Pierre Carron

Artist born in Fécamp on December 16, 1932, is a French painter and sculptor.

He spent his childhood in Le Havre in a family environment linked to the sea. On the paternal side, that of the Newfoundlanders and, on the maternal side, his grandfather designed and built, in the shipyards of Fécamp which he directed, the famous schooners, French Navy training boats: the Belle Poule and the Etoile.

Pierre Carron abandoned his studies at the Lycée François Ier in Le Havre to devote himself entirely to drawing. He follows evening classes at the Regional School of Fine Arts in Le Havre. The director invites him and allows him to work alone during the day in the premises of the school where he devotes himself to the study of the very beautiful casts kept in the establishment. Sensitive to the history of the place: the estuary, between Honfleur and Le Havre, charged with the memory of illustrious predecessors whether it be Monet, Eugène Boudin, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy or Otto Friez, felt like a invitation to pursue the utopia of becoming a painter in turn.

It was then that, following tradition, Pierre Carron went to Paris and enrolled in Gustave Corlin's preparatory workshop for the Grandes Ecoles, where he befriended Raymond Humbert and Pierre Faure.

He successfully passed the entrance examination for the National School of Decorative Arts. After one year, chooses to teach at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Then entered by competition in the painting studio of Raymond Legueult. He obtains the main competitions of the school and finally the First Grand Prix of Rome in 1960. From 1961 to 1964, stays at the Villa Medicis while Balthus is the director with whom he binds. A deep friendship that the artist will celebrate in all of his works.

In parallel with these studies, invited to the Charpentier gallery (Ecole de Paris) where he exhibited an Annunciation in 1956/1957. Noticed by the critic Claude Roger Marx who devoted an article to him in the Figaro Littéraire and who invited him to participate in the selection of the Critics' Prize which he obtained in 1957.

At the end of his stay at the Villa Medici, from 1961 to 1964, after settling in the countryside in Normandy, in Saint Romain, he was called by Nicolas Untersteller, director of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris , in order to assume responsibility for the still life workshop, before taking over from that of his boss Raymond Legueult. The events of May 68 interrupt the project.

Faced with the pedagogical disarray which succeeds at these events, he designates "the Museum" as the privileged place of reflection. To this end, he organized a study group called the Plastic Means of Expression Research Group and founded and assumed, alongside the traditional activities of workshop manager, a course entitled Analysis of a work. In his capacity as workshop manager, he taught there until 1998.