Laure Stella Victorine Bruni

She was born in Liège in 1886 and died in 1975 in Locle (Switzerland), she is a French painter of Belgian and Swiss origin.

Laure comes from an Italian-speaking family, of Ticino origin. She is the great-granddaughter of the painter Fiodor Bruni and one of the two daughters of Constantin Bruni, a piano teacher established in Belgium, in Liège, from 1882, then conductor in different countries.

She obtained French naturalization in 1898 like her father, born in Warsaw in 1865, her mother, Laure Marie Jeanne Listray, Belgian born in 1865 in Liège, and her younger sister. His family then lived in Lyon.

She began to be interested in music, particularly the piano, before becoming a painter. She first exhibited in Switzerland, where her father directed the Geneva theater. She exhibits at the Moos gallery in Geneva.

She exhibited paintings, landscapes and flowers, from 1920 in Paris, thanks in part to the gallery owner Moos also based in this city. Several small exhibitions were devoted to her by Parisian galleries such as the Georges Petit gallery in 1924. She exhibited the paintings Lande Bretonne in 1927, Dans la Drôme in 1928 and Falaise au Tréport in 1929 at the Salon des Indépendants. Abel Bonnard prefaced the catalog of her 1928 exhibition at the Charpentier gallery. The opening of this exhibition attracts personalities. She exhibited again from 1935, in other galleries and at the Salon des Indépendants.

In 1927, she married René Gillouin, a man of letters and deputy chief of staff to the president of the Paris municipal council. She sometimes participates in Parisian social life alongside her husband. Her name and her profession as a painter were involved in a political controversy in 1938 targeting her husband, who had launched a political career (he was a right-wing Paris municipal councilor from 1931) and who denounced foreign painters. of the School of Paris, on the occasion of their presence at the exhibition of “masters of independent art” at the Petit Palais, organized by Raymond Escholier.

Her stepson, Marc, died in 1940. At the start of the Occupation, the Germans reportedly carried out a search of her husband's Parisian home and took away several of his paintings.

René Gillouin, based in Vichy, was then considered one of Marshal Pétain's advisors. His wife is one of the close friends of Marshal Pétain's wife, Annie Pétain. She followed him into exile in Switzerland from 1943. She exhibited in this country, notably marines, in Geneva, Lausanne, Zurich, Lugano. But also in 1948-1949 in Neuchâtel or in Bienne from 1951 to 1955. Her husband moved again to Paris from 1948 and the couple had a house in Vaison-la-Romaine in France. She remains there for part of the year, while maintaining a workshop in Switzerland, in the canton of Ticino in Rovio then in the canton of Neuchâtel.

She divorced in 1958 and continued to paint, based in her studio in Les Brenets, in the canton of Neuchâtel.