PUY, JEAN (1876-1960)

"Jeune Femme Sur Un Tabouret" (c.1900)
Mixed media
29 x 20cm
Signed lower right
*private collection, Melbourne
 
Puy was an influential French Modernist and founding member of the Fauvists. He studied architecture at the École nationale des beaux-arts de Lyon and painting with Jean-Paul Laurens at l'Académie Julian between 1897 and 1898. He met Henri Matisse and other like-minded artists when he transferred to the l'Académie Carrière in 1899. He exhibited his work in 1901, then in an Impressionist style, at the Salon des Indépendants; later, as a Fauvist, he exhibited at the 1905 Salon d'Automne. Puy established the Fauves ("Wild Beasts") alongside friends Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Raoul Dufy to name a few, incorporating a style characterized by wild brush work and strident colors, with a high degree of simplification and abstraction.