French non-figurative painter of the new School of Paris (nouvelle École de Paris) who gave up giving titles to his paintings of large angular and curved intersecting lines.
Louis Nallard’s mother died from the Spanish flu a few months after he was born, and he was raised by his maternal grandparents. Far from the Mediterranean, he travelled to Dombes every summer to where his father’s family came from, and these landscapes of his childhood informed his work ever after.
During World War II he became friends with Marcel Bouqueton with whom he produced a new exhibition in 1940, then attended the “Beaux-arts d’Alger” in 1941. He thus made the acquaintance of Marcel Fiorini, Robert Lavergne who would later introduce him at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher, and Maria Manton, whom he married in 1944. In 1946 he became friends with the painter Georges Ladrey who, like him, was passionate about the work of Pierre Bonnard.
In 1947 Louis Nallard and Maria Manton left Algiers with Fiorini and settled in the Paris region where they befriended Roger Bissière and Roger Chastel. From 1948 Nallard took part in group exhibitions, at the “Salon des Réalités Nouvelles”, “Salon de Mai”, and forged contacts with the Jeanne Bucher gallery, which welcomed his paintings from 1948 onwards.
Quickly established in Paris, Nallard and Manton, from 1950-1952 took up the management of the Hôtel du Vieux-Colombier, near Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which many artists frequented after their shows. Their tenants included Serge Poliakoff, who earned his living playing the balalaika in Russian restaurants, Herman Braun-Vega, freshly arrived from Peru, Sidney Bechet, Robert Hossein, the sculptor César, and the writers Jean Sénac and Kateb Yacine.
In the 1960s Nallard and Manton were directors of “La Galerie”, which they opened to young painters, and the “Salon des Réalités Nouvelles” of which Maria Manton was the general secretary from 1961 to 1995, while Louis Nallard was its vice-president, then honorary president. While his exhibitions followed one another in France and abroad, Louis Nallard joined the School of Fine Arts in 1975, where he taught until 1983.
His wife, Maria Manton, died in August 2003 at age 92. Louis Nallard died on 15 October 2016 in Paris at age 98.
Link to Wikipedia biography (French)