Georges de Feure

Georges de Feure (born on September 6, 1868 in Paris, died November 26, 1943), was a French painter, theatrical designer, and industrial art designer in the symbolism and Art Nouveau styles. He is a designer of furniture, decorative objects and French airplanes.

Georges Joseph van Sluijters is of Dutch origin by his father and Belgian by his mother, born in Liège. He was born in Paris in 1868, but the family was obliged to emigrate to the Netherlands in 1870 at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. His father is an architect.

In 1886, Georges de Feure was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam, which he abandoned after two years. He came to Paris in 1889, and settled at Montmartre; He joins the bohemian Parisian. His circle of intimate includes the composers Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Erik Satie. His pictorial work is definitely inspired by the poems of Charles Baudelaire and the novels of Georges Rodenbach. In the 1890s, he was recognized by Puvis de Chavannes as one of the most important painters of the French Symbolist movement. To live, he became an illustrator at the Courrier Français, Le Figaro Illustré, and for two periodicals of the house Goupil & Cie, Le Théâtre et Les Modes.

His work is characterized by numerous representations of femme fatale, a theme that can be found in all the works of the Art Nouveau movement.

His reputation as a symbolist painter and his experience as a poster artist encouraged art dealer Siegfried Bing to approach him in order to entrust him with the construction of the façade of the “Art Nouveau Pavilion” at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. In addition, Bing confided to Feure, in the company of Eugène Gaillard and Édouard Colonna, the realization of two interiors in this same pavilion. The furniture and decorative objects he designed for the boudoir were praised by critics who saw in it a representation of the quintessence of French art. Their delicacy and feminine grace are praised. Gabriel Mourey for the magazine Les Arts décoratifs describes them as “one of the most exquisite and perfect decorative sets that our era has created. Three years earlier he had written a long article on Feure in The Studio.

Four of his posters are reproduced in the magazine Les Maîtres de l’affiche (1895-1900), namely: 5th exhibition of the Salon des Cent, Jeanne d’Arc magazine, Le Journal des ventes and Thés du Palais Indien. He also collaborates with Cocorico.

Presented in 1892 at Le Barc de Boutteville in the circle of symbolist painters, he participated in the Salon de la Rose-Croix in 1893 and 1894 and in the Secession of Munich in 1896. A great retrospective of his work was held in Paris in 1903 , Then travels to Hamburg and The Hague.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, he continued to create decorative ensembles (evolving from the Art Nouveau style to the Art Deco style), and in 1909 founded De Feure & Deperdussin (DFD & Cie) Monoplane airplanes with inverted reverse propulsion with Armand Deperdussin as his partner, who will eventually dismiss him, before being arrested for a dark matter of speculation. Two models came out of the workshops, the DFD1 and the DFD2, whose design combined Louis Béchereau. At the time of the first tests, at the end of 1910, Georges de Feure had a serious accident: he withdrew from the affair.

He then moved on to the making of costumes and sets for the theater, especially in London where he lived during the First World War.

During the 1920s, he was the artistic adviser for Madeleine Vionnet’s stores and then for the Schwarz-Haumont establishments, specialized in the construction of metallic art structures.

In February 1942, after a long illness, he asked the Ministry of Fine Arts to acquire two of his paintings for the national collection, which he was denied. He died on November 26, 1943 in the Paris of the Occupation.

Georges de Feure has three children: two sons, Jean-Corneille and Pierre-Louis, in the early 1890s, of his mistress Pauline Domec; Then a daughter of Marguerite Guibert, with whom he married July 7, 1897.