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Autoportrait
Salon d'Art moderne de Paris (1969)
Collection particulière |
Native to a Protestant family, farmers installed
in the North of France in Aix-Les-Orchies, close to the Belgian
border, he is the son of Samuel Lepetit, artist painter, cellist,
and of Marie-Anaïs Faivre, who is also descended from an
intellectual and Calvinist environment. Luc is born in Coutances
(English Channel) where the hazard of the appointment drove his
father to teach drawing, as he did in Saint-Lô.
After classic studies marked by the excellence
of his artistic works, he went to Paris where, burning of the
fire of his conquering youth, he enters the school of the "Beaux
Arts" in the class of Emile Renard. Gifted pupil, he undergoes
the influence of this remarkable teacher, apostle of the intimism,
and pays him frequent visits in his Parisian studio of the "place
des Vosges".
In the same time, Luc Lepetit follows the courses
of the national school of decorative Arts where he gets the highest
rewards quickly, among which the first price to the annual competition
in 1922. Before long, he exposes at the Independent, then from
1926, at the Salon of the French Artists where he wins very quickly,
bronze, silver and gold medals (1928). Later he will receive the
Becker (1958), Taylor (1960, 1962) and other prices. Resident
at the Medici villa, the Roman period gives the opportunity to
discover the primitive Italian painters who delight him. Commissioned
by the French government, he stays several months in Algeria in
order to achieve the decorations of public buildings. Tireless,
he paints landscapes in Corsica, Spain, Brittany and in the south
of France.
In Paris, he teaches at the Montaigne high school,
makes friends with painters Lucien Fontanarosa, Ceorges Cheyssials
and Jean-Gabriel Goulinat with whom he shares the religious convictions.
He soon creates a Protestant Artists' society and expresses himself
in the magazine "Reforme". This religious aspect was
certainly at the origin of the installation of his parents in
Monneaux, in 1938. Affiliated to Essômes-On-Marne, this
hamlet is a high place of the Protestantism in Brie-champenoise.
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Luc Lepetit painting
in his
Monneaux estate |
Luc Lepetit discovers the Marne valley but he
hardly has the time to linger over it. He hardly has painted some
views of the small hills between Essômes and Vaux that he
has to pack his bag. The war requires him and, in 1940, he joins
the front of the Campaign of France. It will last forty-five days.
The astounding speed of the downfall of French military forces
make that one often forgets that the "phony war" made
hundred thousand deaths and thousands of wounded soldiers; among
those, gunner Luc Lepetit, blown by an explosion close to his
battery. He miraculously survives but loses the use of his left
lung, the other being seriously mutilated. This permanent infirmity
will turn his painting toward a stronger and stronger pessimism.
[] Fleeing Paris to take care of a very painful
facial shingles, Lepetit moves to Monneaux in 1969. Widower for
some years, he is accompanied by his second wife, Berthe Aubry,
who surrounds him with constant affection. To the concerned artists
calling for news, he opposes a total, definitive silence. Only,
the faithful friend Jean-Gabriel Goulinat, president of the French
Artists and chief of the restoration shop for the national Museums,
has the privilege to visit him.
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La rentrée du
troupeau à Monneaux
Collection particulière |
[] Paradoxically, his pictorial activity doesn't
weaken. Solitary and fierce, he embraces the area with passion,
covering long distance hunting and painting without respite the
landscapes surroundings Monneaux, sometimes pushing his peregrinations
as far as the Petit-Morin valley.
La Rentrée du troupeau à Monneaux
is the ultimate, testamentary work, of Luc Lepetit. [] The painter
lays down the brushes definitely. Not by weariness, but the body
doesn't follow anymore. The slightest effort exhausts him. It
won't be anymore question of painting. Fretting with doubt, he
will destroy an important number of paintings. The end of his
life is an ordeal. He died on January 2, 1981.
Translated from a text by Noël Coret, "Les peintres
de la vallée de la Marne, autour de l'impressionnisme". Published
by Casterman
