1973 Henri Lachieze-Rey French Mourlot Art Exhibition Lithograph. Printed in France on matte paper by prestigious print house Mourlot. Featuring a gorgeous earthy rust toned abstract design from the french artist. Promoting original 1970s art exhibition event of the artists works at Galerie Kriegel in Paris, France. The artist sadly passed just one year after this original event.

Size: 26.4”H x 20.5”W.

Condition: Fair condition with heavy signs of age. Edge fraying on top right and bottom left along with faint crease there also. Faint discoloration and age spots across the entirety of print from natural age. But adds to the authentic look of the artwork from 1973. Framers will be able to mat or help cover mild imperfections when framing if desired.

About the Artist - Henri Lachieze-Rey

Henri Lachièze-Rey was born on December 26, 1927, in Caluire-et-Cuire, in the Rhône region of France, the son of the philosopher and professor Pierre Lachièze-Rey. He first studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, then at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, training between roughly 1947 and 1952. He won second prize in Paris in 1949, an early sign of the recognition that would follow. Over the following decades he painted in Lyon until 1957, then in Saint-Tropez until 1961, and in Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or from 1961 until his death in 1974.

Lachièze-Rey became associated with a Lyon-based circle of figurative painters sometimes called the Sanzist group, and built a reputation for scenes of cafés, bistros, billiard halls, and other enclosed social spaces rendered in muted, atmospheric tones of gray and pale blue. His work often shows customers seated in bistros, with the space suggested through the arrangement of tables and chairs and architectural elements in the background, creating a foggy, melancholic mood. He painted human figures deliberately blurred and indistinct, with visible, thickly textured brushstrokes and impasto, giving his paintings an almost tactile, smoky quality. Critics have noted that throughout his career he returned again and again to these closed, confined interiors, as though the compressed lighting and muted, indistinct faces gave him a way of situating himself within a certain history of painting. His achievements were recognized internationally during his lifetime: he exhibited in Lyon, Cannes, and Paris, became a member of the Salon d'Automne, showed at the Salon des Peintres Témoins de leur Temps, and won a prize at the Biennale de Menton in 1959, later exhibiting as far afield as New York, at the Franck Partridge gallery, which specialized in French figurative painting of the period. 

One striking and rather tragic fact about his life: Lachièze-Rey died accidentally, struck by a car in Lyon, on July 14, 1974, cutting short what had been a genuinely flourishing career. His sudden death left him occupying a peculiar position between martyrdom and mystery, and he never fully escaped a certain disaffection that surrounded the wider Sanzist group in Lyon. Today his paintings are held in institutions including a museum of fine arts in Nice, the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, and the Paul Dini Museum in Villefranche-sur-Saône, which also mounted a retrospective of his work in 2003.