Le fort des Halles, Circa 1950

Alexandre Garbell  

Alexandre Garbell began to handle brushes at the age of thirteen. After studying in Moscow, after also settling with his family in Germany and attending the Heidelberg Academy, he arrived in Paris in 1923 and became a student at the Académie Ranson where he studied with Roger Bissière, with fellow students and friends Jean Le Moal, Alfred Manessier and Francis Gruber. He was therefore part of what was called the School of Paris. But very quickly he worked alone and demonstrated, with regard to all groups and all schools, an independence and freedom that never wavered thereafter.

From 1928 onwards, Garbell's work was regularly presented in Paris, in both personal and group exhibitions.

From 1960 onwards, he crossed borders and exhibited abroad: in Denmark, Switzerland, England, Italy and the United States. On the occasion of the exhibition organized by the "Fine Arts Associates Gallery" in New York in 1956, a television film was shot in the United States on the theme.

Garbell was, at one point in his career, tempted by abstraction. But quite quickly, as with the beach and cliff of Mers-les-Bains, which he frequented assiduously and drew and painted extensively, he went beyond the opposition between abstraction and figuration to account for reality in terms of forms, colors, and rhythms. Figuration risks stopping at the anecdotal, Garbell seeks the essential; he does not represent, he translates, he transposes. "A whole sector of the generation of painters that emerged around 1950 is descended from his conceptions," the daily newspaper confirmed when announcing his death.