Henry Pierre Villierme (August 21, 1928 – March 13, 2013) was an American Californian painter associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement.
From the 1960s to the 1980s Villierme continued to paint and sculpt in his studio, and in the late 1980s returned to public exhibitions.
His father, Louis Justin Henri Faustin Villierme (Tahiti, 1904 – San Francisco, 1967), was member of a French family from Lorient, Brittany, which had settled in Tahiti, French Polynesia, and who later moved to San Francisco.
Upon returning to the United States and discharge from the Army, he enrolled in the California College of Arts and Crafts under the G.I.
In Oakland, at the California College of Arts & Crafts, he met Barbara Albers in 1953, and they married in 1954.
They moved to Southern California in the late fifties, where they stayed, living successively in Hermosa Beach, then in Ojai.
He also credited his time in the Far East, where he was excited by the look of Japan, as well as "the concern for art values" that was part of the Japanese people's way of life.
[3] Outside of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, one of Henry Villierme's early influences at CCAC was the Japanese American abstractionist and abstract calligrapher Saburo Hasegawa.
In August 1957 Villierme won Second Award at the Jack London Square Art Festival for his painting "Highway".
[4] In November, his painting "Lake View" took First Place at the 7th Annual Exhibition Oil and Sculpture at the Richmond Art Center, with honorable mentions going to Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliveira, and David Park.
[5] Villierme was invited to display in "The Next Direction", an exhibition sponsored by the Oakland Art Museum and which also featured works by McGaw, Park, Bischoff, and Diebenkorn.
"[8] In the late 1950s Henry Villierme and his wife left the Bay Area for Southern California to raise their family.
Richard Diebenkorn later said, responding to Villierme's decision, "Of all the painting students at the California College of Arts and Crafts who might have abandoned his direction, Henry was one whose defection could hit me the hardest.
Seventy Sixth Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association.
Seventy-Seventh Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association.