Roger de La Fresnaye

Roger de La Fresnaye was born at Le Mans in 1885 into an old Norman noble family and studied in Paris at the Académie Julian, the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Ranson under Maurice Denis and Sérusier. From 1910 he was one of the painters who took Cubism out of the studios of Picasso and Braque and into the Salons: a member of the Section d’Or group with Gleizes, Metzinger and the Duchamp brothers, he built his pictures from clear planes of bright colour rather than the browns of analytical Cubism, and ‘The Conquest of the Air’ of 1913, now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is the masterpiece of that lyrical, patriotic Cubism.

He enlisted in 1914, contracted tuberculosis in the trenches in 1918 and never recovered his strength.

From 1920 he lived at Grasse with his friend the painter Jean-Louis Gampert, drawing and painting in a new manner, classical and linear, with pen-and-ink landscapes of the hills, portraits of friends and self-portraits whose nervous line keeps a trace of his Cubist faceting. He died at Grasse in 1925, aged forty. His work is in the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Art moderne de Troyes (collection Pierre Lévy), the Musée des Beaux-Arts du Mans and the great American museums.