Rating and value of paintings by Jacques Monory

If you own a work by or after the artist Jacques Monory, and would like to know its value, our state-approved experts and auctioneers will offer you their appraisal services.

Our specialists will carry out a free appraisal of your work, and provide you with a precise estimate of its value on the current market.

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Artist's rating and value

An important artistic figure of his time, Jacques Monory has established himself as a sure bet on the art market. Constantly evolving, his quotation remains high and his works are sold internationally.

In the auction room, his canvases, part of the narrative figuration movement, painted in the 1960s, are the most sought-after and therefore prized. Watercolors are also popular with collectors.

A work by Monory, for example, can fetch around a hundred thousand euros at auction, as demonstrated by his mixed-media composition, Meurtre n°v,dating from 1968 and adjudged €100,000 in 2012, whereas it was estimated at between €80,000 and €90,000.

 Order of value from the most basic to the most prestigious

Artist's style and technique

Jacques Monory develops a painting style in which the image, always fragmented, seems captured in a suspended moment, like a film scene stopped dead.

He works mainly in oils, but also incorporates mixed techniques, notably photography, which he reworks on canvas, playing on the contrasts between reality and fiction.

His systematic use of monochrome, particularly blue, gives his works a cinematic coldness, an almost spectral detachment.

This blue, often declined in multiple shades, acts as a filter, establishing a distance from the subject while intensifying the dramatic atmosphere of the scene.

The image is often split into several planes, creating superimposed effects that confuse the viewer's perception. The framing is precise, sometimes tightened like a zoom, sometimes fragmented like a montage, reinforcing this impression of a fragmented world, between reality and fiction. 

Far from limiting himself to a simple transcription of reality, Monory manipulates his images, reconstructing and deconstructing them, introducing effects of blur or duplication that reinforce the strangeness of the composition.

He borrows from the codes of detective fiction and the photo-novel, drawing on an iconography where threat is latent, where the moment seems frozen before or after a drama. The influence of cinema is omnipresent: his framing is reminiscent of film noir shots, and his play with light accentuates the enigmatic nature of the scenes he depicts.

Mirrors, broken glass and multiplying reflections often reinforce this mise en abyme of the gaze, where one image always seems to refer to another. Through this cold, methodical aesthetic, Monory constructs a work that captures the eye as much as it confuses it, oscillating between fascination and disquiet.

The life of Jacques Monory

Jacques Monory (1924-2018) was a French artist, painter and sculptor, whose work was part of narrative figuration, in opposition to the abstract research that still marked his era.

Trained as a painter-decorator at the École des Arts appliqués in Paris, he honed his eye and technique for ten years with art publisher Robert Delpire, where he helped design illustrated encyclopedias. 

He exhibited for the first time in 1955 at the Galerie Kléber. From then on, he focused on depicting a world dominated by violence and contemporary anxieties. The Les Meurtres series is one of the most striking examples.

Monory doesn't just paint violence, he physically integrates it into his works by incorporating bullet holes shot right into the support.

In Meurtre n°V, a broken mirror reflects the scene, multiplying the image of the viewer, who becomes an integral part of the painting. The work oscillates between reality and fiction, between image and matter, plunging the viewer into an uncertain space.

His systematic use of monochrome accentuates this oppressive atmosphere. He favors blue, declining its nuances to create an unreal, icy world, where the distance between image and emotion is gradually erased.

His works don't seek to provoke a simple shock, but to question our relationship with images and their hold on the collective consciousness.

Focus on Murder n°5, Jacques Monory

In Murder n°5, an emblematic work by Jacques Monory, the artist once again questions the blurred boundaries between everyday life and violence, drawing on visual codes from film noir.

The scene, bathed in an icy blue, is constructed like a fragment of a film suspended in time, a moment freezing the tension of an aggression in progress. The man, shot in a hail of bullets, is depicted in a tight frame, as if we were witnessing the projection of a broken image.

Here, the bullet holes, scattered throughout the composition, echo crime scenes and sordid tales from detective films, while inscribing this violence in an abstraction where emotion is perceived not in the figure, but in the composition itself.

The choice of monochrome is essential: the artificial, almost electric blue eliminates any human warmth and plunges the viewer into a cold, clinical atmosphere.

Far from simply illustrating a violent scene, Monory makes the image a sensory experience, a reflection of a world whose dramatic intensity is accentuated by contrasts of light and shadow.

The violence here is not just visualized, it's experienced through the staging, which directly questions the viewer's relationship with the image: how does this image transform our perception of reality?

By manipulating the codes of cinema, Monory goes beyond simple narration to create a space where interpretation becomes an active process, leaving it up to each individual to decipher the painting's enigma.

Jacques Monory's imprint on his period

Jacques Monory's imprint on his period is distinguished by his novel way of transposing modern images, often marked by popular culture, into a singular pictorial form.

Early in the 1960s, he introduced a new approach, in which photography, cinema and advertising became essential starting points for his compositions.

As William S. Rubin points out, "Monory was able to assimilate the power of the popular image, while injecting it with a sense of drama specific to his time", notably through the exclusive use of blue, a color that became the keystone of his work.

In his paintings, light and shadow are played out through meticulous treatment of the pictorial surface, marking violent contrasts that accentuate the dramatic intensity of his scenes.

This way of diverting the visual elements of everyday life into representations that are both frozen and mysterious testifies to his exploration of solitude and the passage of time.

Their cold tones and taut compositions, featuring isolated figures in urban or interior settings, echo a personal vision of the world, where visual distancing becomes a means of questioning man's relationship to his environment.

 With this approach, Monory, while part of the Pop Art movement, opens up a new, more introspective and distanced path, without however detaching himself from the aesthetic concerns of his time.

The stylistic influences of Jacques Monory

The stylistic influences of Jacques Monory are rooted in a dual tradition, at the crossroads of narrative figuration and imagery borrowed from cinema and photography.

From his earliest works, he explored an aesthetic that owes as much to the incisive framing of film noir as to the fragmented compositions of photoreportage, transposing into painting the staging effects characteristic of twentieth-century visual media.

As Germain Viatte has pointed out, "Monory manipulates the image like a film editor, cutting, cropping, superimposing elements to extract a latent dramatic tension."

This approach brings him closer to vernacular photography and the American noir novel, where the human figure, often solitary, stands out in an urban environment saturated with signs.

He also draws on the monochrome tradition, reducing his chromatic spectrum to ranges dominated by blue, a hue he exploits as a vector of strangeness and distancing, like cinematic filter effects.

In this research, his work dialogues with the works of Frantisek Kupka, Rémi Blanchard or Vladimir Velickovic, while at the same time belonging to an older filiation, where history painting reinvents itself through a fragmented, subjective narrative.

By playing on fragmentary memory and the recomposition of images, Monory thus hijacks the codes of figuration to create a vision suspended between reality and fiction.

Recognizing the artist's signature

Not all of Jacques Monory's works are signed, and copies may exist. Here's an example of his signature.

Expertise your property

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