Bio

André Enard was born in Le Mans, France on 15 October 1926 to his parents Henri Enard and Yvette Douet. From an early age he knew he would be an artist, impressed by the extraordinary beauty of the cathedral in Le Mans which he grew up near and saw every day on his way to and from school.

During World War II, André went to art school while taking part in the French resistance. After the war ended, he went to Paris and enrolled in the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts when he was seventeen years old, where he learned to paint on walls in the traditional technique of fresco. As André described it: "You have to paint when it is still wet. You have one hour, after that it is too late."

André then trained as a painter at the ateliers of Fernand Léger in 1948, enlarging sketches given to him by Leger onto canvas. He also worked with stained glass and mosaïc, renovating cathedrals when windows lost in the war were being replaced across Europe, but mostly in Germany. André considered Leger a great master and was heavily influenced by him in those early years of his career.

Aside from Leger, he also was strongly influenced by Piet Mondrian, one of the pioneers of early 20th century abstract art.

In 1950, André began to exhibit some of his works along with other painters he had met and worked with through Leger, including Ellsworth Kelly. His work at that time, as he explained it, was: "Abstract. Squares. Triangles. Circles. Primitive, in a way, but it was new at that time. It had a certain success and we showed in different galleries in Paris and Germany."

On August 12th, 1958, André Enard married the Icelandic artist, Valgerdur (Vala) Arnadottir Hafstad with whom he had three children: Arni, Grimur and Halldor. Together with their sons, they moved from Saulx-Marchais, a small farm village outside of Paris in Les Yvelines, Northern France to Armonk, New York, for a teaching job in 1974. André painted nearly every day during the five years he lived in Armonk.

He then moved to New York City, which is when he began to work with geometric shapes and labyrinths. André also returned to working with tree bark, fixing the bark on the canvas and painting around it, producing a series of paintings referred to as "planets".

Several solo shows of his paintings were given in New York and at various locales in the United States. Throughout this period, Enard also taught drawing at The School of Visual Arts, where he worked until retiring in 2008.

André passed away at his home in New York City on 28 July 2010. He was buried in the north of Iceland.

André found his passion first with Piet Mondrian’s art, reflections of his tree bark, then with color, magic numbers, fine lines or mesh, fractals, variations and relationships on form and time/space, geometric shapes, labyrinths, forces, elements, movement, nature, laws, religion, tradition, ancient/symbolic art and music.

André held exhibitions in:

Paris 1960-1973
Macon, France 1974
New York City 1976-2011

Many of Enard’s paintings were meditations on what he called, “the infinitely small”. These took the forms of labyrinths, mandalas and modern abstract icons, and they all have the effect of evoking stillness in the viewer.

“These works are treasures. No one, to my knowledge, has more diligently gathered up the skeins of traditional forms, symbols, and materials to create twentieth-century icons of such intensity. They can make a chapel out of a game room,” wrote Roger Lipsey in his book, The Spiritual in 20th Century Art.

In the 1980’s his work changed dramatically when he began a series of paintings in which he addressed himself to the idea of the “infinitely great.” These were images of the planets composed of tree bark and sculpture. “Each planet’s different texture comes from a different bark of a different tree chosen from a different continent. Simplicity/complexity, construction/impression, truly a harmonic pleasure for the eye,” wrote William Segal.

─ Excerpt from Andre Yves Enard, a short film about the painter

Andre Enard has reversed the usual direction of a painter’s progress (from representational toward the abstract). The lush geometries of his early work - the sumptuous, sophisticated esoteric symbols, masterfully rendered and teeming with potential - almost in lift-off from the canvas - give way to, or unveil, at the end of a long career, his aboriginal and enigmatic muse.

It is a significant reversal - from the early abstractions to the figurative (or, more accurately, to the iconic), from the masterfully executed tantric symbols, to these student-like, almost awkward drawings of a muse upon whose oval forms and prominent cheek-bones one can just detect the wisp of a maze - a serpent’s egg (or abstract thumbprint), which has soaked through the rich, receptive medium and throbbing gold of his early mysterious emblems.

She is a Nordic Beauty, this muse, a youth’s ideal of the eternal, enigmatic “she,” a Cranach Eve (or pagan spirit) - blonde, green-eyed and spiky-haired, a punk Mona Lisa, maybe (but thinner, “slim as an eel”), Enard’s enticing muse, she who was always there, perhaps, changing his earliest work with their dazzling pointillism and luxuriant dark power, the delicate, fair and enigmatic muse behind the symbol, sometimes slightly smiling and forever young.

In at least one painting in which this archetypal female is juxtaposed to a series of Morandi-like pots and jugs, she is clearly likened to a vessel herself: smoothly depicted, full throated and wide shouldered, her image fills what could be considered the central panel of a triptych and is flanked on one side by these vessels; in the other panel, unmistakably asserting the cosmic, vast fulfillment of the enlighten human being, her image looms against the splendor of the starry sky.

These late works which have the dry and pristine radiance of frescos, are heralded by paintings of an altogether different woman in altogether different tones and an altogether different quality of paint; and they raise yet other questions about Enard’s work. In one, a gleeful, dark haired woman, strums her unusually long guitar in fleshy browns and oily blues. In another, still rakishly grinning, she saws a violin. In others (referring perhaps, to Madame Bonnard), she is in her bath, parts of her playfully emerging from the water - here an elbow, there a knee, the rest, unknown, submerged….and the tub itself? Life-sized (the works of this period are large) and partly of carved wood, it is, energy from the surface of the canvas, merely an incursion of painting into sculpture? Or do these multi-media examples of Enard’s work, dashed down with deliberate disdain for convention by a painter who knows what he is doing, present an abrupt, almost humorous incursion of sacred and iconic space into your own room?

─ Celestine Frost and Carl Lehmann-Haupt