Jean René Bazaine

It supplied the theoretical base for Bazaine's creative criticism that found its practical use when he was invited, in 1952, by the Carnegie Foundation to sit as the European member of the jury for the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting in company with the American painter William Baziotes.

Bazaine did not pursue his initiation into sculpture, though he became one of the great friends of Alexander Calder, Henri Laurens and of Giacometti, his neighbour at his atelier in the Paris Zone -Porte de Vanves.

A fire in his workshop in 1945 destroyed almost his entire production, leaving only scant reference to his important series of watercolors of the 1930s that prefigured the experimental feel of his mature work.

At his first individual show (Galerie Van Leer, Paris 1932), Bazaine was favourably received by Pierre Bonnard who seemed to recognize a progressive tendency rooted in his own sense of colour (Post-Impressionism developing into Abstract Impressionism).

[5] Demobilized from the army in 1941, Bazaine in the face of the prejudice over Degenerate Art, organized an avant-garde picture show (Galerie Braun Paris 1941) under the heading Vingt Jeunes Peintres de Tradition Française: Estève, Lapique, Pignon were but a few of the artists involved.

And finally in 1990, the Exposition Bazaine in the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris., which was accompanied by the reissue of his major texts on painting in art theory as Le temps de la peinture (Paris, Aubier 1990).

In 1943, Bazaine made three windows for the church of Nôtre Dame de Toute Grace at Assy on the subject of saints related to music, at the glazier's workshop of Marguerite Huré, who showed him the tricks of the trade.

With those works, he was to figure in the company of Georges Rouault (stained glass), Henri Matisse (mural), Fernand Léger (mosaic), Pierre Bonnard (painting), Marc Chagall (ceramics), and others.

[8] The Eglise de Sacré-Cœur d'Audincourt, built in part with the savings of the industrial workers who composed the parish—and who chose the avowed communist Fernand Léger as their creative (and extremely versatile) main interpreter—stands as one of the great monuments of twentieth-century sacred art.