MORETTI Lucien Philippe

Lucien Philippe MORETTI Painter, lithographer, engraver born in Suresnes on 19 May 1922 and died in Etretat at the end of February 2000. In 1946, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he became the pupil of Nicolas Untersteller and Demetrius Galanis; appointed associate member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1947. Moretti has two addresses in Montmartre, from 1952 to 1959 at 8 ter, rue des Saules, opposite the Lapin Agile, and from 1959 to 1963 at 37, rue des Abbesses. He left the Butte in 1963 to move to the Buttes Chaumont; in 1966 he settled in the island of the Derivation near Poissy; there a rabbi linitis with hebrew writing. Finally, he retired to Etretat, in a very 1880 house, a time when he would have liked to live with Offenbach and painters who had their villas on this part of the Normandy coast. But the time spent on the Butte definitely marks his work. Familier de l'atelier du 12, rue Cortot, where the Greek engraver Galanis, a member of the Institute, tells him the Montmartre which he had known, when he inherited the engraving press of Degas, and tells him about Derain, Matisse, Picasso, who came to engrave at Lacourière. Moretti comes every day to the Place du Tertre, at La Crémaillère, an establishment run by Antoine, and the meeting place of rapins, young people, portraitists, guitar players, chess players, but also dancers who come to guinche in the evening, as well as lovers tied under the tonnels of the interior terrace. Countless drawings gathered in Canson's great notebooks immortalize the youth of the 1950s, and later the sweet hippies, dressed for a party that could have been that of Rodolphe and Mimi. It is these characters he then paints on canvas in a frenzy, joyful and healthy party, a carnival populated by clowns, pierrots, girls with short skirts and boys with long hair. Moretti decides to revive a mythical, edenical era that no trial, however hard it may be, that life makes him suffer, manages to make him give up. He exhibited at Lefranc (1949) and Lucie Weil (1949-51), Charpentier (1955), New York (1962), Galliera Museum (1966-67), Bussière, Roussard (1967-1972), Miami (1971), Montreal (1971), Petrides (1973-75), Tokyo (1975). Moretti illustrates in lithographs: the Bag of Bills by Joffo, the Braconnier of God by René Fallet, and the Chansons by Jacques Brel. The prints include black stockings in black and Gramophone in colour. All these lithographs were drawn in the Grapholith workshop, most often on vellum ofArche in jesus or grape formats. Several of them were released by Editions André Roussard. Always young spirit, blue eye and happy verb, Lucien-Philippe Moretti has just started to sculpture. (www.roussard.com)