Lucien Génin

LUCIEN GÉNIN (Rouen, 1894 - Paris 1953).
"Place Pigalle", Paris.
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower margin.
Measurements: 60 x 73 cm; 86 x 98 cm (frame).

As we appreciate in this endearing painting of the Place Pigalle, Génin's style was characterized by capturing the spirit of Paris of the interwar period with a deliberately naïff charm. Lovers fused in an embrace, strollers, businessmen, lonely ladies, couples of all types and conditions, cross paths in this place famous for its cabarets and for having been home to the great artists of the Parisian avant-garde.

Lucien Génin studied at the Rouen School of Fine Arts, where his teachers were Alphonse and Albert Guilloux, and later enrolled in Decorative Arts at l'École-de-Médecine. He took evening classes in sculpture, architectural composition and mathematics. He arrived in Montmartre in 1912, after having done a series of small trades, Maclet finally made a living with his painting. Lucien Genin, at the age of twenty-five, settled permanently in Montmartre. More than a painter of Paris, Genin is a painter of Parisians, of the devouring passion that stirs all his characters in the big city. He paints them in the alleys of Montmartre, dining at night in the Place du Tertre, singing in the Lapin Agile, cars on the boulevards, spectators and street singers; he follows them on the banks of the Marne with the first rays of the sun and in the south of France in summer. In turn, he is in Nogent-sur-Marne, Marseille and Cassis, Cannes and Villefranche-sur-Mer. He was in Douarnenez in 1929 with Pierre Colle, Giovanni Leonardi and Max Jacob. He painted the port of Rosmeur at the feast of the blue nets and exhibited his painting at the Salon d'Automne in 1930. In November 1929, André Warnod wrote about his painting: "Lucien Genin describes Paris with a sometimes hasty ardor but with a pleasant taste of vivid colors". During these ten years, he practiced a painting that was composed, colorful, sensitive, skillful, delicate, humorous and comic. A painting by Lucien Genin won the Art Institute of Chicago prize in 1932. In 1940, he took refuge in Marseilles for a few months. In 1941, the City of Paris bought him a gouache and in 1944 René Fauchois presented his exhibition at the Bernard Gallery. In 1947 he left for Cassis for the last time and exhibited at the Bernard gallery on his return. In his last years he devoted himself to painting landscapes in his room, with his easel under the window, where Robert Doisneau visited him a few weeks before his death. Lucien Genin was immortalized in 1953 in Le Vin des rue by Robert Giraud and Robert Doisneau. A retrospective exhibition was organized for him at the Galerie Seine in 1954.