Thorvald HELLESEN (Norway / 1888-1937) - Lot 64

Lot n° 64
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Estimation :
10000 - 15000 EUR
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Result : 11 970EUR
Thorvald HELLESEN (Norway / 1888-1937) - Lot 64
Thorvald HELLESEN (Norway / 1888-1937) Orphic composition Gouache on cardboard Signed 'Th. Hellesen' lower left 40.5 x 75 cm; with frame 59 x 93 cm Provenance : - Artist's family, by direct descent, Paris Today considered one of the pioneers of cubism and orphism in Norway, it was in Paris that Thorvald Hellesen (Oslo 1888 - Oslo 1937) developed a radical modernism for over 20 years, halfway between synthetic cubism and geometric abstraction. A student of the naturalist painter Christian Krohg (1852-1925) at the Oslo Academy of Art, where he was admitted in 1910, Hellesen's work during this period was in line with the romantic expressionism of Edvard Munch and Ludvig Karsten. Taking advantage of a scholarship to study in Paris, Hellesen arrived in the City of Light in 1914. His stay was originally intended to last just a few months, but ended up lasting more than 20 years. In Paris, Hellesen quickly became involved with the avant-gardes of his time, changing his post-impressionist aesthetic to a synthetic cubism influenced by Braque and Picasso, but also by Picabia's dynamic abstraction. During the Great War, which he spent in Paris, Hellesen met his future wife, the painter Hélène Perdriat (1889-1969), who, as a friend of Apollinaire, André Salmon and Paul Poiret, was also instrumental in integrating Hellesen into cubist circles. After the war, it was under the notable influence of Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes and Auguste Herbin that Thorvald Hellesen developed his mature aesthetic. In his work, Hellesen takes up the themes dear to Léger, namely the advent of man in a mechanical and industrial society. From Gleizes and Herbin, he takes on the more decorative aesthetic, assuming the flatness of the surface, and embraces the theories of Non-Objective Art, which gradually led Hellesen to abstraction in the early 1920s. Recognized by all the major critics (Maurice Raynal, Blaise Cendrars), dealers (Léonce Rosenberg) and artists (Théo Van Doesburg, Amédé Ozenfant) during the 1920s and 30s, Hellesen took part in the Section d'Or exhibitions and the Salon des Indépendants, and, with his wife, held a salon mondain, where the artistic avant-garde of the time would flock. Jean Lurçat, four of whose works are included in this set, was one of the couple's friends. friends of the Hellesen-Perdriat couple, as Maurice Raynal attests in his 'Anthologie de la peinture en France de 1906 à nos jours' published in 1927, where both artists are given equal prominence in the vein of 'decorative cubism'.
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