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Lucie Boyals,say Luce Boyals born on December 14, 1892 in Rabastens and died on January 1, 1946 following a skiing accident in Font-Romeu, is a French painter active during the two war.

Youth and early works
His grandfather Doctor Jean Berenguier and his father Doctor Achille Boyals had built up an exceptional collection of paintings and works of art. They are also passionate about music and poetry. Their home is often used as a performance venue for various artistic practices. It is in this cultivated environment that Luce grew up, forming her taste and her culture.

Very early on, she accompanied her father on his medical visits and took the opportunity to portray his patients. Their very different faces imposed on him an exercise in style, portraits in the bust, with an absent gaze, imbued with gravity, a moving realism. His family encouraged his talent and set up a studio for him in their attic.

Luce Boyals was not yet twenty when she exhibited a lithograph at the Salon (Paris) in 1911: Old Woman from Languedoc. In 1913, she presented at the Salon a pastel, Mélie, an old woman, her shoulders covered with a yellow scarf, knitting a stocking, seated under a trellis. Then in 1914 another pastel, Interesting Reading, and above all an painting, Gossip, where two peasant women from Rabastens are seated side by side, one plucking a black rooster with shimmering green highlights, the other chattering endlessly; the first listens laughingly to the gossip of the other, Mélie Labouysse.

During the First World War, Luce Boyals became friends with Odette Labouysse, the granddaughter of Mélie, one of the gossips, who from 1917 would become her favorite model. A period begins which confirms the true passion of the painter for the portrait. In some portraits of children, the eyes become the main thing. In the many portraits of women, blondes or brunettes, in supple and soft colors, we remember the symphonies of pinks, mauves, blues or yellows, harmonies of youth.

Student at the Icart studio in Toulouse, founded in 1895 for young girls from the municipality, his first drawings date back to 1910-1912. It enriches its means of expression, the watercolor brings liveliness, spontaneity and the brilliance of color in small format portraits. In the 1920s, sanguine, black or colored pencils, pastel were often used for larger formats. This decade will be the most important in the life of the artist.

In 1921 the Latin Art Exhibition took place at the Palace of Arts in Toulouse, opening Luce Boyals to the work of Antoine Bourdelle. She visits him in Paris in his studio and attends some of his lessons, works in the studio of the Great Thatched Cottage frequented by Germaine Richier and Alberto Giacometti. The style of his drawings is then upset, becoming very sculptural, opposing facets of shadow and light. A friendship was born, she made the portrait of Bourdelle then that of his wife Cléopâtre in 1930, returning to a drawing more "ingresque" of astonishing precision. She wrote in a letter to her father:

Marriage with Georges Gaudion
In 1919, at the Touny-Lérys, she met Georges Gaudion, a chemist assistant to Paul Sabatier (chemist). Gaudion is also a musician and composer, painter, illustrator and poet. Georges Gaudion and Lucette Boyals were married in Rabastens in September 1920. Madame Gaudion moved in with her husband in the beautiful apartment at 19 rue du Taur ("Street of the Bull"), in Toulouse, where Georges lived with his widowed father.

Luce Boyals, who continues to sign her works with her maiden name, enters the hectic life of her husband. With him she practiced many new sports: motoring, cycling, casting and especially skiing.

Integrated into the Toulouse artistic life, the circle of her friends grew and the portraits multiplied: the deputy Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Georges Duhamel of the French Academy, the dean Paul Sabatier (chemist) Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the painter Laure Delvolvel and Doctor Paul Voivenel.

At the same time, the field of his research broadened. In the summer, in the Pyrenees or in the Toulouse countryside, she painted many landscapes with her husband. The key is wider, thicker with the use of the painting knife.

With plein air painting, Luce Boyals detaches herself from the constraints of the studio, her palette changes and becomes clearer. The tones are more lively, sometimes violent. She regains the power of the Fauves. Like Pierre Bonnard, whose retrospective opened in Paris at the Drouet gallery in 1924, she developed a passion for yellow.

The still life, which she had already encountered in her youth with numerous floral compositions, is making a strong comeback. The influence of her husband is decisive and the memory of Paul Cézanne always present, as in the blue tureen, tomato and pepper.

From portrait to nude
But it is with the female nude that Luce Boyals achieves her most complete artistic journey. In the years 1917-1920, she had her friend and model Odette pose nude. The nude is then modest, academic, it recalls the drawing lessons for the exclusive use of young girls of Victor Icart. Then in the Roaring Twenties, the nudes became more and more sensual and realistic. Seated or lying down, arms raised, the body offers itself shamelessly to the painter as well as to the viewer. The shadows are tinged with red or bright green. The nude drawing shows an even more noticeable evolution.

Antoine Bourdelle, in 1920, made him see the body differently, like a sculptor, through planes of light and shadow, Luce also needed the lesson of Ingres, d a drawing with a perfect line and an impeccable model. It is with oil painting that she puts into practice her new vision of the body. She remembers the sumptuous red chalk nudes of Alfred Boucher, those of the sculptor Aristide Maillol. In large sketchbooks, she accumulates rapid studies, the pencil stroke is synthetic, her audacity evokes Henri Matisse or Pablo Picasso. Little by little, his passion for the nude prevails over that of the portrait.

Died as a result of a skiing accident
The life of Georges and Luce Gaudion is very full : teaching chemistry, music and jazz, poetry, painting and illustration for him, painting and drawing for her. But also sport and the mountains, which were fatal to them. On February 17, 1942, Georges Gaudion smashed his skull on the rocks at Superbagnères. Four years later, Luce had a fall skiing in Font-Romeu and broke her leg, she died during the operation attempted to reduce the fracture on January 1, 1946.

Gallery
The Musée du Pays rabastinois (Rabastens country museum) exhibits an important collection of watercolours, paintings and drawings by Luce Boyals.


 * Watercolor and painting on canvas

Tribute
Rue Luce-Boyals in the Casselardit district in Toulouse bears his name.

Related Articles

 * Georges Gaudion
 * Rabastine Country Museum