Olivier Debré

Olivier Debré (1920-1999) was one of the best-known French abstract painters of the postwar era in Europe. Born in 1920 into a prosperous intellectual and professional family, Debré came from a lineage of distinguished figures in French life. His grandfather was the Chief Rabbi Simon Debré, his father Robert Debré was a well-known pediatrician, and his brother Michel Debré was the great statesman who served as Prime Minister of France under President Charles de Gaulle. The family maintained an ancestral home overlooking the Loire River, and Debré showed an interest in both art and architecture by the age of nine, perhaps in response to his grief over the death of his mother.

In 1939, Debré studied briefly in Paris with Le Corbusier, the French-Swiss architect who was one of the pioneers of the International Style, and he enrolled in the Faculty of Letters at the Sorbonne. He also attended the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, where he studied painting. During the Second World War, Debré served with the French Resistance and received the Croix de Guerre. Despite the Nazi occupation of Paris, he was able to exhibit some of his paintings during 1940 and 1941. In 1942 he became part of the circle of artists surrounding Pablo Picasso, who encouraged Debré to move toward abstraction. After the war he became part of the new generation of painters belonging to the School of Paris, which included Pierre Soulages, Nicolas de Staël, Serge Poliakoff, and Maria Elena Vieira da Silva.

Debré's paintings in the 1940s reflected the horrors of war, subjects that proved unpopular with the postwar market. Following Picasso's advice, in the 1950s and 1960s Debré began to create abstract representations of the human figure painted in tall, narrow formats: vibrantly colored, immobile verticals that he referred to as signes-personnages, or figurative signs, and signes-paysages, landscape signs. The paint was applied to the canvas in massive applications of color that reinforced the artist's sense of solitude. These pictures seemed to bear little direct connection to anything human; instead they were celebrations of color, and Debré proved to be a master colorist. At the same time, he developed a parallel fascination with the concept of space.

By the end of the 1960s, Debré had further developed his signes-paysages series, which had become more fluid in its representation of space and more joyful in its radiance and emotion. He often worked on these monochromatic canvases out of doors. This approach carried into his monumental works and large-scale commissions, for which he is best known, including the ornamental paintings for the French Pavilions at the Montreal World's Fair in 1967 and the Osaka World's Fair of 1970, as well as the stage curtains for the Hong Kong Opera, the Shanghai Opera, the Comédie-Française, and the Théâtre des Abbesses in Paris. He also designed a postage stamp and a stained glass window, and he wrote essays on his vision of changing forms and architecture for the contemporary city.