Bernard Lorjou

Bernard Lorjou (1908-1986) was one of the most powerful French Expressionist painters of the postwar era, whose politically engaged and emotionally intense pictures established him as a distinctive voice within twentieth-century French art. Born in Loir-et-Cher, France, in 1908, Lorjou was the youngest of three children in a very poor family. He lived in extreme poverty during his youth, even to the extent of needing to sleep at the Orsay train station during his teenage years. In 1934, after having worked at a renowned silk house and having saved enough money, Lorjou opened a studio in Montmartre with his partner Yvonne Mottet. He exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants in 1942.

Three years later Lorjou held his first solo exhibition at the Galerie du Bac in Paris. In 1946 the Galerie du Bac held a seminal exhibition dedicated to the emerging Expressionist artists of France, Belgium, and Germany, including Lorjou, Chaim Soutine, Georges Rouault, James Ensor, and Max Beckmann. It was at that same gallery that Lorjou would exhibit in 1948, after receiving the Prix de la Critique award, in order to effectively found, with five other members, the artistic group L'Homme Témoin, which defended figurative painting during the aesthetic and political tumult of the mid-twentieth century.

Lorjou enjoyed successful business relationships with Galerie Wildenstein and Wally Findlay over the course of his career. Additionally, he was a friend to such modern luminaries as Guillaume Apollinaire, for whom he created a series of wood engravings as illustrations for the writer's work Le Bestiaire. His work was often religious and frequently political, acting as commentary on topics ranging from the AIDS crisis and world hunger to the Algerian War and conflict in the Middle East. He completed commissions for the United Nations and was invited by Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco to exhibit in the Monte-Carlo casino. In 1977 he was the Guest of Honor at the Salon des Artistes Français. One year before his death, the Palais de l'Europe organized his retrospective in Menton, France. His paintings are held today in French museums and in significant international collections, where they remain among the most vivid records of the political and moral concerns of twentieth-century European art.