If you have an artwork by this artist and would like to sell it, please contact us.
Jean-Pierre Cassigneul Biography
Jean-Pierre Cassigneul is a French artist who has built a seven decades-long career painting sophisticated young women. His style, which reflects the early influences of Post Impressionist artists including Pierre Bonnard and Kees Van Dongen, is reduced, graphic, and elegant. A modest and private man, Cassigneul has become increasingly famous in the past few years, especially because of the intense interest in his art from Japanese collectors.
Cassigneul was born in Paris on July 13, 1935, the son of a Greek father—Jean Demètre—who had been raised in Egypt. Two years after Jean-Pierre was born, his father took a French surname (Dessès) and launched a fashion house on Avenue George V in Paris, where his son would grow up watching chic models wearing his father’s classically inspired couture. Young Jean-Pierre began drawing at an early age before being sent to live with his grandparents in Switzerland in 1944 at the age of nine to escape from the German occupation.
After WWII Cassigneul returned to Paris and attended the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly and made plans for a future in medicine while also taking drawing classes. After deciding as a teenager to focus on art he enrolled in the Académie Charpentier, a private arts school founded in 1945 in the heart of Montparnasse. Because of the school’s proximity to famous bars and cafes— including Le Dôme, La Closerie des Lilas, La Rotonde, Le Select, and La Coupole—Cassigneul was introduced to many artists and bohemians including Lucy Krogh, a gallerist who had once been the mistress of artist Jules Pascin. Sensing his talent, Krogh gave 17-year-old Cassigneul his first solo exhibition in 1952. A year later, he was appointed a member of the Salon Automne.
In 1954 Cassigneul began private studies with Jean Souverbie, a well-connected artist who also taught at the École des Beaux-Arts. A friend of Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, and Félix Vallotton, Souverbie was well acquainted with Cubism and the Nabi painters, whose works he introduced Cassigneul to. The young artist soon applied to and was accepted at the École des Beaux-Arts where he was mentored by Roger Chapelain-Midy, an internationally known artist and set designer whose somber paintings were tinged with a dreamy Surrealistic aura.
As Cassigneil’s art developed he painted an occasional still life or park scene but remained focused on the theme of women. Often inspired by the figures and features of models he glimpsed in the Jean Dessès showroom, he developed simple compositions that placed slim, elegant women—often wearing hats—at the edge of the ocean or in other outdoor settings. Cassigneul’s style, which emphasized flattened form and sinuous lines gave his paintings graphic unity. His striking harmonies of Impressionist color drew comparisons to Matisse and Fauvist artists of the early 20th century.
Throughout the 1950s and beyond he remained uninterested in the abstract art that gained wide attention in Paris and instead continued looking back towards pre-war Modernism. He spent two years in military service, both in Germany and Algeria, and then returned to present a 1964 exhibition at Gallery Tivey-Faucon. This show attracted the attention of Japanese art dealer, Kiyoshi Tamenaga, who later showed Cassigneul’s work in Tokyo. In 1974 he collaborated on a suite of eight lithographs with Jean-François Josselin, which was published by the famous print atelier Mourlot. Cassigneul developed 30 illustrations for a new edition of Charles Baudelaire’s poems, Les Pièces Condamnées.
Now in his eighties, Cassigneul continues to work in Paris where he often employs live models in his studio. His signature works—paintings of women with clear features in sophisticated, often nostalgic settings—have earned him an international reputation and broad audience of collectors.