Gaston Chaissac is recognized today as a major artist of the twentieth century. Of modest origin, self-taught, his work is quickly noticed by the avant-garde creators of the cubist movement, who encourage him.
His corpus of drawings, a major part of his work, is abundant and lively. Gaston Chaissac was in fragile health and stayed at the sanatorium of Clairvivre, north of the Dordogne, between 1939 and 1942, a period of intense creation, but also of questions and existential crisis revealed by his prolific correspondence. The exhibition brings together some forty original drawings from this period, to which are added large-scale paintings by the artist. The entourage and artistic context are evoked by the works of creators with whom Chaissac had friendly and letter-writing relations early on, Otto Freundlich, Albert Gleizes and Jean Dubuffet, and his references, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
A presentation of raw works of art, to which Chaissac resembles himself, emphasizes the modernity and acuity of artists long put on the sidelines of the scholarly world of art.