Thérèse Boucraut

Thérèse Boucraut (born in 1930) grew up in the Petit-Bateau factory, a company created by her grandfather, then managed by her parents. During her childhood, she played in these buildings, these interior streets, a small closed town, full of forbidden games, discovering colors and materials, in the atmosphere of a craft profession: assembling shapes, creating new methods for weaving threads, searching for colors... In this context, she practiced drawing very early, and approached various techniques (watercolors, charcoals, tapestries, engraving, clay...) as evidence of a manual and physical practice of pictorial art.

Thérèse Boucraut paints from nature, and with models her painting is like an imaginary figurative theater but not realistic sometimes, the human figure is present as a testimony of the existence of objects then only the objects remain present, scattered, vibrant with life of yesteryear, the human figure is set in the space of the forest, or the workshop: the forest, the workshop, becoming a large theater, a space of suspended play. The scales change, and seem to question the place of the human: object or actor? Leaving the "Mural Painting" Workshop of the ENSAD, where Gromaire taught, and holding the diploma, in 1957, Thérèse Boucraut devoted herself to painting.

Two major trends at the time separated painters - all the creators who worked in and around the field of art - or even opposed them, sometimes violently. Abstraction and Figuration; in this context we will speak of a "return to figuration". Over the following years, even decades, the problem of the subject linked to the return to figuration was latent.