Technical information
- Title : The Red Mullets
- Date : 1931
- Technique : Oil on canvas
- Dimensions : 55 × 38 cm
- Location : Unknown
Biographical / historical context
In 1931, Breuillaud was still fully within the ZM cycle, at the moment when his pictorial language stabilizes after the explorations of the late 1920s. This consolidation does not mean calm: it results in a surer way of organizing paint, holding organic matter within structure, and setting color in tension.
With The Red Mullets, he turns to a still-life motif—fish laid on a cloth—yet the aim is not culinary fidelity. The subject lets him concentrate, on a reduced surface, two opposing forces: the moist, supple, almost filament-like bodies, and the accidented geometry of the fabric, which becomes a support for construction. In the current state of the corpus, the painting remains one of Breuillaud’s rare known incursions into a strictly food-based motif, likely drawn from market observation.
Formal / stylistic description
Four red mullets lie on a pale cloth with thick folds, seemingly twisted together. The composition tightens around a red-orange core: the fish, grouped as a bundle, brush against and interlock with one another, forming a living mass rather than a descriptive alignment.
The color is built through contrasts: saturated orange-reds of the fish, streaked with whites and pinks; bluish greys and granular whites of the cloth in broad passages; a very dark, almost black upper zone that compresses the air and tightens the scene; and an ochre-pink periphery, likely the tabletop, warming the whole.
The touch is lively and slick. Breuillaud does not insist on anatomical precision: he seeks an axis and a tension, even if it means slightly elongating or deforming bodies to achieve a more incisive dynamic. The cloth plays a decisive role: its folds become broken planes, knots, and creases that frame and contain the red matter. Cold, lateral light produces no bright sheen; it remains matte, as if absorbed by the flesh and the thickness of the fabric.
Comparative analysis / related works
The painting belongs to the small group of organic works from the early 1930s in which Breuillaud probes the relationship between living matter and spatial organization. A typical ZM procedure appears here: making a warm nucleus emerge (the fish reds) within a cold, architectured structure (blue greys of the cloth, the upper blacks), transforming an ordinary motif into a device of tensions.
The converging bundle arrangement recalls other compositions from the same period in which multiple elements gather to form a vibrating center. More broadly, The Red Mullets shows that still life, for Breuillaud, is not an autonomous genre: it becomes a laboratory for masses, torsions, and chromatic relations.
Justification of dating and attribution
The date 1931 is consistent with the warm/cool palette characteristic of the late ZM phase, with the cloth built as twisted planes, and with a thick yet matte paint handling close to canvases from the same year. No formal element invites a shift in attribution.