AB-PR2-1950-023 — Untitled (c. 1950)

Technical information

Title : Untitled
Date : c. 1950
Technique : Oil on canvas
Dimensions : Unknown
Location : Private collection

Biographical / historical context

This composition belongs to the research André Breuillaud pursued at the very beginning of the 1950s, when landscape and rural scene became a field for formal experimentation rather than a purely descriptive motif.

At this time, the artist favours a synthetic idiom: figures, trees and hills are reduced to stable colour masses held by a network of contours. The subject remains legible, but the primary concern is pictorial construction—flat areas, rhythms and colour relationships.

Formal / stylistic description

The scene unfolds as a horizontal frieze. On the left, a large seated figure—compact, head slightly inclined—imposes a visual weight that anchors the entire composition.

At centre, a stylised tree acts as a hinge: its trunk and branches, more “drawn” than naturalistic, articulate the planes and link the foreground to the background hills.

On the right, a second, smaller figure answers the left-hand mass and closes the space. The whole functions through balance rather than narration: resting attitudes, the landscape’s silence, the stability of forms.

Space is not built through linear perspective but through overlapping planes and interlocking colour facets. Warm earth tones (ochres, oranges, reds) are set against deep blues and greens, intensifying the sensation of light and material.

Comparative analysis / related works

The frieze principle and the use of a structuring vegetal armature relate this work to other compositions from the same year, where Breuillaud organises the landscape in strata and flat tones, particularly when a tree serves as a pivot between figures and hills.

Compared with AB-PR2-1950-022, which introduces a choreographic pulse in the foreground, this painting opts for a slower temporality: the same concern for module-based construction and for colour building space, but in service of a more contemplative scene.

Justification of dating and attribution

The dating to c. 1950 accords with the characteristic combination, at this time, of a warm Provençal palette and a supple geometrisation (simplified planes, firm contours, absence of naturalistic modelling).

Attribution to André Breuillaud is consistent with his immediate post-war vocabulary: figures treated as coloured volumes, tree-signs, and a landscape constructed by interlocking chromatic fields rather than atmospheric rendering.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Private collection.