- Artist
- Edouard Pignon 1905–1993
- Original title
- Les Monteurs de Lignes électriques à Vallauris
- Medium
- Ink on paper
- Dimensions
- Support: 581 × 778 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1961
- Reference
- T00438
Catalogue entry
Edouard Pignon born 1905 [- 1993]
T00438 Les Monteurs de Lignes électriques à Vallauris
(Men installing Electric Cables at Vallauris) 1954
Inscribed '54 | Pignon' b.r.
India ink on paper, 22 7/8 x 30 5/8 (58 x 78)
Presented by the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1961
Prov:
With Leicester Galleries, London (purchased from the artist through the Galerie de France, Paris); with Mayor Gallery, London; Friends of the Tate Gallery 1961
Lit:
Jean-Albert Cartier, Edouard Pignon
(Geneva 1955), p.9; Henri Lefebvre, Pignon
(Paris 1956), pp.47-8
Repr:
The Friends of the Tate Gallery: Annual Report 1961-62
(London 1962), between pp.12 and 13
Pignon made some dozens of sketches on this theme at Vallauris in 1954. He told the compiler that this drawing was executed in his studio, from notes made on the spot, as was his usual practice. Then in Paris the following year he began a large painting on this subject, measuring 260 x 195cm, which he finally abandoned as unsatisfactory. (Though listed in the catalogue of his exhibition at the Galerie de France in June-July 1955, it was never actually exhibited there). In the end he only made a very few small canvases, none of which has ever been exhibited apart from one in his retrospective exhibition at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in 1966.
A drawing listed as 'Les Electriciens (1953)' was included in the New Year Exhibition
at the Leicester Galleries in January 1957 (38) and again (probably the same drawing) in their exhibition Artists of Fame and of Promise. Pt.2
in August-September 1959 (26), but as the Leicester Galleries had three drawings of this subject it is uncertain which one this was. As the Tate's drawing was acquired unframed it seems likely that it had never been exhibited.
Published in:
Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, p.609, reproduced p.609