Andree Descharnes Biography
Andree Descharnes was born in 1923 in Nevers, France. She graduated from the
Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris during the Occupation, and also worked in the
Resistance with members of her family led by Pierre Auclair, Resistance leader and
France's Grand-master Freemason of the Lodge of the "Grand Orient." After
graduating from the Beaux Arts and plotting maps for the American Armed Forces,
Andree began designing wallpaper and fabric. But it is in Floral and Still-life
painting that she truly excelled and to which she eventually devoted every spare
moment of her time. A classicist in the tradition of Poussin and Chardin, Descharnes
also followed Montaigne's "Juste Milieu" philosophy of subtle intelligence and
grace. The truth she uncovered in the simple objects she depicted has a zen like
immediacy captured with an almost miraculous brushwork. When celebrated art
historian Argan saw one of Descharnes paintings in her and spouse Alfred Russell's
apartment in Trastevere, he was convinced it was a seventeenth century Dutch
Masterpiece. Andree Descharnes and Alfred Russell met when he had his first Paris
exhibit as a central figure in the group of abstract expressionists who worked in both
Paris and New York. The two were married in 1949 with Ad Reinhardt serving as best
man. During the early fifties, Descharnes concentrated on pen and ink drawings and
watercolors of the world around her, such as the breakfast table or the views out the
window of the Paris apartment, all done in a nervous "Giacometti style." In the mid
fifties Alfred Russell began copying masterpieces in the Louvre. This period proved a
turning point in both artists' careers. For Alfred Russell it spawned a renewed interest
in the classical tradition of the past, not only in the paintings of sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, but also in the sculpture and philosophy of the Greeks and in
the use of the Figure as an Abstract language. In 1956 Alfred Russell and Andree
Descharnes had a daughter, Elsie, while they were living in Surrealist painter Kurt
Seligmann's "Villa Seurat," an early Modernist House in Paris's 14th
arrondissement, as Alfred Russell was on sabbatical from his teaching job at Brooklyn
College. Andree did not start painting still-lives until seven years later, when her
childcare and textile design duties became less demanding. While the family spent
much of 1961 living in Nice, France, Andree started a series of floral paintings, with
the beautiful roses that grew in the enclosed garden behind the house. Several of these
paintings are on view in the museum. She went on to paint a variety of still-life
subjects, always emphasizing the living elements within a formal compositional
structure, for instance, one lemon amidst an arrangement of reflective silver objects.
Andree Descharnes died prematurely in 1976 after a long battle with cancer. Much of
her small but exquisite oeuvre of oil paintings and drawings is on exhibit here.