User:Edufrene/Jean Jégoudez

Jean Jégoudez (4 July 1915 - 5 March 2007) was a French painter. His drawings focus on patterns involving nature, faces or eyes. His style which was sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract, has evolved significantly over time.

Life
Jean Jégoudez grew up in a bourgeois family. He studied in the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs.

In 1940, during World War II, he was imprisoned by the Germans in Provins, but was able to escape and returned to Paris on foot. As a result of the war, he became anti-militarist but he also acknowledged that he has made some good friends during this period. He replied to Jean Rousselot in 1946 "I would like […] to make a painting where men could still recognise themselves..." .

He was good friends with poets including René Guy Cadou, Jean Bouhier, Luc Bérimont and others from the École de Rochefort.

He used to live modestly in his studio on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and he got married with his first wife in 1950.

The art critic, Jean-François Chabrun, ranked Jean Jégoudez among one of the best painters in the 1950s and admired "the marvelous audacity without which we would not see the world neither as it is nor as it will be".

Jean Jégoudez collaborated in the first issues of Cahiers de l'Herne under the supervision of Dominique de Roux.

He produced several works for schools or universities, the first of which, in 1966, was a large mural for the University of Nantes.

After his divorce, he married his second wife, a German musician in 1967 and they settled in Provence, near Saint-Cézaire-sur-Siagne.

Jean Jégoudez died on 5 March 2007 in Grasse.