Author Description

He was born in Bordeaux in 1920. Adolescent, he met Picasso to whom he showed a representation he made of the Sainte-Chapelle. The master, whom the prospect astonishes, asks him to keep the drawing. Coulon refuses and runs away! At the age of 20, during a trip to the Alps, he decided to devote himself entirely to painting. From the start, his works are all abstract. During the post-war years he was introduced to artistic circles as the second Ecole de Paris and became close to painters such as Nicolas de Stael, André Lanskoy and Maria Henela Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szenes. His beginnings are promising since at 29 he exhibited alone at the gallery Jeanne Bucher whose guestbook shows the presence of artists who will soon know the celebrity. Among them, Rothko, Vieillard, Deyrolle or Arnal. The following year, in 1950, he participated in a group exhibition in New York. Then he will refuse almost all the exhibition proposals. His painting evolves, especially in terms of chromatic scale, with the family events that affect it. In the same way, his work reflects the happier events of his marriage and his travels to the United States and Italy. Most of his canvases are of small size and a very refined style, vertical juxtaposition of colors the width of a flat brush. f the oil painting represents the backbone of the work of Jean-Michel Coulon, from the 2000s he will put his creativity at the service of shimmering collages in which he puts all his energy. A true creative frenzy to which oil paintings of the 50s and 60s serve as a support. This book proposes to discover the work of an artist whose work has been praised by his peers but which seemed to refuse the recognition of the general public during his lifetime.