AB-MP2-1953-001 — Rue Lepic (1953)

Technical information

Title: Rue Lepic
Date: 1953
Technique: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 55 × 46 cm
Location: Unknown

Biographical / historical context

In 1953, Breuillaud is still fully immersed in Montmartre, though he now alternates Parisian stays with regular periods in Provence. The “market paintings” of 1951 opened an intense urban cycle: streets, stalls, anonymous figures, and the rhythms of the crowd.

1953 marks a significant shift: the artist complicates his geometric structure, sharpens contrasts, and develops a more nervous, almost graphic handling. Reproduced in the Pillement Catalogue (1967), this work is an essential marker in the passage from the fragmented colourism of the early 1950s toward the more angular, tense structural network that will characterise MP3.

Formal / stylistic description

The composition is dominated by a bundle of vertical and oblique lines structuring a dense street space, invaded by compact silhouettes.

The black-and-white treatment—rare in the production of this period—intensifies the sense of urban saturation: dark masses, fractured walls, dry tracings, and figures reduced to uncertain volumes. The street is rebuilt in blocks, like a broken architecture in which figures become almost inseparable from the setting.

Brushwork is short and abrupt; planes interlock like scaffolding. One perceives a vibrating mesh that recalls certain strands of post-war French painting (Manessier, Le Moal), a black graphic line that anticipates the gestural tension of early MP3, and a deliberate reduction of tonal contrasts in order to bring out the motif’s underlying structure.

Comparative analysis / related works

This Rue Lepic in black and white occupies a hinge position between the colourful markets of 1951 (MP2M)—fragmented crowds, frontal figures, vivid palette—and the more abstract compositions of 1954–1955, with dynamic lines and tightened masses, rising toward MP3.

Compared with the three other “Rue Lepic” works (AB-MP2M-1951-002/003/004), this one is the most compact, the most constructed, and the most dramatic.

It shares with AB-MP2M-1951-004 (Rue Lepic II in black and white) a taste for a monochrome model, but pushes further the dematerialisation of the subject, reducing the street to an almost calligraphic interlacing.

Justification of dating and attribution

Dating is consistent with: its mention in the Pillement Catalogue (1967), classified in the year 1953; an internal structure far denser than the 1951–1952 markets; the use of black and white, typical of the 1953–1954 experiments on urban crowds; and the signature and recurring format within the “late Montmartre” series.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Reproduced in: Pillement Catalogue, Paris, 1967, section “Rue Lepic”.

Iconographic source: black-and-white reproduction consistent with the Pillement print.