Gromaire, Marcel
(b Noyelles-sur-Sambre, Nord, 24 July 1892; d ?Paris, 11 April 1971).

French painter and designer. He was set to follow a legal career and received little formal artistic training. From 1910, however, he frequented the studios of Montparnasse, assimilating Matisse's style through tuition from Henri Le Fauconnier at the Academie de la Palette and from Felix Vallotton at the Academie Ranson. He exhibited six canvases at the Salon des Independants of 1911. He continued to draw while serving in the Army from 1913 to 1919 but was wounded on the Somme in 1916. From 1919 he devoted himself to painting and to writing about art and the cinema. His post-war paintings were marked by an admiration for the Flemish and to a lesser extent German Expressionists and for the work of Fernand Leger, although Gromaire later repudiated the Expressionist label. From 1920 he exhibited regularly at the Salon d'Automne and at the Salon des Independants and in 1921 held his first one-man show at the Galerie La Licorne in Paris; the gallery's owner, Maurice Girardin, to whom he was contracted between 1920 and 1932, later donated his collection of Gromaire's work to the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Wider recognition of his art was signalled in 1925 by the publication of the first monograph on him and by the controversy aroused by War (1925; Paris, Mus. A. Mod. Ville Paris) on its exhibition at the Salon des Independants.

Gromaire was particularly productive in the late 1920s, when he achieved a new sensuality in his work. In the 1930s he played an active part in the artistic and political struggles against Fascism. In 1937 he produced a frieze for the Sevres Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, the first of numerous public mural commissions, followed in 1938 by his first tapestry. In 1939, together with Jean Lurcat, he founded the Ecole d'Aubusson, dedicated to the teaching of tapestry technique and restoration, by means of which they helped to revitalize the tapestry industry. After World War II the forms in Gromaire's paintings became more splintered, partly as a result of his work in stained glass, and he was active in the debate between realism and abstraction.

Gromaire's characteristic subjects were landscapes, cityscapes, nudes and celebrations of peasant and urban working-class life; the latter became a particular interest after a visit to the USA in 1950, where he also produced city views such as New York, Central Park (1951; Paris, Pompidou). He was never an official member of the Communist party, but his mature work was fired by profound Socialist convictions and by an almost mystical belief in a truly humanist art in which aesthetics and ethics were inextricably linked. Using deep and rich colours in his paintings, he endowed the human form with considerable monumental dignity.

PUBLISHED WRITINGS
L'Art moderne (1919)
Notes sur l'art d'aujourd'hui (1919)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
J. Cassou: Marcel Gromaire (Paris, 1925)
W. George: Gromaire (Paris, 1928)
M. Zahar: Gromaire (Geneva, 1961)
Marcel Gromaire (exh. cat. by J. Cassou, Paris, Mus. A. Mod. Ville Paris, 1963)
Marcel Gromaire, 1892--1971 (exh. cat., ed. M.-O. Briot; Paris, Mus. A. Mod. Ville Paris, 1980)
L'Oeuvre grave [de] Marcel Gromaire, 1892--1971 (exh. cat., Gravelines, Mus. Arsenale, 1980)

MONICA BOHM-DUCHEN

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