Jacques Doucet (Île-de-France1924 – Paris 1994) was a French painter.
A lover of words and colours, he was a friend of the poet and painter Max Jacob, who encouraged him to paint and invited him to make his life a continuous quest.
Together with the painter Jean-Michel Atlan, Doucet will be one of the very few French artists to maintain relations with Belgian, Dutch and Danish experimental groups in the aftermath of the war. He collaborated with the ‘Reflex’ group and joined the ‘Revolutionary Surrealism’.
From 1944 he participated in the Salon d’Automne, the Salon des Surindépendants, the Salon de Mai and international exhibitions in the European cities of Amsterdam, Liège and Brussels.
In 1947 Doucet held his first solo exhibition at the ‘Európai Iskola’ art centre in Budapest. Parallel to his work as a painter, the artist produced important works on paper: lithographs, gouaches, collages, drawings, and tapestry cartoons. He gradually became more and more abstract, and his brushstrokes became broad and dense.
In December 1947, at the invitation of the Dutch artist Corneille Guillaume Beverloo, he travelled to Amsterdam to meet his friends Kerel Appel and Constant Nieuwenhuys, members of the future Dutch Experimental Group founded in July 1948.
Also in 1948, the CoBra group was founded, of which Doucet would be a member, a fertile laboratory of artistic experience from which important individualities would develop.
Jacques Doucet will produce works similar in spirit to the works of Paul Klee, Jean Miró and folk art, based on improvisation and the search for a form of painting made up of elementary figurative signs. The artist’s first Parisian exhibition took place in November 1948 at the Galerie Colette Allend, where he exhibited a selection of paintings and works on paper for the first time.
The 1960s marked a turning point in his painting; his art became more expressionist, more lyrical, while the tones were softened by the use of ochre, grey and blue.
In 1997, the Ariel Gallery in Paris organised a major retrospective of his work.
His works can be seen in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
© Jacques Doucet
