Biography
Gabriel Dauchot is a French painter and lithographer born on May 10, 1927 in Livry-Gargan and died on November 7, 2003 in Paris 10th. Nicknamed "the painter of the human comedy", he is associated with the figurative movement of Young Painting within the School of Paris.
Supported by the encouragement of his father, an architect, and painting from the age of fourteen, Gabriel Dauchot, whose admiration goes to Maurice Utrillo and Chaïm Soutine, received advice from Émile Othon Friesz and Yves Brayer at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in 1940, then entered the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in 1942.
He participated in the Parisian Salons from his youth and was not yet twenty years old when the Katia Granoff gallery, then the Cardo gallery, organized his first solo exhibitions. "The winner is under thirty" observes Claude Roger-Marx, who does not fail to note "the atmosphere of disguise that is dear to him" as well as "the muted truculence that he gives to opaque backgrounds where cold grays, greens, carmines and saffrons sing with distinction" when in 1951 the prize of the Society of Art Collectors and Amateurs was awarded to Gabriel Dauchot.
Waldemar George observed in the 1950s that if "his early works were treated in a realistic style that sometimes borders on populism, the painter tries to free himself from it and reacts against a literary art". His last paintings of the time, "portraits, landscapes, compositions and still lifes, stand out for the intense life of the material".
Nearly forty years later, however, in 1989, Gérald Schurr would continue to retain in Dauchot's work "a sad countryside populated by pitiful beings, halfway between drama and derision, a colorful universe saved from tragedy by a scathing humor." His apartment-studio was located at no. 5 Place Pigalle in Paris.
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"Dauchot is the painter of nostalgia. He would have liked to live between 1850 and 1900 and the characters he depicts generally wear outdated costumes. He paints sad harlequins, dejected birdcatchers, street violinists, snowy landscapes, still lifes and funerals. But, if he expresses nostalgia through the choice of his subjects, he also expresses it through his technique. He never uses pure colours. His style evokes Soutine through the importance of the material effects, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec through the layout." — Yvon Taillandier
"He is today one of the greatest artists in Paris, in the tradition of Utrillo, Marquet or Dufy. He invites us on a nostalgic stroll through a timeless Paris, that of small trades, mechanics and grisettes, attics and bistros, this mocking Paris that amuses and moves him and that he restores to us in his own way." — Jacques Chirac, Gabriel Dauchot Retrospective, [catalog], Lanobre, Château de Val, summer 1992
"[…] The flavor of a tragicomic reality told in this truculent expressionism, tinged with black humor, which was unanimously praised by critics in the post-war years." — Gérald Schurr, Le guidargus de la peinture, Les Éditions de l'Amateur, 1993, p.302.
"Apart from still lifes and landscapes, Dauchot is fond of these anonymous, melancholic, dreamy beings, waiters, married people who mingle with characters directly from a world of acrobats: pierrots, harlequins [...] This "merchant of the marvelous"; as René Domergue calls him, also knows how to tint some of these scenes with black humor, notably his funerals." — Lydia Harambourg
