Jean-Claude Libert

Jean Claude Libert was an artist (1917-1995).

Its first fabrics go back to approximately 1938. Raise decorative Arts, it seeks its way like young draftsman, under the aegis of his/her father Marcel Libert who directs the Libert Workshop of drawings for fabrics.

The Second world war will separate it from its family but, whereas he is made prisoner by German, he continues to draw and paint during his four years of captivity in Austria.

As of its return to Paris, drawing aside the invitation of his father to enter the family company, it rents a small workshop street Gros and is devoted entirely to painting. In artistic search of discipline, it contacts the cubists Georges Braque and Albert Gleizes. This last, often compared with Socrate, exerted near its disciples a kind of maieutic revealing them with themselves: be, said to them it, of the “artist-craftsmen”. From there, undoubtedly, at Libert this activity was born from potter ceramist which it will divide with Yvette Libert, its wife, in Villeneuve-the-Avignon, then with Sabata, den place of the artistic world since more than one half-century.

However, painting always holds the great place. Libert, very demanding of nature, is invested completely in its works in a very personal way; if it received cubism much, he was never the slave.

Its work will know a succession of stages: research of the structure, searches light through the colors, always animated by the rate/rhythm. The painting of Jean-Claude Libert represents a fifty years tour of which it prepared in the last years of his life a large rhythmic fresco “the battle of Valmy” in nine tables. This fresco became to some extent its message.

Extracts of press

Jean-Claude Libert remains always faithful so that the cubism learned to him, the concept of table object, table poem which is sufficed for itself and radiates a such crystal, without for that needing to tell in a precise way a history or a real spectacle.
Its last fabrics start from an emotion which it tested in front of nature. The plays of light on the old walls, the sky between the branches of the trees, the sun on a face, the stone or the sheets, suggest to him a set of rates/rhythms coloured in agreement with its own interior rates/rhythms.

External references

Libert

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