Simon Joseph Simon-Auguste (20 April, 1909 – May, 1987) was a French artist, known for his intimate paintings, mainly portraits, nudes, and still lifes.
[a] Born in Marseille, Simon-Auguste was the son of Antonin Auguste, a cabinetmaker specialized in restoring furniture in the chateaux of the Provence.
He combined these various jobs with evening classes at the Marseille school of fine arts (the director was Henri Brémond).
In 1936, he helped illustrate Les Taches d’Encre, by Léon Cadenel,[c] with an ink design of a Provençal landscape.
Later these evolved into children, still lifes and locals, full of intimacy and simplicity, which gained him a lot of recognition.
Among these, we find La fillette au bol and Tête d'Enfant, which were purchased by the Musée Longchamp, Marseille.
Simon-Auguste returned to Paris after the Liberation in 1944, to take part for the first time in the Nationale with La Fillette aux Pommes.
This year he submitted Le Café du Commerce to the Grand Prix de la Peinture Contemporaine, at the Marsan Pavilion (Louvre Museum).
The major problems of art are approached and resolved with remarkable determination: that of composition, clear and rigorous; that of line, clean and pure, as in the work of the Primitives; that of color, at once striking in its vibrant blues and subtlety refined, harmonized.” “...The moving sensitivity of this artist.
In blue surroundings, female subjects depicted in peaceful colors assume attitudes of calm and repose; an art of silence and meditation whose delicacy is very winning.” “I love silence and the sweetness of the daily routine, the simple language of familiar objects, the profound individual glory, the quiet enthusiasm of meditation.” “I want to escape the modern myth of cosmos, the geometry of the arbitrary and the factual, to translate the balance, density, purity and tenderness of the human figure, its delicate shapes, and to draw this inner world deeper than interstellar spaces.”