Jean Langlois French, 1923-2014

Jean Langlois was born on March 8, 1923, in Nancy, in the Lorraine region of northeastern France. He came from a family shaped equally by military service and artistic culture: his father, a decorated veteran of Verdun who became a pioneer of French aviation and later a documentary filmmaker, and his mother, a graduate of the prestigious École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Langlois grew up on the Arvor Air Base near Bourges before the family returned to Nancy and eventually relocated to Paris, where his father was stationed as war approached.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, the sixteen-year-old Langlois left school to study at the Paris School of Applied Arts. He was soon separated from his studies when his father was posted to Algiers, and Langlois spent two formative years at the Algiers School of Fine Arts, absorbing the works of the Old Masters. It was there that he first encountered El Greco, whose painting struck him with the force of a revelation and set the trajectory of his artistic life.

Returning to Paris in 1941, Langlois enrolled in the decorative painting program at the School of Applied Arts, where he discovered Tintoretto, Goya, Daumier, Michelangelo, Matisse, and the Impressionists. The school was then under the direction of Fressinet, known for his ability to attract exceptional teachers. Among them was Jacques Zwoboda, under whom Langlois studied and whose own Grande Chaumière academy Langlois later joined as massier, responsible for recruiting models and managing students. At nineteen, he participated in the Liberation of Paris in August 1944, then joined the Allied forces and fought through Germany until the end of the war.

Back in Paris, Langlois began teaching at the École Supérieure des Arts Modernes, where he remained for forty-four years, from 1947 to 1991, devoting himself to the art of drawing and to fundamental research in aesthetics across successive generations of students. His position gave him abundant time to paint without commercial pressure, and he worked steadily in the solitude of his studio for more than six decades, building a body of work largely invisible to the institutional art world but deeply felt by those who encountered it.

His practice divides clearly into two periods. Until the late 1970s, he worked in a muted, tonal palette described as his "brown period," painting in oil on canvas. In the late 1970s he discovered acrylic paint and began working on medium-density fibreboard rather than canvas, a change that transformed both his palette and his subjects. His "colorist period" opened into richer, more saturated compositions, the physical character of the support lending new texture and directness to his surfaces.

Langlois's painting is resolutely figurative, rooted in the classical tradition without nostalgia or defensiveness. He works on canvases of eight to ten feet, preferring scale over intimacy, and draws his subjects from the objects that surround him in the studio: a Japanese suit of armour, a wooden horse, a piece of fabric draped over a chair, an African mask, a ceramic jug, or the landscape visible through his window. He co-founded the Talma Group in 1965 with Jacques Landron and Jean Marnat, and exhibited at the Musée du Mans, the Salon d'Automne, the Salon des Artistes Français, the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon Comparaisons, the Salon Terre Latine, the Marcel Bernheim Gallery, and the Katia Granoff Gallery. From 1982 to 1992 his work was shown continuously at the Galerie Cardinal on the rue du Cardinal Lemoine in the 5th arrondissement, managed by his friend Georges Grandet. A retrospective of his career was held at the Chaumont Abbey in 2008. He was nominated for the Prix de la Critique in 1967 and awarded the Médaille d'Or des Artistes Français in 1968.

Jean Langlois died on January 15, 2014. He was ninety years old, and had been painting in his studio daily until three months before his death.