1881 -1936 · Virginia, Paris and American abstraction

Architectural volumes, bold colors and radical still lifes make Patrick Henry Bruce an American pioneer of geometric abstraction.

Patrick Henry Bruce was born in Virginia in 1881 and died in New York in 1936. After initial training in the United States, he moved to France in 1904 and spent most of his career there. In Paris, he discovered Cézanne, attended Matisse's academy and became closer to Sonia and Robert Delaunay. The simultaneous colors of Orphism and the fragmented forms of Cubism led him towards increasingly abstract painting. From 1912, still life became his main laboratory. In his latest compositions, produced after the First World War, some objects from the apartment-workshop - vase, glass, cut fruit, tray - were transformed into prisms, cylinders and planes strongly colored. Still life painting illustrates this paradoxical balance: the volumes seem solid, but the verticals and flat areas constantly recall the surface of the painting. The Agee and Rose series pushes this economy further. The coded titles, pinks, yellows, blues and greens construct less a subject than a visual architecture. Bruce sometimes uses rulers, compasses and mechanical drawing instruments to clarify its shapes. Isolated and disappointed, he destroys a large part of his production. Bruce sometimes uses rulers, compasses and mechanical drawing instruments to clarify his shapes. Isolated and disappointed, he destroys a large part of his production. However, the preserved works reveal an essential link between European cubism, precisionism and American abstraction with clean edges. The "Patrick Henry Bruce" selection nevertheless reveals an essential link between European cubism, precisionism and American abstraction with clean edges. next to Still Life and Agee and Rose Painting, C11. Its reading favors atmosphere.

Bruce reduces still life to an architecture of color: the vase becomes a cylinder, the table becomes a plane and the light becomes a geometric relationship.