Printer: Atelier Duchapm

Condition: Very good condition

Frame: Oak

Artist: Édouard Pignon (1905-1993) was a French painter and ceramicist from Pas-de-Calais in northern France. The son of a miner, the young Édouard witnessed devastating injuries and deaths from a pit explosion as well as horrific brutalities during strikes. During the First World War, his school was closed and he spent his days at his mother’s coffee shop just ten kilometres from the front. A soldier stopped one day and drew the boy’s portrait on his way to the trenches and Pignon knew then that he, too, wanted to paint. After a spell in the mines and a factory, he went to Paris in 1931 and worked for Renault, attending evening classes for painting lessons at the Boulevard Montparnasse School. He joined the Communist party in 1933 and the Resistance during the Second World War. In 1937, he contributed to an exhibition which included works by Bazaine and Tal Coat, and later that year exhibited with Braque, Léger and Picasso, the latter who would become a great friend for three decades. Inspired by Léger, for his first exhibition in 1939, at the Salon des Indépendants, he painted mines, factories and union meetings.