About the Artist
Andre Minaux
Andre Minaux (1923 - 1986) was a French painter, printmaker, illustrator and sculptor born in Paris, whose style evolved through New Realism, Impressionism, Figurative painting, and Geometric art to Non-Figurative painting. He began as one of the post-war group of young French artists interested in a certain return to realism, printed for a time at Mourlot, and was informed by some of the greats such as Picasso. From 1944 he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, Salon des Independants and Salon de Mai, and had his first one-man show at the Galerie des Impressions d’Art in Paris in 1946. In 1949 he participated in the second Homme-Temoin group exhibition at the Galerie Claude, which also included Lorjou, Buffet and Rebeyrolle, and the same year won the Prix de la Critique. The social realism of Homme-Temoin was in tune with Minaux’s own work, in which he pared away detail and employed thickly painted, expressive brushstrokes in subdued colors to depict everyday scenes. He also made lithographs to illustrate books. From the 1960s his colors brightened yet his work became more serene, although the subject-matter remained the same. In the 1970s he concentrated on the theme of women in interiors in a series of colored etchings, where the forms were flattened and abstracted.
