Yolande Fièvre

French painter and sculptor, born on 25 January 1907 in Paris, died in 1983 in Paris.

Life

As a young woman, Yolande Fièvre travelled to America and lived for a few years in Egypt. She trained at the École des beaux-arts and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, then taught at the École des beaux-arts in Orléans.

In the 1930s she discovered Surrealism and met André Breton, who led her to abandon landscape for automatism. Her friends included Jean Paulhan, Jean Dubuffet, Raymond Queneau and Bernard Réquichot, whose suicide in 1961 devastated her. Her husband died in 1968.

The work

She first practised automatic painting and drawing. In the 1950s she turned to the object and pursued research into often organic materials: driftwood and “shipwrecked stones” (1957-1961), then “relief boxes”, in which fragments of wood, clay and pebbles, sometimes inhabited by small figures, evoke mysterious cities. The Oniroscopes are among her series.

In 1961 she paid tribute to Réquichot with Rêve pour un jeune mort, an assemblage of driftwood, pebbles, bones, metals, shells and potsherds (93 x 167 x 15.7 cm), which entered the Musée national d’art moderne with the Daniel Cordier donation in 1989.

Exhibitions and collections

• Solo exhibitions from 1957, notably at Simone Collinet’s and Daniel Cordier’s in Paris, at the Svensk-Franska Konstgalleriet in Stockholm and at the Galerie Bonnier in Geneva
• Halle Saint-Pierre, Paris, 2007-2008
• Collections: Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou (Hommage à Bernard Réquichot, 1961, on deposit at Les Abattoirs, Toulouse)
• Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles: “Automatic Paintings, Oniroscopes”, with Ursula, 14 March to 12 April 2025