Jules Cavaillès

Jules Cavaillès was born in Carmaux in 1901, the son of a mining-company employee. He came to Paris in 1919, took evening classes while working, and entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1924; his first Salon d’Automne was in 1927, and in 1936 he won the Prix Blumenthal and had his first solo show at the Galerie Charpentier.

With Brianchon, Legueult, Oudot, Terechkovitch, Limouse, Planson and Caillard he formed the group later called ‘La Réalité poétique’ — painters who kept faith with colour, pleasure and the visible world through the years of abstraction. He taught at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts and was elected to the Institut in 1971.

Cavaillès’ subjects are interiors with open windows, bouquets, women reading, the harbours of the Midi and the landscapes of his native Tarn — Cordes-sur-Ciel, Albi, Carmaux — painted in flat, bright patches bounded by black contour, with a decorator’s sense of pattern.

He exhibited from 1946 with the Galerie Romanet and later with Galerie Charpentier and Wally Findlay, was much collected in the United States, and is represented in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centre Pompidou and museums across France. He died in 1977.