Elegant in a hat in the Paris metro-1947

Oil on canvas signed and dated on the left.

Dimensions: 73 x 60 cm, with frame: 82 x 68.5 cm

Very original and strong painting where we find the   dark circles around areas of bright colors typical of the painter.

The artist stages an elegant woman in an unusual place, the Parisian metro of the 1940s with its wooden seats and two-tone green and red wagons.

Painter, poet, choreographer and filmmaker, after having studied and started painting at the Beaux Arts in Algiers, Marcel Pouget went to Paris in 1946, aged 23, thanks to the generosity of a group of amateurs.

He will only make brief appearances at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, preferring to it the attendance of avant-garde artists of his time, mainly those with ties to the international artistic movement, among which Alechinsky, Appel, Lindström.

His paintings are qualified as “abstract expressionist”, a term rejected by Pouget who prefers that of “New figuration. "

Back in Oran, in 1947 Pouget's pictorial expression disconcerted his patrons. Pouget then returned to Paris for his first exhibition in metropolitan France. 

He appears at the Salons des Indépendants, in the Fall, in May and then at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles.

He will participate in numerous individual and group exhibitions in Parisian galleries as well as in Europe.

M.Pouget is attached to the expressionist movement of the new figuration but quickly finds his own writing through large streaks of black paint surrounding areas of violent colors. Color is at the heart of his expressionist language. His characters are surrounded by a powerful line.

With a lonely and tormented temperament, Marcel Pouget died of Legionnaire's disease on December 5, 1985.

"The constant of his work, observes Jacques Busse, is then that he contributed to the maintenance of figuration in a period of significant abstraction"