Posts by Nadia Podzemskaia & Lorenzo Vinciguerra

Marie-Renée Chevallier-Kervern (1902-1987), after her artistic beginnings in Amiens and Paris, settled in 1936 in Brest, where her husband was appointed City Architect, and became actively involved in the Société des Amies des Arts. A friend of Marguerite Sérusier, Max Jacob, Jean Deyrolle and Charles Estienne, she remained, after the Liberation, in the devastated city. At a distance from the Parisian art scene, she developed in a highly independent and original manner, contributing to the history of post-war abstraction with an immense body of work made up of oils, gouaches, pen-and-ink and charcoal drawings, engraved slates, as well as pasted and torn papers and sewn fabrics. The period 1955-1961 is crucial in this respect: it was then that she painted her most representative canvases and began to produce her collages and her sewn fabrics, contributing to the artistic language of her time in dialogue with Bissière and Manessier, but also Le Moal, Tal Coat, Tapiès, Burri. In this article, we attempt to shed light on the relationship between the means of expression to which the artist resorted at this time and her travels in Italy, Germany and Spain.