Yvonne Canu French, 1921-2008

Born in 1921 in Meknes, Morocco, Yvonne Canu was the daughter of French colonial administrators. Interested in art as a child, she was encouraged to pursue a career as a painter seriously by her father. Canu would begin her studies at Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in the late 1930s. Although her time there would be interrupted by the start of the Second World War in 1939, as a young artist she would meet established painters such as Elisée Maclet and Leonard Tsuguharu-Foujita. While the Neo-Impressionist style that Canu was famous for bore little resemblance to their works, both figures were instrumental in introducing the young artist to the techniques and preoccupations of Impressionism. In the late 1940s, Canu would complete her training at the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere, the leading centre for non-academic painting.

Despite her impressive classical and impressionistic training, Canu’s style developed largely from a single encounter with the seminal pointillist work, George Seurat’s famed Sunday Afternoon on the Grand Jatte in 1955. Struck by how complex contrasts of primary and tertiary colours could coalesce into intensely lit landscapes, Canu wholeheartedly adopted the style, after her encounter with Seurat’s work she would begin to exclusively work in a neo-impressionist idiom.

Belonging to a generation of mid twentieth-century French artists who would begin to return to divisionist and pointillist techniques and attempt to expand upon them, interest in Canu’s work continues to grow. Of particular note was a 2016 retrospective exhibition of her works on the banks of Lake Lugano, titled ‘Yvonne Canu: The Last of the Pointillists’ that showed her oeuvre alongside works by Signac, Seurat, and Foujita. With her mastery of juxtaposing tones while still creating a meticulously delineated composition, Canu remains one of the final paradigms of Neo-Impressionism.