Charles Lacoste 1870-1959

Charles Lacoste: Between Impressionism and Symbolism Painter

Born to a Bordeaux accountant and a Creole mother, Charles Lacoste (1870–1959) was a French Symbolist painter, born in Floirac, a town bordering Bordeaux in the Gironde. As a teenager, he formed close friendships at school with the future poet Francis Jammes and with Gabriel Frizeau, who would later become a winegrower and a major collector of Odilon Redon, Eugène Carrière, Rouault, and above all Paul Gauguin.

LIFE, STYLE, AND WORKS OF CHARLES LACOSTE

Driven early on by the desire to become a painter, Lacoste trained as a self-taught artist by visiting the public and private collections of Bordeaux. In 1894, he published in L’Estampe originale a view of London that, with its deliberate synthetism, already signals his aesthetic ambitions. At the time, the artist made frequent trips to the British capital, an industrial city with a misty, smoke-filled atmosphere from which he gradually drew his own vision of nature, stripped down and melancholy. It was also during these years that he associated with André Gide, Arthur Fontaine, the Rouart brothers, and the composer Henri Duparc.

Rejected by the Société des Amis des Arts de Bordeaux, he took part in the 1898 Salon de La Plume, just as the magazine had published his article “Simplicity in Painting,” and exhibited that same year at the Salon des Cent. After settling in Paris, he participated in the Indépendants from 1901 onward, then at the Salon d’Automne starting in 1903. Thanks to Gide, the artist met the dealer Eugène Druet, who supported him by exhibiting his work every year from 1904 to 1938 and hosting his first solo show in January 1905. Also championed by Berthe Weill from 1906 onward, his work achieved a certain success, and his reputation spread beyond France, most notably at the Salon de la Libre Esthétique in Brussels in 1907, then at the Salon de la Toison d’Or the following year in Moscow.

In the interwar period, Lacoste succeeded in applying his vision to large-scale mural paintings, executing the decorations for the east staircase of the Palais du Sénat in 1928 and for the Toulouse Museum of Natural History in 1930.

Dated 1907 and coming from the collection of the great patron and collector Georges Couturat, our Symbolist landscape, La forêt, exemplifies all that made Charles Lacoste’s work so distinctive. A lover of Japanese art and a collector of prints, he brought to his canvases a simplification of forms and expansive perspectives, emphasized by flat areas of color in soft tonalities. This corner of forest appears stripped of all human presence, structured by the strict or sinuous verticals of tree trunks rising from a ground animated only by a few blackbirds and fallen branches. The painter modulates his planes of color with a lighter, more precise touch, adding a subtle sense of light that casts shadows across the green grass. Reflecting a vision shaped by order and restraint, in the manner of the Nabis (Vallotton and Maurice Denis) this painting bears witness to the evolution of Lacoste’s production during the first decade of the twentieth century.

It is precisely this ongoing pursuit of simplicity and synthetic purity that elicited the praise of his friend Francis Jammes in the preface to Lacoste’s 1905 exhibition at the Druet gallery: “Charles Lacoste inhabits the land of discreet harmony, where a taste so perfect prevails that never does a discordant cry disturb the landscape; there is no striving for effect in this art, naturally simple and effortlessly distinguished, and which has breeding. It even seems that this painting is afraid of drawing attention to itself. That is its genius at this moment.”