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Lapicque, Charles
(b Taizé, Rhône, 6 Oct 1898; d Paris, 15 July 1988). French painter, sculptor and printmaker. He was an engineer by training, studying machinery and architecture and conceiving a passion for geometrical working drawings and perspective. These led him to draw for his own pleasure and finally to teach himself to paint. He consistently worked with great freedom, oblivious to current trends. Encouraged by Jacques Lipchitz, he decided in 1928 to devote more of his time to painting while working at the Faculté des Sciences in Paris on scientific research into value and colour in relation to pictorial creation. The results of his experiments, first published in specialized reviews, appeared in book form in 1958. These complementary activities make Lapicque unique in French painting: his scholarly rigour, far from hampering his painting, seems to have encouraged his audacity. In 1937, Lapicque was commissioned to execute five decorative panels for the Palais de la Découverte in Paris. He subsequently began to take a particular interest in Cubism, as a result of which his work approached that of Jean Bazaine and Maurice Estève. Together they became known as ‘painters in the French tradition’ as distinct from the Ecole de Paris. Lapicque himself realized, however, that the post-Cubist fragmentation of the pictorial space in paintings such as the Great Talavera (1941; Copenhagen, Nmus.) represented the end of an era rather than the beginning of a new one.
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