Oscar Gauthier

Oscar Gauthier (1921-2009) was a significant French abstract painter whose lyrical explorations of color and gesture secured him a substantial place within the postwar Parisian avant-garde. Born in Fours in the Nièvre region of France, Gauthier pursued his formal training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris between 1941 and 1947, while at the same time working at the atelier of Othon Friesz. He also studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, immersing himself in the layered artistic education available in wartime Paris.

Following the war, Gauthier traveled to the United States, returning to France in 1948. Back in Paris he entered a remarkable circle of artists that included Sonia Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Francis Picabia, and Hans Hartung, as well as such younger figures of his own generation as Jean-Michel Atlan and Guillaume Corneille. Though the German occupation of Paris had deprived him of many years of creative opportunity during his formative period, Gauthier nevertheless became one of the first painters of his generation to embrace abstraction in earnest.

In 1944, 1945, and 1946, Gauthier exhibited at the Salon des Moins de Trente Ans, and in the following years his work appeared in numerous important venues, including the Salon d'Octobre, the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, the Salon des Comparaisons, the Salon de Mai, and the Salon d'Automne. He also took part in several significant group exhibitions, among them Fifty Years of Abstract Painting in Paris in 1957, the 10th Prix Lissone in Milan the same year, Nouvelle École de Paris at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in 1958, the 6th São Paulo Biennial in 1961, and The Age of Jazz at the Musée Galliéra in Paris in 1967.

Gauthier's work can be situated within the tradition that the influential French art critic Michel Ragon described as paysagisme abstrait, or "Abstract Landscape," a lyrical current within postwar European abstraction that retained an underlying sense of the natural world even as it dispensed with descriptive form. In the 1960s his work shifted in a new direction, developing a distinctly Europeanized response to the American Pop Art movement while retaining the painterly sensibility of his earlier practice. His paintings are held today in significant French museum collections and remain valued examples of the postwar Paris School.