AB-MP4-1955-001 — Blue Night (1955)

Technical information

Title: Blue Night
Date: 1955
Technique: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 97 × 130 cm
Location: Private collection*

Biographical / historical context

In 1955, André Breuillaud crosses a decisive threshold: the recognisable scene (landscapes, figures, market episodes) gives way to a painting of structure—mental architecture and rhythms. This shift does not abandon reality; it transposes it. City, studio, window and night become matrices of form.

Blue Night belongs to this phase of recomposition. The title—whether functional or later—points to the work’s atmospheric dimension: a constructed nocturne in which light is no longer descriptive but woven into the pictorial fabric itself.

Formal / stylistic description

The composition unfolds in a large horizontal format, organised by a dense network of segments and facets that suggests a built space. At the centre, a lighter rectangular ensemble evokes a façade or plane, while a broad dark arc in the foreground acts like a bay or curve of circulation, anchoring the image in a depth that is paradoxically flat.

The chromatic range privileges blues (cobalt, ultramarine, petrol blue) and violets, punctuated by red and orange accents that energise the surface. Layers appear built by successive reprises: warmer zones show through beneath the blues, as if night were constructed by overlay rather than by uniform darkening.

Treatment combines two registers: mosaic-like blocks and more fluid passages where the paint melts and leaves breathing spaces. This alternation creates tension between “plane” and “depth,” between architectural reading and luminous sensation.

Comparative analysis / related works

Compared with earlier compositions still anchored in motif (the working scenes and landscapes of the early 1950s), the painting shifts attention to internal organisation—lines, joints, bays, zones of shadow and light. It reads as a hinge between a cubist-like deconstruction of subject and a fully assumed structural abstraction.

The work naturally resonates with other 1955 experiments on paper, where vegetal or biomorphic motifs are reduced to signs (branches, arcs, ovals). Here those signs mineralise: branching becomes framework, a clearing becomes a luminous window, and the nocturnal ground functions as a mesh.

Within the corpus, the foreground arc and the central light announce a recurring grammar (arcs, thresholds, axes) that will return in later works.

Justification of dating and attribution

The date 1955 is consistent with the nocturnal palette, the strengthening of the structuring network, and the abandonment of direct narrative markers. The scale and constructive ambition place the work at the heart of the MP4 phase.

Attribution presents no difficulty: facture, colour range and linear writing correspond to Breuillaud’s documented manner in the mid-1950s, and connect without rupture to neighbouring works.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Private collection*.