Gaston Chaissac
b. 1904, France
d. 1964
French painter, sculptor, and naive artist, 1910-1964
Born into a French rural working-class family, Chaissac was an autodidact. In the late 1930s, his neighbours in Paris, the artists Otto Freundlich and Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss, convinced him to become an artist and promoted his career. A decade later, Jean Dubuffet championed his work as Art Brut only to later exclude him from the Art Brut collection, saying that Chaissac had become “an educated man, in touch with cultivated circles...more or less a professional artist”.
Chaissac lived remotely in the coastal town of Vendée and cited unconventional influences, including prehistoric art and the art of children. At the same time, he was also extremely aware of contemporary ideas of abstraction, Cubism, and Surrealism and incorporated them into his work. He kept in touch with established critics, artists and writers through extensive letter writing. In 1947, he wrote to Picasso, “more than ever, I’m a Picasso in clogs, Picasso’s student, student by correspondence course”.
Chaissac earned a remarkable amount of international recognition during his lifetime with exhibitions across Europe and the U.S. Artists such as Georg Baselitz have cited him as an influence. Today his work is held in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Les Sables-d’Olonne; Espace Chaissac, Sainte-Florence, Vendée; amongst others.