landscapes of the Seine.

In 1939, in La Frette-sur-Seine, he painted his wife sewing (Interior at La Frette) and his friend Desnoyer painting (Atelier de la Frette) beside him.

In his memories, his wife Marcelle wrote: "Perhaps it was in this modest house of the Frette that Albert felt most at home. His well-insulated workshop in the attic dominated a loop of the Seine, its river. Albert felt comfortable and safe. Desnoyer worked in his studio corner, he didn't bother either. »