AB-PR2-1950-025 — Untitled (c. 1950)

Technical information

Title : Untitled
Date : c. 1950
Technique : Oil on Isorel (hardboard)
Dimensions : 27 × 35 cm
Location : Private collection

Biographical / historical context

This small oil on Isorel belongs to the hinge around 1950, a moment when Breuillaud intensifies his research into the Provençal landscape by simplifying forms and strengthening the organization through coloured planes.

The rigid support, well suited to swift work and later reworkings, favours an atmospheric approach: rather than a topographical record, the artist seeks a sensitive synthesis of relief, cultivated land, and light.

Formal / stylistic description

The composition is structured in horizontal strata. In the foreground, a warm field or hillside (oranges, terracotta) holds a constellation of blue‑green and pale green vegetal masses, laid down as rounded patches. Trees are not described individually; they appear as synthetic volumes, sometimes heightened with violet or bluish touches that cool the shadows.

In the middle distance, a path or pale band meanders and leads toward a darker, violet‑blue ridge, where a distant architectural line (a village silhouette or a building) is suggested by a few luminous strokes. The sky, largely orange, acts as a warm “ceiling” that compresses depth and reinforces the chromatic resonance between earth and atmosphere.

The touch is supple and layered: scumbled flats, visible reworkings, and transitions achieved by juxtaposition rather than modelling. The whole privileges a warm/cool harmony (oranges set against blue‑greens) and a reading through rhythms of patches, anticipating the more emphatic constructions of the following cycle without yet adopting a systematic angular geometrization.

Comparative analysis / related works

Through its banded organization and its simplification into vegetal patches, the work continues the rigid‑support landscapes of the second half of the 1940s, but with heightened chromatic intensity and a more radical desire for synthesis. Compared with PR2 landscapes of 1950, it retains softer contours and an atmospheric fluidity: construction still relies on supple transitions rather than strictly polyhedral slabs.

The violet distance and warm sky reinforce the notion of a “sensation‑landscape,” where light is translated through colour itself more than through perspective. This kind of solution prepares the evolution of 1951, when Breuillaud tends to stabilize planes more firmly and to densify the motif’s underlying framework.

Justification of dating and attribution

The dating “c. 1950” is consistent with the balance between readable figuration (relief, cultivated plots, a distant built silhouette) and an already very advanced simplification of vegetal masses.

The warm palette (oranges and ochres) counterbalanced by blue‑greens, together with the scumbled handling and superimpositions, corresponds to Breuillaud’s research at the hinge between 1949 and 1951.