121. In the Garden (On the Chaise Longue) [1946]

Due to his parents’ persistence, Henri Catargi attended Law at the Sorbonne, where, with the permission of the teachers who were well-disposed towards the students who had been on the front, he passed all his exams in one year. He then attended the classes of the Julian Academy in Paris, but he did not identify very well with the work mode and rhythm, and the artist was eager for knowledge and wanting to learn as much as possible in as little time as possible, so he would enrol at the Ranson Academy, where he found a teaching staff and a group of colleagues to his liking. The meeting with the Parisian environment also facilitated his visits to the great museums, namely the meeting with the great masters, whose works he reproduced as a way of practicing his artistic skills. Caught in the nets of French bohemia, he opened his first personal exhibition in Paris in 1922. The following year, Maison d’Art in Bucharest hosted the first H.H. Catargi personal exhibition in Romania; and in 1924 he made his debut at the Official Salon. The artist demonstrated from the beginning that he was a fine analyst of human typology and that he based his work on rigor and depth, at the expense of aesthetics and a purely decorative spirit. His portraits are distinguished by subtle chromatic harmonies, in flat hues, which are carefully delineated. The lyricism of the colour and light effects used reveals Catargi in a double stance: the painter-poet of human characters. He adapts his creation to the social reality of the time and fervently illustrates working men, representatives of an age. He distinguished himself by the interiorization of the characters, who acquire a calm, statuary allure. He took from Lhote’s geometrism, and constantly used the same colour range: blue and green in low, cold tones, to which he spontaneously joined declinations of pink. He often sketched young faces, overflowing with vitality, and he mainly used the visceral line that revealed the outline of the ethereally-rendered bodies. Catargi contains feminine grace and delicacy in more or less ample, rigorously articulated volumes. The sensitive thematic differentiation, with stages that mark the artist’s visual evolution, is intensified by the balance of chromatic ratios. (D.C.)

Literatura

The catalogue of the retrospective exhibition "H.H. Catargi", The R.S.R. Museum of Art, Bucharest, 1986-1987. CEBUC, Alexandru, "H. H. Catargi", Meridiane Publishing House, Bucharest, 1987.

Dimenzije

width 97.5 cm, height 80 cm

Opis

oil on cardboard, signed and dated bottom left, in orange, "H.H. Catargi, (19)46"

Izlasci

1946

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