1970s Rene Smet Signed French Lithograph. Printed in France on thick white matte paper. Hand signed by artist and part 146/175 of limited edition series. Featuring an abstract still life bouquet of flowers.

Size: 30.2ʺW × 22.2ʺH. 

Condition: Excellent condition.

About the Artist - Rene Smet

René Louis Smet was a Belgian painter born in 1929, known for bold color and thematic work, and celebrated for his total dedication to his craft over a career spanning seven decades. He trained at the St-Luc High School of Art in Belgium, where he showed early talent as a draughtsman, then passed the entrance exam to the Fine Arts Academy in Brussels and spent two formative years, 1949 and 1950, as a boarder at the Leon Devos School, receiving a thorough grounding in drawing. In 1954 he left Belgium for Brazil, where he lived for four years without returning to Europe, based in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Manaus, with extensive trips into the Amazon. That period proved pivotal: exposure to the rich colors of the Amazonian forest made his palette more luminous and turned him into a lifelong lover of pure color, while he supported himself illustrating short stories and novels and exhibited at venues including the São Paulo Modern Art Salon and the Institute of Architecture.

Smet returned to Brussels in 1959 and was admitted to the painting section of the Paul Delvaux studio at the Institut Supérieur de la Cambre, at a moment when the city was a hub of the COBRA movement. That same year, a grant from the Belgian government tied to Franco-Belgian cultural agreements sent him to Paris for two years at the Cité Universitaire, and he grew fond enough of the city to settle there permanently. The following decades brought steady recognition and travel: a Silver Medal at the 1962 European Prize in Ostend, two years at the Academia Belgica in Rome from 1962 to 1963 (where the pageantry of the Church left a mark on his work, including a series of paintings of bishops and priests), acquisitions of his paintings by the Belgian government and the Palais des Beaux-Arts, and one-man shows in Paris and Brussels. In 1970 he spent over a year discovering the United States and Canada, including a six-month journey across the Mid-West and Southwest to California, and the vast desert landscapes and open skies he encountered there permanently shaped his use of blue, along with a series of paintings depicting American towns as strange, cold, dreamlike compositions of horizontal and vertical volumes.

Smet went on to exhibit across Europe, the United States, and as far afield as Japan, with shows in Washington, Düsseldorf, Barcelona, and Nagasaki, while remaining a fundamentally solitary artist who resisted attachment to any school or movement and kept his distance from fashionable circles. He was drawn again and again to the sea, particularly the coast of Brittany, where he sketched beaches, dunes, and moorlands in all seasons and painted sailing boats, wind-bent figures, and processions of Breton women. In 1982 Brussels honored him with a personal retrospective organized by Sabena, and in 1984 he received the "Painter of Light" prize at the 27th Salon of Tours, recognition for a body of work that, by his own telling, balanced serene faith with an artist's private anguish. René Smet died on December 16, 2019, in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, at the age of 90.