Pierre Bosco, La partie de Polo, 1960, Oil on Canvas

Pierre Bosco Oil on canvas signed lower right "La partie de Polo" Circa 1960


Pierre Bosco became interested in art at an early age and his first works show a natural sensitivity to color and a desire to give volume to images, which would later become his artistic signature. When he discovered the paintings of Cézanne, Pissarro, Gauguin and Rouault, he was convinced that his future lay in Paris. There he met the artists Pierre Bonnard, André Derain, Aristide Maillol, Edouard Vuillard and his brother-in-law, the Nabi painter Ker-Xavier Roussel, who became his great spiritual master and with whom he would discover his own artistic personality. In the 1950s, he began to experience greater success by participating in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, where his paintings received praise. The following year, he exhibited fifty paintings at the Galerie du Hérisson to an enthusiastic audience. The French press associated the paintings of this period with a "bewitching magic," and according to the poet Guy Lavaud, "Bosco is a powerful painter and a visionary." For three consecutive years, the painter was selected for the prestigious Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Paris prize. 1956, Bosco signed a fifteen-year contract with the renowned Galerie de l'Elysée in Paris for exclusive representation. At this point in his career, Pierre Bosco had reached a maturity appreciated by art connoisseurs as well as by the press, which was unanimous in praising his "dazzling visions"; Le Figaro considered him "one of the greatest painters of his generation" and the New York Herald saw him as "the latest Picasso in perspective, and very much in vogue" (May 14, 1957). By now, Bosco had earned his place among the greatest names in contemporary painting: Chagall, Braque, Picasso, Matisse; his paintings are in the permanent collections of museums. In 1964, he exhibited at the Max Bodner Gallery in New York; his paintings were shown among those of Marie Laurencin, Picasso, Signac, Pissarro, Renoir and Rouault. In April 1967, Bosco was awarded the silver medal of the city of Paris and in June he was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Pierre Bosco has a special place among American and European collectors, particularly in France and Italy, but also in Scandinavian countries. Many Hollywood celebrities such as Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Jack Palance, as well as the former French president Georges Pompidou, were all collectors of Bosco's paintings. His works are also in the collections of the Musée de la Ville de Paris, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Tel Aviv, Caramulo (Portugal), the Beaverbrook Art Gallery (NB, Canada), the Toledo Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, etc.