Description

LARGE ORIGINAL PASTEL IN COLOUR ON PAPER signed and dated, Verdet 57, St Paul.
A stunning sunset behind the hills of Saint-Paul de Vence, with a very 'hairy' black fir in the foreground. 

An unusual work from his first series of Sortilèges de Provence, created under the encouragement of Pablo Picasso.

A close friend of Jean Giono from the mid-1930s, André Verdet met Jacques Prévert in Saint-Paul in 1941. They published two collections together, In Saint Paul de Vence and Stories. Discharged for health reasons, he joined the resistance. Captured in February 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald. After the liberation, Verdet published several collections of poems and met Pablo Picasso in 1950 through Prévert. After the publication of Black provender (1955), he no longer found inspiration and Picasso advised him: "Work not only in front of the landscape but within it and with it... In this way you will be able to continue to express in drawing what you have written in your poems of Provence Noire". (in Pluralautobiography, 1992). This encouragement gave rise to a first series of works, Sortilèges de Provence which he produced from 1956 to 1960.

"There is no other example of a poet bursting into painting with such suddenness and success."Alain Bosquet - Pierre de vie, Tribute to André Verdet, 1986.