IMAGE DETAILS

Virginie Devillez Fine Art

Pierre-Louis Flouquet (Paris 1900-1967 Brussels)
Féminités, circa 1923-1925
Oil on canvas
125 x 87 cm
Signed lower right 'flouquet'
Provenance: Galerie Patrick Derom, Brussels; private collection, Brussels; private collection, Brussels (by descent to the present owner)
Literature: Serge Goyens de Heusch, Pierre-Louis Flouquet. 1900-1967, Brussels, Fondation pour l’Art belge, 1993, (ill. p. 56)
Exhibitions: Brussels, Galerie Patrick Derom, The Avant-garde of the 1920s in Belgium, 1992, cat. n° 12 (ill.); Drogenbos, FeliXart Museum, L’Équerre / 7 Arts 1923, scenographic reconstruction of the fair stand of the publishing house L’Équerre, 2008-2011, no catalogue published

Born in Paris, Pierre-Louis Flouquet was nine years old when his family moved to Brussels. Mainly self-taught, he received a brief artistic education at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where he met, among others, Victor Servranckx and René Magritte. The latter soon shared a studio with Flouquet, who began producing geometric works that represented a true synthesis of Cubism and Futurism.

Throughout the 1920s, Flouquet exhibited frequently on the international stage - in Paris, Madrid, New York, Chicago, Buenos Aires, and Berlin, at the Galerie Der Sturm. For the gallery’s eponymous magazine, Flouquet even designed a large number of covers. During this period, he developed an art that evolved primarily through distinct series: Paysage plastique, Féminités, Composition, Formes, and Construction.

The large-scale painting Féminités belongs to the series of the same name, begun in 1922, which explores geometric variations on the morphology of the female body. The rigor and purity that Flouquet infused into these anthropomorphic stylizations - further emphasized by his distinctive sense of composition - reveal his fascination with the formal perfection of the new technological creations of the modern age. Yet, in Flouquet’s work, as in that of Fernand Léger, such faith in mechanical forms does not lead to a total rejection of figuration, but rather to a search for plastic correspondences between the human and the machine. The composition Féminités is particularly harmonious, achieving a balance between line and color, enhanced by a marble-like background that lends warmth to the work.