Alexis Lartigue Fine Art

Alexis Lartigue Fine Art Post War & Modern Art
Georges Mathieu - Hartung - Sam Francis - Poliakoff - Calder - Vasarely - Soulages- César - Venet...

Corsica 🌞
22/08/2026

Corsica 🌞

This small sheet in tempera and pencil belongs to the final years of Ernst’s career. Its reduced format (8.4 by 15.5 cm)...
12/08/2026

This small sheet in tempera and pencil belongs to the final years of Ernst’s career. Its reduced format (8.4 by 15.5 cm) gives the landscape an almost fragmentary character, closer to a notation than to a fully developed view.

The composition is organised in horizontal bands: a yellow-ochre sky crossed by a dark diagonal, an irregular ridge where most of the pictorial density is concentrated, a pale strip beneath it, and a brown foreground. The pencil line appears intermittently along the darker forms, defining certain contours while leaving others unresolved. This economy of means recalls effects associated with frottage and grattage, techniques through which Ernst had long explored the capacity of a surface to suggest forms not entirely predetermined by the artist.

The Galerie Bel’Art label on the reverse gives the title Paysage (microbe). The word microbe subtly alters the scale at which the image is read: what first appears as terrain can also resemble a stain, a cellular form or an organism seen under magnification. The landscape is no longer entirely stable as a category. Its identity depends, in part, on the distance from which it is perceived and on the name through which it is recognised.

Max Ernst, Paysage, 1964
Tempera and pencil on paper
Signed “Max” below right
8,4 × 15,5 cm

Two heads, one single body: this oil on canvas, 55 x 45 cm, signed and dated 1959, builds its presence on a strict symme...
29/07/2026

Two heads, one single body: this oil on canvas, 55 x 45 cm, signed and dated 1959, builds its presence on a strict symmetry, two superimposed ovoids joined by a dark bar standing in for a neck, set against an olive green ground worked in successive rubbings. Each face resolves into a grid of sectors outlined in dry brush, where dominant ochres and beiges open onto flashes of yellow, pale blue, and pink; eyes, mouth, down to the network of colored facets, everything repeats from one register to the other, as though the canvas painted not two distinct heads but a single head seen twice. This modular treatment of the face extends the lesson Brauner drew at the time from Klee, whose memory he cites in L’Intelligence (1956) and Souvenir de voyage (1957): retaining not the vocabulary of the Bauhaus but its constructive principle, the image as an aggregate of autonomous cells.

In Brauner’s work, doubling is neither a compositional device nor mere decorative repetition. From Le Lion double of 1947, and above all Être guetté par sa propre conscience of 1954, in which a figure finds itself watched by its own double, it forms the mechanism through which the painter staged what he called, not without emphasis, his « personal myth »: consciousness splitting from itself in order to watch itself act. Without imposing on it a scholarly reading he himself dismissed, one recognizes here the very structure that Rank, and later Freud, assigned to the Doppelgänger, a figure of doubling that protects the subject by multiplying him, before turning into the trace of his uncanny familiarity with himself.

Conceived in 1974 and executed in 1977, the canvas holds this narrow vertical format, where an orthogonal grid bordered ...
25/07/2026

Conceived in 1974 and executed in 1977, the canvas holds this narrow vertical format, where an orthogonal grid bordered in green deforms at two points: a dark swelling in the upper third, where the blue turns to black at its center, and a second, lighter one in the lower register, where the blue lightens to the palest lilac. Between the two, the grid briefly regains its regularity before the eye is caught again by the second distortion, the squares stretching into rectangles as they approach the lighter pole.

This polarity belongs to a principle Vasarely cultivated with some consistency at the time, that of the visual echo and the mirror-image, where a single vocabulary of forms answers itself from one pole of the composition to the other, shifting only in value. He himself placed these swellings within a cosmological project, seeking through such forms to create his « own energies » in order to reach « interstellar spaces. » The canvas belonged to the Vasarely Center in New York before passing to a Larchmont collection around 1985, then to Brussels.

Zett-Oltar, 1974/77
Acrylic on canvas,
141 x 77 cm

Tradition remains vital insofar as it lends itself to new formal configurations. Chagall’s paintings bring biblical narr...
09/07/2026

Tradition remains vital insofar as it lends itself to new formal configurations. Chagall’s paintings bring biblical narratives, Jewish folklore, the Parisian avant-garde, and the remembered world of Vitebsk into a shared pictorial language, allowing inherited forms to assume new aesthetic and symbolic lives.

Executed around 1967–1968, this work belongs fully to the Edge Paintings period that Sam Francis developed in the mid-19...
25/06/2026

Executed around 1967–1968, this work belongs fully to the Edge Paintings period that Sam Francis developed in the mid-1960s. At this stage in his career, the artist enacted a decisive shift by relocating chromatic intensity to the outer limits of the canvas, leaving the center largely open. This strategy fundamentally redefined the structure and perception of pictorial space.

The composition unfolds as a vast, luminous white field, at once restrained and highly charged. Color is concentrated exclusively along the perimeter. A band of intense red traverses the upper edge, while the right side is marked by a strong vertical strip of red inflected with deep blue accents. Along the left margin, a darker zone in saturated purples and near-black descends the full height of the canvas, introducing a pronounced vertical density. At the bottom edge, passages of green and turquoise extend across the width, forming a chromatic base that subtly anchors the composition.

These colored margins do not function as a conventional frame. Instead, they operate as zones of compression, activating the expansive void at the center. The white is not an empty background but the primary spatial agent of the work. It becomes a field of tension and illumination, a breathing expanse against which the saturated edges resonate.

Untitled, 1967–68
Acrylic on canvas
93.7 × 70.1 inches

Throwback to Art Paris with Takashi Murakami 🌼
15/06/2026

Throwback to Art Paris with Takashi Murakami 🌼

In 1980, Yayoi Kusama had been living for three years at the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Tokyo, where she had...
10/06/2026

In 1980, Yayoi Kusama had been living for three years at the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Tokyo, where she had voluntarily taken up residence in 1977 after returning to Japan, a move that rekindled the crises and hallucinations that had accompanied her since childhood. Butterfly was created during this period of personal and artistic reorganization. Far removed from the spectacular environments that defined her New York years, the work reflects a return to more modest formats and an especially sustained drawing practice. The sheet becomes a space of condensation in which the artist continues, on a reduced scale, her exploration of living forms and the logics of proliferation that have structured her imagination since the 1950s.

The symmetry of the subject, the butterfly, appears here unstable. Pink and yellow washes slightly overflow their contours, while the blue-grey body seems subtly displaced from the central axis. The black dots, arranged rhythmically across the wings, accompany the development of the form. In this encounter between the organic and the serial, between the fluidity of watercolor and the rigor of the repetitive motif, Butterfly reveals one of the enduring constants of Kusama’s practice: the search for an always precarious balance between chaotic expansion and the principle of order.

Butterfly, 1980
Felt-tip pen on paper
Signed, dated, and stamped with the artist’s seal
9,6 × 10,7 in

31/05/2026

In 1953, Hartung is in the midst of a series of pastels begun in 1948 that will eventually yield nearly two hundred sheets, each serving as a matrix for his paintings. The medium suits him: its ductility allows curves and straight lines, reversals of direction, to follow one another in a single unbroken movement. Against this ochre and brown ground, worked in gradations, several black marks surge across the surface along trajectories nothing fully premeditated.

One might be tempted to read these jets as writing, their gestural quality evoking the trace of an ideogram. Hartung resisted the comparison: unlike some of his contemporaries, he never acknowledged any influence from Oriental calligraphy, his mark being more forceful, more physical, its meaning immanent to the gesture. What he called the urge to « leave the trace of my gesture, to scratch, to scrape » designates a purely bodily economy, where the act precedes the intention. Jennifer Mundy cites Hartung speaking of an « alchemical law » capable of « transmuting apparent disorder into perfect movement » (Works on Paper 1922–56, Tate Gallery Publishing, London, 1996), a formulation that captures the constitutive ambivalence of his practice.

Hans Hartung (1904–1989)
Untitled, 1953
Pastel and chacoral on paper
48.3 x 72 cm

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