Jules Cavailles (1901 - 1977) was an well-known, highly regarded, and versatile painter. He worked in oils, gouache, and pastel, and his subject matter featured figures, portraits, nudes, still lifes, flowers, landscapes, and animals. His work is represented in many leading collections and museums, including the Modern Art Museum in Paris, and the museums in Toulouse, Albi, Marseilles, Chicago, and Helsinki.

He started as a technical draughtsman during which time he met “le pere Artigue” - who was a friend of the famous pointillist artist Henri Martin – and who encouraged him to go to Paris to study fine art. In 1925 he enroled at the Academie Julian and he began exhibiting at the various Parisian Salons from 1928 – the Societie des Artistes Francais, Artistes Independants and l’Automne. To fund his studies he opened a small chemist shop. He was soon invited to participate at the Salon des Tuileries and in 1936 he organised the 14th exhibition of the Artistes de ce temps in the Petit-Palais. In the same year he received the prestigious Grant Blumenthal and he was soon awarded the commission to decorate the Pavilion of Languedoc for the Exposition Universelle. He was part of a group of artists called “La Realite Poetique”. His artistic style is characterised by the juxtaposition of pure colour, derived from an interpretation of fauvist painting which was less interested in the early Fauve artists’ search for intensity and dynamism than a simple expression of ‘joie de vivre’.

Jean Cassou about Jules Cavaillès

Slowly he garnered his knowledge, studied the charms and secrets of colours, practised his scales and adjusted his palette, which is certainly in the image of his warm, rich and full heart, a palette made for singing the joys of life. He is a sober and strict draughtsman with a marvellous conciseness, and it strikes me at this point that I should long ago have said a few words about the quality of his drawings. They are among the most excellent of our French school of drawing, and we see in them the benefit he has derived from a stay in Italy among the sites which inspired the most illustrious masters of that school, Poussin, Lorrain and Corot. Italy, seen by the French, sheds its academic garb and becomes sheer light and truth, a precise, clear, pure and immense universe, the most crystalline of music.

In these paintings perspective space is deliberately converted into musical space, the distances and tempos between two sounds, the relative position of objects in rhythm. The objects themselves are stripped of their conceptual significance. They cease to be a vase, a flower, the creation of man or of nature, roots or pebbles, to become one of the notes of a bizarre song.

Painting of this kind is absorbed quite differently from painting which is established in the geometric and perspective theatre of our approaches and which orders objects in accordance with our optical illusions. The natural destiny of Cavaillès marks him out as starting from the earth and the earthly places where he was rooted and progressing towards that painting, so temporal, so poetical and so musical.

He is a master of his craft. Moreover, how could such a man, wholly faithful to his personal nature, in any way fail to merit the fine title of craftsman, which is granted only to the artist devoid of artifice, who, to the end, obstinately refuses its dignity solely from its tools and its material faithfully used? It is when he is solidly grounded in his craft that we can look to a painter for what we expect from every painter to whose company we commit ourselves, namely renewal. He renews himself and us with him. We share with him the knowledge of something which is never finished.

Hommage à Cavaillès, published by the Editions Bruker, Paris, 1961.

External link

• Jules Cavailles Research Center