Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - L’homme au chapeau – 1961

Robert Detheux (1932-2010) – The Man with the Hat – 1961 Artist: Robert Detheux (Brussels, 1932 – Tournai, 2010) Title of the work: The Man with the Hat Date: 1961 Signature: Signed and dated “Detheux 61” in the upper right, on the orange background. Technique: Graphite and paint (black and orange) on tinted cardboard. The face is drawn, barely modeled. The hat is painted in black, including the band. The right-hand background is brushed with orange. The beige cardboard remains visible in the face. The whole is mounted on a white sheet. Dimensions: 26.5 × 24 cm Condition: Good overall, with a crease visible in the upper right corner, and a small chip of the cardboard under the hat, on the left. The line is crisp, the paint intact, the signature legible. Studio cardboard, grain, hatched clothing remains untouched. The crease does not reach the face. Sold mounted on a white sheet, unframed. Provenance: Artist’s studio collection (acquired directly). Description: Small sheet from 1961. Detheux is twenty-nine years old. The portrait is reduced to its signs: a hat, a mustache, an ear, a hatched collar. The face is not modeled. The beige cardboard serves in its stead. The nose, mouth, and mustache are indicated with a single stroke. The ear, on the left, is drawn. Under the hat, two dots, like eyes that do not look. The hat, painted black, weighs on the head. The headband is a broad stroke, cut cleanly. On the right, an orange background cuts into the cardboard. The clothing at the bottom is hatched, dense, without detail. The figure is in profile, almost facing us, and it does not settle. We are still near the sheets from the late 1950s: object, barely defined face, flat areas that do not strive to describe. Signed, dated, small format and a year not well represented: a characteristic youth work, for lovers of Belgian surrealism drawn to reduced portraits and studio flat tones. Artist’s Biography: Born in Brussels in 1932 and passed away in Tournai in 2010, Robert Detheux is a singular figure in 20th-century Belgian art. A graduate of the Saint-Luc Institute in Fine Arts in Brussels, he taught graphic expression at the Tournai Academy until 1996, while pursuing a coherent personal body of work. As early as the 1950s, he established himself with a surreal, highly personal graphic language. He received the Belgian Young Painting Prize in 1953, 1954, and 1971. This sheet belongs to that first period, rare on the market: an object, a barely indicated face, flat areas. The following decades deepen the same territory: 1970s – female bodies and faces, hybrid figures, textures; 1980s-1990s – grotesque, eroticism, black humor; 2000s-2010s – spectral portraits, apparitions, creatures. Little-known in his lifetime, Detheux worked freely. The uncovering of his studio collection (nearly 1,500 works) has made this coherence visible. His drawing, demanding and immediately recognizable, now attracts collectors of Belgian surrealism in Belgium, Spain, and Europe.

Estimación:€200

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