AB-MP2-1955-001 — Pigalle at Night (II) (1954)

Technical information

Title: Pigalle at Night (II)
Date: 1954
Technique: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 130 × 89 cm
Location: Unknown

Biographical / historical context

After the markets, streets and daytime scenes, Breuillaud turns to a highly constructed urban nocturne in which the Pigalle district becomes a pretext for probing the city’s deeper structures. Artificial light, cast shadows and the geometry of façades feed a painting that is only figurative in the background.

Compared with the first version, Pigalle at Night (II) pushes abstraction further by compressing the masses and tightening the internal architecture of the composition.

Formal / stylistic description

The vision is no longer descriptive but mental—close to a late, cubo-expressionist language. The work is built from interlocking verticals, as if buildings had become internal columns: superimposed planes, translucent partitions, and stacked blocks of value.

A cool palette—nocturnal greens, deep blues, muted ochres—creates an almost organic atmosphere in which volumes seem to breathe. A dominant central vertical axis organises the reading: a sequence of modulated rectangles, alternations of matte and glossy passages, and gradual tonal shifts.

Space is “polyphased”: façade, street, interior and reflections appear to overlap within a single pictorial field. Human presence is reduced to clues—vibrations of colour, fragmentary silhouettes—almost dissolved into structure. Where version (I) favours luminous diagonals, version (II) privileges a near-architectonic verticality.

Comparative analysis / related works

Pigalle at Night (I) and (II) form a conceptual diptych: two successive attempts to extract not anecdote, but the place’s invisible architecture.

In relation to (I), this second version is more inward and meditative, less chromatically explosive. It marks a pivot point—the closure of the figurative urban cycle and the slide toward the more abstract language of the following period.

Justification of dating and attribution

The date 1954 is consistent with Breuillaud’s position at the end of a narrative and plastic cycle begun in Montmartre in the late 1940s. The work connects directly with: the last markets (MP2M, 1951), already experimenting with compressed fields of vision; certain paintings of 1953 (Rue Lepic, black and white), where space becomes a network of notches and broken lines; and the coming compositions of MP3 (1955–1956), which will push this grammar of blocks and interstices still further.

Dating is further supported by its immediate kinship with Pigalle at Night (I) (shared tensions and structures), and by its transitional logic between the large urban compositions of 1953 and the entry into MP3. It therefore sits at the very end of Book I, just before the shift into 1955–1958.