Georges
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"Portrait de la mère de l'artiste" Huile sur papier |
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© Georges BARTHOUIL |
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Georges Barthouil, French painter (b.1934, Tourcoing)
A self-taught painter, G.B. was to have studied medicine ? he actually started attending lessons at the Faculty of Medicine in Lille in 1950. At that time, he was a mere spare-time painter because of severe constraints imposed by his family, although they would loosen up on him during school holidays. G.B. had to wait until he came of age (then 21) in order to leave Tourcoing where his parents had got a divorce and the family house was being put up for sale.
In 1955 he enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine in Algiers but he had to get a [teaching?] job for want of financial resources. He embarked on a postal tuition course in Italian language and literature at the University of Aix-en-Provence. Through thick and thin he managed to paint as much as he liked when he was not studying or teaching.
He worked as a junior teacher at Algiers, a foreign language assistant successively at Palermo, Iasi (Romania), Stockholm and Salonika, a fully-qualified high-school teacher at Bastia (Corsica) and Marseilles (1956-70), and lastly at the University of Avignon where he headed the Department of Italian until 1999.
G.B. never stopped painting; nor did he writing (aside from literary criticism he also produced translations, poetry and narratives). The different periods in his painting production ? mostly oils ? vary in great measure according to the places he currently lived in. Still it is consistently characterized by that ?powerful wind of visual imagination?, as a critic once put it. In G.B.?s compositions a quasi-mystical lyricism of colour combines with the rigorous vigour of underlying structure.
Despite numerous isolated experiments, G.B.?s works revolve around three major themes: still life, the human face and expressive half-abstraction aiming to capture brief visions of metamorphosis.
Private exhibitions at Algiers, Palermo, Salonika, Iasi, Bastia, Catania, Viterbo, Avignon.
[Some of] G.B.?s paintings owned by private collectors in Algeria, Morocco, Italy, Belgium, Romania, Greece, Sweden, the USA, France?
