“I have long been marked by all the colors of Tunisia; I have kept a colorful, exalted, dazzling, sunny memory of it, which has never left me and never leaves me. .."
Born 15 December 1917, in Tunis; died 27 March in 2006, in Paris. Painter, illustrator.
Self-taught artist, Edgard Naccache began painting in 1934 while working as a proof-reader in a Tunisian newspaper. He became a journalist in 1943. His first exhibition took place in Tunis in 1938. He was sent to a labour camp in 1942 during the occupation of Tunisia by the Axis troops. In 1948, he visits Paris for the first time: his first contact with museums and contemporary painting, and he exhibited at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, invited by priest Maurice Morel, a specialist of Pablo Picasso and Georges Rouault. The following year, in 1949, he participated in the creation of the artistic movement of l’Ecole de Tunis. In 1950, Edgard Naccache won the prize for young painting in Tunisia. Between 1950 and 1960, his research leads him to give up subject. After a second trip in Paris and his first solo exhibition at the Galerie de l’Université in 1961, he definitely leaves Tunisia to settle in France in 1962, where he is then devoting all his time to painting. He was invited to the founding exhibition of Figuration narrative in 1965, "La Figuration narrative dans l'art contemporain", in Paris. His art, during a first period (1963-1965) heads towards abstraction (« Les marelles »), then (1965-1970-1976) he evolved within the movement of « Narrative Figuration ». With time he settles into the « New Figuration » movement. Edgard Naccache was buried in Paris in the Montparnasse cemetery.
“I have long been marked by all the colors of Tunisia; I have kept a colorful, exalted, dazzling, sunny memory of it, which has never left me and never leaves me. Consequently, it is more than a memory that I carried, it is in the very essence of my sensitivity that I was marked by these colors of childhood, of youth and it is obvious that I find them permanently in my current work”.