LOUTTRE . B (Marc-Antoine BISSIERE)

Biography

Louttre.B, pseudonym of Marc-Antoine Bissière, born on 15 July 1926 in Paris, where he died on 6 April 2012, was a French painter and engraver, whose initially non-figurative work developed from 1962 in the direction of an "allusive representation" that was both poetic and humorous.

Marc-Antoine Bissière, known as "Louttre", is the son of Albertine Lucie Lotte and the painter Roger Bissière. Roger Bissière taught at the Ranson academy, which Jean Le Moal, the massier of his fresco workshop, Alfred Manessier and the sculptor Étienne Martin were to attend around 1935. Leaving Paris in 1938, Bissière settled in Boissiérette, in the Lot, where Louttre lived until 1949. In 1942 he began to paint, while working in the fields and clearing wood. In February 1944, under the name of Antoine Bissière, he participated in an exhibition at the Galerie de France, prefaced by Gaston Diehl, with Bissière and his friends, Bertholle, Le Moal, Manessier, Singier, Étienne Martin. In May, he joined a maquis in the Lot and was then drafted.

From 1945, Louttre worked with Bissière:

    "I was twenty years old, we painted every day in the same studio, back to back; and for two years we played ping-pong, he with his knowledge, I with the unconsciousness of youth: he would find something, I would take it up; he would take it up in turn. Those were two years of sharing. I offered him my candour, he offered me his knowledge", he recalls.

The Pierre Loeb gallery presented his paintings in 1957 and the Jeanne Bucher gallery in 1959 (preface by Jacques Lassaigne). At the same time, he exhibited at the Salon de mai and then at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. In 1960, he began to engrave and print on linoleum and wood using the processes of intaglio on metal, in friendly complicity with Marcel Fiorini. In 1961, he won the second Paris Biennale.

From 1962 onwards, he turned away from non-figuration and returned to live in Boissiérette until 1967, henceforth signing his paintings Louttre.B. From 1965 to 1967 he produced a series of sand paintings, a technique to which he returned several times in the following decades. In 1966, he won the Fifth Tokyo Print Biennial and in 1967, the Grenchen Triennial in Switzerland.

In 1970, the Jeanne Bucher gallery exhibited the "engravings for the wall" (2 metres by 3 metres) that Louttre.B had printed with the help of Fiorini and Paul Decottignies.

Louttre.B, working between Paris and Boissiérette, subsequently presented nearly a hundred private exhibitions of his paintings and engravings in Paris (notably at the Fabien Boulakia gallery between 1979 and 1987, then at the Le Troisième Œil gallery) and in the provinces, but also in Germany, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. He produced several books and, from 1966, monumental sculptures in cement, mainly for public buildings. Between 1968 and 1973, he collaborated several times with the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres on a fountain, a wall panel and a clock.