MADELEINE DINÈS

Biography

“I have a terrible desire to paint, paint, paint.”

Madeleine Dinès, unpublished journal, 1926

Madeleine Denis was born on May 2, 1906 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, she is the fourth daughter of Nabi painter Maurice Denis, the “Nabi of beautiful icons”, and the only one of the painter’s children to follow an artistic career.

She began her artistic training at the Ateliers d’Art Sacré, founded by her father, and later studied with philosopher and psychologist Henri Delacroix. Madeleine Denis continued her studies at the Grande Chaumière and the Académie Ranson, and occasionally at the Bateau-lavoir, where her brother-in-law, Swiss sculptor Marcel Poncet, had a studio in which she sometimes came to work. In 1929 she took part of the Salon des Tuileries.

She established herself as a young artist in reaction to her father’s work, and signed her first canvases in the mid-twenties, changing her name to “Madeleine Dinès”, and even, more radically, to “Dinès” from 1932 onwards. From the moment she signed without a first name, Dinès clearly demonstrated her desire to be considered an artist, regardless of her gender.

During her studies, Dinès befriended the Spanish-born painter Maria Blanchard, whose studio she frequented, became close to Chana Orloff and met the poet Jean Follain, whom she married in 1934.

The couple led a bohemian life, each on their own, Madeleine and Jean needing peace and freedom to create. Follain introduced Dinès to his poet and writer friends, with whom she forged close ties (Apollinaire, Max Jacob, André Salmon, Jean Paulhan etc.).

In her painting, Dinès pursued a realist path, the antithesis of the sacred scenes of her father Maurice Denis, but also of the abstract and surrealist path typical of her era: Still lifes, bouquets, country landscapes, familiar interiors, self-portraits, playlets, nudes... The many portraits she painted (Armen Lubin, Maria Blanchard, René de Obaldia, Alain Cuny etc.) were of close friends and personalities from the world of art and literature, but also of anonymous people she met on her travels in France and abroad. In the 1960s, her powerful colors and solid structure brought some of her paintings closer to the “pop” movement.

Her deliberately traditional style avoids banality, rendering the secret life of each object and the intimate. She rehabilitates the everyday to the detriment of pure imagination.

In 1937, Dinès took part in the Salon des Femmes Artistes Modernes, founded and chaired by Marie-Anne Camax Zoegger. That same year she organized her first solo show at the Parisian gallery La Fenêtre ouverte, and she subsequently alternated between solo and group shows in France and abroad. In 1943, Dinès organized her second solo show, at the Galerie du Dragon in Paris, with an invitation written by Leon-Paul Fargue.

After Jean Follain’s accidental death in 1971, Madeleine Dinès gave up painting for devoting herself mainly to promoting her husband’s work. She passed away in 1996, in her apartment on the Place des Vosges.

A feminist from the outset, she was an independent, modern woman who took a back seat to the art world and the major currents of the 20th century, but her figurative painting today echoes contemporary artistic upheavals.