Bataille 1955 Bernard Quentin

"Bernard Quentin, a semiotic art, a beacon towards the post-modern universality of tomorrow"

Pierre Restany

ARTIST

Bernard Quentin was born in 1923. He arrived in Paris around 1940 to study painting, sculpture and architecture at the National School of Decorative Arts and the National School of Fine Arts. Between 1942 and 1944, he was actively involved in the Resistance within the "Manipule" network, and in 1945, when he regularly attended the Maison de la Pensée Française, he became friends with Pablo Picasso.

This meeting and his discovery of Guernica will notably influence the abstract and expressionist writing of the unique book on the theme of the horrors of war and the death camps which he exhibited at the Salon des less than thirty years old that year, before resume his classes at the National School of Fine Arts which had been interrupted by the war. He then anchored himself in the artistic milieu of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district and frequented existentialist and surrealist circles, the painters Wols and Camille Bryen as well as the lettrism theorist Isidore Isou. He was also part of the Boris Vian gang with Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Anne-Marie Cazalis and Juliette Gréco with whom he then lived in a room under the roofs of rue Servandoni.

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