Sans titre 1, 1991

Claude Bellegarde  

Claude Bellegarde was born in Paris in 1927. By the end of the Second World War, he met the philisopher and writter Lanza del Vasto, a disciple of Gandhi, thanks to whom he joined the same community.

From then on, Claude Bellegarde's artistic practice was related to his spiritual experience. In this community, he was introduced to sculpture. Sick, he went to a sanatorium in 1951, a period which was a time of meditation for him, marked by the monochrome white, also called achromatism. He works with a brush, a knife, and he sometimes uses crumpled and glued paper, anticipating the Western minimalist experiments of Klein and Manzoni during the late 50s. Color reappeared in his work after a trip he made to Morocco. The artist started using then a symbolism of colors that are a revelation of the being. His philosophical reseach about color continued during the following years. The artist explores the subjects of meaning, perception and even power.

The art critic Pierre Restany says about Claude Bellegarde "He is one of the last greatest colorists in the strict philosophical sense of the word and expression".

Claude Bellegarde's pieces are part of the collections at the Guggenheim of New York, at the Center Georges Pompidou, and at the Tate Gallery in London, among others. In 1971, a retrospective of his work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris.