Jacques Nestlé (1907-1991)

Lot 100 - French painter
Gouache and collage on paper.
Artist's stamp lower right.
Solid oak frame.
Circa 1960
20th century.
Dimensions when viewed: H: 106; W: 75 cm

Jacques Nestlé was born in Saarbrücken in 1907. In 1925, he moved to Berlin, where he was influenced by the Bauhaus school and the avant-garde artists of the period, such as Kandinsky and Paul Klee. In 1933, he moved to France and joined a number of artists in Paris, where the modern art revolution had already been underway since the mid-19th century. In Paris, Henri Matisse noticed his work, encouraged him and provided lasting inspiration. Later, art dealer and collector Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was keen to promote him, as he had done with Picasso, Braque, Derain and Gris. Jacques Nestlé, who described himself as "neither a painter nor an artist, simply a man who paints", did not accept Kahnweiler's proposal. Jacques Nestlé is a painter of color and form, in the same artistic vein as contemporaries such as Kandinsky, Mondrian and Miró. His nudes, sometimes stylized to the extreme, in which the female form becomes colored lines and contours, recall the curves of Matisse's nudes or the anatomical composition of Picasso's cubist nudes.