(1922 – 2020)

Claude Marie Madeleine Bouscharain

Post War

Overview

Claude Bouscharain’s canvases are pervaded by a provocative and vaguely disturbing atmosphere – a sense that the viewer is being provided with a view into rather than of the personages who inhabit the distorted space.  Her colour combinations contribute to the unreality:  in her earlier works she composed mainly in minor key, with cool and neutralized tones performing visual functions usually reserved for the dominant, hotter colours.  Always her content was concerned with human beings, her style often hovering on the borders of abstraction; but while the figures were deprived of individualizing features they were never totally reduced to non-figurative forms.

Following her visit to the USA in 1966, Claude Bouscharain was drawn towards hard-edge design and purer colour.  She also switched to the acrylic medium and embarked on large-scale compositions.  However, the stylistic and technical adjustments did not connote an altered orientation; she summarised her artistic philosophy as follows:

“I am interested in human life.  My painting helps me to delimit what I know about it.  To me, an ordinary, down-to-earth life does not exist. By its very beginning and end, it is entirely mysterious.  Therefore I am not interested in dreams and fantasies; what one calls ‘reality’ is the strangest of all.”

In her reference to the “strangeness of reality”, Claude Bouscharain provides a key to the enigmatic nature of much of her work. However, to search too intently for rational meanings in all her canvases is to sacrifice their essential poetry and their subliminal emotional communication to the banalities of overt things and explicable occurrences.

Reality, for Bouscharain, is a compound of subjective insights and imprecise moods and feelings, a heightened awareness of the overtones and metaphysical implications of actions, events and situations, an externalisation of the angst of modern living and a persisting private concern about human isolation and alienation.  To make such a vision both tolerable and tangible, she has tended to ritualise reality:  she unmasks its strangeness by stripping away the psychological comfort of familiar context, light and viewpoint; and then dresses her perceptions in schematic colour and hieratic form.

In her later work, the hieratic quality is emphasized by the detached precision of her use of the acrylic medium:  the personalised imprint of brushwork, pre-sent in her earlier oils, has been eliminated and forms are fixed in time and space by the uncompromising hard-edge style.  Yet each ritualised tableau is endowed with hyper-realist drama by the intense and penetrating light in which the images are bathed.

Education

1941 – 1942

Entered the Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Institute of Educational Sciences), Geneva; studied child-psychology

1945

Attended drawing classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris

1946

Admitted to the Académie l’Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris

1947

Continued studies at the Art Students’ League, New York, under Robert Beverley Hale and Morris Kantor

1950

Académie Montmartre, Paris, under Fernand Lége

Exhibitions

1985

Group exhibition with Erik Launscher and Stanley Pinker, Drostdy Centre, Stellenbosch

1982

Solo exhibition, University of Stellenbosch

1981

Republic Festival Exhibition, Durban

1979

Invited artist, Cape Town Biennale

1975

Cape Town Festival Exhibition, South African National Gallery, Cape Town (March)

1974

Republic of South Africa Exhibition, South African National Gallery, Cape Town (in lieu of Venice Biennale)(August)

1973

South African Association of Arts, Cape Town group exhibition (May)

New Cape Art, South African Association of Arts, Cape Town (October)

1972

Solo exhibition, South African Association of Arts, Cape Town (August)

Group exhibition, Gallery Connoisseur, Johannesburg (October)

1971

Exhibition of Cape Artists, Durban Museum

Republic Festival Exhibition, South African National Gallery, Cape Town (May)

1970

Group exhibition, South African Association of Arts, Cape Town (February)

Inaugural Exhibition of new premises, South African Association of Arts Gallery, Cape Town (June)

Inaugural Exhibition, Bulawayo Art Gallery, Rhodesia (December)

1969

Quinquennial Exhibition of South African Art, South African National Gallery, Cape Town (October)

1968

South African Breweries Biennale, travelling exhibition

1966

Republic Festival Exhibition, South African National Gallery, Cape Town (May)

Solo exhibition, Artists’ Gallery, Cape Town (June)

South African Breweries Biennale, travelling exhibition

Republic Festival Exhibition, Pretoria

1965

Group exhibition, South African Association of Arts, Cape Town (January)

South African Women Artists, South African National Gallery, Cape Town (May)

Fifth Cape Salon, South African Association of Arts, Cape Town (August)

1964

Fourth Cape Salon, South African Association of Arts, Cape Town (August)

1963

Third Cape Salon, South African Association of Arts, Cape Town (August)

South African Flora in Art, South African National Gallery, Cape Town (August)

Group exhibition with Erik Laubscher, Lidchi Gallery, Johannesburg (October)

1962

Cape Wild Flower Paintings, St Martini Gardens, Cape Town (July)

Second Cape Salon, South African Association of Arts, Cape Town (August)

1961

First Cape Salon, South African Association of Arts, Cape Town (August)

South African Art Today, Durban

1960

South African Artists, Ghent, Belgium (March)

1959

Group exhibition, Under 40s Exhibition, South African Association of Arts, Cape Town, (September)

Solo exhibition, South African Association of Arts, Cape Town (October)

First of five solo exhibitions at the Argus Gallery, Cape Town

1950

Art Students’ League Tercentenary, New York

Participated in over 40 group exhibitions from 1950 in the United States of America, South Africa, Belgium, Zimbabwe and Australia

Collections

Public Collections – South Africa

  • South African National Gallery, Cape Town
  • Hester Rupert Art Museum, Graaff-Reinet
  • National Museum, Bloemfontein
  • Pretoria Art Museum
  • Sandton Municipal Collection
  • University of the Orange Free State
Featured Artwork
  • Claude Marie Madeleine Bouscharain - Owls in Guava Tree
    Claude Marie Madeleine Bouscharain
    Owls in Guava Tree

    Acrylic on Board
    100 x 92.5cm
    Signed: “Bouscharain” (Lower/Left)

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  • Claude Marie Madeleine - Bouscharain - The collector
    Claude Marie Madeleine Bouscharain
    The Collector

    Oil on Canvas on Board
    71 x 101.5cm
    Signed: “Bouscharain” (Lower/Left)

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  • Claude Marie Madeleine Bouscharain - Seeing all
    Claude Marie Madeleine Bouscharain
    Seeing All

    Acrylic on Canvas
    152 x 107cm
    Signed: “Bouscharain” (Verso)
    Circa: 1967/1968

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