YVONNE CANU

THE LAST OF POINTILLISTS

YVONNE CANU
The last of the Pointillists

21st MARCH to 21st MAY 2016
FROM MONDAY TO SATURDAY, FROM 10 a.m. TO 6 p.m.
ON SUNDAYS BY APPOINTMENT
VIA PEDEMONTE DI SOPRA, 1 – MELANO (TICINO)

FREE ENTRANCE

With Signac and Foujita’s artworks

THE EXHIBITION

The Mediterranean Pointillism of Yvonne Canu: French Riviera lights, Saint-Tropez and its harbour.

Among the few female performers and the last exponents of Neo-Impressionism, Yvonne Canu paints with round brushstrokes of juxtaposed pure colours, according to the principles of pointillism; it is up to the spectator, and not to the hand artist, to mix the colours and fuse them together.

The exhibition includes about thirty works, mainly with coastal and port subjects, within a setting that will immerse the public in the Mediterranean and vacationer atmosphere of the French Riviera and Saint-Tropez. Canu’s soft colours, in fact, give us all the nuances of light, shadows and water reflections and express the peace of the port and its moored sailboats.

VIRTUAL TOUR

Virtual Tour of the exhibition.

THE ARTIST

Biographical notes

Yvonne Canu was born in 1921 in Meknes in Morocco from French parents. She started her art studies at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, but she was forced to interrupt them because of the outbreak of World War II.

After the war, she attended the Montmartre circles and met artists such as François Gall, Élisée Maclet and Tsuguharu Foujita, who introduced her to the en plein-air landscape painting and to impressionism principles. In the following years, she came up to Cubism, under the influence of Ossip Zadkine.

The definitive arrival to Neo-Impressionism is dated 1955, when Canu admired for the first time Georges Seurat masterpiece, “Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte“. Since that moment, she became an interpreter of the pointillist technique and style, extending until today the legacy of this movement. She died in 2007 of natural causes.