Cassigneul, Jean-Pierre

Biography

Born in 1935, Jean Pierre Cassigneul lived and grew up in Paris in a well-to-do family who introduced him to art and fashion at an early age. At the age of 17, he mounted his first exhibition at Galerie Lucy, before entering the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris three years later, in 1955.

During his military service in Algeria, the artist designed battalion insignia and built a chapel in the Sahara. He subsequently made the decisive encounter with Kiyoshi Tamenaga, a young Japanese art dealer, Noël Schuman, a publisher, and Simone Karoff, director of the Findlay Gallery, three people who supported and launched the artist's brilliant ascent. In Japan, in particular, his works met with widespread success. In 1965, he exhibited his first lithographs at Galerie Bellechasse in Paris.

In 1977, Cassigneul produced 30 lithographs to illustrate Charles Baudelaire's Les pièces condamnées. In 1985, he produced a lithograph screen, Le Jardin du Luxembourg, exhibited at the Bouquinerie de l'Institut, now the Galerie de l'Institut.

The artist doesn't limit himself to lithography, exploring the potential of other media such as tapestry or stained glass, with Le Jardin des délices, commissioned by Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, but also theater sets and costumes, such as those created for La Fille mal gardée at the Bolshoi Theater.

Jean-Pierre Cassigneul doesn't try to retranscribe reality, but imagines silhouettes of unknown women, elegant and dreamy, based on real models. The poetry that emanates from his works brings him closer to artists such as Édouard Vuillard or Pierre Bonnardwhose lithographs he owns. His palette of contrasting tones and tight framing also place him in the Expressionist heritage of Kees Van Dongen. At the age of 80, this unclassifiable artist, for whom "one should only paint or create in general when one feels the need to do so as a matter of course", continues to create relentlessly.