Claude Venard

Claude Venard was a highly individual post-Cubist painter known for his still-lifes, landscapes, and eccentric portraits. In the late 1930s, he exhibited with the Forces Nouvelles, a group that rejected the avant-garde in favour of a return to traditional craftsmanship, and included the artists Pierre Tal-Coat and André Marchand. Even early works, such as La Poêle dans L’Atelier (1940) presage Venard’s imminent turn to Cubism: the overall flatness of the painting, its variations in scale, and the artist’s use of basic geometric forms like rectangles, cylinders, and cones are all representational strategies which would be useful later in his career. Venard soon distanced himself from the Force Nouvelles, and began developing his own vibrant, energetic Post-Cubist style, characterized by a rich impasto and an extremely varied color palette. His Still Life (1955–56) featuring highly stylized fish against a boldly patterned background illustrates the increasingly abstract turn his work took throughout the 1950s. Later in his career, Venard added still more texture and volume to some of his works by using heavy applications of oil, or mixed media such as cardboard and sand.