Paul Alex Deschmacker, Lily in a white vase (circa 1940)

PAUL ALEX DESCHMACKER (Roubaix 1889 - Paris 1973) Lilies in a White Vase. Circa 1940. Oil on canvas. 81 X 50 cm (canvas) 97 X 65.5 cm (frame) Signed lower left: PAUL ALEX DESCHMACKER Studio stamp on the back of the canvas: P.A. DESCHMACKER / ATELIER Title on a label on the back of the frame: Flowers in a White Vase. Nudes, landscapes, flowers – Paul Alex Deschmacker was a versatile painter. The son of a textile merchant from Roubaix, he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lille, where he won numerous medals and prizes. He then continued his studies for four years at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, under Fernand Cormon, whose studio was a veritable breeding ground for talent, including Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and Toulouse-Lautrec. After leaving Cormon and striking out on his own in the 1910s and 1920s, Deschmacker quickly gained recognition as a major artist. He taught for a time at the École d'Art Industriel in Roubaix, but in the mid-1920s, he returned to Paris, where he acquired a large studio on the hill leading up to Montmartre, the very place where this still life of lilies in a vase was undoubtedly created. This work displays impeccable technique and academic skill, while also exhibiting strong modernist and abstract tendencies through the use of frontal perspective. For Deschmacker, this was not a mere artifice, nor a means of concealing any technical deficiency, nor a desire to be modern for its own sake. On the contrary, this allowed him to reveal the colors, patterns, and geometric connections of what lay before him in a way that can only be achieved by manipulating reality. In 1986, thirteen years after his death in 1973, a retrospective was dedicated to him at La Piscine in Roubaix, the city of his birth.