Françoise Juvin

Small bouquet of buttercups, oil painting by Françoise Juvin

Françoise Juvin (1927-2010) is a French artist born in Nancy. She entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon in 1941 where she met several artists such as Jacques Truphémus, André Cottavoz, Jean Fusaro, and Pierre Coquet who would become her husband in 1948. With the latter, she joined Sanzisme in 1945, term invented by the painter Philibert-Charrin to characterize a movement bringing together a few former students of the Beaux-Arts de Lyon. Not wanting to belong to any artistic movement whose titles end in "-ism" (Impressionism, Cubism, etc.), they choose to name their group "Sanzism", literally the "Without-ism". This post-war period brings together the younger generations under the age of thirty who wish not to submit to any influence. While in the School of Paris, an intense debate developed around the notions of abstraction and figuration, in Lyon, this group of young artists, barely out of the rigors of war, took up this debate on their own. This new generation brings together personalities as diverse as André Cottavoz, Pierre Doye, James Bansac, Antoine Sanner, Jacques Truphémus, Jean Fusaro, Paul Philibert-Charrin, André Chaix, Paul Clair, Pierre Coquet, Edouard Mouriquand, Roger Bravard, Pierre Palué , André Lauran, Jean Mélinand and Françoise Juvin. The first exhibition of the Sanzistes took place in 1848 at the high school chapel, rue de la Bourse in Lyon. In the 1950s the couple moved to Paris, where Françoise taught plastic arts. She thus unites her two activities, she is both a painter and a teacher. In 1960, the Romanet gallery, formerly located on avenue Matignon, exhibited works by Françoise for several years with Pierre Coquet, Jacques Truphémus, Raoul Pradier and Coutelas. The landscapes, the places chosen by Françoise take shape on the canvas, during the detour of a trip undertaken in several regions of France, in the North, at Tréport, in Les Sables d'Olonne and especially in the south, Collioure, Argelès, Nice and Cannes. But Paris also remains one of her favorite subjects, still lives and flowers, which are for her a pretext to use cheerful and luminous colors. “His union with Pierre does not overshadow his nature. Where he, spontaneously cuts off, eliminates, she, with a kind of candor, brings, adds... and the color exults. (excerpt from the book “Les Sanzistes ou la renaissance de la modernité” by Antoine Vollerin, Editions Mémoire des Arts, 2002)