Guy de Rougemont was born on April 23, 1935 in Paris, to the union of the cavalry officer Jean-Louis du Temple de Rougemont (1910-1990) and Louise Lejeune (1913-2002), descendant of General Baron Lejeune (1775 -1848), battle painter and Caroline Murat (1782-1839), sister of Napoleon I. The eldest of five children, Guy de Rougemont shared a passion for art with the rest of his siblings from a very young age.

From childhood, Guy de Rougemont was introduced to artistic practice by his American paternal grandmother, who taught him watercolor: the artist owed him, he said, his first artistic impulses. After the Second World War, his father was transferred to Great Britain, which allowed young Guy to visit London museums during his various stays.

In 1957, Jean-Louis du Temple de Rougemont was appointed to the Pentagon, the family settled for a year in Washington, where Guy de Rougemont attended an American school and exhibited his first watercolor. Back in Paris, he completed his schooling at the Cours Bergson.

In 1953, he prepared for the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in the studio of the painter Bernard Cathelin (1919-2004), rue de la Grande Chaumière. He was admitted in 1954 and favored painting, following classes with the French painter Marcel Gromaire (1892-1971).

His first personal exhibitions were then held abroad: in 1962, his paintings were presented at the d'Arcy Galleries in New York. From 1962 to 1964, he was a state scholarship holder at Casa Velasquez in Madrid and presented his work at the Ateneo Mercantil gallery in Valencia in 1964: Spanish culture permeated him irreversibly.

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The choice of abstraction (1965)

Guy de Rougemont spent the year 1965 in New York, at the invitation of his friends Jean and Irène Amic. Living in a shared apartment with the painter Marisol Escobar, he met prominent artists on the New York scene, from Andy Warhol to Robert Indiana, including Frank Stella. He opens up to large format acrylic paint, measuring the strength of simplified and refined shapes, as well as the power of solid color. His work is often assimilated to the movements of Pop Art and Minimalism, whose forms he draws inspiration from, without claiming to be so.

Four major periods can be outlined in the career of Guy de Rougemont, based on the geometric shapes he used to compose his works. In 1965, he introduced the ellipse. This develops on the surface of its web until a major event occurs.

In 1967, he created the environment for the Fiat Hall on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The artist placed his canvases cut into the shape of ellipses in the exhibition space, establishing a dialogue with the automobiles. Using this geometric form, the artist produced his first objects in volume.

In the early 1970s, he began using the cylinder. The artist considered this geometric shape to be the perfect combination of circles and lines, so he used it to place his polychrome volumes in space. Its large cylinders, also nicknamed “totems”, “columns” or even “beacons” take place in the exterior space, as on the Place Albert Thomas in Villeurbanne, or in the interior space, as shown in the sculpture Table columns.

A major event that marked the use of the cylinder was the coloring of a museum, at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris in 1974. The artist himself recognized, a posteriori, that this installation allowed us to receive numerous orders. The twenty columns of the museum portico were covered in colored PVC, ephemerally. He was able to play with borders, placing his work between two spaces, interior and exterior, the junction of which was materialized by the museum square.

At the end of the decade and particularly during the 1980s, the artist abandoned the cylinder for the raster surface. One of his best-known creations from this period is the colorful marble mosaic created in 1986, which still adorns the pavement of the Bellechasse square, in front of the Orsay Museum. The polychrome geometric shapes have been integrated into the ground of the urban space.

Finally, from the 2000s and until the end of his life, the artist deployed the serpentine line, marking a marked return to the use of curved shapes. Guy de Rougemont has produced a lot on many media, trying his hand at various artistic mediums.

A “tweed rebel”

According to his friend Eduardo Arroyo, he “applies his language to the universe”. The artist wants, like many other artists of the 20th century, to decompartmentalize the arts. Its objective is to place color in the space of daily life. This involves the use of all the artistic means at its disposal. The artist nevertheless describes himself as a painter above all. This distinction was officially made during his appointment to the Academy of Fine Arts as a painter in 1997.

Often described as a socialite, a “rebel in tweed”, he joked, the artist loved art and parties, artists and friends, bullfighting and cats, his remarkable midday farmhouse and his elegant wife. Anne-Marie. Attentive to those around him, he was inspired by the creative worlds of his many artist friends, while remaining singular in his practice, not belonging to any artistic group. His work only follows one guideline, that of formal obviousness, enabled by the use of geometric shapes, understandable by all and dictated by a certain underlying rigor. The color is then organized within these shapes. Adrien Goetz wrote about him in 2019, in the exhibition catalog From the ellipse to the serpentine line at the Diane de Polignac gallery in Paris, that he “liberates his forms as much as he orders them”. Until the end of his life, the artist remained faithful to his quest for color and light, pursuing this creative freedom that is unique to him.