COTTAVOZ André

André COTTAVOZ (born 29 July 1922 in Saint-Marcellin, Isère) is a French painter and lithographer who belonged to the Sanzist group and the École de Paris.

Born in 1922 in Saint-Marcellin, Isère, André Cottavoz studied at the École des beaux-arts de Lyon in 1939.

In 1942, Cottavoz at 20 years of age, he was in Class 22 and had to go to the Compulsory Labour Service. The STO earned him a deportation to Austria with his comrade Philibert Charrin. Despite difficult living conditions, they managed to paint on pieces of cardboard and even to expose them, but the paintings would be destroyed.

Freed and his studies completed, he participated, from 1945, in several exhibitions. In 1953, he won the Feneon Prize.

Meanwhile, an important movement was born: the New Figuration of the Lyon School, or Sanzism. Jean Fusaro, André Lauran, Jacques Truphémus and Paul Philibert-Charrin join André Cottavoz in expressing their tendencies, namely the search for a light less natural than springing from the very inside of the canvas, an intention which Cottavoz for his part supports by the thickness of the "sensuous paste which he accumulates in pastel and chalky tones […] figurative in the sense that he starts from reality, abstract in the sense that he reduces it to its essence": painting, for André Cottavoz, is really sculpting his canvases (where monochromy is not uncommon) to the trowel, hence the nickname that could be given to him from "Green Monticelli".

In Vallauris, where he settled permanently in 1962, André Cottavoz was interested in enamelled ceramics, which he worked with Roger Collet.

André Cottavoz's works are featured in numerous museums in France and abroad, and numerous exhibitions of his works have been organized in France and abroad since 1946.