Nature-morte au poisson, Ginette Rapp (1928

Still-Life with Fish, Ginette Rapp (1928 – 1998)

A little-known artist, Ginette Rapp nevertheless exhibited a lot in the Parisian galleries and modern salons of her time. Today, the Centre Pompidou has seen obvious to include several works by this artist in its collections. Marked like her colleagues and contemporaries by the obscurantism and the horrors of the Second World War, Ginette Rapp first infuses her paintings with a dark and cold character, austere sometimes but which will become clearer as the years progress.

Our still life with fish is undoubtedly a work of her youth. There is an echo of Bernard Buffet and the influence of the new School of Paris. Two worlds clash there in the ordinary of everyday life: the old one symbolized by the bouillotte lamp and the new one, that of the post-war period and technological advances in the field of communication, by the pole that can be seen by the window. Whether electric or telephone, it bears witness to a world apparently in motion but whose fundamental nature does not change: it is mortal, as evidenced by the fish in the foreground.