Jules Oury, dit Marcel-Lenoir 1872-1931

Born into a family of goldsmiths in Montauban, Jules Oury moved to Paris in 1889, at the age of seventeen, initially to work as a jeweller. After studying at the École des Arts Décoratifs, he drew inspiration from the Italian and French Primitives whose works he discovered at the Musée de Cluny and the Louvre.

Having decided to become a painter, he adopted the pseudonym “Marcel-Lenoir”, partly to avoid confusion with his brother Louis Oury, a sculptor and poster designer. Fascinated by the art of Puvis de Chavannes and soon drawn to Symbolism, he frequented the poet Paul Fort and befriended Joséphin Péladan, who invited him to participate in the sixth and final Salon de la Rose+Croix at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1897.

Marcel-Lenoir presented several illuminated works of mystical inspiration, combining sumptuous costumes and decorative settings with a rigorously Synthetist treatment of the figures. Around this time, the publisher Arnould rescued the artist from his bohemian existence. Impressed by the purity and formal synthesis of his work, he offered to print and distribute his compositions.

Around 1902–1903, Marcel-Lenoir gradually moved away from the Symbolist aesthetic to develop a personal visual language that recalled the experiments of both the Nabis and the Divisionists, while anticipating the bold colours of the Fauves.

A singular figure, with a Christ-like appearance and a fiercely independent temperament, Marcel-Lenoir led a life poised between austerity and fantasy, while pursuing an ambitious quest for a spiritual and artistic ideal. Closely associated with the Abbaye de Créteil, an artistic and literary community founded in 1906 under the impetus of the poet Charles Vildrac, he published his first collection of poems, reflections and aphorisms in 1908 under the title Raison ou Déraison, reflecting his affinity with this intellectual circle.

After settling in Bruniquel in 1915, he devoted himself to fresco painting from the following year onwards. Between 1920 and 1923, he created The Coronation of the Virgin for the Institut Catholique de Toulouse, a vast composition that ranks among the masterpieces of his monumental œuvre.

A remarkably versatile artist—successively a jeweller and draughtsman, illuminator and printmaker, painter and fresco artist—Marcel-Lenoir left behind, upon his death in 1931, a profoundly original body of work. It is now being rediscovered as one of the most distinctive expressions of late Symbolism and the revival of monumental art in early twentieth-century France.