Louis Chapuy, Hôtel des Sports (circa 1950)

LOUIS CHAPUY (Lyon 1882 - Bron 1967) Hotel des Sports. Circa 1950. Oil on cardboard. 32 x 45 cm (painting) 48 x 61.5 cm (frame) Signed lower right: Louis Chapuy. Inscribed on the back: Route de Paris / à la M** Carré. A great chronicler of Lyon's working-class neighborhoods, Louis Chapuy is the most important painter of the 20th-century Lyon cityscape. Born in La Guillotière, a working-class district in central Lyon, Chapuy apprenticed as a printer, and it was only after taking evening drawing classes at a local art school that he began his career as an artist. Initially inspired by the previous generation of Lyon landscape painters, he took his easel to the hills, fields, and rivers around Lyon, but he found his true calling when he turned his brush to Lyon itself. Chapuy's urban landscapes of Lyon are one of the city's great artistic achievements. He painted the working-class neighborhoods: the cafés and bars (like the one pictured here), the roads and houses, the factories and sports centers. Many of these areas were undergoing upheaval as bulldozers demolished the 18th- and 19th-century city to replace it with concrete. Because Chapuy had no formal art training, he didn't follow the rules of art: his perspective is flat or frontal, his compositions seem naive, but his brushstrokes and the geometry of his works are exceptional. His figures—cars, motorcycles, trams—possess a dematerialized, ethereal presence, for his subject is never the details but the urban landscape itself. He has an almost magical talent for depicting movement, whether in isolated figures or the entire composition. In 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 Lyon artists' exhibition) organized a major retrospective of his work, and a street in Lyon was also named in his honor.