ArtistMendoze, Robert

Artist Years1930-2014

Artist NationalityFrench

TitleHarvesting Hay, Normandy

Year1967

MediumPainting > Oil

DimensionsCanvas: 10.5 X 18 inches

Accession NumberRC1960

NotesRobert Louis Mendoze was was born in Toulon on 10 October 1930. He was the son of Denis Mendoze, an employee of the PLM Railway, and Jeanne Fargues, both from Toulon. He is the elder brother of Christian Mendoze. In 1962, he married Jeanine Dumas, a native of the Allier, of whom he had a son Christophe Mendoze.

He showed real drawing skills at an early age and at the age of fifteen he joined the École des Beaux-Arts de Toulon. From 1945 to 1950, he was a pupil of Eugène Baboulène and Henri Pertus. He is passionate about Paul Guigou and Vincent van Gogh. In 1950, with comrades from the École des Beaux-Arts including Pierre Anfosso, Jacques Burois, Monique Ducreux and Gilbert Louage, he founded the Groupe 50 which brought together young Toulon painters with a passion for figurative. For fifteen years, this ephemeral group allowed them to make themselves known at salons or collective exhibitions, first at the Musée d'Art de Toulon and then throughout France.

From 1955 to 1965, Robert Mendoze was selected for the Prix du Rotary International at the fifty-year-old in Menton, the Prix de la jeune artistique Méditerranée in Nice, the Prix du Provençal at the Festival d'Avignon, the Prix de la ville de Toulon at the Festival de Toulon, the Prix Othon-Friesz in Paris and the Prix Fénéon in Paris.

In Nice, he was noticed by the art dealer Dezso Kellermann who began to buy him canvases, which Michel Kellermann then continued after succeeding his father. In 1966, his works were exhibited at the Armand Drouant Gallery in Paris. He nevertheless resisted the temptation of the capital and preferred to live in the countryside to be close to nature and paint on the motif.

After his marriage, he settled in Sainte-Anastasie-sur-Issole where he participated actively in cultural life. Representing the Toulon school, he claims to be a figurative and landscaper. He painted the Varese campaign in all seasons and belonged to the Provençal Imager Group. He was also interested in the Allier, the country of his wife, Brittany and Normandy whose light for him was equal to that of his native land, not to mention the ports of the Toulon area[. Its landscapes and navies are continuously open; it holds huge spaces on cigar box bottoms. It gives the first place in work on the matter of scrub, rocks, foliage, petals of its favorite flowers, roses, sunflowers, iris. It offers a beyond the landscape, without a message or grandiloquence, thanks to an art that does not care to imitate nature but tries to do as it does.

In 1970, the English art dealer Robert Perham became interested in him and presented his paintings in the United States; this collaboration lasted about twenty years. In 1990, American designer Marie Warren opened a gallery in Atlanta to present her works and became her exclusive agent for the United States, Recognised abroad as a post-impressionist painter, his paintings are exhibited in Atlanta, Geneva, London, Mannheim, Monaco, Montreal, New York and Osaka.

In 1980, while remaining in Sainte-Anastasie-sur-Issole, he became professor of painting at the École municipale des beaux-arts de La Seyne-sur-Mer. He taught his students that "we can very well, in our time again, paint trees, flowers, everything that lives around us and is bursting interesting." His choices relate to the prosaism of the subject, the simplicity of the object represented, and the power of the emotion that emerges from it.

After his death, thanks to his son Christophe Mendoze, who retained part of his works, many posthumous exhibitions were organized in the Toulon region.
(source: wikipedia.org)