Louis Chapuy, Gerland Houses, around 1950

LOUIS CHAPUY (Lyon 1882 - Bron 1967) Houses of Gerland. Circa 1950. Oil on cardboard. 33 X 41 cm. Signed bottom right: Louis Chapuy. Titled on the back: Houses of Gerland. Exhibited as number 35 at the Louis Chapuy Retrospective, Salon d’Automne in Lyon, 1968. A great chronicler of the working-class districts of Lyon, Louis Chapuy is the most important painter of the urban landscape of Lyon in the 20th century. Born in La Guillotière, a working-class neighbourhood in central Lyon, Chapuy apprenticed as a printer and only began his artistic career after taking evening drawing classes at a local art school. Initially inspired by the previous generation of Lyonese landscape painters, he took his easel to the hills, fields, and rivers around Lyon, but he found his true vocation when he turned his brush towards Lyon itself. The urban landscapes of Lyon painted by Chapuy are one of the great artistic achievements of the city. He painted the working-class neighbourhoods: cafés and bars, streets and houses, factories and sports centres. Many of these areas were undergoing upheaval as bulldozers demolished the 18th and 19th-century city to replace it with concrete. As Chapuy had no formal training in fine arts, he did not follow the rules of art: his perspective is flat or frontal, his compositions seem naïve, but his brushwork and the geometry of his works are exceptional. His figures, cars, motorcycles, and trams have a dematerialised, ethereal presence, as his subject is never the details but the urban landscape itself. He has an almost magical talent for depicting movement, whether of isolated figures or the overall composition. By the mid-20th century, Chapuy was revered by art critics, collectors, and fellow artists. In 1968, a year after his death, the Salon d’Automne (the salon of Lyon artists) held a major retrospective of his works, and a street was also named in his honour in Lyon. This painting represents Gerland, an industrial and working-class district of Lyon. Before the 1960s, the neighbourhood consisted of buildings and houses exactly as Chapuy depicts them, but today, after the bulldozers, they resemble small islands in a sea of concrete.