Yvonne Canu
1921 – 2008

Yvonne Canu is currently one of the most sought after contemporary pointillist painters. This piece is in excellent condition and fully inscribed and signed on the reverse.

Yvonne Canu was born in Morocco in 1921

She was a French painter who belonged to a group of twentieth-century artists who looked to and expanded upon the theories of the divisioniste artists of the late 19th Century. Her paintings usually depict landscapes, harbour scenes and architectural views.

She studied at the College of Decorative Arts in Paris and after World War 2, she met, and was influenced by, several painters most notably Tsuguharu Fujita and Elisee Maclet. Fujita instructed her in drawing and composition and introduced her to the Impressionists. She was subsequently drawn to cubism and studied alongside Ossip Zadkine at the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere

Canu exhibited examples of her work at the Tribute to Seurault exhibition held at the Petit Palais in Geneva. Later, she was profoundly influenced by Seurat’s ‘L’Ile de la Grande-Jatte’ and was profoundly influenced by his work. It was not long after she dedicated herself exclusively to pointillism and adopted the technique for all of her paintings, which are often beautifully coloured and very atmospheric.

She exhibited extensively after the Second World War until her death in 2008.

Although Pointillism is considered a continuation of Impressionism, the conception of forms and volumes is far from it. In pointillism, forms are conceived in a geometry of pure masses, which makes his paintings perfect examples of order and clarity. Yvonne Canú, through the adoption of tiny brushstrokes in the form of dots, manages to accumulate, even on small surfaces, a wide variety of colours and tones, each of which corresponds to one of the elements that contribute to the appearance of the object. At a given distance, these tiny particles mix optically and the result is a much greater intensity of colour than any pigment mixture. In this sense, their studies of light and colour surpass those of all the Impressionists, but they also encounter greater difficulties. With more knowledge and a more disciplined eye, Canú found all the characteristics of the light spectrum, as well as a way to lighten or darken a given hue compared to the simultaneous features produced by the surrounding colours.
Yvonne Canú was a French painter, considered part of Neo-Impressionism, who used pointillism techniques in her works. Born to French parents, she began her studies at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, but these were interrupted by the Second World War. The future pointillist met artists such as Élisée Maclet and Tsuguharu Foujita, who introduced her to landscape painting and the principles of Impressionism. She then attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière with Ossip Zadkine. Yvonne Canu began to present her works after the end of the Second World War, but it was not until 1955 that she finally approached Neo-Impressionism. Canu made this decision under the impression of the painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat, one of the pioneers of this movement. He worked in this pointillist direction for most of his life, until her death in 2008.