A first Félix Del Marle for Roubaix

14/2/24 - Acquisitions - Roubaix, La Piscine and Paris, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris - It will be presented as part of the thematic exhibition "Les enfants de la Piscine" (Children of La Piscine) that the Roubaix museum is preparing to unveil in parallel with the exhibition Impressionist Children from the Musée d’Orsay that it will host from February 17 to May 26. This portrait of a Young Boy with a Ball by Félix Del Marle (ill. 1) is the first work by the artist to join La Piscine’s collections. It was acquired thanks to the support of the Société des Amis du Musée and the FRAM Hauts-de-France, and fetched 5,000 euros hammer at the auction organized by Maîtres Debacker and Richmond at the Hôtel des Ventes de Boulogne-sur-Mer on November 11, 2023[[We would like to thank La Piscine for the precise information it provided.]

1. Félix Del Marle (1889-1952)
Young Boy with a Ball, Portrait of Jean-Pierre Dobelle, 1932
Oil on canvas - 116 x 89 cm
Roubaix, La Piscine
Photo: Roubaix, La Piscine

See the image in its page

A protean artist who embraced many aesthetics over the course of his career, as well as many fields - painting, drawing, architecture and furniture - Félix Del Marle, has gone down in posterity above all for his adherence to Futurism - of which he was one of the few French representatives - and then to Neoplasticism in the 1910s and early 1920s. Dated 1932, the full-length portrait that joins Roubaix belongs to a lesser-known period, that of his "return to order" in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The artist then returned - in portraits, fairground scenes and religious compositions - to figuration and a certain classicism, before discovering surrealism and returning after the Second World War to abstract painting, first explored alongside De Stijl. Born in Pont-sur-Sambre, between Valenciennes and Maubeuge, Félix Del Marle trained early on at the Beaux-Arts de Valenciennes before briefly joining the Merchant Navy. He then…