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Art of the 20th Century
Pierre Roy
Pierre Roy
(b Nantes, 10 April 1880; d Milan, 26 Sept 1950).
French painter, stage designer and illustrator. After working briefly in an architect’s office in Nantes, he moved to Paris and enrolled at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, which he disliked. He then worked on designs for the Exposition Universelle of 1900 before entering the Ecoles des Langues Orientales to learn Japanese and modern Greek. After this he studied at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs under Eugène-Samuel Grasset and then, from 1902 to 1904, at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens. He first exhibited paintings in 1906 at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and in 1907 and 1908 at the Salon des Indépendants. About 1910 Roy came into contact with the Fauves and the circle of writers around them, such as Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, an association that influenced his style away from its earlier academicism. In 1913, through Alberto Savinio, he met and quickly became a friend of de Chirico, who was to be a great influence on his work. The following year Roy copied de Chirico’s Premonitory Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire (1914; Paris, Pompidou) as a woodcut for an unpublished edition of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes.
