A figurative of matter
Claude Venard trained freely in Paris, attended the Academies, exhibited at the Salon des indépendants. After the war, he imposed himself in the New School of Paris, away from lyrical abstraction as social realism. He painted ports, still lifes, nudes, villages of the South, with a thick paste and frank colors inherited from Cubism without keeping the intellectual fragmentation.
The subject as a pretext for construction
At Venard, a sailboat or a nude is not an anecdote: it’s an assembly of plans. The impasto gives daily life an almost architectural density. Sailboats (65.2 × 100 cm) and Women with bare breasts from your collection belong to this obstinate repertoire of the 1950s-1980s. He exhibits a lot, sells well, and for a long time remains a « collector’s painter » rather than a hero of a conceptual museum.
A reassessed seat
Mort à Sanary in 1999, Venard returns to sales as a witness of robust French figuration. His work reminds us that the School of Paris was not only gestural and black: it also believed in fruit, port, body, painted as one builds a wall.
