FRENCH PIETA

 

MICHEL CIRY was  a very talented figure in modern French culture.  He was the composer of six symphonies for orchestra, mixed choir, and soloist. He published 36 volumes of memoirs. He was a master of modern etching, designing postage stamps and illustrating literary classics by authors ranging from Emily Bronte to Franz Kafka, and he painted.

He art was largely devoted to sacred themes. He also chose to remain celibate, living in self-imposed exile from the Paris art scene for over fifty years on the seacoast of Normandy in Varengeville-sur-Mer, where a museum opened in 2012 to display works in his personal collection from a career spanning over seven decades.

He was born in 1919 in La Baule in South Brittany. He showed promise as both an artist and musician while he was still a teenager. He created his first etching when he was sixteen and made his public debut three years later at an exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris.  He was a student of contemporary French musician, Nadia Boulanger, yet in 1958, he gave up composing  to devote himself to painting.

Ciry has been described as an artist of solitude.

 As French Roman Catholic Writer Francois Mauriac once observed: “Ciry knows how to make divinity shine through a poor face similar to those we walk past on the street.”

 

 “It seems my lot has been to translate the anguish, the pain, the diversity of torments that can assail a human being,” explained Ciry. “I do not cultivate this sadness but it imposes itself in such a way there is hardly space for anything else in my work but this.”

 When a friend once urged Ciry to renounce images of solitude and become “a painter of love,” the artist was quick to defend himself. “How could I be anything else but a painter of love?” he wrote. “It is precisely my great and slightly mad ambition in this time of hatred to want to stay on the side of love.”

Pieta:  

Top- Pieta of Nortre  Dame- 1950

  Right:- Pieta (1954)