Rating and value of paintings by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes

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Rating and value of the artist Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes

The artist Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes leaves behind a body of work characteristic of modern painting, he is famous for his canvases and drawings. Now, prices for his works are rising under the auctioneers' gavel.

His paintings are particularly prized, especially by French buyers. The price at which they sell on the art market ranges from €40 to €100,000, a substantial gap but one that says a lot about the value that can be attributed to Ribemont-Dessaignes' works.

Grand musicien, an oil on cardboard dating from 1920 sold for €100,000, despite being estimated at between €60,000 and €90,000.

Order of value from a simple work to the most prestigious

Style and technique by artist Georges Ribemont Dessaignes

Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes is a painter and writer behind a multifaceted and experimental body of work. Active between 1910 and 1930, he developed a protean artistic practice that blended painting, drawing, theater, poetry and music.

He remained faithful to the spirit of radical experimentation of the Dada group, in which he was a major player. His paintings reject any form of academicism in favor of a deliberately naïve or absurd aesthetic, marked by schematic figures, flat compositions and a distorted use of classical pictorial conventions.

He is influenced by Dada and anti-art. His pictorial work, like his texts, is intended as a critical gesture against the traditional values of bourgeois art, which he categorically rejects.

He uses humor, nonsense and the incongruous as means of aesthetic contestation. His graphics are deliberately simplified, with forms often reduced to silhouettes or symbols.

He takes an approach close to illustration or shadow theater, which gives his works a rather immediate satirical power.

He uses bold, contrasting colors, and employs pure colors that are laid down in solids, reinforcing the direct legibility of the image and its force of visual impact - consistent with a desire for subversive clarity.

With Ribemont-Dessaignes, the boundary between writing and image is quite often blurred, his plastic works participating in a narrative or poetic logic where word, sign and figure intertwine.

Ribemont-Dessaignes' painting, like his literary work, is defined by a refusal of established rules and a quest for absolute formal freedom. It embodies the Dada spirit at its most radical, ironic and inventive.

Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, his life, his work

Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes is an artist who is part of the Dada group, born in 1884 in Montpellier. He began his artistic training in Paris, at the Académie Julian, where he familiarized himself with painting and quickly developed a taste for literary and plastic experimentation.

His involvement with the Dada movement began in 1919, alongside Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia. He published manifestos, absurdist poems, plays and drawings.

He thus asserted a critical stance against academism, war and bourgeois conventions. His activity was protean : the artist practiced poetry, theater, painting, the novel and sometimes the essay.

This diversity contributed to making him one of the most complete representatives of the Franco-European avant-garde between the two wars.

His positioning was marginal and independent. After the Dada period, he remained on the bangs of mainstream trends, refusing any fixed appearance. He is interested in esotericism, experimental music and pursues a dense, unclassifiable literary oeuvre.

He collaborates with the Surrealists (Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dali...) for a time, and distanced himself from it due to political and aesthetic differences, preferring to maintain a freer, more personal stance. He then withdrew from the group due to political and aesthetic differences, preferring to retain the freer, more personal position he had previously held.

Ribemont-Dessaignes continued to write until the 1960s, publishing novels, reviews and memoirs. He died in Saint-Jeannet in 1974, leaving behind a multifaceted body of work, currently being rediscovered for its radicalism and originality.

As a result, Ribemont-Dessaignes remains a rather singular figure of the French avant-garde, whose life and work embody a constant fidelity to the independent, ironic and experimentalist spirit that marked the Dada group and its followers.

Focus on The Lecturer, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, circa 1920

The Lecturer in Ribemont-Dessaignes is a satirical and absurd subject. It depicts an isolated figure, standing on a dais, visibly speaking to an absent or indifferent crowd.

With this choice, Ribemont-Dessaignes derides intellectual authority figures and learned discourse, which is a recurring theme in the Dada universe.

The composition is deliberately simplified : the drawing is characterized by a great economy of means. The figure, reduced to a few schematic lines, is frozen in a rigid attitude. The background is almost empty, reinforcing the scene's effect of isolation and absurdity.

His graphic style is direct and ironic, the work uses a caricature-like graphic style, with thick contours and sparsely-modeled forms. This stylization accentuates the ironic, comic and critical aspect of the subject matter.

The artist does not seek to seduce through virtuosity but to question the visual codes of his time.

Through this rather grotesque figure, the artist attacks the oratorical pretension and vacuity of certain public speeches, notably joining the anti-bourgeois and anti-academic concerns of the Dada group.

This work is typical of his Dadaist commitment. Le Conférencier in fact illustrates the absurd aesthetic dear to Ribemont-Dessaignes, where meaning is deliberately blurred and the image becomes a vehicle for questioning social and artistic certainties.

Through this work, which is both comic and disturbing, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes opposes institutional logic with the subversive power of drawing. In this way, the Conférencier reveals all the irony and radicalism of an artist who has turned the absurd into a critical tool that is both visual and political.

Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes' imprint on his period

Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes played a decisive role in spreading Dadaist ideas in France from 1919 onwards, through his active participation in reviews, his manifestos and his hybrid creations mixing text, image and stage.

He established himself as a promoter of total creative freedom : through his literary, pictorial and theatrical works, he embodied the spirit of radical experimentation of Parisian Dada, rejecting all academic conventions, aesthetic hierarchies and standards of good taste.

He is a model of intellectual independence, since although associated with the Dada group, and later briefly with Surrealism, he refuses all forms of ideological orthodoxy. His deliberate detachment from the movements with which he was associated made him a free and lucid figure in a context that was often quite conflictual.

He established himself as a passer between different artistic disciplines  through his simultaneous practice of painting, poetry, theater, the novel and even music criticism, he embodied a rather rare form of interdisciplinarity, consistent with the dissolution of artistic boundaries advocated by the avant-garde.

His influence is discreet but enduring : if his name remains on the bangs of the great figures of his time, his work is being rediscovered for its inventiveness, critical coherence and influence on the forms of conceptual art and experimental writing that were to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century.

The imprint of Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes therefore lies less in a style than in an attitude : that of an integral, irreverent and independent artist, whose work embodies the desire to liberate art from its formal, ideological and commercial canons. 

Recognizing the artist's signature

Not all the painter's works are signed. However, with or without a mention, it's important for you to have the work appraised to ensure its originality and to be able to date it. And of course, copies do exist.

Knowing the value of a work

If you happen to own a work by or after Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, don't hesitate to request a free appraisal using our form on our website.

A member of our team of experts and chartered auctioneers will contact you promptly to provide you with an estimate of the market value of your work, as well as ad hoc information about it.

If you wish to sell your work, you will also be accompanied by our specialists in order to benefit from alternatives for selling it at the best possible price, taking into account the inclinations of the market.