Jeffrey Winter Fine Arts
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Claude Lacaze
Born 1938
Claude Lacaze was born in 1938 in Angoulême, Charente France. He studied at the Lycée Montaigne in Bordeaux and was first trained by a master painter Mer Gambey, who was in the practice of leading his students to the pier of Bordeaux where André Lhote liked to paint.
When Lacaze left his parents’ house, he intended to concentrate his efforts in painting, a passion he had taught himself from the beginning of his studies. He entered l’École des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux. During his school time he was a student of Marty, who created the decorations of the Bordeaux Opera.
Like Maurice Albe, Lacaze’s neighbor and student of André Lhote, Lacaze associated himself with Post Cubism. His talent became evident in his first one-man exhibition at Paris Rue Visconti, shortly after leaving l’École des Beaux Arts.
The “Bordeaux School” of painting has produced many important artists, André Lhote among the most well known. Lhote was one of the most important Cubist painters and intellects in the circle of Picasso. Lhote was also one of the most influential art teachers of the 20th Century whose students number in the thousands. From the 1920s through the 1960s his students from all over the world gained varying degrees of fame. Tamara de Lempicka was among the most famous, but there are many lesser known students that produced fine bodies of work. Nicholas Poliakoff, Katia Palvadeau, Elizabeth Ronget and Anna Walinska are among those that we have written about in our books. Lhote operated a free academy in Paris through which passed innumerable talented, ambitious, adventurous painters in those years.
The “Bordeaux School” also produced the finest Art Deco artists. Jean Dupas, Jean Despujols, Raphaél Delorme and Robert Pougheon all came from Bordeaux and stylistically share a common thread of mythologically and romantically inspired subjects and general themes.
The discovery of the work of Claude Lacaze now adds to the tradition of The “Bordeaux School.”. The obvious influence great Cubists like Lhote, Jean Metzinger, Louis Marcoussis, and others emerge in his paintings, but along with other artists such as Poliakoff, Ronget, Palvadeau Walinska, and others of his generation his work stands on its own merit thanks to his unique interpretation of subjects, colors, and cubist style.
Lacaze became a professor of Fine Art at Collège de Puyguilen and joined the society La Maison des Artistes. He continued his work for several years without the need for fame or fortune. The artist is quoted as saying “Only Art.” On occasion, as a favor to a friend, the artist would exhibit in a gallery but was rarely present for the private viewings.
The artist’s early work revolved around rather academic Cubist inspired imagery and became more sensual, especially in his nude studies. Although the different compositional groupings of still-lifes are isolated one from the next, Lacaze set up a “polyphony of both form and representational analogies” that keeps the eye in perpetual movement across the work and thus joins its otherwise fragmented parts. He plays with drawings of shadows and light to realize a new view of the world, a sort of new deal of art. It is through his disdain for technical criteria and his insistence on the expressive value of paint that he found his own style. His paintings reflect his elegant manners and colorful discourse.
After Lacaze stopped painting for himself he was commissioned to paint a series of works for a dealer in the south of France. He was asked not to sign them and to his surprise they were later appeared with a signature J-H Guyot. Jacques- Henri Guyot to this day has a gallery and sells contemporary cubist style paintings bearing that signature, however it is not known who paints them.
Exhibitions: Paris, Galerie Visconiti; Périgueux, N.T.P.; Angoulême, Galerie Tison d’Argence; Bordeaux, Galerie du Loup; Sainte Maxine, Galerie L’Oleil Fauve. The Musée des Beaux Arts de Bordeaux also exhibited his work.
Claude Lacaze
Images and Biography
