Louis Marcoussis

Louis Marcoussis was a Polish-born French painter born in Warsaw, Poland in 1878. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow before moving to Paris in 1903. Marcoussis was featured in his first exhibition at the Salon d’Automne in 1905, followed by another exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants in 1906.

Marcoussis’s early career was selling caricature drawings to French satire publications, such as La Vie Parisienne and Le Journal. He met Edgar Degas in 1906, but quit painting in 1907. He returned to painting in 1910 and met Braque, Picasso, and Apollinaire in the same year. His early painting style was Impressionist, however, after his break from painting, Marcoussis adopted Cubism as his primary style.

After serving in the French army during World War I, Marcoussis exhibited at the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin in 1921. His first solo exhibition took place in 1925 at the Galerie Pierre in Paris, followed by more solo exhibitions at Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels in 1928, and Galerie Georges Bernheim in Paris in 1929. By 1930, Marcoussis had become friends with Helena Rubinstein, one of his greatest supporters. From 1934-35, he exhibited his prints at The Arts Club of Chicago and M. Knoedler in New York, followed by a solo retrospective of his prints at the Palais de Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1936 and at the London Gallery in London in 1938. Marcoussis left Paris in 1940 for Cusset, France as the German army advanced. He died in Cusset in 1941.