Jean Leppien within the Galerie Lahumière | EUROtoday

The picture appeared to him like a contemporary gust of wind or the solar popping out after a heavy rain: when he was simply eighteen years outdated, he was so captivated by an summary portray by Wassily Kandinsky in Dresden that he shortly set off for Dessau and drove as much as the Bauhaus – on his bicycle. Kurt Leppien, who was born in Lüneburg in 1910, quickly grew to become a scholar of Kandinsky, but in addition of Josef Albers and Paul Klee. In 1930 he moved to Berlin, the place he seemed over Lucia and László Moholy-Nagy’s shoulders. This and expertise as an assistant to an promoting filmmaker gave Leppien the premise for a full-time job, which he took up after he left the nation for political causes in 1933.

The North German now photographed and designed picture montages and reviews in addition to promoting and e book covers in Paris. Because he continued to oppose the Nazi state from right here, his German citizenship was revoked in 1936. He later went into hiding in Sorgues close to Avignon and ran a small farm, the place he and his spouse Suzanne, a Bauhaus scholar from Hungary with Jewish roots, have been arrested by the Gestapo in 1944. Among different issues, Suzanne Leppien was deported to Auschwitz and Jean Leppien was sentenced to jail. The couple survived and reunited in Paris in May 1945.

After greater than ten years of nice rigidity, the painter was naturalized in France after the warfare and now had Jean referred to as. But above all he was capable of construct on his time in Dessau and Berlin and grow to be artistically energetic. Leppien shortly asserted himself within the circle of French post-war trendy artists with photos that put colour surfaces and geometric shapes in dialogue with each other. He remained true to this curiosity in innovation till his demise in 1991.

This is the place the Jean Leppien exhibition is available in, which is at present being proven by the Paris Galerie Lahumière, which focuses on artists of geometric abstraction. It presents summary works by Leppien from 1946 to 1983 and thus affords a small retrospective (costs between 4,500 and 30,000 euros). The gallery’s founders, Jean-Claude and Anne Lahumière, a local of Bremen, had been intently related to Leppien since 1988, once they first confirmed him.

Painted with oil on canvas, the early works present kinds which are decided by curves and contours and seem like shifting rhythmically. At that point the artist was already residing between Nice, Roquebrune close to Menton and Paris, the place he was a founding member of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. Later works gained in severity after which returned to extra lyrical sounds. Finally, Leppien remoted particular person components within the space and achieved calm or positioned particular person giant geometric shapes over smaller fields. Some of it appears virtually meditative. He generally experimented with photos whose untreated canvas remained seen to be able to incorporate tissue and texture into the composition.

For Leppien, the embarrassment of labeling what he produced, whether or not as “abstract” or “absolute” or “non-figurative” portray, mattered little. What was extra essential to him was to make the “individual expression of a line, a shape and a color” understandable and to create an “atmosphere, a climate” that encourages the viewer to make their very own interpretation, which evokes the play of the associated picture components. By evading the illustration of actuality, a non-representational work serves to make one other, “spiritual reality” seen, in accordance with the painter’s credo.

Jean Leppien, Galerie Lahumière, Paris, bis zum 13. May