Rosenberg & Co. is pleased to present Marguerite Louppe: Diagramming Space, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States. This exhibition brings together over 30 paintings and works on paper by the artist that draw upon Cubism and Purism to delineate space and color fields while evoking an indelible familiarity.

Marguerite Louppe (1902–1988) was born in Commercy, in eastern France. Soon after her birth, Louppe’s family moved to Paris. In the 1920s, Louppe attended classes at the Académie Julian, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, the Académie Scandinave, and the Académie André Lhote. These establishments encouraged both teachers and artists to rethink the more standardized methods of traditional French art schools. At the Académie Julian, Louppe’s contemporaries were Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Louise Bourgeois, and Maurice Brianchon, whom she married in 1934.

By the 1930s, Louppe had developed an intimate sense of subject and style: she painted delicate still lifes and interior scenes of life in Paris. She experienced great success in these early years, exhibiting at many Parisian galleries, such as Galerie Charpentier in the 1936 exhibition entitled Premier Salon de la Nouvelle Génerátion, which showed the “elite of the young painters.” That same year, the French state acquired one of her paintings, now held by the Centre Pompidou.

After living and working together in Paris, where they entertained a rich social life and hosted regular salons, Louppe and Brianchon purchased a country home in Dordogne in the 1950s. Here, Louppe had a dedicated studio space for the first time in her career. This period saw her greatest output. Her early, soft interior scenes evolved into theoretical examinations of artistic practice itself. Her studio became one of her primary subjects, as did the garden and landscape surrounding her country home. By the 1960s, her landscapes utilized both a Diebenkorn-like abstraction and the linear refractions seen in her earlier work.

Over the course of her career, Margeurite Louppe balanced traditional figuration with modernist methods of abstraction. She embraced a contradiction and tension between the straightforwardness of her arrangements and the singularity of her planar compositions. Louppe’s spatial diagramming and unpredictable orchestration of color combine to define her oeuvre, as evident in works such as the angular Nature morte aux cigarettes, the light-struck Carafe et orchidée, and the subtle Atelier de Maurice Brianchon avec palette. Art historian Karen Wilkin writes, “Louppe’s paintings reveal their full complexity and inventiveness slowly. They demand that we pay close attention and reward us when we do.”