Paris (AFP)

The painter Yves Corbassière, one of the main artists of the post-war Saint-Germain-des-Prés, space painter, provocative and eccentric, died Monday at 94 years of age in Poissy, announced his son William to AFP.

Yves Corbassière will have painted posters, portraits of women, abstract canvases all his life ... Some 5,000 works. Close to the American Action Painting, he remained mainly known for his paintings representing space.

Eccentric, "zazou" germano-pratin, the artist dandy in the black hat was a tireless animator of the wildest evenings, in company of the most beautiful models.

Corbassière was even better known in the United States than in France. His works are exhibited in forty American museums.

He had obtained from NASA that she send signed works to space, like his famous "Charlie in the infinite" in 1984. One of his works decorates the entrance hall of the space center in Houston.

He who had been a professor at the University of California (UCLA) boasted that François Mitterrand, but also Ronald Reagan, the Kennedy and Johnson families, had works by him.

Corbassière restored the painted ceilings of the Parisian restaurant Lasserre and invited in his workshop near Montfort-l'Amaury (Yvelines), thirteen great chefs for a lunch whose entrance would be "the table that is eaten".

Among his many eccentricities, the artist had returned after an operation part of his femur to be cast in a plastic block by the sculptor Armand and installed on a pedestal of Caesar, all wrapped by Christo, for the benefit of Doctors without Borders (MSF).

He founded the association Artistes sans Frontières, making a workshop available to artists passing through Paris.

In 1993, he dumped a ton of coal at the International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) to denounce "the Mafiac".

A trial that hit the headlines in Paris in the early 90s concerned the photo of the famous "checkered car". Yves Corbassiere had to obtain damages from the photographer Robert Doisneau and from the company Nouvelles Images which had distributed posters and postcards with his famous car without mentioning his name.

The photo was taken in 1947 in front of one of the high places of Saint-Germain-des-Près, Le Tabou. The photo showed him behind the wheel of his 1925 Renault Torpedo convertible, painted in a checkerboard pattern, with a group of "zazous".

© 2020 AFP