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 near 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 two museums were built for his work. 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.
At a glance
- Born
- 9 March 1920, Bursa
- Died
- 27 August 2013, Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher
Bursa, Thessaloniki and Issy-les-Moulineaux
Jansem was born in Bursa. His family fled to Greece in 1922 and he spent his childhood in Thessaloniki, before they reached Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris, in 1931, when he was eleven and began to paint. He studied at the free academies of Montparnasse from 1934 to 1936 and at the École des Arts Décoratifs, and in 1953 he was made a member of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Goya and Bruegel were his main sources, his mother and his children were the subjects of the early pictures, and he was described as a miserabilist, a painter of unfortunate people. Two museums were built for his work in Japan, in Ginza in Tokyo and at Azumino in Nagano Prefecture. He first visited Armenia in 1973, in 2001 thirty-four of his paintings were given to the Armenian Genocide Museum, and in 2003 France made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.
Brianchon, the Salon d'Automne and Massacres
Before art school he paid his way painting lettering for greyhound racing and retouching photographs, and from 1936 he was taught by Maurice Brianchon, Raymond Legueult and Roland Oudot at the École des Arts Décoratifs, taking his diploma in 1938. A foot injury that had kept him in hospital for four years as a boy also kept him out of the army, and he worked in a gas-mask factory until the Liberation while he went on painting. He became a French citizen in 1940, showed at the Salon des Indépendants from 1941 and the Salon d'Automne from 1945, and won the Prix Populiste in 1951 for Les Buveurs and the City of Paris's Prix Antral in 1953.
On journeys to Greece, Spain and Italy from 1950 he drew bullfights, processions, markets and carnivals from life. His career became international in 1957, and in 1969 the Mitsukoshi gallery in Tokyo gave him a retrospective; the museums in Ginza and Azumino opened in 1992 and 1993. He illustrated books by Baudelaire, Villon, Lorca, Giono and Camus, among others, and in 2002 he went to Yerevan to open his exhibition Massacres at the Armenian Genocide Museum.
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