Biography

Charles Lapicque was a French painter known for his brightly colored depictions of landscapes and figures. Employing fragmented pictorial space, patches of color, and cursory outlines, Lapicque’s style most closely resembled that of Raoul Dufy. “Long studies of nature led me to conclude that red, orange and yellow as colors always ready to become lighter, to become brighter, and blue, on the contrary, as a color is inevitably destined to darken,” he once explained. Born on October 6, 1898 in Theizé, France, Lapicque fought in the artillery during World War I, and received the Croix de Guerre in 1918. The following year, he entered the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris, where he trained as an engineer. Lapicque produced some of his first landscape paintings in 1920, and continued working in a laboratory as an engineer, where he also researched color perception. By 1943, the artist had devoted himself entirely to his art career and abandoned his assistant position at the Faculté des Sciences. Over the following decades, Lapicque traveled to Venice four times and produced paintings inspired by the city’s villas, gardens, and church facades. The artist died on July 15, 1988 in Orsay, France. Today, his works are held in collections throughout France, including the Musée d’Unterlinden, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, and the Musée de Lorraine.