Rating and value of paintings by Bernard Lorjou

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Artist's rating and value

Bernard Lorjou's value on the art market is extremely high. His most prized works are his surrealist canvases, whether portraits or landscapes.

The artist is particularly prized among 20th-century Italian painters and draughtsmen. Bernard Larjou's works sell for between €10 and €33,800 at auction.

His painting Le port de Londres (oil on canvas), dating from 1946, sold for €33,800, against an estimate of €10,000-15,000. 

Order of value from the most basic to the most prestigious

Bernard Larjou's style and technique

Bernard Lorjou, a singular figure of twentieth-century French Expressionism, asserts his style with a vibrant burst of color and self-assumed excess.

Defying the conventions of an often abstract modernity, he claims a figurative painting where excess is never gratuitous but viscerally committed.

His canvases, marked by sweeping gestures and an exaggerated palette, convey an almost primitive urgency, a need to capture the world's violence and beauty in their tragic cohabitation.

The forms, sometimes distorted to the extreme, oscillate between the grotesque and the sublime, bearing witness to a humanity confronted with its own abysses.

Lorjou, a true alchemist of pictorial drama, superimposes layers of dense matter, bringing out vibrant textures that amplify the emotional intensity of the work.

With this exuberant, uncompromising painting, he's not trying to seduce, but to shock, to remind us that art, in its raw essence, is a cry for the absolute.

The life of Bernard Lorjou

Born in Blois in 1908, Bernard Lorjou immediately set himself apart from the dominant trends of his time, asserting an independence that would mark his entire career.

Trained as a self-taught artist, he rose through the ranks of the Parisian art world in the 1930s, first as a poster painter before making his mark on the pictorial scene.

Rejecting glossy formalism and the diktats of abstraction, he militates for a free figurative painting, capable of expressing the violence and tumult of his century.

Co-founder, in 1948, of the group "L'Homme Témoin", he rose up against the academicism of modern art, advocating a return to the subject, to the human, in all its complexity.

His career was marked by controversial exhibitions, where his sometimes provocative and powerful work aroused both admiration and rejection.

From scenes of historic massacres to monumental portraits, Lorjou builds up a body of work in which rage and tenderness intermingle, bearing witness to his sharp eye for tragedy and the grandeur of existence.

Far from passing fashions, he stands out as a discordant but essential voice, that of an artist for whom painting was an act of faith in the truth of vision.

Focus on The Death of Ghandi, Bernard Lorjou, 1948

In La Mort de Gandhi (The Death of Gandhi), a monumental painting from 1948, Bernard Lorjou deploys a gripping dramaturgy that is striking for its emotional intensity and resolutely figurative approach.

The work, emblematic of his artistic and political commitment, transcends simple historical homage to reach a universal scope, that of a meditation on sacrifice and violence.

The composition, dominated by the Mahatma's outstretched body, revolves around a dramatic centrality that immediately catches the eye.

Wrapped in his traditional white dhoti, Gandhi, a figure of peace and asceticism, becomes the epicenter of a pictorial tumult in which Lorjou stages the visceral confrontation between light and darkness.

The tones, oscillating between the dazzling purity of white and bloody reds, evoke a struggle between spirituality and the brutality of the world. These colors don't just illustrate: they vibrate, they scream, as if the canvas itself bore the scars of the event it represents.

Lorjou's brushwork, with its almost ferocious vigor, makes no attempt to soften the violence of the moment. On the contrary, he explodes it in a dense, often impasto material, where contours blur to better suggest the vital, tragic energy that permeates the scene.

Around the martyr lie indistinct figures, sometimes accusing, sometimes annihilated. This silent chorus, echoing ancient frescoes, gives the whole a theatrical dimension that draws on both Christian iconography and Eastern narrative traditions.

In a gesture that goes beyond mere denunciation, Lorjou makes this work a meeting place between the individual and the collective, between history and eternity.

The very texture of the paint, with its striations, impastos and raging brushstrokes, reflects an inner struggle that seems to run through both painter and viewer.

The Death of Gandhi is not a reconstruction. It does not aspire to accuracy or objectivity. It is a vision, a pictorial cry that speaks directly to the viewer's interpretation.

In choosing to paint this scene with such intensity, Lorjou is part of a humanist tradition in which art becomes the mirror of the torments and hopes of his time.

But, true to his approach, he rejects sentimentality: the work, despite its emotional charge, remains anchored in a raw, almost uncompromising materiality.

This painting perfectly embodies Lorjou's singularity: a visceral, committed style of painting that has no regard for fashions or academic expectations.

By exalting the tensions between beauty and horror, figuration and abstraction, he reminds us that art is not a refuge but a battlefield, a place where the infinite struggle to grasp the elusive is played out before the viewer's eyes.

The Death of Gandhi thus remains a major work of the post-war period, not only for its formal audacity but also for its ability to challenge, disturb and move, reaffirming the essential role of the artist as witness and prophet of his time.

Bernard Lorjou's imprint on his era

Bernard Lorjou, a singular, rebellious figure on the twentieth-century art scene, left his mark on his time with a body of work in which figurative art became an act of resistance to the hegemony of abstract trends.

While abstraction triumphed in the immediate post-war period, driven by figures such as Pierre Soulages or Hans HartungLorjou, like his contemporary Francis Gruber, reaffirmed the power of reality as an inexhaustible source of emotion and questioning.

But where Gruber explores man's existential anxieties, Lorjou positions himself as a committed chronicler, denouncing the violence and inequalities of his time, often with a brutality that borders on the sublime.

His work is characterized by a deeply narrative and visceral approach, where the tragic and the monumental rub shoulders.

In this respect, his approach could be compared to that of painters such as Renato Guttuso or José Clemente Orozco, who have also turned their art into a space for struggle and testimony.

However, Lorjou steers clear of any didacticism: his brush is less a tool of persuasion than a weapon for shaking up consciences.

Where Guttuso favors more orderly compositions, Lorjou explodes shapes and colors in a tumult that reflects the urgency of his subjects.

Compared to figures such as Bernard Buffet, whose often melancholy figuration also challenged the dominant abstraction, Lorjou stands out for a more raging expressiveness and a more ardent palette.

While Buffet builds his works on rigorous lines and static atmospheres, Lorjou lets matter and gesture dominate, sometimes recalling the ardour of Chaïm Soutine or the vehemence of Van Gogh.

Lorjou's legacy, though sometimes marginalized by official history, lies precisely in this intransigence. He embodies a vision of art as a mirror of the world's convulsions, refusing the comfort of convention to better capture the tumultuous essence of his time.

With his discordant but necessary voice, Lorjou remains a model of creative freedom, in constant dialogue with the crises and aspirations of humanity.

His signature

Although there are variations, here is a first example of its signature:

Appraising your property

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