AB-PR2-1950-022 — Dance in Front of the Village (1950)

Technical information

Title : Dance in Front of the Village
Date : 1950
Technique : Oil on canvas
Dimensions : 38 × 61 cm
Location : Private collection

Biographical / historical context

This work lies at the heart of the PR2 sequence (1950), a moment when André Breuillaud shifts the Provençal landscape from a still descriptive motif to a construction by planes: village, hills, fields and trees become colour-modules arranged like a mosaic.

Dance in Front of the Village pushes the experiment further by introducing, in the foreground, a collective scene—a round dance (farandole)—that tests the painter’s new syntax. Rather than setting figure against landscape, Breuillaud seeks their compatibility: human movement must inscribe itself within a space already “built” by colour and geometry.

The stake is therefore not anecdotal but structural: making a lived world (rhythm, gesture, cadence) coincide with an organised world (planes, flat tones, the village’s underlying armature).

Formal / stylistic description

The composition reads as two superposed registers. In the upper part, a village set on a rise is stepped in simplified volumes (roofs, towers, façades), laid over a chequerboard of plots. Planes follow one another as bands and inclines—fields, embankments, hills, then sky—like a stacking of colour strata.

In the foreground, five figures occupy the space as “sign-forms”. They are not portraits: oval heads, torsos in flat areas, limbs reduced to segments, hips tilted and arms held in tension. The dance is conveyed by circulating diagonals, twists and crossings of silhouettes, creating a continuous pulse before the village’s stability.

The geometrisation remains firm without becoming rigid: facets cut both bodies and landscape while retaining elasticity (hip shifts, shoulder arcs). In places, a dark line acts as a “holding line”: it contains the flat tones, stabilises the figures and clarifies the overall architecture, producing an effect akin to stained glass—broad colour fields held by an armature.

Colour organises depth rather than describing naturalistic light. Yellow-oranges and ochres build the ground as a warm stage; greens structure vegetal masses; blues cool and recede, establishing counterpoints (clothing, shadows, distance). The subject—a popular dance—thus becomes a formal principle: the energy of movement sets a plane-built space vibrating.

Comparative analysis / related works

A clear structural kinship links this painting to AB-PR2-1950-004 (The Village in Spring): the same simplified village set on a patchwork of colour planes, where each form (house, hill, field, tree) reads as a module articulated within the whole.

Dance in Front of the Village reprises this matrix but brings it into motion by placing a group of dancers in the foreground. Where AB-PR2-1950-004 privileges an almost autonomous landscape construction (compact motif, puzzle effect), AB-PR2-1950-022 overlays a bodily rhythm onto the parcelling rhythm: the figures, themselves reduced to planes, do not break the structure—they put it to the test.

The variation is revealing of 1950: Breuillaud experiments with introducing the figure without returning to classical perspective, making the body one coloured module among the others.

Justification of dating and attribution

The dating to c. 1950 aligns with the defining traits of PR2: a still readable motif (village, fields, figures) summarised into planes; space built through flat tones; a palette organised by warm/cool systems; and a dark outlining line that structures the whole.

The internal proximity to AB-PR2-1950-004 anchors the work in the same search for a “modular mosaic” specific to that year. Attribution to André Breuillaud is supported by the faceted handling, volumetric simplification, colour/structure relationship and the warm-green range typical of his Provençal landscapes around 1950.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Private collection.