Jacques Doucet

Jacques Doucet was born in Boulogne-Billancourt in 1924. While he was a teenager, he was passionately fond of poetry and painting. During the Second World War Doucet, was interned as a political prisoner. This experience had a great influence on his later creative work. After his release from prison, he studied art in Paris at the independent Montparnasse Academy. Doucet was, for a short period of time, a member of the Paris-based Revolutionary Surrealist movement, but this former World War II political prisoner thought that the group was too political for his tastes. In 1947, Doucet met the Dutch artist Corneille, who persuaded him to join the Dutch Experimental Group, which was founded in 1948, and later that same year became the movement known as CoBrA. Doucet made the cover of the second edition of the magazine Reflex, which was written by the Dutch Experimental Group.

Doucet joined the CoBrA Art Movement in 1948, the same year it was founded at a major international conference in Paris. This movement gave birth to some of the most avant-garde and important artists within the European abstract movement. We believe Jacques Doucet to be one of the worthwhile artists that used this movement as a springboard to further experimentation. A curled snake became the symbol of the movement. CoBrA was named after Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam, the capital of many members’ home countries. The manifesto was drawn up by Dotremont in response to a statement by the French Surrealists entitled La Cause est entendue. The statement made it clear that this newly formed group, now called CoBrA, was officially no longer in agreement with the mainstream French artists of the day. The CoBrA painters wanted to break new ground, preferring to work spontaneously and with the emphasis more on fantastic imagery. CoBrA, along with Tachisme, a French style of abstract painting in the 1940s and 1950s, and L’Art Informel, a kind of action painting, were among the post-World War II European art movements that were related to but developed independently from Abstract Expressionism in the United States. CoBrA only existed about three years. Many of its members went on to forge successful careers afterwards. In 1951, after the Exhibition in Liege the CoBrA movement was officially disbanded. Yet during its short existence CoBrA had succeeded in rejuvenating Western European Art.

As a member of CoBrA, Doucet never involved himself much with the theoretical or political sides of the movement. Rather he felt drawn to its free, artistic, expressionist climate, as well as to the intensity in which CoBrA artists involved themselves with their art.

After an initial fascination with Paul Klee and Joan Miro, Doucet painted more and more in an abstract way. He used all sorts of materials in his art to create mixed media works of paint and collage. He finally turned to a total non-representation form of art with his own individual and signature warm, poetic, and abstract language. The graffiti on the walls of World War II prisons influenced his later work. He constantly experimented with different mediums and materials, and never stopped evolving as an artist. Jacques Doucet died in Paris in 1994.