Claude Venard – Still life with chair and sunflower

Claude Venard was born in 1913 into a business family from Burgogne. At the age of 17 he began to take evening classes in painting at the Ecole des Arts Appliques. However, after six years of conscientious study, he was forced, in order to support himself, to spend most of 1936 working as a restorer at the Louvre Museum. This experience, however, turned out to be beneficial in as much as it enabled the young artist to fill the gaps still existing in his artistic education.Upon Venards release from the army, at the end of World War II, his life was transformed. With recognition came the chance to put painting before all else. In 1945, through his continued friendship with Gruber and Marchand, Venard shared mutual success. He remained faithful to a post-Cubist compositional style, and progressively accentuated the chromatism of his pallet up to reaching the crudest of colours, which he used in very thick forms and sometime applied with a pallet knife.