Past
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The Surrealist Figure: André Masson, Hans Bellmer and Pierre Jahan
24 May - 4 Jun 2025 Surrealism is often an art of metamorphosis and of the deeper desires of the unconscious mind. The confusions of categories between the organic and mineral, the human and the animal... Read more -
Tous Léger! Fernand Léger and his contemporary echoes
30 Apr 2025 The exhibition ‘Tous Léger’ (All Léger) opened recently in Paris at the Musée de Luxembourg, showing how the plastic innovations of one of the masters of the 20th-century avant-garde, Fernand... Read more -
Pierre JAHAN: The Surrealist Herbarium
1945-1948 22 Feb - 7 Mar 2025 'Surrealism... takes great advantage of equivocation and lends itself to a number of transpositions’, said André Breton. I think that the photographer who so much suggests, describes or finds (if... Read more
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Lyrical Abstraction: Judit REIGL and Henri MICHAUX
12 - 26 Feb 2025 In France in the Post-War period, Lyrical Abstraction, led by Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Gérard Schneider, becomes one of the most important artistic movements. Its focus was on the... Read more -
Les Nabis : Paul-Elie Ranson and Ker-Xavier Roussel
12 - 26 Feb 2025 Under the impulsion of Paul Sérusier and Maurice Denis' new ideas about the very nature of painting (Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a female nude or... Read more -
André Masson: America
9 - 22 Jan 2025 Fleeing the Occupation, André Masson and André Breton arrive in New York in 1941, after a three-week stay in Martinique. Although impressed by the metropolis, André Masson, as always, found nature far more appealing than the chaotic pace of the city. He settled in New England, near Lake Waramaug, where he was visited by Calder, Kay Sage, Yves Tanguy and Arshile Gorky, and exhibited in the United States, notably with Kurt Valentin and Pierre Matisse.
André Masson's work is one of continuous metamorphosis. In the United States, inspired by the wild, spectacular landscape so different from the more pleasant European landscape, he once again changed his way of painting, even if the mythical theme persisted. His works reflect the fertility of American soils, as well as the violence of extreme atmospheric phenomena. He allows himself to be carried along by new, more dynamic and violent pulsations:
“...the paintings have become infinitely more violent. The influence of climate is indisputable. There's also this terrible, aggressive light, no mist...Seized by the earthly force and violent climate of this region, I seek and perhaps find pictorial correspondences of elemental forces. Telluric mysteries. Phenomena of hatching and germination also find their transposition in numerous canvases and pastels.”
It's impossible not to recall the influence André Masson's American period had on Abstract Expressionism in its early days, and especially on the work of Jackson Pollock. It's likely that Pollock met Masson at Stanley W. Hayter's Atelier 17 in New York, where Masson worked on prints. The two artists shared the same totemic vision of the forces of nature. Jackson Pollock was marked by the presence of surrealist artists during the war: works such as "Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle", 1943, now held in the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, show a vision close to Masson's surrealism of the same period. Read more
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André Masson: A Mythology of Nature
14 - 31 Dec 2024 Nature represents one of the through-lines in Surrealist André Masson's oeuvre. In 1923, one of his earliest series that captures the interest of Surrealist founder André Breton is his forests, in which the cubist style combines with a more symbolist, philosophical view of nature in order to create strange environments.
On his return from Spain at the end of 1936, André Masson rejoined André Breton's Surrealist group, and took part in the group's International Exhibitions in Paris and London in 1938. Faced with the rise of fascism, and hastened by the Spanish Civil War, Masson held the belief of the Greek stoic philosophers in an eternal return of things. Settling in Lower Normandy in 1939, Masson declared that he was ‘taken back by the poetry of the forest’. But he adopted the posture of a hermit philosopher, that of Heraclitus as described by Nietzsche - ‘the non-consideration of present and instantaneous things making up the essence of the great philosophical nature’.
Between 1938-1939, the artist is working on his Mythologies, a work he considers to be his swan song. The mythical impetus of these large drawings blends with the quest for a universal principle of nature, above all metamorphosis and genitor eroticism. Dans le pur néant shows the desire, the meeting of a mineral couple, gigantic, which feeds the continuous flow of an unfinished world, in perpetual becoming. In this great mythological nature, the plant, the mineral and the human intertwine in a kind of osmosis, a wedding where everything transforms and germinates. As in German Romanticism, especially with Goethe and Novalis, nature is perceived as a supreme truth.
This quest for natural delurium and métamorphosis will pursue with the Martinique drawings, which the artist himself characterizes as a "vegetal delirium". On hiw way to New York escaping the Occupation in 1941, Masson and Breton are stopped in Martinique, where they will remain for a month. There, they are surprised by the discovery of savage, exotic jungles, which will feature heavily in their poetic work, published in "Martinique charmeuse de serpents", which masson illustrates entirely. Much like his earlier cubist forests, nature is presented as a sort of "horror vacui", all-encompasing, organic and hidding a deeper meaning. Read more -
Kees Van Dongen : Illustrator
10 - 31 Oct 2024 We have the pleasure to present to you two new works by Fauvist painter Kees Van Dongen - both rare originals that served as models for the illustrations of books... Read more -
André Masson: le surréalisme révolutionnaire
9 Oct - 30 Nov 2024 On the occasion of the Surrealist centenary, the gallery has the pleasure to showcase a selection from its exhibition 'André Masson: le Surréalisme révolutionnaire', which is part of the parcourse... Read more
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Picasso's Owls
7 - 7 Jul 2024 The fact that Picasso liked to surround himself with animals is well known. One day in 1946, as Picasso was working at the Musée d'Antibes, his photographer friend Michel Sima,... Read more -
T'ang Haywen: the Lyrical Landscapes
22 - 28 May 2024 Chinese painting is never abstract. As T'ang Haywen says himself, his is an art that never loses touch with the sensible world. In his ink works, which are at the... Read more -
Nicolas Lefeuvre: Somewhere Between Now and Before
21 - 25 May 2024 Galerie Jean-François Cazeau has the pleasure to present the latest works of Contemporary artist Nicolas Lefeuvre. This series, called Somewhere Between Now and Before, wears its title well: it is a transition, a road between the ink Landescapes which consecrated him and his new researches on canvas.
These works are the first the artist ever created on canvas, and the passage to the new medium allows for new aesthetic possibilities, and a new depth of colour. References to past series permeate the new series: the abstract allusion to a kimono, the stamped ink sigils... Read more
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Pablo Picasso: The Vollard Suite
2 - 16 Dec 2023 Discover two of the most important plates from the Vollard Suite at the gallery : the Minotaure aveugle guidé par Mare-Thérèse dans la nuit étoilée and the Faune dévoilant une dormeuse d'après Rembrandt. In which, the mythology of the Maditerranean meets Picasso's own personal mythology. Read more -
Pablo Picasso : 1968-1971
The thrill of creation 3 - 14 Oct 2023 Between 1968 and 1972, Pablo Picasso, already over 80 years old, enterprises his last two major graphic works, as a sort of distillation and celebration of his entire career. Those... Read more -
The Modern Still Life: Cubism and Colour
12 - 19 Sep 2023 Contrary, or perhaps in paralll to, their revolutionary ambition, the 20th century avant-gardes often chose to rework and re-interpret the traditional subjects of art history. As such, the still lif,... Read more
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André Dunoyer de Segonzac's Saint-Tropez
22 - 29 Jul 2023 Born in 1884 in Boussy-Saint-Antoine, near Paris, Dunoyer de Segonzac began his artistic training in Paris in 1903. He attended the Académie de la Palette and the studios of Luc Olivier Merson and Jean-Paul Lorens.
From 1909, Dunoyer de Segonzac regularly took part in exhibitions at the Salon des Indépendants, and exhibited at the Salon de la Section d'Or in October 1912 and at the Armory Show in New York in 1913. His paintings of the period show the influence of Cubism and, to a lesser extent, Expressionism. Mobilised in August 1914, he left Saint-Tropez to join the army corps in Fontainebleau and, during the First War, produced a series of drawings of the trenches. After the war, the engraver Jean Emile Laboureur introduced him to the technique of etching. This was the defining moment in Dunoyer de Segonzac's artistic output, and he never left printmaking until the end of his life: he created more than 1,600 prints.
Between the two wars, Dunoyer de Segonzac was recognised by the critics, along with André Derain and Henri Matisse, as one of the most important modern artists. In 1925, together with Moreau and André Villeboeuf, Dunoyer de Segonzac bought Charles Camoin's villa in Saint-Tropez, which he renamed Le Maquis. Not falling into the trap of the Mediterranean sun, he devoted himself to translating the rare moments of grey light or dark skies, expressing a timeless feeling and a melancholy atmosphere. Looking at Cézanne's work towards the end of his life, he turned more and more to watercolours. It was his watercolours that brought Dunoyer de Segonzac commercial success as well as officielle consecration when he was appointed curator of the Musée de L'Annonciade in Saint Tropez when it was created in 1955. He died in Paris in 1974. Read more -
Herbin / Charchoune : L'Abstraction Symbolique
13 - 22 Jul 2023 True nomads of the avant-garde, Auguste Herbin and Serge Charchoune present two parallel and contrasting roads in the art history of the last century. Both artists have careers spanning multiple... Read more -
BRAFA Art Fair 2022
19 - 26 Jun 2022 Read more
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The Sculpture in all its Forms
16 Feb - 21 Mar 2022 Read more -
Portraits from 1928 to Nowadays
2 Feb - 7 Mar 2022 Read more -
Colorful Art to Brighten January
13 - 31 Jan 2022 Add warmth and richness to your art collection with a work of art from Galerie Jean-François Cazeau. We have selected some artworks which are color-saturated and vivid, and which will... Read more
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Art Paris 2021
7 - 12 Sep 2021 Read more -
La faune et la flore
Fauna and Flora 2 Oct - 13 Nov 2020 De Picasso à Masson, les maîtres modernes du 20e siècle trouvent dans la faune et la flore beaucoup d'inspiration. Cette exposition rend hommage à la nature derrière ces œuvres et... Read more -
Formes et corps dans l'art à travers les siècles
The Figure and Body in Art Through the Centuries 17 Jul - 3 Sep 2020 Nothing might have evolved so much as the representation of the human form over the course of the last centuries. The human ideal has transformed from an original idealisation of... Read more
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Portraits de Maîtres
16 Jun - 16 Jul 2020 Portraiture is said to have originated over 5000 years ago. However, it is in the 20th century that portraiture seems to have evolved the most, from figurative, to cubist, to... Read more -
Discover Abstraction with Sudaporn Teja
A selection of works by Thai contemporary artist Sudaporn Teja 31 Mar - 23 May 2020 Read more -
Nicolas Lefeuvre - A world of Land(e)scapes
Enter the universe of Nicolas Lefeuvre 'Land(e)scapes' 21 Mar - 30 Apr 2020 About the Artist (lives & works in Lisbon) Nicolas Lefeuvre was born in France in 1975. After studying at Beaux-Arts in Rennes (France) and architecture/product design at Camondo in Paris,... Read more
