Jean rustin biography
- Biography.
- Jean Rustin was a French painter and prominent figurative artist.
- French painter, born in Montigny-lès-Metz.
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Jean Rustin: Frères Humains
Born in 1928, Jean Rustin was at first a master of lyrical abstraction. A major retrospective was devoted to him at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris in 1971, after which he decided to begin a quest for a new and singular figuration. A single subject: humanity laid bare, presented in its truth, without detours or evasions, like a contemporary vanity. A miserabilist representation of the man, where triumphs the human as the painting, relieved of any cultural connotation, social or temporal. Some milestones have marked its growing recognition: in 1982, an exhibition in Creteil, near Paris, partially censored for pornography; in 1991, a monograph written by the famous English art critic Edouard Lucie-Smith, comparing Jean Rustin to Lucian Freud; in 1994, a retrospective of his figurative work in Oberhausen, Germany; in 1997, the creation of the Jean Rustin Foundation in Antwerp, taken over in 2002 by Maurice Verbaet and Corinne van Hövell, with a Paris office from 2007 to 2012. Jean Rustin is now recognized as one of the major figurati
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French painter, born in Montigny-lès-Metz. After the Second World War he settled in Paris, where he studied at the École des *Beaux-Arts, 1947–53, and built up a successful career as an abstract painter, culminating in a retrospective at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1971. However, he then changed direction dramatically and began producing bleak and disturbing figurative works, typically showing aged, decrepit nudes—men and women—in bare, cell-like rooms. Their odd proportions have much to do with the disquieting animal-like quality. Rustin especially tends to paint the nostrils too high, leaving too much distance between nose and mouth. They are sometimes compared with Francis *Bacon's paintings, but Rustin's vision—though just as despairing—is much quieter.
He has stated that his essential subject as an artist is solitude and he relates this to political disillusion. He told an interviewer: ‘Once I believed in socialism, that there was going to be a revolution and everyo
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Jean Rustin
Jean Rustin (3 March 1928 – 24 December 2013) was a French painter and prominent figurative artist.[1][2]
Biography
Rustin was born at Montigny-lès-Metz on 3 March 1928. At the age of 19 he moved to Paris where he studied at the School of Fine Arts, in the studio of Untersteller.[2] During the 1950s he was mainly preoccupied with abstract painting but from the 1970s he embarked on figuration. He created a bizarre world of human figures, where an existential dead-end is transformed into fright, abhorrence, pity but also relief.
The artist stated that....."I realize that behind my artistic creation, behind the fascination for the naked body, there are twenty centuries of painting, primarily religious, twenty centuries of dead Christs, tortured martyrs, gory revolutions, massacres and shattered dreams [...] I realize that history and maybe art history are engraved on the body and flesh of men....."[citation needed]
The work of Rustin is relatively unknown. Until the late 1960s, his abstract painting had a large
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