Jean Dewasne’s work combines visual arts, architecture, music, mathematics, urban planning and industry in a whirlwind of complex geometric shapes and bright flat colours.

In search of a personal visual language, Jean Dewasne abandoned painting in favour of technical and industrial materials.

A prominent theorist of abstract painting, co-founder of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and winner of the first Kandinsky Prize in 1946, Jean Dewasne began writing his “Traité d’une peinture plane” (Treatise on Flat Painting) at the age of 30. This seminal text on pictorial aesthetics is a veritable plea for free painting, unencumbered by any figurative constraints and rich in shapes and colours.

In the early 1950s, he designed his antisculptures, made from car body parts that he painted in bright colours with industrial lacquer. These works were exhibited at the Denise René Gallery in 1953.

From the 1960s onwards, his new visual language also manifested itself in monumental wall compositions, such as those at the Grande Arche de la Défense.

Discover Jean Dewasne’s work in detail:

We find in colour: harmony, melody, and counterpoint.

Charles Baudelaire
Excerpt from the catalogue of the first Salon des Réalités Nouvelles exhibition in 1947