JEAN PAUL BRUSSET (Remoulins, 1909-Marseille, 1985). Untitled. Oil on canvas. Signed in the lower margin.

JEAN PAUL BRUSSET (Remoulins, 1909-Marseille, 1985).

Untitled.

Oil on canvas.

Signed in the lower margin.

Size: 54,5 x 65,5 cm; 56 x 67 cm (frame).

Jean Paul Brusset was a French painter and illustrator. In 1929, he enrolled at L'École des Arts Appliqués et des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. He then exhibited in important galleries, such as the Salon des Tuileries, and soon obtained his first special exhibition. In the preface to the exhibition catalogue, Tristan Bernard praises him as "A fine painter and a true interpreter of nature". During the difficult economic times of the 1930s, Brusset survived as a decorator, especially at the Cannes Festival. At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Brusset was drafted into the French Navy. In 1942, he left France for Algiers, where he decorated the studio of the Voice of America. He then held an exhibition in Tunis. In 1945 he returned to Paris and settled there again with an exhibition in 1946. In L'Amateur d'Art, reference is made to his "hitherto largely ignored talent"; and he is admired as a "true painter" with a "serious heart", a "deep inner life". From 1948 to 1954, Brusset travelled to Caracas (Venezuela) and San Juan (Puerto Rico), and spent a period in the United States with his exhibition Paris by Brusset, under the patronage of the cultural attaché of the French Embassy in Washington D.C. As a result of the success of the exhibition of his works, acquired by the Delgado Museum of Art in New Orleans, Brusset was named Honorary Citizen of the city and Colonel of the Honour Guard of the Lord Governor of Louisiana, an honour never before bestowed on a foreigner. The exhibition then visited numerous cities, including Memphis, Dallas, San Francisco, New York, Miami, Montreal and Toronto. In 1955, Brusset returned to France, where an exhibition of his ceramics presented in Cannes won him the prize of L'Academie Internationale de la Ceramique de Genève. In 1956 he collaborated with Jean Cocteau in the decoration of the chapel of Saint Pierre in Villefranche-sur-Mer; and in 1957 he exhibited at the Galerie Vendôme in Paris. The paintings were subsequently acquired by the French government. Brusset's last major exhibition was La Provence du Brusset, organised by the Mayor of Baux-de-Provence on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Frédéric Mistral's birth in 1980.