Lot n° 303
Estimation :
30000 - 50000
EUR
Result without fees
Result
: 105 000EUR
Serge GAINSBOURG (1928-1991)
Children in... - Lot 303 - Crait + Müller
Serge GAINSBOURG (1928-1991)
Children in the square
Oil on canvas.
Signed lower left Ginsbourg.
33 x 45,5 cm
According to Elisabeth Levitsky, Serge Gainsbourg's first wife, the painting was originally larger and square. Before giving the painting to Juliette Gréco in July 1959, Gainsbourg cut the stretcher to make the canvas smaller and more rectangular.
The young Lucien Ginsburg, whose real name was Gainsbourg, became fascinated with painting when he discovered Andrea Mantegna's Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian at the Louvre Museum in Paris at the age of 14. Back in the capital after the Liberation, his family moved to 55 avenue Bugeaud in the 16th arrondissement. The young Ginsburg dropped out of school a few weeks before passing his baccalaureate at the Lycée Condorcet and enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He attended the Montmartre Academy where his painting teachers, including André Lhote and Fernand Léger, encouraged him in this discipline. It was during this period that he met his first wife, Elisabeth Levitsky, private secretary to the famous surrealist painter Georges Hugnet, on 5 March 1947. Lucien Ginsburg then lived from small jobs, he became a drawing and singing teacher and even a supervisor in a high school. But his main activity remains painting. Influenced by modern trends, he painted every night and dreamed of being a genius of painting like Francis Bacon or Fernand Léger. In October 1948, he joined the Charras barracks in Courbevoie to do his military service. On Sundays when he was on leave, he went to the Louvre with Elisabeth to admire Titian's Man with a Glove, Velasquez's Las Meninas and, above all, Eugène Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus. Very quickly, Elisabeth organizes a meeting with Pierre Loeb, who launched the careers of Joan Miro, Wilfredo Lam... and so many others, to
to organize a Lucien Ginsburg exhibition at the famous Galerie Pierre in Paris. For this purpose and during her first appointment, she takes under her arm, four paintings of the young artist: a painting The two children in a square, two paintings representing her naked near a tree and the Portrait of a young man in a bar. Unfortunately, Private Ginsburg was fed up with the bohemian life, the art dealers and painting. Not making enough money, he says, "I can paint, but I have nothing to say! As soon as he got out of the army, he played during the three summer months at the Casino d'Argelès-sur-Mer, and gradually gave up his passion to become a bar pianist. Spending the summer of 1954 as a pianist at Flavio's in Le Touquet, he returned to Paris to take the Sacem entrance exam on July 1st 1954. In the months following his entrance to the Sacem, the painter Lucien Ginsburg destroyed most of his work. Today, only five paintings remain in circulation, including a small-format work kept by Jane Birkin since 1969 and a canvas offered by Serge Gainsbourg to Juliette Gréco in July 1959, after a radio broadcast "Soyez les bienvenus", during which he declared that his only love was painting. Juliette Gréco confided in 2010: "After the show we did together, he came to my house and said: 'I've burnt everything, destroyed everything, I give you this. It's the only one left... It's a very touching painting. It's a very touching painting. It's his sister and him, little kids in a garden playing in a sandy alley.
Finally, in the spring of 1958, after signing with Jacques Canetti, artistic director at Philips, Gainsbourg immediately began a new career as a songwriter and performer.
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