Frédéric MENGUY

Biography

Born in Paris in 1927, Frédéric Menguy was a pupil at the Sarcelles secondary school, then at the commercial school in Goussainville (Val d'Oise). Very early on, he developed a passion for drawing and painting and attended evening classes at the Paris workshops (Place des Vosges, then Boulevard du Montparnasse) while working as an accountant in an insurance company (1943-1949), then only part-time in a stockbroker's office (1950-1951). More in line with his vocation, he entered the École normale d'enseignement du dessin in 1951 and, having obtained the certificat d'aptitude au professorat de l'enseignement du dessin d'art, taught drawing in 1953.

In 1956, Frédéric Menguy gave up teaching to devote himself entirely to his work as a painter, following in the footsteps of Bernard Buffet and André Minaux, in the expressionist tradition of Francis Gruber, whose dark and miserable paintings always express the pessimism of the post-war period. 1957 was the year of his first exhibitions3, and personal exhibitions at the Théâtre du Tertre of the writer and engraver Georges Charaire, then in the Parisian salons. In 1958, he married Nicole Allardin.

The research that followed in Frédéric Menguy's work initially brought him closer to abstract landscape painting and evoked Nicolas de Stael. His lithographic work began in 1964, before his discovery of the Corbières region in 1966 led him to settle in Villeneuve-la-Rivière the following year, where he turned definitively to the colourful figuration that was to characterise him, particularly with his cypress landscapes and his dreamlike evocations of femininity and the world of the circus with its clowns and horse rides.

Paying tribute to Frédéric Menguy who died in March 2007, only a few days after his wife was taken by a painful illness, Patrice de La Perrière analyses that, "despite the festive side of his subjects and themes, we realise that beyond the image offered, Menguy's paintings hide, behind a joy that is ostentatious, a certain nostalgia for our childhood soul. And even if his power of poetic evocation, which he has within him, allows him to translate his thoughts and emotions into a fairy-tale universe, this does not prevent the depth and extreme sensitivity that are in a way his weapons.