ROGER GEORGES ANDRÈ DUVAL (1901-?) Meudon (Seine-et-Oise), France

La Chambré 1924

Oil on canvas

Signed and dated: ROGER DUVAL XXIV(lower left)

Exhbited: Paris, Salon des Indépendants, 1926, no. 1122

For more information see: Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs, Vol. 4, E. Bénézit (Paris: Librairie Gründ, 1976).

Painting: H: 23 2/3” x W: 36 1/5”

Framed: H: 35” x 47 5/8”

Roger Duval painted in a modernist figurative style and beginning in 1920 regularly exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. In 1925 he was awarded a prize by Paul Poiret for a painting entitled Conversation and again in 1926 for another painting entitled Bal Musette. Also in 1926, La Chambrée (1924) was exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants. By 1928 Duval’s technique had evolved into a moderninst/cubist style and a group of his paintings were featured in an Exposition of Painting and Sculpture in Boston, MA.

 It is interesting to note Duval’s shared vision with Picasso in their depiction of peasant figures in repose. Their full-bodied, voluptuous and sensual forms illustrate both artists’ sculptural approach to painting in the early 1920s. However by the mid-1920s Duval and Picasso’s painting styles evolved from these softer, rounded shapes into more angular, abstracted forms.