Albert Bitran
1931–2018 · French painter, engraver and sculptor of Turkish origin
Albert Bitran was a French painter, engraver and sculptor born in 1931 in Istanbul, into a Sephardic Jewish family. He died in Paris on 9 November 2018. Associated with lyrical abstraction, he worked mainly in Paris, though he exhibited widely in several countries.
He studied at the Collège Saint Michel in Istanbul and was admitted to the Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris, but soon turned to painting instead. In 1948 he settled in Montparnasse, sharing the American pavilion of the Cité Universitaire with expatriate artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Jesús Rafael Soto. After an early phase of strict geometry, his work moved towards a gestural, informal language. His first solo exhibition took place in 1951, and in 1958 he became a French citizen.
In the sixties and seventies, series such as the Doubles and the Sextuor gained him recognition in Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Austria. In the eighties he began the Grandes Formes, and later he drew on memories of his childhood and of Turkey in Mediterranean-inspired works, such as those based on arcades. His last cycle, Les Noirs, centred on black. He received the distinction of Officier des Arts et Lettres and left a body of work present in collections and group exhibitions until his final years.