Bissière

Roger Bissière, French painter of the Nouvelle École de Paris, is a representative of the non-figurative painting from the 1950s.

‍

Roger Bissière (1886—1964) painter and thinker of painting, he developed a work based on a constant reflection on the structure of the painting, color and rhythm, without ever breaking with the classical foundations of art.

‍

Trained in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, Bissière played a major role as a theorist and teacher very early on, especially at the Académie Ranson, where his teaching had a lasting influence on a generation of artists. His pictorial work gradually evolves from a structured figuration, marked by Cézanne and cubism, towards a constructed abstraction.

‍

From the end of the 1930s and especially after the Second World War, Bissière developed a personal abstract language. The figure dissolves in favor of an enclosed space, organized by colored masses and internal rhythms. His painting is not about strict geometry or gestural abstraction, but about a search for balance between intuition and construction.

‍

In the 1940s and 1950s, the central period of his work, color became a structuring, matt and dense element, organizing the surface according to an internal necessity. This meditative, rigorous and silent abstraction distinguishes Bissière from the major trends of the post-war period.

‍

His work was recognized as early as the 1950s and integrated into leading French public collections, in particular at the Pompidou Center and the Museum of Modern Art in the City of Paris. Since his death in 1964, numerous exhibitions have paid tribute to the artist's work, testifying to his importance in the history of abstract art in France. In 1994, the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris organized a retrospective bringing together more than 100 works by Bissière.

‍