Andre Brasilier

Andre Brasilier was born on 29 October 1929 in Saumur, France, into a family of artists. After early studies at Saint-Louis de Saumur and the Collège de Saint-Erembert, he moved to Paris at age twenty and entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1949, studying painting in the studio of Maurice Brianchon. He won the Prix Florence Blumenthal in 1952 and the Premier Grand Prix de Rome in 1953, a prize that carried a three-year residency at the Villa Medici in Rome, from 1954 to 1957.

His first solo exhibition, at Galerie Drouet in Paris, opened in 1959. Over the following decades he developed a recognizable style of dreamlike, rhythmic compositions built around horses in motion, festival and equestrian scenes, and the recurring figure of his wife Chantal. His work was the subject of a string of major retrospectives: a hundred-work survey spanning 1950 to 1980 at the Chateau de Chenonceau in 1980, a second retrospective at the Musee Picasso, Chateau Grimaldi in Antibes in 1988, and, in 1992, "Brasilier at Bagatelle" in Paris, organized by Jacques Chirac, which coincided with the publication of a catalogue raisonne of his lithographs.

In 2005 the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg gave him a major retrospective; gallery sources describe him as one of only two living artists, the other being Pablo Picasso, to have been honored with a Hermitage retrospective during their lifetime, though this claim is not independently confirmed beyond gallery materials. In 2007 a further retrospective was held at the Museum Haus Ludwig fur Kunstausstellungen in Saarlouis, Germany, alongside a traveling exhibition through Tokyo, Nagoya, Niigata, Sapporo, and Fukuoka in Japan. He continues to live and work in Paris, still painting at 96. In 2025 Opera Gallery, his current representing gallery, presented "60 Years of Painting" in Paris, and in 2026 he collaborated with Opera Gallery and Longines on the official poster for the Paris Eiffel Jumping. His work is also handled by other dealers, including Rukaj Gallery in Toronto and John Adams Fine Art.

Sotheby's has described Brasilier as one of the last surviving modernists of the School of Paris, framing his continued practice as a living bridge to that generation. Gallery and museum texts consistently present his sustained commitment to lyrical, figurative painting, centered on horses, landscape, and the female figure, as a deliberate counterpoint to the postwar dominance of abstraction. The clearest evidence of institutional esteem is the sequence of retrospectives he received while still working, at the Chateau de Chenonceau, the Musee Picasso in Antibes, the State Hermitage Museum, and the Museum Haus Ludwig in Saarlouis. No exact, attributable critical quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be independently verified for this profile.

Brasilier's public auction record is modest relative to the scale of his museum recognition, and reported figures for his top result vary by source and are incompletely documented. Artsy cites a Sotheby's sale in 2022 as the artist's high auction record at HKD 3,800,000 (approximately USD 487,000 at prevailing exchange rates), though the specific work and exact sale date are not disclosed in available sources. A separately documented sale of Grande chevauchee du lac en automne realized EUR 362,000 in 2022, against an estimate of EUR 120,000 to 240,000, though the auction house is not named in that source; it is unclear whether this is the same transaction cited by Artsy or a distinct sale. Other confirmed results sit well below this level, including a reported USD 106,250 at Heritage Auctions (exact work and date not disclosed in available sources) and USD 89,400 for La vallee de la Muze (1988) at a Sotheby's online "Modern Discoveries" sale in 2024, indicating an active but comparatively thin market spread across France, Hong Kong, and the United States.

There is no catalogue raisonne of Brasilier's paintings, only a 1992 catalogue raisonne of his lithographs, so provenance and gallery verification carry extra weight for any painting under consideration. His market is spread across multiple dealers rather than a single exclusive representative, with Opera Gallery the most consistently documented current representative alongside Rukaj Gallery and John Adams Fine Art, which increases the importance of confirming the specific chain of ownership on any work. Reported figures for his auction-record work differ between sources and key details, including the record work's title and sale date, are not consistently disclosed, so collectors should confirm sale details directly with the auction house before relying on any single quoted price.