Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/668986
18 Soleil horizontal - Composition 409, 1960 Signed and dated 'Bissière 60' lower right Oil on sackcloth 18 1 / 8 x 21 5 / 8 in, 46 x 55 cm Provenance Galerie Jeanne-Bucher, Paris Theodore Schempp, New York (acquired from the above in 1967) Exhibitions Paris, Grand Palais, Salon d'Automne, Hommage à Bissière, 1961, 3 November – 3 December 1961 Mexico, Museo Nacional de Arte Moderna; Caracas, Museo de Bellas Artes, Cien años de pintura en francia, De 1850 a nuestros dias, 1962, cat no.8 (illus.) Bordeaux, Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Bissière, 1965, cat no.49, 22 December 1965 – 25 January 1966 Literature Neuchâtel, Bissière, Isabelle & Duval, Bissière: catalogue raisonné, Ides et calendes, 2001, p.866, no.2532 ROGER BISSIÈRE 1886-1964 As a professor at the Académie Ranson in Paris (1925 – 1938), Roger Bissière influenced an entire generation of young artists, including Maria Vieira da Silva and Alfred Manessier, with his abstract pictorial language informed by the natural world. Working as a critic for magazines L'Esprit Nouveau and L'Opinion prior to the Second World War, Bissière's comprehension of artistic theory in burgeoning avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Neo-Impressionism established a crucial foundation for his experiments with abstraction. Soleil horizontal - Composition 409 is characteristic of Bissière's mature style. While the poetic grid of verticals and horizontals indicates Bissière's continued interest in Cubist perspective, it highlights the decisive shift in his work after the Second World War towards an abstraction entirely devoted to the sensory experience of the natural world. In the same year as this work, Bissière explained to the critic Georges Boudaille, 'I have repeatedly said that if I was not a figurative artist, I would absolutely refuse to be abstract. For me a painting is only valid if it has a human value, if it suggests something and it reflects the world in which I live... I try to recreate a world for myself made of my memories and my emotions, where the smell of the forest stays all around me, the colour of the sky, the sunlight, and the love I have for everything that lives: plants, beasts and even men and their miserable condition'.