JAMES PICHETTE (1920-1996) - Lot 50

JAMES PICHETTE (1920-1996) HYMN TO FREEEDOM (OSCAR PETERSON), Acrylic on canvas. Signed and dated lower right. Countersigned, dated and titled on back. H 55 x W 46 cm EXHIBITION : - "James Pïchette and Jazz. 30 years of painting", Galerie de Chaulnes, Paris, - James Pichette et le Jazz", Fondation Septentrion, Marc-en-Bareuil, October 9 - December 6, 1991, PROVENANCE : - Private collection. - Pescheteau-Badin sale, Paris, December 19, 1991. Born in Châteauroux on August 1, 1920, to a Quebec father who came to France in 1917 with the American Expeditionary Force and a mother from Nîmes, James Pichette was the brother of poet and playwright Henri Pichette. He volunteered for military service in July 1939, but his health forced him to spend a long period of time in Haute Savoie in 1942, where he took up painting. Returning to Berry in 1943, he took an active part in the local resistance and returned to Paris after the liberation of the capital, decorated with the Croix de Guerre. His beginnings in abstraction were encouraged by Gino Severini, Alberto Magnelli, Jacques Villon and Max-Pol Fouchet, who prefaced his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1949, and Charles Estienne, to whom he owed his first review. In 1950, he took part in the Vème Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. In 1952, he became a boarder at the Maison Descartes in Amsterdam, where he familiarized himself with the works of Piet Mondrian and Georges Vantongerloo. Until 1968, his painting could be likened to modern calligraphy, in which the broad, free and spontaneous line became the main motif. Impasto is generous and color vivid. From 1970 onwards, James Pichette achieved a synthesis of geometric and lyrical abstractions, with the emergence of the disc and circular forms, and broad flat tints of ever-bright color in highly structured compositions.