Émile Lahner (1893-1980) - Landscape

Emile Lahner

45 x 54 cm. 47.5 x 56.5 cm with frame.

Oil on canvas.

Circa 1960's

Hand signed.

CONDITION: Good condition, only a little hole in the canvas. See photos.

PROVENANCE: PBA collection, Paris.

Emile Lahner (28 September 1893 – 14 December 1980) was a Hungarian-born painter who moved to Paris in 1924 and became part of the School of Paris, a group of international artists working in Paris between 1900 and 1940.

Lahner was born in 1893 in the village of Nagyberezna in Carpathian Ruthenia, in Ung County of the Kingdom of Hungary (present-day Ukraine). Lahner's mother died in childbirth and he was orphaned at the age of seven when his father was killed in an accident. Placed in the care of a guardian bishop, he was sent to a boarding school to begin training as an engineer. Lahner abandoned his engineering career in 1921 and enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Budapest, where he studied under János Vaszary, a pivotal figure in the Art Nouveau movement.

During World War I, neighboring Romania and the new Soviet Republic pillaged much of Hungary. The ensuing "Red Terror" and "White Terror" ensued and thousands were imprisoned or killed. In this harshly repressive atmosphere, many artists and intellectuals, including Lahner, were forced to flee their homeland or chose to emigrate. Lahner decided in 1924 to move to Paris where he could study the modern masters, Delacroix, Van Gogh and Monet.

Lahner arrived in Paris in 1924 residing in Montmartre. He studied with the artist Antoine Bourdelle and worked as a painter for Parisian theaters and film producers. He developed stage sets for the filmmaker Alexander Korda.

As the Third Reich advanced across Europe, Lahner joined many artists who took refuge in Vichy France in the Dordogne. He explored the famous cave paintings of the Dordogne which inspired a series of primitive paintings.

After the liberation of Paris in 1945, Lahner returned to the rue des Perichaux where he began to exhibit his work more frequently. In 1948 he made the first of many trips to Algeria, where he was commissioned by the Averseng family to design a chapel for the town of El Affroun. This assignment provided Lahner with the opportunity to participate in the fascination with chapel construction and adornment that was then popular in France.

Lahner's exploration of stained glass and its refractive properties during this project had a profound impact on the rest of his abstract work.

In 1951 he visited the artist Pablo Picasso in Vallauris, with whom he eventually exhibited at the Galerie Daniel Malingue in Paris.

In 1957, at the age of 64, Lahner married Jeanne Cazenave. After his marriage, Lahner moved from his spartan studio of twenty-five years on the rue des Perichaux to an apartment on the rue Alfred-Stevens, near the Place Pigalle. In 1959 he met an American art dealer from California named Laszlo Laky. Mr. Laky became one of the artist's closest friends and supporters.

In the spring of 1961, Lahner scored a critical success at a watershed exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Castel. This exhibition was sponsored by Lahner's longtime friend Léopold Sédar Senghor, a well-known poet and former president of Senegal.

From the 1960s until his death in 1980, Lahner continued to exhibit. He was known for his wide-ranging stylistic exploration, informed through his early exposure to the Art Nouveau, Constructivist, Synthetic, and Non-objective art movements in Eastern Europe. While living in Paris, he was greatly influenced by Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Primitivism. Lahner's close friends included the artists and writers Jean Bouret, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Jean Trichet, Marcel Sauvage and André Masson.