Jean Jansem valuation
Painted dancers, bathers and the Armenian genocide, in earth colours and heavy line.
Jean Jansem was born Hovhannes Semerdjian in Ottoman Turkey in 1920, survived the aftermath of the Armenian genocide as an infant, and reached France in 1931 by way of Greece.
What a work by Jean Jansem is worth
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Bio
Jean Jansem was born Hovhannes Semerdjian in Ottoman Turkey in 1920, survived the aftermath of the Armenian genocide as an infant, and reached France in 1931 by way of Greece. He trained in Paris and painted for seven decades in a manner that barely changed: figures — dancers, acrobats, bathers, mothers and children — modelled in ochres, greys and browns with a strong dark contour, monumental in feeling regardless of scale. In his last years he made a large cycle on the genocide, now installed in Yerevan. He died at Paris in 2013.
The market runs on two axes: France, where he showed for decades and where the earlier work is best understood, and Japan, where he was extremely popular from the 1970s and where a museum was devoted to him. Oils on canvas or board lead. There is a very substantial lithographic output published in signed and numbered editions over many years, which is plentiful and modestly priced, and which is frequently mistaken for painting in reproduction. Drawings and studies in sanguine and charcoal are numerous.
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