Georges Bauquier’s career is defined by his intimate personal and professional relationship with the great Cubist master, Fernand Léger. For twenty years the two painters would work closely together, and after Léger’s death Bauquier would be instrumental in both founding a museum dedicated to the artist and writing his eight volume Catalogue Raisonné. Crucially, despite effectively remaining in Léger’s shadow until the older painter’s passing in 1955, Bauquier was able to create his own synthesis of Cubism, creating a personal style that combined Léger, Braque and Cézanne for which he is increasingly lauded.

Born in 1910 in Nîmes, Bauquier would decide to become an artist in his early twenties, enrolling the School of Fine Arts in Paris in 1934 he would receive a first-rate classical education in draughtsmanship. However, after becoming increasingly dissatisfied at the constraints of academic painting, Bauquier would join the School of Contemporary Art in 1936, and immediately begin to work closely under its then director, Fernand Léger. After a fraught period during the Second World War, where the young artist would join the Communist Party and French Resistance (culminating in a period imprisoned by Nazi occupiers) he would immediately reunite with his teacher. In the next decade the two artists would work together daily; so close was Bauquier’s relationship with Léger that after the latter’s death in 1955 he would marry his wife, Nadia. Alongside his new wife, Bauquier immediately set about creating a museum to celebrate Léger’s life, which they opened in 1960 and would subsequently furnish with 348 works by Léger.

Bauquier’s own art would develop quickly, and while he often declined to publicise his output, his exhibitions in the early 1950s were prefaced by Léger and saw great success in Paris. His works are usually predicated on a balance between great colouristic freedom and maintaining rigid compositional principles which he had learned from his teacher. Bauquier’s best known pieces are his still lifes, which occupy bold, often Cubist-inspired interiors, and frequently feature the artist’s favoured motif, a single piece of vegetation.