Word: marchande
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...taking three steps back to jump over the wall that leads to the unknown," said Painter André Marchand. An exhibition of four dozen new Marchand canvases in a Paris gallery last week underlined his words. Critics praised the pictures to the skies ("one of the most interesting painters of our generation"). At 42, Marchand was still much in debt to Picasso and Matisse, but there was something new and strange about his work...
...strangest thing was Marchand's color. The paintings in his previous exhibition (TIME, May 26, 1947) had reflected the cool hues of the Burgundy forest. Lately Marchand, like Van Gogh before him, had made a pilgrimage to Arles and developed a new palette there. Reds, phosphorescent greens and blues, and jet black were his standbys now. Some of his pictures looked like the negatives of color photos, with red skies, blue suns, green sand and black and green nudes. "Color doesn't interest me," he said flatly. "I am trying to extract light from all objects...
...least of his new pictures seemed to radiate light. There were glowing little pointings labeled Lemons and Oranges, Radishes, or just plain Fruit, but never "Still Life." Marchand hates the term nature morte, never uses it. "Nature," he says, "is never dead." His paintings of bulls silhouetted against hot-colored sand were even livelier than the still lifes. Says Marchand, who returned from Arles with a headful of fact & fancy about fighting bulls: "Do you know they always die at night, standing up, their eyes turned toward the moon...
Geometry & Assurance. For delicate tastes there were the smaller, cooler and more careful paintings of France's top second-rankers, including Pierre Tal-Coat (44), Andre Marchand (42), Francis Tailleux (36) and Edouard Pignon (44), who unabashedly follow Picasso's and Matisse's lead and do it well. If their geometrized landscapes and still lifes said nothing very new, they at least spoke with assurance. Originality, they could reasonably argue, is less important than mastery...
...Marchand has found a 14th Century greystone house deep in the Chatillon forest north of Dijon. "It is better to lie down in the grass and regard nature intimately," he has decided, "than to spend your life in ceaseless discussions. To read the blossoms and other arrangements of nature, to touch the wonderful textures of things in the woods, with surfaces as exciting as a woman's skin-you can't find that in a cafe...