Felix del Marle

Felix del Marle, born Aime Felix Mac Del Marle and also recorded as Felix Lucien Aime Delmarle, was born on 21 October 1889 in Pont-sur-Sambre, in the Nord department of France. He entered the Academie des Beaux-Arts de Valenciennes at age 16, around 1905, where his teachers noted his talent and awarded him prizes for painting and drawing. Around 1907, at 18, he left France to work in the holds of a ship bound for the Far East, returning around 1909. He then spent time in Brussels, moving between art schools, painting courses, and artists' studios, before returning to Lille, where he took courses at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. No degree or diploma from either school is documented.

In 1912 del Marle moved to Paris, where he met Guillaume Apollinaire and Gino Severini and adopted Futurist ideas. In 1913 he exhibited Futurist influenced paintings at Clovis Sagot's gallery and published a manifesto, "Le Manifeste futuriste a Montmartre," in the newspaper Paris-Journal on 10 July 1913, declaring that Montmartre had to be destroyed. He is generally described as one of the only French painters to fully join the Italian Futurist movement.

His work later shifted toward Neo-Plasticism and De Stijl influenced geometric abstraction. After the Second World War he was one of the founders, in 1946, of the Salon des Realites Nouvelles in Paris, a key showcase for non-figurative art. In 1952 he collaborated with Jean Gorin on the Neo-Plastic polychromy of the Renault factory at Flins, a large architectural color scheme. He died later that year, in 1952, in Courbevoie, in the Becon-les-Bruyeres district. One gallery source describes the cause as lung cancer, though this is not corroborated by a second source. The precise date of death varies across sources and could not be independently confirmed for this profile.

Institutional framing of del Marle centers on his rarity. The Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris describes him as a protean artist and one of the few French painters to represent Futurism, a movement otherwise dominated by Italian artists. Later writing tends to emphasize the arc of his career, from the urban dynamism of his Futurist period through his Neo-Plastic and abstract work, and his organizational role in postwar French abstraction through the Salon des Realites Nouvelles. No fully verifiable, attributed critical quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile.

Del Marle's market is small and only lightly documented. His auction record is Bretonnes, which sold for GBP 121,250 (about USD 238,479) at Christie's London on 25 June 2008, per compiled auction-result listings that identify it as his highest recorded price; this figure has not been independently confirmed against a primary Christie's catalogue. More recently, L'Addition (The Bill), a 1933 painting, sold for USD 107,950 at Sotheby's New York in May 2025, and Ovales, a 1947 panel, sold for EUR 47,500 at Sotheby's Paris on 16 October 2019. Other recent Paris auction estimates for his work have generally clustered in the EUR 8,000 to 20,000 range. The sample of public sales is too small to support a reliable price trend, and any single result should be read in that context.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Felix del Marle, and current gallery or estate representation could not be confirmed as of this writing. Recent commercial activity includes a 2023 pairing exhibition with Hans Bellmer at a Paris gallery, but that alone does not establish ongoing representation. The public auction record is thin, with only a handful of documented sales and a wide estimate range, so provenance and comparison to catalogued museum examples matter more than usual in verifying a work. Recent sales, including L'Addition at Sotheby's in 2025 and Ovales at Sotheby's in 2019, sit well below the 2008 record for Bretonnes, underscoring how uneven the public market remains; collectors should treat any single result as an isolated data point rather than an established trend.