Jean GORIN

Biography

Jean Gorin was the youngest of a family of four children, his father a shoemaker. In 1910, his family settled in Nort-sur-Erdre, near Nantes. After failing the primary school certificate, he began a professional apprenticeship in Nantes in 1912, then in Paris, where he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1916, he was mobilized in Nantes, then left for the fighting zone after a few months. He completed his military service on the banks of the Rhine in 1918.

He was a student of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nantes in 1919. He moved to Nort-sur-Erdre in 1922, where he carried on a professional activity while continuing to paint. In 1922, during a trip to Paris, he made his first contacts with cubist works. After a cubist period, he made his first abstract painting in 1925 and discovered in 1926 the work of Piet Mondrian.

He creates polychromy and neoplastic furniture for his home in Nort-sur-Erdre. He applies to the modern world, in particular to architecture, the research on abstract art of Piet Mondrian. He did not stop developing his ideas more especially in the field of relief as early as 1930, then of construction in space, finally in architectural projects. In 1932 he travelled to the Soviet Union, invited by a group of intellectuals and artists and discovered Russian constructivism. In 1934, he became a member of the steering committee of the Abstraction-Création association, which was created in 1931. He moved to Le Vésinet in 1937, sold his house in Nort-sur-Erdre and destroyed much of his work. He was mobilized in 1939, then a prisoner of war until 1942.

Jean Gorin also stayed in Grasse between 1940 and 1945, where he owned a decoration shop. He moved successively to Grasse (1947), to Nice for health reasons in 1950 and developed projects of neoplastic architecture there, until 1956, where he settled at Perreux, and finally at Meudon (1962). He made sculptures, or rather models of sculptures that he photographed before destroying them, since they could not be kept in his workshop, which was too cramped. His art has distanced itself from that of Mondrian by the introduction of relief which develops to become a true mural sculpture. Mondrian’s Neoplasticism only allowed compositions made with vertical and horizontal lines. In his creations, he finally introduced the circle, then the oblique line, while maintaining the horizontal-vertical rigour of pure neoplasticism.

He died in 1981.