Bernard Réquichot

Bernard Réquichot was born on 1 October 1929 in Asnieres-sur-Vegre, in the Sarthe region of France. He attended Catholic schools near Paris as a child, then trained through a sequence of ateliers and academies in Paris between 1945 and 1951, including the Atelier d'Art Sacre, the Academie Charpentier, the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, the Ecole des Metiers d'Art, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he also studied engraving. He did not complete a formal degree; his training was closer to an autodidact's path through free workshops and competitive study than a single academic credential.

His mature work combined painting with collage and assemblage, building dense, web-like graphic surfaces and reliquary-like objects from found and painted material. He had his first solo exhibition in 1955 at the Galerie Lucien Durand in Paris, and by the end of the decade he had come into the orbit of the dealer Daniel Cordier, a central supporter of his work and later the source of major donations of his art to French museums.

Réquichot died on 4 December 1961 in Paris. Multiple biographical sources, including the artist's dedicated archive, French and German reference works, and gallery texts, describe his death as a suicide: he jumped from the window of his studio and residence, roughly 48 hours before the opening of what would have been his second solo exhibition at the Galerie Daniel Cordier. That exhibition never opened to the public. He is buried in the Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise in Paris, division 32.

Réquichot's critical standing rests on his position within Daniel Cordier's circle and on the museums that have since absorbed and shown his work, most notably the Musee National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou, which organized a full retrospective in 2024 under the title "Je n'ai jamais commence a peindre," curated by Christian Briend. Writers and curators have repeatedly framed his practice around the tension between control and chance: dense, web-like graphic surfaces, assemblages he called reliquaries, and a working method that treated found and painted material as a kind of controlled accident. His work has also been read in relation to Cordier's broader circle of postwar French artists working outside the dominant Paris school labels of the period, without settling on a single named movement to describe him. No verified, exact quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so none is reproduced here.

Réquichot's market is defined less by a clear auction benchmark than by sustained gallery and museum activity. The best documented public auction result identified in available sources is a 2025 sale: an untitled oil and paper collage on panel sold for USD 37,500 at Swann Galleries in New York on 22 May 2025. Broader auction-market coverage for the artist remains fragmentary, so this figure should be read as the strongest documented data point available rather than a confirmed all-time record. His commercial visibility has been carried mainly by Paris galleries, Alain Margaron, Christophe Gaillard, and Baudoin Lebon, and, since early 2026, by Galerie Michael Werner in Berlin, which opened a solo exhibition of his work there on 30 January 2026.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Réquichot, and no certificate-of-authenticity program; verification runs through the artist's own archive site and through the small group of Paris galleries that have handled his estate and market for decades. His auction record is thin, with the strongest documented public sale a USD 37,500 result at Swann Galleries in 2025; collectors should treat any single reported price, gallery or auction, with caution rather than as a market benchmark. His strongest signal of durability is institutional: sustained holdings at the Centre Pompidou and other French museums, plus the 2024 Pompidou retrospective and the 2026 Berlin gallery exhibition, both of which point to renewed scholarly and commercial attention on a body of work that remains comparatively under-documented at auction.