The third art loses one of its faces.

The French painter Gérard Fromanger, committed artist and major representative of Narrative Figuration, has died at the age of 81, the Académie des Beaux-Arts announced on Friday.

"It is with emotion that the Academy of Fine Arts learned of the death of the painter Gérard Fromanger", indicated on Twitter the institution, which had made dialogue his works with those of impressionists in an exhibition mounted in 2019 at Marmottan Monet Museum in Paris.

“Gérard Fromanger was a friend, a comrade, a traveling companion, a visionary.

An artist committed to the defense of all freedoms, a poet with a cheerful and multicolored palette ”, reacted the former Minister of Culture of François Mitterrand, Jack Lang.

Prototype of the empathetic artist

This artist born in 1939 in Pontchartrain, near Paris, was the prototype of the empathetic artist, committed to his time: "Anguish is global: time, money, the market", he explained to AFP two years ago, on the occasion of this exhibition.

Descendant of a long line of painters, he was part of a group of artists who formed in the 1960s the movement of Narrative Figuration (or "new figuration"), consisting in creating stories and stories with figures, in contrast to abstract art.

In a 1964 exhibition bringing together several artists, when he himself was unknown, "they put my painting in the toilets," he said.

“It is there that Giacometti, demigod on earth, saw and loved my painting.

I introduced myself.

The history of art is a relay race.

If we do not seize the witness, we are not in the race ”.

He knew the world and its greatest artists

In particular, he produced many canvases featuring crowds of colorful silhouettes, and also had a very strong predilection for the color red which he sublimated in his creations.

This artist who frequented Giacometti, César, Prévert, Godard, Foucault and Deleuze will always register on the left and keep fond memories of the "sumptuous feast" that May 68 had been. He had exhibited in China, America, and France. Africa and Europe.

The Pompidou center devoted a major retrospective to him in 2016.

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