Claude Venard

Born in Paris in 1913 and died in Sanary-Sur Mer in 1999, Claude Venard was a French painter. In 1930, he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris to devote himself to painting, but studied for only two days before leaving the school, disparaging the quality of its teaching. In 1936, he accompanied a master restorer to the Louvre, where he acquired a vast artistic knowledge. That same year, he took part in a group exhibition by an avant-garde group advocating the "Forces Nouvelles" artistic movement, whose principle was to return to the traditional principles of craftsmanship. This movement was strongly associated with Pierre Tal-Coat and André Marchand. However, Venard decided to leave the movement, which he considered too severe, and embraced the post-Cubist style that would later characterize his work. Using a very clean palette, the painter has the particularity of using a knife to apply his paste paint within compositions of fairly rigorous geometry. His post-Cubist works were exhibited on numerous occasions in Paris, London, Tokyo and New York.