Robert Lotiron, 1886-1966 : La Poésie Du Quotidien

Exhibition in three parts organised at La Piscine-Musée d'art et d'industrie A.-Diligent, Roubaix, 25 June - 4 September 2022, at the Musée des beaux-arts de Cambrai, 25 June - 16 October 2022, and at the Musée du Mont-de-Piété, Bergues, 25 June - 30 October 2022

An essential representative of figurative art in France during the inter-war period, Robert Lotiron contributed to the revival of decorative arts in the 1930s and 1940s through his wall decorations and his projects for the Sèvre and Gobelins factories.

After entering the Académie Julian in 1903, he became friends with Roger de La Fresnaye, Paul Véra and Louis Marcousis, and later met Robert Delaunay, Apollinaire, Gleizes, Metzinger and Léger. The pre-war years were years of intense experimentation: Salon d'Automne and then Salon des Indépendants in 1910, exhibition of the "Blaue Reiter" in Munich in 1912. His first important painting, Le Tennis, allowed him to become a member of the Salon d'Automne.

His works, generally small in size but never lacking in monumentality, render without emphasis and with sensitivity the climate of an era, of everyday France. Lotiron established himself as one of the most prominent landscape artists of his time. After the Second World War, he enriched his research by tackling lithography.
This exhibition catalogue retraces the life and work of this fiercely independent artist who said: "Free of commitment, I paint for my pleasure and my torment.