Yves Saint-Front in the Louis and Annette Kaufman Collection
Louise and Bernard Palitz Gallery
November 21, 2005 – January 27, 2006
Call Lubin House for availability

The Syracuse University Art Collection is pleased to present the first New York City exhibition of paintings and prints by the French artist Yves Saint-Front. The artwork in the exhibition has been provided through the generosity of Annette Kaufman of Los Angeles, California. Friends of the Palitz Gallery at Lubin House and of the Art Collection may recognize Mrs. Kaufman as the source of artwork used in our Milton Avery Revisited exhibition.

A descendant of mariners, Saint-Front paints an extraordinary number of seaside images, boats at harbor, beach scenes, and villages near-the-sea landscapes. This exhibition of paintings and prints is composed primarily of Tahitian paintings and French landscapes that Saint-Front created between the mid 1960s and mid 1980s. During this period he worked in Paris and Chausey, France and the islands of French Polynesia, including Tahiti, Bora Bora and Moorea. Many of the images collected by Louis and Annette Kaufman are of landscapes that Saint-Front knew well; he uses his home in Tahiti, his parent's homes in Paris and Chausey, and other landscapes near the coast of Brittany in northwestern France, as his primary subjects.

Yves Saint-Front paints numerous images that include family, friends, and local villagers with a luminous and colorful palette. His extensive experience with stained glass and interior design lend his paintings a particular style that unites bold brushwork with an intelligent use of space, color, and surface patterns. The painting, Le Soir: Isabelle at the telephone, illustrates his use of color and design to create effective spaces and interesting scenes. Note the view into a lighted room through the darkness behind Isabelle and how Saint-Front uses splashes of color to help unite the two areas and add interest to the scene. His paintings of Brittany are no less interesting with dramatic viewpoints, bold style, and sure brushwork.

Saint-Front is represented in numerous museums around the world, such as the Musée D'Art Moderne in Paris and the Musée Gauguin in Tahiti, but many know his stained glass work in churches and monasteries in France, Tahiti, and St. Bernard's Monastery in Alabama. Born in Paris in 1928, Saint-Front began painting as a boy in the late 1930s and after high school entered the prestigious L’Académie de la Grande Chaumiere. In the tradition of the Academy, Saint-Front continues his studies by working in Beaux-Arts studios including that of Jean Souverbie, Francis André, and Michel-Claude Touchard. These experiences had a profound effect on the young artist. His color, composition, and style are marked by experiments using artificial light at night, a process that heightens the importance of design and limits his palette. It is at this time that Saint-Front's work is noticed by interior designers and he creates his first tapestry designs and paints his first interior decorations at the home of Admiral and Mrs. de Toulouse-Lautrec. (Mapie, the Countess de Toulouse-Lautrec, wrote French cookbooks, food columns, magazine articles, and was the directress of a cooking school at Maxim's restaurant in Paris.)