AB-PR1-1950-011 — Deposition (1950)

Technical information

Title : Deposition
Date : 1950
Technique : Oil on cardboard
Dimensions : 38 × 46 cm
Location : Private collection

Biographical / historical context

In the current state of the known corpus, the year 1950 marks a singular moment: Breuillaud tackles, exceptionally, an explicitly religious subject. Deposition appears to belong to the same climate of research as Christ on the Cross (1950), in which the artist transposes his modern vocabulary (coloured planes, simplification of faces, emphatic contours) into sacred iconography.

A link with the Salon d’Art Sacré (1950–1951) is plausible, but remains to be confirmed in the absence of documentation specifically attached to this work.

Formal / stylistic description

The horizontal composition presents Christ’s body laid in the foreground on a pale shroud, treated in simplified volumes with pinkish highlights and contours. Around him, three figures gather in the foreground: at left, a brown figure bends and supports the head; at right, a woman leans in a gesture of care (lifting, wrapping, preparing the shroud). At the centre, a blue‑draped, haloed figure stands upright, one hand raised to the face: a silent presence that immediately inscribes the scene within a Marian register.

In the second plane, two strange figures—painted in greens and light greys and outlined in brown—appear behind the main group. They are deliberately dematerialized: bodies reduced to vertical planes, heads barely indicated, gestures schematized. This handling reads as a distancing—witnesses or assistants held back—rather than as portraiture. Iconographically, they may correspond to the traditional assistants of the Deposition/Burial (Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus), but Breuillaud treats them as sign‑figures, almost ghosts of the action, widening the scene to a collective without weighing down the narration.

The setting is reduced to a few signs: purple and blue hills in the background, dark cypress silhouettes, a stone wall and a vertical ruin at right, and a tree branch drawn in reserve. This economy avoids anecdote and gives the episode a timeless dimension. The palette favours accords of mauves, pinks, and ochres, counterbalanced by deep blues (drapery) and muted greens (background). Faces are deliberately schematized, sometimes reduced to flat zones, bringing the ensemble closer to a modern icon than to naturalistic narrative.

Comparative analysis / related works

Through its simplified contours and its dramaturgy of coloured planes, the work closely dialogues with Christ on the Cross (1950). One finds the same blue/ochre polarity, the stylization of witnesses, and a will to monumentality achieved not through detail but through the structure of masses. The major difference lies in staging: Christ on the Cross is frontal and architected around the cross, while Deposition unfolds a more open, horizontal narrative in which landscape and ruins contribute to an atmosphere of mourning.

The two greenish silhouettes in the second plane reinforce a choral dimension: Breuillaud inscribes the drama within a community of witnesses, yet relegates them to an almost abstract presence, as if to preserve the centrality of the outstretched body and the gestures of care in the foreground.

Proposed iconographic parallels with an earlier Deposition by Georges Rouault (simplified faces, gravity, a non‑naturalistic spirituality) and with later treatments by Marc Chagall (collective narrative, symbolic colour, Christ’s body as emotional axis) are especially illuminating. In Breuillaud’s case, however, construction remains more compact and more structural: draperies and bodies read as interlocking planes, and the scene avoids floating effects in favour of an earthly, almost rural gravity.

Justification of dating and attribution

Although the work is not explicitly dated on the front, several indicators converge toward 1950: angular simplification of silhouettes, the use of coloured contours to solidify volumes, a contrasted palette (deep blues set against warm earth tones), and the synthetic treatment of faces.

Stylistic coherence with Christ on the Cross (1950) strengthens the hypothesis of closely related production. Attribution to Breuillaud is supported by this formal vocabulary, characteristic of the PR1 phase at the hinge between 1948 and 1951, here transposed to a sacred subject.

Documentary confirmation (catalogue, hanging photograph, exhibition mention) would help clarify the exact context and purpose (Salon d’Art Sacré or a commission).