Léon Gard (12 July 1901 - 12 November 1979) was a French painter and art critic.
Biography
Early years
Gard was born in Tulle, Limousin. His family moved to Morigny, Normandy, and then to the 13th arrondissement of Paris. Gard at an early age started to express his artistic gifts. In 1913, at the age of twelve he drew a self-portrait in charcoal. Two years later he wrote to Louis Metman, the curator of the Museum of Decorative Arts, who took him under his wing and enrolled him in the Académie Ranson. He found a job as a notarial clerk. At sixteen, he copied old paintings for a play, (the story of an antique dealer and a forger), adapted by Gabriel Signoret whose portrait he later painted.
Gard was seventeen when he exhibited for the first time in the (Autumn Gallery) with his portrait of Metman. He received a special award and was proposed as a member. This early success was not repeated and Gard later said ironically: "Was my work so bad, or were these gentlemen of the jury carried away by the wine? Who will ever know? In any case, if they made an error on that day, they corrected it afterwards."
1920s and 1930s
In 1922, he entered the National School of Art in Paris (headed by Ernest Laurent), but he clashed with his professors and the school's atmosphere: As for his masters, he wanted to recognize only the Old Masters and, especially, those Leonardo da Vinci called "the mistress of the masters": nature.
He caught the eye of Albert Besnard . He failed the Rome Grand Prix, but he received the Chenavard prize.
When he left school "by the Bonaparte route" (that is, by failing), he signed a contract with an art dealer named Chéron who counted among his protéges Chaïm Soutine, Tsuguharu Foujita and Kees van Dongen. Louis Metman gave him a small living allowance, which enabled him to go to paint in Toulon, sending back his paintings to Chéron.
The Great Depression of 1931 stopped these stays and obliged him to take a job in a workshop restoring paintings. He became the owner of the workshop a few years later. He continued to send his work to the Paris Salon and to exhibit in the Bernheim and Charpentier galleries.
It was through his work restoring paintings that he met Sacha Guitry and they became friends. Gard painted portraits of the actress Jeanne Fusier-Gir, of Sacha Guitry and of Sacha's ex-wife, the actress Lana Marconi.
1940s and 1950s
In 1946, Gard founded the art review Apollo (not to be confused with the English Apollo magazine), at first writing most of the articles and signing under his own name or a pseudonym. He started a crusade against abstract art and explained his own conception of art, whose only sensible criterion seemed to him to be to imitate nature.
This work as writer and art restorer slowed down his painting work and his exhibitions at the Castet gallery, but it did not stop them completely.
When Sacha Guitry died in 1957 he lost a friend, an admirer and a significant supporter.
1960s and 1970s
In 1960, the French State bought one of his paintings () ("Red Roses"). From that moment on, as soon as he could escape from his restoration workshop, he ran to take refuge in in the forests of L'Isle-Adam, Val-d'Oise, where he painted subjects as easy to conceive as they are hard to make: pond life, tricks of the light, the wind on leaves and sky, the changing seasons, etc.
Three years before his death, he gave the proceeds from his workshop to his son, and wrote to him: "I had hoped that in the life of art that I had, I would meet some true art lover: I gave up this idea because I found only speculators or people who wanted vane family portraits. I concluded that your artistic sense is better than that of all these fake collectors."
In his workshop on Rue Bourdonnais, where customers became increasingly rare, he continued to write all that he still had to say on art and life.
He painted only two more paintings, the last one (), "The Red Géranium" a month before he died, on 12 November 1979, alone and destitute in his studio in the Quai des Grands-Augustins, where his final illness set in.