André Bauchant (1873-1958) is one of those French artists long known as "naïve painters" for whom the term "modern primitives" would be more appropriate. Besides landscapes of the Touraine countryside and pictures of flowers and birds, he painted poetic and mythical visions. A horticulturalist by profession, he did not embark on his career as a painter until he was 46. His work is marked by his close affinity with nature and his passion for ancient mythologies. In 1921 Bauchant exhibited for the first time at the Salon d'Automne in Paris, where he came to the attention of Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, who became Bauchant's mentor and a passionate collector of his work.
André Bauchant's position in the shadow of his far more famous fellow-painter Henri Rousseau is unjustified. For the first time, this catalogue raisonné offers a comprehensive overview of Bauchant's art, and thus provides the basis for a re-evaluation.
At the age of fifteen, Dina Vierny (born 1919) became a model and muse to the 73-year-old sculptor Aristide Maillol. He claimed that she looked like one of his works "come alive", and that it was her body that he had been sculpting all along. She was Maillol's source of inspiration for the last ten years of his life. Both Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard, artists to whom Maillol sent Vierny, attribute to the model a renewed inspiration for painting and sculpture.
Dina began as an artists' model in her mid-teens and evolved from being a simple muse to taking a serious interest in the business of curating the art of those for whom she worked. She regarded Maillol as her finest benefactor and mentor.
After Maillol's death, in a car crash, Vierny collected the work of Maillol and dozens of his contemporaries, including Matisse and Bonnard, Marcel Duchamp, André Bauchant and Wassily Kandinsky. These works are now displayed at the Musée Maillol in Paris. She still lives and works in France.
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