Édouard Pignon

Edouard Pignon is a French painter born in 1905 in Bully-les-Mines and died in 1993 in La Couture-Boussey. He spent a difficult childhood and worked at the mine, then at the factory from 1920 to 1927. After his military service, he moved to Paris in 1927 and took painting classes at the Boulevard Montparnasse School, those of the Germain Pilon School and began studying Applied Arts at the Labor University. He joined the Communist Party in 1933 and will be resistant during the Second World War. His first personal exhibition was organized in Paris in 1939. With the artists Bazaine, Estève, Lapicque, Le Moal and Manessier, he was one of the “Twenty painters of the French tradition” who exhibited in Paris at the Braun gallery in 1941. All through throughout his career, Edouard Pignon practiced figurative painting, criticizing abstract art for suppressing reality. The subjects of his paintings often testify to his political commitment, without practicing "socialist realism". He declines his work by series on canvas, watercolors, ceramics and giant sculptures. An artist going against the grain and a man of character extremely attached to his freedom, Edouard Pignon, a friend of Picasso, refused all his life an attachment to any artistic movement or to an Academy. His work is visible in many major museums, in France and abroad. To help create a museum in Marles-les-Mines, Edouard Pignon donated forty of his paintings, drawings and lithographs, as well as works by his friend Picasso