Prax Valentine Henrietta

Valentine Prax was a French painter, born in 1899 in Bône (now Annaba) in Algeria and died in 1981 in Paris/France. Her work includes genre scenes, genre scenes with figures (The Outing, Wedding Breakfast, Boaters), landscapes, harbor views (Navvies at Roadworks, Sailors on the Jetty), figures, nudes and still lifes. She also painted under glass. She studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Algiers/Algeria before moving to Paris in 1919. In Paris she discovers the Cubists, the Fauvists, Picasso, Braque and Van Dongen, the paintings of Cezanne, the personal collection of art dealer Ambroise Vollard, she reads Apollinaire and Max Jacob. She places her easel in Bièvres, in Clamart, in Montfort l'Amaury and in Marly-le-Roi and creates landscapes in gray harmonies, green and brown. She did not paint from a model, but he contemplates and transcribes the world through a poetic prism. In 1920 she married the sculptor Ossip Zadkine. In the same year she made her debut at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants. Art critics see in her work "fresh spontaneity without embellishment", an "ingenuity that mocks ignorance". Many exhibitions followed, both in France and abroad. In 1976, for example, there was a solo exhibition in the Musée d'Art Moderne and in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Posthumously, her works were exhibited in 2002 in the group exhibition Elles de Montparnasse at the Musée du Montparnasse in Paris. (BT)