Many works by Jean Dupas for Bordeaux

24/8/24 - Acquisitions - Bordeaux, Musée des Beaux-Arts - Art Deco, too often the victim of vandalism (see the articles) and which no French national museum is interested in, the Musée National d’Art Moderne having always shied away from it, can at least count on certain others such as La Piscine in Roubaix, the Musée des Années 30 in Boulogne-Billancourt (which nevertheless deserves more active support from the municipality) or, for certain artists, the museums of their home town. The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, where Jean Dupas hails from along with several other major figures of the period, will soon be devoting a retrospective exhibition to him, and has recently been able to add five works to its collection, two of which were donated by its active Friends’ Society. Four years ago, the same museum also acquired a painting (see news item of 9/9/20).

Jean Dupas was undoubtedly one of the painters at the origin of Art Deco, the foundations of which he laid during his stay in Italy after winning the Prix de Rome in 1912. His stay at the Villa Médicis was interrupted by the First World War, but he returned there in 1919, and his 1921 ’envoi de Rome’, White Pigeons (location unknown), four years before the 1925 Industrial and Modern Decorative Arts exhibition, already testifies to the birth of the new style, a blend of tradition and modernity.
Dupas’s major works include, of course, the decor for the liner Normandie, created in collaboration with Jacques-Charles Champigneulle, heir to a long line of master glassmakers, his contribution to the decor of the Church of the Saint-Esprit in Paris, and the murals at the Bourse du Travail in Bordeaux.

The works acquired by the Bordeaux museum are three drawings from an Aguttes sale in Neuilly on 10 October 2023 (from the Aristophil sale), a fourth purchased from the L’Horizon chimérique gallery in Bordeaux, and a painting from the Didier Aaron gallery in Paris.

1. Jean Dupas (1882-1964)
Departure for…