Eugène Paul dit Gen Paul was born in Paris in 1895 where he died in 1975. Coming from a working class background, he learnt painting as a self-taught artist by bathing his production in the scenes of his daily life in Montmartre: balls, views of Paris, which earned him the reputation of being one of the many “painters of Montmartre” that he assiduously rubbed shoulders with, like Utrillo.
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Gen Paul developed a style with multiple influences, marked by the avant-gardists of the turn of the century – Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh in particular – as well as by his contemporaries – his friend Juan Gris, Picasso’s cubism, Vlaminck’s colour and touch. Skillfully distorting, sometimes to excess, the reality he observes, using vivid colours with symbolic and eloquent tonalities, Gen Paul is often considered an expressionist painter, whose impasto, coupled with a highly expressive gestural intensity, brings him closer to the art of a Chaïm Soutine.
