Rating and value of paintings by Bernard Lorjou

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Artist's rating and value

On the art market, Bernard Lorjou's rating 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. Thus, the price at which Bernard Larjou's works sell ranges from €10 to €33,800 at auction.

His painting Le port de Londres (oil on canvas), dating from 1946, sold for €33,800, whereas it was estimated at €10,000 to €15,000. 

Order of value from the most basic to the most prestigious

Style and technique of Bernard Larjou

The vibrant burst of color and self-assumed excess is the style of Bernard Lorjou, a singular figure of 20th-century French expressionism.

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 ample gestures and an exacerbated palette, convey an almost primitive urgency, a need to capture the violence and beauty of the world in their tragic cohabitation.

The forms, sometimes distorted to the extreme, oscillate between the grotesque and the sublime, witnesses 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.

Through this exuberant, uncompromising painting, he seeks not to seduce but to impact, to remind us that art, in its raw essence, is a cry launched at the absolute.

The life of Bernard Lorjou

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

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

Refusing glossy formalism and the diktats of abstraction, he militated 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 set himself up against the academicism of modern art by 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 historical massacres to monumental portraits, Lorjou built up a body of work in which rage and tenderness intertwine, bearing witness to his sharp eye for the tragedies and grandeur of existence.

Far from passing fads, 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 La mort de Ghandi, Bernard Lorjou, 1948

In La Mort de Gandhi, a monumental painting from 1948, Bernard Lorjou deploys a striking dramaturgy that strikes with its emotional intensity and resolutely figurative approach.

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

The composition, dominated by the Mahatma's outstretched body, is articulated around a dramatic centrality that immediately captures the eye.

Wrapped in his traditional white dhoti, Gandhi, a figure of peace and asceticism, here 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 battle 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 stigmata of the event it represents.

Lorjou's brushwork, with its almost ferocious vigor, doesn't seek 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 and tragic energy that permeates the scene.

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

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

The very texture of the painting, 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 of it.

By 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 refuses all sentimentality: the work, despite its emotional charge, remains anchored in a raw, almost uncompromising materiality.

This painting is the perfect embodiment of Lorjou's singularity: a visceral, committed painting that has no care for fashions or academic expectations.

Exalting the tensions between beauty and horror, between 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.

La Mort de Gandhi thus remains a major work of the post-war period, not only for its formal audacity but 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 time

Bernard Lorjou, a singular and unsubmissive figure on the twentieth-century artistic landscape, marked his time with a body of work in which figuration rose as an act of resistance to the hegemony of abstract currents.

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

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

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

In this respect, his approach could be likened to that of painters such as Renato Guttuso or José Clemente Orozco, who also made their art 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 with figures such as Bernard Buffet, whose often melancholy figuration also defied 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 ardor of Chaïm Soutine or the vehemence of the paintings 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 his signature:

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