Gen Paul

Gen Paul was born Eugene Paul on 2 July 1895 at 96 rue Lepic in Montmartre, Paris. His formal schooling ended around age 14, followed by brief evening drawing classes at two Paris municipal schools. Accounts of his later training conflict: some sources describe him as essentially self-taught, while others report a few years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris; no degree is documented in either case. He served in the First World War, and at least one biographical account credits him with the Croix de guerre for bravery, though this detail rests on a single source and should be treated with caution. Early recognition came when the French state purchased one of his paintings of the Place Pigalle for 300 francs.

He began showing at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Independants from 1920, and in 1928 exhibited fifty paintings at Galerie Bing in Paris alongside Picasso, Rouault, and Soutine. In 1934 he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and was later promoted to Commandeur in 1962. In 1937 he painted a large mural for the Pavillon des Vins de France at the Exposition Internationale de Paris. A retrospective followed at Galerie Drouant-David in Paris in 1952, and his work was shown repeatedly at Galerie Ferrero in Geneva.

Gen Paul died on 30 April 1975 at the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris. Several sources state that he died of cancer. He was buried at the Cimetiere Saint-Vincent in Montmartre. Posthumous exhibitions have included a large centenary retrospective at the Couvent des Cordeliers in Paris in 1995, group shows at Galerie Roussard in Paris in 1999 and 2002, and a 2023 exhibition at Findlay Galleries, a secondary-market dealer in his work.

Gen Paul's reputation rests on his standing within the interwar Paris avant-garde and his lifelong identification with Montmartre. On the occasion of a 1995 centenary retrospective at the Couvent des Cordeliers, a gallery text tied to the Gazette de l'Hotel Drouot described him as among the foremost, and by some accounts the only true, expressionist painter in the French tradition, though this characterization could not be verified as an exact quotation against an independent source. At his death in 1975, the critic Jean-Paul Crespelle is widely reported to have described him as the last great painter of Montmartre, a characterization that has been repeated in gallery and dealer accounts of his career since.

Gen Paul's market is thin and dominated by works on paper and prints, which typically trade in the hundreds to low thousands of euros. A specialist price guide reports a high of EUR 140,000 for the painting Le Joueur de guitare (The Guitar Player) at Artcurial in Paris in 2008, but this figure could not be corroborated against a primary sale database and no exact sale date is available, so it should be treated as unverified. The highest price independently confirmed for this profile is USD 8,750, for a work sold at Heritage Auctions on 30 November 2017. Regular secondary-market activity continues through auction houses including Christie's, Bonhams, Sotheby's, Hampel, and Doyle, and through dealers such as Findlay Galleries, Galerie Roussard, and Le Coin des Arts in Paris.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Gen Paul, so provenance and dealer expertise, particularly from Galerie Roussard in Paris, carry significant weight in authentication. The market is uneven: the great majority of works on paper and prints sell for modest sums, a confirmed 2017 auction result reached only USD 8,750, and a small number of oils have reportedly reached six-figure prices in unverified reports; the strength of any single high result should be weighed against the thinness of the broader trading record. Collectors should also expect some inconsistency in reference sources regarding his training and early career, and should rely on museum-held examples, such as those at the Centre Pompidou and the Musee d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, as anchors for connoisseurship.