Get Notified
Be the first to know about new works by Pierre Ernest Kohl.
1897-1985 | Monegasque
Pierre-Ernest Kohl, Pierre Kohl
Monegasque Painter of the École de Paris
Pierre Ernest Kohl was born in Monaco on 3 February 1897, the son of a prosperous entrepreneur who expected him to take over the family business. He chose painting instead and entered the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where he lived from 1920 to 1938 among the writers and painters of Montparnasse — a friend of Max Jacob and Léon-Paul Fargue, exhibiting alongside Braque, Chagall, Picasso and Modigliani.
At Picasso’s suggestion he spent eight years making pottery before giving it up to devote himself entirely to painting, drawing and watercolour.
Kohl’s art favours imagination and the dreamlike: figures, nudes, landscapes and fantastical compositions in a free, lyrical hand, often in watercolour and charcoal. His early Paris studies from the model belong to the academies of the 1920s; the later work grows more oneiric.
He returned to Monaco in 1940 and worked there for the rest of his life, dying in Neuchâtel on 6 June 1985. The Centre Pompidou holds work by him, and his paintings and watercolours pass regularly through the sale rooms of Monaco and Switzerland.
