Works of Art: Jacques Doucet

Étè à Saint-Christol D, 1991

Silkscreen, 5/200

30 x 40 inches

$ 900

Works of art by Jacques Doucet are available at if ART Gallery, 1223 Lincoln Street, Columbia, SC.

Contact Wim Roefs at if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com or (803) 255-0068/(803) 238-2351.

Biography: Jacques Doucet

Jacques Doucet (French, 1924-1994)

Jacques Doucet was among the few French members of CoBrA, the Northern European group of figurative-expressionist painters who established a painting style related to what Abstract Expressionists in the late 1940s and 1950s were doing in the United States. Doucet briefly had been a member of the Paris-based Revolutionary Surrealist movement, but the former World-War II political prisoner thought of the group as too political. As a member of CoBrA he never involved himself much with the theoretical side of the movement, instead feeling more at home in its general free artistic, expressionist climate and the intense manner in which CoBrA artists involved themselves with their art. After an initial fascination with Paul Klee and Joan Miro, Doucet turned to total non-representation, creating mixed media works of paint and collage and using a rather individual warm, poetic, abstract language. The graffiti on the walls of World War II prisons influenced his work. Doucet’s art is in museums throughout Europe, including Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum and CoBrA Museum, Denmark’s Louisiana Museum for Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Essay: CoBrA

C O B R A (1948 –1951)

CoBrA was with Art Informel and Tachism among the post-World War II European art movements that were related to but developed independently from Abstract Expressionism in the United States. CoBrA was named after Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam, the capital of many members’ home countries. The group organized exhibitions and published pamphlets, a journal and short monographs. As an organization, CoBrA only existed about three years, but many of its members had prominent careers afterward. The group’s core figures were Dutchmen Karel Appel, Corneille and Constant, Dane Asger Jorn and Belgians Pierre Alechinsky and the poet Christian Dotremont. Dozens of other artists belonged to the group in some fashion, including Lucebert, Reinhoud and Jacques Doucet. CoBrA art combined the energy, spontaneity and painterly qualities of Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel, the subject matter and imagery of Art Brut, children’s drawings, Nordic mythology and African figuration, and Surrealism’s subconscious approach to making art. It produced an aesthetic that became a mainstay in Western European art.