Marcel Rene Chassard - French expressionist - 1947 - oil on canvas "still life with violin" signed

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• Marcel Chassard is born in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. André Flament restores "a childhood without stories and of which there would be nothing to say except that it was entirely focussed towards drawing and painting". He decided to devote his life to this vocation when at the age of thirteen, in 1920, he obtained the highest award of the drawing competition opened by the city of Paris to the best students of all municipal schools. In 1921, he joined the École des Arts Applied Germaine-Pilon where he has as masters Robert Wlérick in sculpture, Jules Chadel (1870-1942) in Drawing and Pierre-Paul Montagnac (1883-1961) in decoration

After a brief visit to the National School of Fine Arts in 1924, also after his temperament felt shared between the cubist temptation "which was for him only a stage" 3 and the refocusing towards classicism favored by The advice of Pierre Laurens and André Favory2, Marcel Chassard entered the artistic service of the Draeger of Montrouge printing in 1925. Returning there in 1929 - the year he married Janine Schmidt - after a two -year military service to the 34th aviation regiment Du Bourget, to work with artists like Jean Piaubert and Victor Vasarely, he frequented the evening lessons from the Colarossi academy where he receives the advice of Othon Friesz. In 1933 - Year of birth of his daughter Colette - he was director of the Synthesis review. For the purpose of illustrating the bibliophilic publications, he realized his first lithographs at Fernand Mourlot. Then he became artistic and technical director of the Revue Le Jardin des Modes in 19362. For Claude-Saulvy, "If the daily realities forced Marcel Chassard to Practicing a job, he knew how to keep, from ten years at Draeger, a contribution from which his talent took advantage of. And it is perhaps the disciplines of the layout and the printing processes that it owes its qualities of balance and construction and also this quiet and safe force which emanates from its paintings ”.
Mobilized in 1939, when its recent canvases evoke vacations in the Basque Country (the Biiatou church), in Corrèze (the waterfall in Gimel), in Switzerland (the San Lorenzo church in Lugano) 5, Marcel Chassard is a student reserve officer. In 1942, he followed the courses of the Academy of the Grande Chaumière. His first meeting with Jean Jansem dates from 1945. In a sustainable friendship, the two artists will peel together landscapes, nudes, as well as, vice versa, a portrait of one by the other.
If the year 1947 inaugurated a period of forty years of exhibitions, the post-war period shows a Marcel Chassard still in search of deepening his knowledge, in particular by the approach of two masters who have nothing in common otherwise to the fascinner: Sandro Botticelli whom he really discovers in museums thanks to a trip to Italy in 1947 and whose landscapes and portraits provide him with an absolutely necessary spiritual and material viaticum "; Lyonel Feininger, of which in 1959 "He passionately studied the construction of canvases with their colorful chromatism of the prism". Meanwhile, in 1957, Marcel Chassard met Camille Hilaire whose monograph he published with a text by Robert Rey.