Michel Henry [Golden Venice] Oil painting No. 25

This work was painted by Michel Henry before 1990 and is included in the art book Michel Henry.

Michel Henry is a painter who mainly paints flowers, and together with Buffet and Brasilier, he is one of the leading painters in the 20th century French art world. His paintings give off a sense of happiness, so he is called the painter of happiness in France, and the king of poppies in America, because he paints many poppies. His transparent colors are likened to jewels. Red is said to be the color of ruby, blue is the color of sawaire, green is the color of emerald, and deep brown is the color of topaz. Michel Henry's paintings are collected by the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Swedish royal family, the Principality of Monaco, the Saudi Arabian royal family, and others. Galerie Adeka has been the sole distributor of Michel Henry in Japan since 1995, planning Michel Henry exhibitions in famous department stores and galleries throughout Japan, producing original prints signed by the artist himself, selling painting prints, and managing copyrights.

Work Description

This work must have been created before 1990. All the outlines of the buildings are traced with thick lines, sometimes doubled. Since 1990, he has mostly drawn only prominent buildings, and the rest of the scenery is blurred or omitted with thin vertical and horizontal lines. This painting depicts St. Mark's Basilica from the left, facing the sea. From this angle, the brown spire-shaped bell tower of St. Mark's Square looks large, and only the large central dome of the three domes of the basilica is visible.

Michel Henry is known as a painter who paints with brilliant colors, but he also excels in the beauty of his drawings, compositions, and materials. Both Michel Henry and Bernard Buffet inherited the clear outline of the building from their Beaux-Arts professor Narbonne, under whom they studied. The two triangles, an isosceles triangle with the dome roof as its apex and a spire stretching into the sky as its horizontal side, bounded by a line connecting the Venice waterfront and the apex of the spire to the dome roof, confront the (circular) sphere of the violet wild rose in the foreground, giving the painting a geometric beauty.

The small bouquet of wild roses is painted on an equal footing with Venice, the most beautiful floating city in history. In other words, this painting proves how much Michel Henry loves flowers. The wild roses in the foreground are painted in pale violet, and the water surface in the background is painted in two complementary colors, a paler violet and a pale yellow-orange. The pale and delicate violet of the bouquet is unified with the water surface, but the complementary colors make it stand out. The city of Venice is painted in a darker brown than the bouquet, and the sky is painted in an orange-yellow color, which is the complementary color of the violet. In other words, all the colors were chosen with the intention of making the violet of the wild roses stand out and look beautiful. The buildings, drawn with strict, strong lines, have a hard look, and are contrasted with the light of the water surface and the soft atmosphere of the bouquet. Michel Henry must have wanted to make the subdued violet the main focus of the painting. There are various mechanisms to support the main focus of the wild roses.

Gallery Adeka Yasuhiro Takeda