Biography of Gérard Fromanger
Gérard Fromanger is a French painter born on September 6, 1939 in Pontchartrain and died on June 18, 2021 in Paris.
After secondary school, Fromanger briefly attended the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris and continued his training at the evening classes of the City of Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, under the direction of Robert Lesbounit. The sculptor César, impressed by his work, lent him his studio and followed his artistic development for two years. Fromanger also became friends with the poet Jacques Prévert and the brothers Alberto and Diego Giacometti.
From the 1960s, Fromanger stood out as a major figure on the Parisian art scene, contributing to narrative figuration and the invention of the New History. In May 1968, he was one of the founders of the Atelier populaire des Beaux-Arts, which created posters and slogans supporting student and worker movements. The same year, he collaborated with Jean-Luc Godard to make film-tracts.
In the early 1970s, he traveled to China with the help of Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. Involved in the art world, Fromanger used the camera to capture images without a deliberate point of view, like a film of anonymous movement, according to Michel Foucault.
Friendship with poets, philosophers, writers, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, musicians and architects is an essential driving force of his creative process. After working and living in Normandy, Camargue, China, Belgium, Paris, London, Berlin, Tokyo, Abidjan, and New York, he spends the later years of his life working between Paris and Siena.
In 2015, a controversial stained glass project for the Romanesque church of Anzy-le-Duc, proposed by a local industrialist and designed by Fromanger, was abandoned after objections from the Bishop of Autun and the public. The bishop deemed the project incompatible with the Christian identity of the building.
Gérard Fromanger died on June 18, 2021 in Paris, at the age of 81. He is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery (division 42).
