Guy de Rougemont (1935-2021) French

The gallery is honoured to represent the estate of French artist Guy de Rougemont (1935–2021).

Guy de Rougemont was born in Paris in 1935. He was introduced to art at an early age, painting watercolours with his American paternal grandmother, whom he credited with inspiring his first artistic impulses. In 1954, he was admitted to the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, where he devoted himself primarily to painting and joined the studio of French painter Marcel Gromaire (1892–1971).

His first solo exhibitions were held abroad, notably at the d’Arcy Gallery in New York in 1962. From 1962 to 1964, he was awarded a French state scholarship to the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, and presented his work at the Ateneo Mercantil gallery in Valencia in 1964. He then spent 1965 in New York with his friends Jean and Irène Amic, where he encountered young artists from the New York scene, including Andy Warhol, Robert Indiana and Frank Stella. He embraced large-scale acrylic painting and explored the power of simplified forms and flat colour. His work is often associated with Pop Art and Minimalism, whose forms influenced him, although he never claimed allegiance to either movement. Four major periods can be identified throughout Guy de Rougemont’s career, defined by the geometric forms that shaped his work.

From 1965 onwards, he introduced the ellipse, developing it across the surface of his canvases. In 1967, he created an environment for the Hall Fiat on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, installing canvases cut into elliptical shapes within the exhibition space and establishing a dialogue between art and the automobile. Following this project, he began creating his first three-dimensional objects. During the 1970s, he began working with the cylinder, a geometric form he considered the perfect combination of circles and lines. He used it to place polychrome volumes within space, creating large cylinders, also known as “totems”, “columns” or “markers”, which appeared in urban settings, such as Place Albert Thomas in Villeurbanne, as well as in interior spaces, including his Colonnes de table. Mise en couleurs d’un musée, presented at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1974, marked the culmination of his use of the cylinder. The artist temporarily covered the museum’s twenty portico columns with coloured PVC, playing with the boundaries between interior and exterior and extending his work onto the museum forecourt.

At the end of the decade, and particularly during the 1980s, the artist moved away from the cylinder towards the gridded surface. In 1986, he created one of his major works: the mosaic of coloured marble that adorns the pavement of the Bellechasse forecourt in front of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Finally, from the 2000s until the end of his life, the artist developed the sinuous line, marking a pronounced return to curved forms. His sources of inspiration included his observation of the Old Masters, particularly Henri Matisse, as well as contemporary artists, notably his long-time friend Eduardo Arroyo (1937–2018), who said of him that he « applies his language to the universe. »

Like many artists of the 20th century, the artist sought to break down the boundaries between artistic disciplines. His aim was to bring colour into the spaces of everyday life, drawing on every artistic medium available to him. Nevertheless, he described himself as a painter above all—a distinction formally recognised by his peers when he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1997, to the seat reserved for a painter.

Guy de Rougemont died in August 2021.

Text by Julie Goy, art historian and co-curator of the exhibition Incursion dans l’Atelier de Rougemont, Palais de l’Institut de France, Paris 6th arrondissement.