Pierre Tal Coat

Pierre Jacob

Pierre Tal Coat (born Pierre Jacob: 12 December 1905 - Clohars-Carnoët; 12 June 1985 - Saint-Pierre-de-Bailleul)

Born in 1905 in Clohars-Carnoët, ten kilometres from Quimperlé (Finistère), Pierre Jacob of his real name, lost his father in 1915 who died on the Argonne front. and obtained a scholarship as a ward of the Nation which enabled him to enter the higher primary school of Quimperlé. Moulder and ceramic painter at the Henriot earthenware factory in Quimper in 1924, he drew in pencil, charcoal or pastel, characters and landscapes of the Breton countryside.

Arriving in Paris in 1924, Tal Coat met the painter Émile Compard, met Auguste Fabre and Henri Bénézit, and exhibited in their gallery under the pseudonym Tal Coat ("Front de bois" in Breton). From 1930, he became friends with Francis Gruber, André Marchand, Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia, Ernest Hemingway, Alberto Giacometti, Balthus, Antonin Artaud, Tristan Tzara and Paul-Émile Victor. In 1932, he became a member of the group Forces nouvelles. In 1940, Tal Coat went to Aix-en-Provence with André Marchand, a city where many artists, including Charles-Albert Cingria and Blaise Cendrars, took refuge. In 1941, he took part in the exhibition of the Twenty young painters of French tradition organized by Jean Bazaine and exhibited at the Galerie de France in 1943. Returning to Paris in 1945, he took part in the first Salon de Mai, then returns the following year to Aix, where he meets André Masson, the philosopher Henri Maldiney and the poet André du Bouchet, who will remain his closest friends. His painting then becomes non-figurative.

With the artists of the new École de ParisThe Galerie de France (from 1943 to 1965), the Maeght Gallery (from 1954 to 1974), Benador Gallery (from 1970 to 1980), then the H-M Gallery, the Clivages Gallery and the Berthet-Aittouarès Gallery regularly exhibited his paintings. In 1956, sixteen of his paintings are presented at the Venice Biennale with those of Jacques Villon and Bernard Buffet. Alongside Joan Miró and Raoul Ubac, he collaborated in 1963 on the Maeght Foundation's work with a mosaic for the entrance wall and in 1968 he received the national grand prize in the arts. A retrospective exhibition was devoted to him at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1976.