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About Bernard LaMotte
This landscape painter studied under Lucien Simon (1861-1945), the portraitist and genre painter.46 He married the widow of Twentieth Century Fox president Sidney R. Kent, Lilyan White Kent, a painter and sculptor, then was introduced to such stars as Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, and Greta Garbo. Lamotte had a studio in Montmartre called Le Bocal [Fish Bowl], where Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote Le petit prince. He knew Picasso and Utrillo, and he traveled widely, as far away as Tahiti and India. In 1936, Lamotte exhibited gouaches at New York’s Wildenstein Gallery. He had a studio over Le Grenouille Restaurant on 52nd Street in New York, and became an American citizen in 1951. Working in a vivid Fauve manner, LaMotte produced oils on canvas, decorative screens, book illustrations, and theatrical sets and costumes. His paintings recall the works of Matisse, Bonnard and Dubuffet. Lamotte also did delightful murals in French restaurants in New York City, for instance a port scene of St. Jean de Luz in a corner of La Côte Basque Restaurant (1958). Three years later he executed a mural for the White House pool under the Kennedy Administration (now in the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston). In 1965, almost every most of his work en plein air. He did so with this oil known as Central Park -- New York. In this scene as in most of his works, this Parisian-educated New York artist worked directly from his subject, applying his pigment with a seemingly effortless bravura. Three distinct registers make up the composition: the foreground of Central Park itself, the geometric buildings that make up the well-known New York skyline, and the sky and clouds. LaMotte was not sparing in his use of color in the foreground, while he relegated skyline forms to somber tones in the architectural part of the composition, no doubt an influence of the Cubist palette. The painter excluded figures and automobiles here, thus retaining an economic pictorial severity. The scene reveals a purposefully reticent artist, as one might expect from the Cubist influence Lamotte absorbed while living in France. All in all, this New York City landscape reveals a serious depiction of a scene frequently romanticized by other painters. |
Paintings by Bernard LaMotte
| Central Park - New York |
| oil on canvas: 21 x 25 inches |
| signed: lower right |
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