Geneviève Claisse

Geneviève Claisse (17 July 1935 – 30 April 2018) was a French painter of geometric abstraction. Her vocation was awakened by reading Art d'aujourd'hui, a leading forum for geometric abstraction. She was a relative of Auguste Herbin, who first saw her work when she was eighteen and encouraged her to keep painting. Herbin regarded her as "the successor appointed by destiny and heredity."

Her early work shares with Herbin a devotion to formal purity and precise execution. She worked tirelessly, often late at night after a day in the studio, carefully painting abstract forms on bold, colourful canvases. She first exhibited in 1958 at the Galerie Caille in Cambrai and the Galerie Hybler in Paris. In 1959 she moved to Paris to share a studio with Herbin, and in 1961 she began exhibiting at the Galerie Denise René, where she showed regularly in the following years.

From 1964 she developed series of circles and triangles, which she also carried into architectural scale, most notably a mural ensemble in the entrance hall of the SCAC company building in Puteaux. Her screenprint album "Cercles", published in 1967, documents this period. Her work kept formal synthesis and compositional clarity, with technique always serving creation. She represented France in the International Association of Plastic Arts of UNESCO from 1986 to 1995. Her legacy lies in her contribution to French geometric abstraction in the second half of the twentieth century.