Othon Friesz | Fauve painter

Achille-Émile Othon Friesz (6 February 1879 - 10 January 1949), who later called himself Othon Friesz, a native of Le Havre, was a French artist of the Fauvist movement.

Othon Friesz was born in Le Havre, the son of a long line of shipbuilders and sea captains.

He went to school in his native city.

It was while he was at the Lycée that he met his lifelong friend Raoul Dufy.

He and Dufy studied at the Le Havre School of Fine Arts in 1895-96 and then went to Paris together for further study.

In Paris, Friesz met Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet and Georges Rouault.

Like them, he rebelled against the academic teaching of Bonnat and became a member of the Fauves, exhibiting with them in 1907.

The following year, Friesz returned to Normandy and to a much more traditional style of painting, since he had discovered that his personal goals in painting were firmly rooted in the past.

He opened his own studio in 1912 and taught until 1914 at which time he joined the army for the duration of the war.

He resumed living in Paris in 1919 and remained there, except for brief trips to Toulon and the Jura Mountains, until his death in 1949.

During the last thirty years of his life, he painted in a style completely removed from that of his earlier colleagues and his contemporaries.

Having abandoned the lively arabesques and brilliant colors of his Fauve years, Friesz returned to the more sober palette he had learned in Le Havre from his professor Charles Lhuillier and to an early admiration for Poussin, Chardin and Corot.

He painted in a manner that respected Cézanne's ideas of logical composition, simple tonality, solidity of volume, and distinct separation of planes.

A faint baroque flavor adds vigor to his (most known for) landscapes, still lifes and figure paintings.

Othon Friesz died in Paris.

He is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.

Othon Friesz was a founding member of the Fauves - the rebellious but short-lived movement known for its ferocious colors and exuberantly gestural brushwork - before returning to his academic roots.

Achille-Émile Othon Friesz was born on 6 February 6 1879 in Le Havre, the scion of a long line of shipbuilders and sea captains.

He attended the lycée and the municipal art college in his native city and there met Raoul Dufy, with whom he went to Paris to pursue further study in art.

In Paris, they befriended Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, Maurice de Vlaminck and others who would revolt against the sober strictures of the Academy and develop the expressive, vibrant style known as Fauvism.

Friesz participated in the watershed Salon d'Automne in 1905 that riffled the sensibilities of critics and the public at large but found an advocate in Ambroise Vollard.

The Favues would exert a profound influence on the trajectory of modern art in the twentieth century, paving the way for expressionism in all its powerful iterations, but the group itself drifted apart a few short years later.

By 1908, Friesz had all but abandoned brilliant colors and lyrical lines for a more stolid style, hearkening back to his early lessons from Charles-Marie Lhullier and Leon Bonnat but also evincing the compositional theories of Cézanne.

In the last decades of his life, Friesz was a respected painter, illustrator and teacher in the academic tradition, holding professorships at the Académie Scandinave from 1929 and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière from 1941.

He was active to the last, illustrating an edition of Petronius's Satyricon and producing a suite of twelve lithographs for Mauriac's Désert de l'Amour in the months preceding his death on 10 January 1949.

Friesz's work is represented in numerous major institutional collections, including the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, the Musée du Petit Palais in Geneva and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. | Source: © Sotheby's

Achille-Émile Othon Friesz, dit Othon Friesz - pittore Francese (Le Havre 1879 - Parigi 1949).

A Le Havre abbandonò gli studi liceali per frequentare assieme a Braque e Dufy la Scuola di Belle Arti.

Nel 1898, grazie a una borsa di studio, si trasferì a Parigi.

Nel 1906 si recò con Braque ad Anversa, ma dopo la guerra (cui partecipò), si stabilì definitivamente a Parigi, dove dal 1924 insegnò all'Accademia scandinava.

L'opera di Friesz si mosse nell'orbita dell'impressionismo fino al 1904, anno in cui la conoscenza di Matisse lo convertì al fauvismo -Ritratto di Fernand Fleuret, 1907, Parigi, Musée National d'Art Moderne.

Dopo il 1908, la scoperta della pittura di Cézanne lo indirizzò a una tavolozza terrosa ed a una solida struttura delle forme, delimitate con una grafia ad arabesco di memoria liberty (Cassis, 1909, Zurigo, Kunsthaus).