Robert Simon

His surfaces are built from rapid, sculptural brushwork that gives even his smallest canvases a quality of physical presence — maximum emotional concentration in minimal space.

Robert Simon (1889-1961) spent his career in Paris, working from a studio on the rue Alfred Stevens in the 9th arrondissement and exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Artistes Français. A Post-Impressionist painter of the Paris school, he worked in a mode of vibrant, tactile brushwork, preferring small formats and favoring subjects drawn from the city streets, French and Breton landscapes, coastal scenes, and intimate studio interiors. He was close to Jean Pougny, Charles Kvapil, and André Lhote, and counted the critic Claude Roger-Marx among his friends. Upon Simon's death in 1961, Roger-Marx honored him in Le Figaro with the tribute: "The painter Robert Simon passed away, brush in hand."

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Robert Simon was born in 1889 and spent his working life in Paris, rooted in the 9th arrondissement where his studio on the rue Alfred Stevens placed him at the center of one of the city's most creatively charged neighborhoods. The rue Alfred Stevens lies just below Montmartre in Pigalle, the district where painters, writers, and critics had gathered since the nineteenth century, and where the city's artistic culture remained vital well into Simon's own era.

He exhibited regularly at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Artistes Français, the two institutions that formed the backbone of established Parisian art life, and built his reputation within a circle of painters that included Jean Pougny and Charles Kvapil, and under the broad influence of André Lhote. His closest critical ally was Claude Roger-Marx, the art critic and historian whose writing shaped French taste across the first half of the twentieth century. When Simon died in 1961, Roger-Marx paid tribute to him in Le Figaro with an article whose title spoke for itself: "The painter Robert Simon passed away, brush in hand."

Simon worked in a Post-Impressionist mode rooted in color and touch, his surfaces built from rapid, sculptural brushwork that gives even his smaller canvases a quality of physical presence. He preferred small formats, working on cardboard and panel as often as canvas, and used that intimacy deliberately: the aim was maximum emotional concentration in minimal space. His subjects range across the life of Paris and of France more broadly. Auction records confirm a body of work encompassing Parisian street scenes — the Seine barges, the Tour Eiffel seen from the Pont Mirabeau, the Morris column on the boulevard Rochechouart — alongside Breton landscapes, coastal views of Bandol and Ibiza, snow scenes in Villiers, and intimate studio interiors at the rue Alfred Stevens. His still lifes, of flowers, pitchers, fruit, and domestic objects, share the same qualities of directness and light that animate his urban and landscape subjects.

Robert Simon died in Paris in 1961, at work until the end.