Louis Latapie

Louis Latapie (1891-1972) was born in 1891 in Toulouse, France. His father was a well-known journalist and editor of Le Télégramme and La Liberté, and the young Latapie grew up in a cultivated household that supported his early artistic ambitions. He had an interest in art from a very early age and is known to have been drawing regularly by the age of ten. He registered for classes at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he studied under Jean-Paul Laurens. In 1911 he became a student at the Académie Julian and also at the Académie Ranson, where he was introduced to Cubism by the Nabi painter Paul Sérusier.

Latapie was sent to the war in 1914, where he was injured three times and one of his brothers was killed in action. Upon his return from the war, Latapie began to reestablish himself as an artist, and in 1920 he became a professor at the Académie Ranson. This was a critical time for the artist, as he met numerous artists who would become a great influence on his own painting, including Roger Bissière, Jean Metzinger, Max Jacob, and Jacques Villon. In that same year Latapie met and married his first wife, Estelle Isch-Wells. In 1922 he entered numerous exhibitions, including several one-man shows at the Galerie Druet.

In 1923 Latapie formed the group known as Castors de Montsouris with Georges Braque, Bissière, and Amédée Ozenfant, a circle whose work laid down important ground for the continuing development of the Cubist movement. This would have been a particularly happy time for the artist, but his wife, Estelle, died suddenly that same year. Devastated by his loss, Latapie moved to Toulon in 1925. In 1927 he returned to Paris, where he met his new wife, Renée Meurisse, and spent the next few years teaching and traveling between Paris and Toulon. After serving in the war a second time, Latapie bought a studio in Seine-Port and became associated with the School of Paris, the international community of painters who continued to reshape modern art from their base in the French capital. He is remembered today as an accomplished French modernist whose long career carried the innovations of prewar Cubism into the postwar decades.