20 April 1933 (Paris) – 17 September 2018 (Arcueil)
French painter, drawer, engraver, sculptor, artistic director of periodicals, poster artist, art historian and writer.
French painter, drawer, engraver, sculptor, artistic director of periodicals, poster artist, art historian and writer.
Aged only eleven, Jean-Pierre Jouffroy discovered painting in 1944 at the Jeanne Bucher gallery, which exhibited works by César Domela, Vassili Kandinsky and Nicolas de Staël.
‘When I saw Kandinsky’s way of touching the unknowable, I was astounded, and knew immediately that this was for me, that it would be my domain, my territory’.
In 1945, sent to a Benedictine boarding school at La Pierre-qui-Vire in Morvan, he benefited from the teaching of one of the monks, Maurice Lavergne, who introduced him to the rudiments of drawing and painting: ‘It was there that I caught the painting bug, a place where I was unreachable’.
On 22 November 1954, he had his first exhibition at the Galerie du Passeur in Paris, the success of which exceeded all expectations.
This year, 1954, also marked the beginning of his political activism: with the Aurès uprising, he understood, ahead of his peers, the absurdity of France’s colonial status was in Algeria.
He expressed this opinion in one of his essays at Sciences Po ; it earned him a Fail in his oral exams and he left without a degree.
He became fully dedicated to painting.
Young painter that he was, he was deeply affected by the death of Nicolas de Staël 17 March 1955.
In June 1955, he landed his first contract with Maxime Blum, a lawyer and collector.
On 12 December 1955, he met Patricia Lambert. They married two months later and lived together ever since, founding a family of four children.
From 1955 to 1958, he painted and exhibited in a number of Parisian galleries.
In 1956, he signed a contract with André Weil and came into contact with the American collector Nathan Cummings, who would go on to buy several hundred works from him over a ten-year period.
On 1 May 1958, he was drafted into the army for two years. His opposition to the Algerian war grew all the stronger during his time in the military. He met communist activists who, like himself, were opposed to this colonial conflict. Upon completion of his military service, he painted several canvases related to the Algerian War of Independence.
Jean-Pierre Jouffroy was very hard-working. Inspired by his predecessors, he based his work on the materials he used and the object, distancing himself from the abstract painters of the 1950s, of whom he said:
‘You can’t imagine the romantic fervour of the abstract painters in the fifties; their belief in fighting for a just cause, in self-sacrifice, in militant joy.’
Il expérimente les matières à sa disposition en peinture, en gravure et en sculpture.
He explored all the materials available to him in painting, engraving and sculpture.
In his painting, he uses both acrylics and oils, , oil resist projection techniques as well as brushwork in the manner of Rubens, and collages. Using these diverse techniques he produced a wide variety of art: landscapes, portraits and self-portraits. For long periods his work centred on themes inspired by painting or music. Women and the body enjoyed pride of place.
Colour forcefully predominates in his paintings, conveyed by rich, vibrant materials.
His work comes in all sizes, from the tiny to the colossal: from landscapes tucked into camembert packaging, to monumental female nudes painted on canvases ten metres tall, which served as the mainstage backdrop at the 1989 Fête de l’Humanité festival.
For two public commissions, notably, he used innovative materials: in Montreuil in 1977, an enamelled metal comic strip on the myth of Atalanta; in 1998, for a secondary school in Arcueil, he worked with glass-makers to create large portraits of Dulcie September in enamelled tempered glass.
