CLAIRIN Pierre-Eugène

Pierre-Eugène CLAIRIN (born 14 March 1897 in Cambrai, North) was a French painter, illustrator, engraver, and resistor.

Biography

Son of an officer in the 4th regiment of leatherwork in Cambrai, and of a mother of Anglo-American descent, he studied in England and entered the École des beaux-arts de Paris in the workshop of Fernand Cormon in 1913. He joined the cavalry, then in 1915, in the Air Force. As a war pilot, he was awarded the Cross of War, the Military Medal and the Legion of Honour.

In 1919 he joined Paul Sérusier's workshop at the Ranson Academy. He met Maurice Denis and Édouard Vuillard, who introduced him to engraving and lithography. As a child, he stayed in Brittany during the summer, in the family of his uncle Georges Clairin, and at the Salon d'automne in 1921, he presented Breton landscapes and exhibited his paintings of Pont-Aven at the Druet gallery, where he met Pierre Farrey. In 1927 he signed a contract with the Bernheim Gallery, which exhibited it in New York. In 1929 he won the Abd-el-Tif Prize. He spent two years at the villa Abd-el-Tif, which he extended until 1934 by trips to Morocco and South Algeria. He will return regularly to Algeria after 1945.

On his return in 1934, he moved to Saint-Loup-de-Naud and, for the 1937 Universal Exhibition, he decorated the pavilions of Île-de-France and the Vatican State (which earned him a gold medal) and the Conservatoire national de musique. Engaged in 1939 and demobilized in 1940, he organized a network of resistors in Saint-Loup-de-Naud. In 1946, he went on a mission and lectures in the United States and worked in particular for and with Albert Camus, whom he had met in Algiers in 1929, by Edmond Charlot, at the bookshop-gallery "True Riches". He published in Rombaldi editions a series of drawings on the works of Camus (Noces, L'Exil et le Royaume, La Femme adultéré) and Henry de Montherlant in 1950. He received the Grand Prix de l'Île-de-France in 1957. From 1960, he painted notably in Île-de-France and in the Pont-Aven region. He was elected a member of the Académie des beaux-arts in 1967 (Section IV: Gravure - Armchair 4) and president of the Société des peinteurs-graveurs français in 1970. He died on the return of one of his last exhibitions to Pont-Aven in July 1980. His wife died in 1977.

Paul Sérusier wrote to Clairin, whom he considered his spiritual successor: "I would like to find in you the heir of a tradition that my masters have left me, and to whom I think I have added something, when it would be only a little order. Pierre-Eugène Clairin was one of the last painters to have worked in Paul Gauguin's workshop at Lezaven Pont-Aven.