DUFRESNE, CHARLES (French, 1876-1938)

Studied sculpture and pastel at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris until 1910, when after being awarded the Villa Abd-el Tif scholarship he spent two years in Algeria.
His contact with the oriental world left an imprint on his mind which remained with him for the rest of his life. Exoticism is not only reflected in his choice of subjects but also in his handling of the light, his imaginative sense of colour, and in his brush-stroke the cursive sweep of the arabesque.
Throughout his lifetime he was very well respected and was offered to teach at the École des Beaux-Arts. He participated in several Salons: de Peinture, Indépendants, Nationale, d'Automne and in 1923 at the Salon des Tuileries, of which he was a founding member.
His work was widely exhibited in Paris, London and Brussels. In 1938 he came third in the Pittsburgh Carnegie Prize after Picasso and an American artist. That year, an entire room at the Venice Biennale was dedicated to his work after his death in August.
Apart from sculpture and painting, Dufresne also practised mural painting with commissions for the Palais de Chaillot and the Faculté de Pharmacie and designed stage decorations for the Odeon Theatre in Paris. His cartoons commissioned by the Mobilier National were woven by the Beauvais tapestry manufacture.

Public collections include:
Musée Carnavalet, Paris
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris
Musée de l’Armée, Paris
Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Grenoble
Musée des territories d’Outre-Mer, Paris
Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne, Paris
Museum of Modern Art, New York
and major museums in Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Brussels, Copenhagen, Geneva, Moscow Stockholm, Prague, Saint-Tropez, Washington DC.