Technical information
- Title: Small Blue World
- Date: 1955
- Technique: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 55 × 46 cm
- Location: Location: Unknown
Biographical / historical context
In 1955, Breuillaud produces many medium-format works that allow him to test compositional solutions rapidly. These pieces often function as autonomous studies: they concentrate an idea of space and a chromatic range without seeking the amplitude of a large landscape.
Small Blue World belongs to this exploratory moment. The artist tests an almost architectonic vertical organisation while maintaining a luminous atmosphere that suggests an interior, a passage, or a small “city scene” reduced to structure.
Formal / stylistic description
The canvas is built from a tight juxtaposition of colour planes: deep blues, violets and turquoises, with touches of orange and muted red animating certain edges. The whole forms a kind of pictorial edifice: rectangles interlock, vertical bands articulate the field, and a light zone at the centre evokes a threshold or opening.
Paint remains thin but active: visible reprises, transparencies and slight tonal variations give depth to the flats. Contours are not rigidly drawn; they are built by rubbing and overlap, sustaining a sense of movement despite the geometry.
Comparative analysis / related works
The work can be compared with The Blue Alley (same chromatic climate, same idea of passage) while asserting a more compact density: the tighter format intensifies the sensation of a “wall” of forms, and the central light becomes a clearer pivot.
This interlocking logic anticipates the 1956 research on values and wall-like structures. Small Blue World nonetheless retains a sensitive dimension: colour remains primary, producing an atmosphere rather than a purely abstract diagram.
Justification of dating and attribution
The date 1955 is corroborated by the dominance of blues and the presence of secondary warm accents, characteristic of a phase in which architecture is still carried by colour rather than by a strict grey-value framework.
The signature “Breuillaud” is visible at lower left in the reproduction. The writing (vibrating flats, superimpositions, supple contours) corresponds to the artist’s hand in the same sequence of works.
Provenance / exhibitions / publications
Provenance: not documented to date.
Exhibitions: not recorded.
Publications: not recorded.
© Bruno Restout - Catalogue raisonné André Breuillaud