Jeanne Coppel (Romanian, 1896-1971)

Biography

Jeanne Coppel learnt painting techniques from childhood: from 1910 she began to prepare canvases, learning how pigments work together or against each other. In 1912, Coppel with her friend Dorothea Roth travelled to study in Berlin. Coppel frequently visited Galerie Der Strum thus becoming acquainted with the most innovative modern art movements of the day, including the expressionists of the Blaue Reiter group, Cubism, Orphism of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov’s Rayonism. In 1914 Coppel assisted on Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes production of Le Coq d’Or in Monte Carlo, for which the set and costumes were designed by Goncharova. From the beginning of her career Coppel was among the pioneers of non-figurative painting.

She returned to Romania in 1916 and continued to paint. During the First World War, she was forced to find shelter in a village in Moldova, where painting supplies were unavailable. However, she found a stack of coloured tissue paper and inspired by her acquaintance with Goncharova and Larionov used it to make her first abstract collages inspired by Rayonism. In 1919 Coppel left Romania once again and settled in Paris. She joined the Académie Ranson, where her teachers were Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Paul Sérusier. Her style fluctuated from Nabi figuration to abstraction until around 1936. During the Second World War, she and her family took refuge in Marseille and Aix-en-Provence. In 1942, in a situation similar to one she had experienced in 1916, Coppel returned to collage, this time with greater freedom, producing more complex compositions. She described how the unavailability of her usual paints and canvas had instead opened a greater variety of material to use in her works and thus led to greater pictorial inspiration. She resumed painting when she returned to Paris in 1946. Her originally very rigorous style evolved toward increasingly free forms.

Coppel made major contributions to the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, founded by Robert and Sonia Delaunay in 1939. In 1961, her work was included in a major show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York titled The Art of Assemblage. 

Related artists

Natalia Goncharova / André Lanskoy / Pierre Dmitrienko / Youla Chapoval / Serge Charchoune / Anna Staritsky / Ben Nicholson / Francis Bott

Available works

Please see below the selection of available original artworks by Jeanne Coppel.