François Barraud was a Swiss painter who stood out thanks to his still life portraits, female nudes and several double portraits of him and his wife.
He was born in La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland, on November 14, 1899 as the eldest of four brothers, all of whom were artists.
Given his natural love for art, he studied Fine Arts in his hometown.
Source: For love at art
Exceptionally talented, Barraud eventually became one of the best of the little-known artists, and thanks to his talent, he entered a competition where he was a great success at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Basel, earning him a trip a Reims, France, in 1922 and later to Paris, where he would work as an artist and also as a craftsman.
En Paris he would meet his wife, Marie, whom he married in 1924 and would be his model in many of his works. He then he studied the masters of the Louvre, and joined the movement "Neue Sachlichkeit" (New Objectivity), a movement that was born in Germany to oppose expressionism, of which they were part among others, Christian Schad, Georg Scholz, Otto Dix, Rudolf Schlichter, Otto Griebel.
During his years in France, brought an unusually wide variety of influences to his work.
Inspired in his youth by the paintings of romantic landscapes, flirted with a French realist style in the 1850s before falling in love with the Renaissance tradition, especially the stylistic excesses and melodrama of the Baroque.
He combined these influences with an unapologetic Catholicism and whimsical irony that curiously predicts the postmodern art culture of the late XNUMXth century.
Making his first woodcuts in Paris, Fauvism came to the fore, and color was decisive in his work.
He was inspired by the style's bold use of rich colors, dark contours, and an anatomy and an emphatically unreal space.
The realistic style of his work approaches to his contemporaries as Balthus and Moses Kisling, however, is much sharper and its compositions and its scenes are much more convincing than any of the aforementioned.
Despite the talent and modest success he enjoyed throughout his life, he suffered from illness, finally dying of tuberculosis in 1934, at just 35 years of age.
He left a legacy of art behind him that is an inspiration to many modern painters and artists.
