Baterbys Art Auction Gallery - Bios

Edouard Pignon

(1905-1993) Edouard Pignon was a French painter of the New School of Paris. He was born on February 12, 1905 at Bully-les-Mines, in the Pas-de-Calais. He moved to Paris in 1927 where he worked in the Renault and Citron car factories and attended evening classes in painting and sculpture. In 1931 he joined the Association des Artistes et Ecrivains Revolutionaires through which he met left-wing intellectuals such as Louis Aragon and Andre Malraux, and painters including Fernand Leger, Jean Hilion and Francis Gruber. From 1933 he painted a series of Meetings and in 1936 the first version of the Dead Worker and Homage to the Asturian Miners. His art took on a stylized and periodic influence from Picasso and both artists fought for 50 years against the systematic socialist realism. In interviews recorded and published between 1962 and 1987, Pignon has often referred to his own personal adventure and its pictorial approach, particularly in the quest for reality in 1966 and against the tide in 1974.