Guy de Lussigny started painting in 1950. At first a figurative painter, he soon followed in the footsteps of Mondrian and Malevich. A pivotal encounter with Gino Severini, a founder of the Italian Futurist movement, occurred in 1955. Severini encouraged Lussigny to pursue his chosen path in geometric abstraction. The straight line, square format and colour come to dominate Lussingy's work. In 1956, he met the painter Auguste Herbin, a meeting which turned out to be equally important. Both artists took liberties with colour theory, thereby multiplying their possibilities. The gallerist Colette Allendy organised Lussigny's first individual exhibition in Paris in 1959. Thereafter he exhibited regularly in France, throughout Europe and Japan In 1967 Lussigny settled permanently in Paris and participated in a number of salons, among them 'Grands et jeunes d'aujourd'hui', 'Salon des réalités nouvelles' and 'Salon comparaisons'. From 1969 to 1975, he worked with Denise René in Paris and New York. 1974 marked his third important encounter, with the Italian painter Antonio Calderara. They became fast friends. Friendship with artists was a key element in his life, notably that of the German sculptor Hans Steinbrenner, the Italian sculptor Francesco Marino Di Teana and the painter Antoine de Margerie.
Work
Guy de Lussigny's painting, pure and precise, conjures a poetic feeling. The square becomes, for the artist, 'the most harmonious shape of human invention', while the line is 'a precise rendition of mathematical reasoning'. With these elements, Lussigny creates a pictorial language with the aim of achieving 'a kind of perfection'. In 1968, the Institut de France and the Académie des Beaux-Arts awarded him the Prix Dumas-Millier. His works can be found in numerous public collections and museums in Valenciennes, Montbeliard, the Fondation Calderara, Fnac, Frac Ile de France, Macon, Mondriaanhuis, Musée Tavet-Delacour de Pontoise, Musée Matisse du Cateu-Cambrésis and, especially, in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Cambrai, with 120 works from the André Le Bozec donation. With a university degree in history and an accomplished pianist, Guy de Lussigny was a cultivated person.
Quotes
'Lussigny, who also drew tapestry cartoons, used pure abstraction, painting monochrome backgrounds on which float elementary geometric shapes, for the most part the square and line. Searching for balance and a subtle harmony, his works lend themselves to meditation", according to an analysis by the Galerie Gimpel & Muller in Paris, which mounts regular exhibitions of Lussigny. 'Working in the context of the Neoplastic movement, Guy de Lussigny developed a geometric style which he has pursued with unfailing rigour. To attain a new pictorial reality, his intuitive and empirical language makes use of colour'. Around Guy de Lussigny's paintings there is a mystery. It's like the murmured account of n private adventure which is almost mystical. He need only render the simplest of geometric shapes -the square- and juggle the slenderest of chromatic contrasts, to expand his pictorial works and launch them into a veritable universe where it is less a matter of seeking satisfaction in another sphere than it is to find oneself grounded in that self-same universe.' . Vitoux, friend and admirer of the artist, wrote this on the occasion of his exhibition at Galerie Gimpel & Muller in 2008.
