Georges Henri TRIBOUT

Georges Henri Tribout was born in Paris in 1884. After studying at the University of Notre Dame in Boulogne, he enrolled in courses at the Académie Julian from 1904 to 1905 and showed his first work at the 1909 edition of the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. He soon decided to move to Saint Cloud, in the countryside not far from Paris, where his friend, the Belgian art critic Emile Verhaeren had been living for some time, and it was Verhaeren who put him in touch with a number of artists, including Ensor, Montald and Zweig. During the Great War he signed up for the French Army’s “Camouflage” Corps, along with other painters. On his return to Paris he devoted his energies to painting once again, specialising primarily in landscapes and portraits. In the early 1920s he started to branch out into new areas, including ceramics, stage set design and architecture, to the extent of even showing his work at the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1925. He died in 1962.
Through his friendship with Emile Verhaeren and the painters that Verhaeren supported, Tribout initially fell very strongly under the influence of Symbolism, yet he soon moved away from that trend and revisited the use of light in a post-Impressionist vein. In the early 1910s he drew close to the Cubist style, though seeking his inspiration in the luminism of Delauney rather than in the destructured orthdoxy of Picasso.
Lovers, the painting under discussion here, is emblematic of this new style. Dated 1919, the picture shows how, having abandoned the destructuring of his subject achieved hitherto with small dashes of colour, the artist entered upon a new stylistic phase in which silhouettes, rendered with soft strokes of colour, are accompanied by large fields of pure colour. The war years that he had spent in the Army’s “Camouflage” Corps certainly played an important role in modulating this new style. This can be seen particularly clearly in the backgrounds which, as in Lovers and The Nude (painted at more or less the same date), are on occasion fully-fledged camouflage textures. But unlike in genuine camouflage work, his subject continues to play the leading role in his pictures, emerging through the use of an incisive outline and a telling use of light. The two lovers, shown embracing in the centre of this composition, stand out starkly in the painted space thanks to the cascade of light shattering on the woman’s back and on the marked outline of the lovers’ bodies, heralding the interest in decorativism that was soon to become a distinctive feature of Tribout’s work.
Recent cleaning has revealed a painting on the back of the card, which Tribout had first painted and then painted over in order to be able to reuse the support for Lovers. The rediscovered painting depicts a woman at her toilet, combing her hair. In stylistic terms, both in the choice of subject and in the execution of the painting, it harks back to the works which Tribout was painting between 1909 and 1911. Constructed on the basis of tenuous colours applied with small brush strokes and of an extremely vibrant handling of light, the composition is reminiscent of such works as The Bathers, which Tribout painted in 1909, or as The Nude, painted in 1911 – works in which the teachings of Cézanne are permeated with a markedly Impressionistic legacy.

Lady at the mirror