Born in 1886, Roger Bissière is one of the major French artists of the 20th century. As a painter, art critic and teacher, he contributed greatly to the development of non-figurative painting. He created a dense œuvre of profound humanity. The collections of the museum hold eight of his works.

Bissière painted this abstract composition entitled Gris et violet (Grey and Purple) in 1957, near the end of his life. It is imbued with a certain discreet and contemplative lyricism in a space fragmented by shifting exchanges of colours. The artist gives fundamental importance to the light that nurtures the colours of the paint through its intangible but sensitive presence.

In the mid-1950s, Bissière’s visual language organizes itself around a grid formed by a network of underlying lines on the canvas. Starting from a black background, colours gradually assert themselves through light colour planes. The colours vibrate within the composition somewhat like light shining through stained glass windows in a changing rhythm.

Several artists of the École de Paris, such as Le Moal, Bazaine, Manessier and Singier, used grids to give structure to their paintings. Bissière does the same in this major work that is influenced by Cubism and presents structural similarities with Paul Klee’s pictorial oeuvre.

Text | CC BY-NC | Malgorzata Nowara