The painter, sculptor, architect, graphic artist, neoplasticist Albert Jean Gorin, known as Jean Gorin, was born in Saint-Emilien-de-Blain in 1899. In 1910, his family settled near Nantes, where he began a professional apprenticeship. The young man went to Paris for a while to study art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. After the war, during which he was mobilized, he will be, from 1919, a student at the School of Fine Arts in Nantes. In 1922, during a trip to Paris, he had his first...

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  Biography of Jean Gorin

  The painter, sculptor, architect, graphic artist, neoplasticist Albert Jean Gorin, known as Jean Gorin, was born in Saint-Emilien-de-Blain in 1899. In 1910, his family settled near Nantes, where he began a professional apprenticeship. The young man went to Paris for a while to study art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. After the war, during which he was mobilized, he will be, from 1919, a student at the School of Fine Arts in Nantes. In 1922, during a trip to Paris, he had his first contact with Cubist works. He devoured the book by Gleizes and Metzinger (Du cubisme). In 1925, during the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, he met not only Le Corbusier's architecture, but also his painting and, beyond that, Purism (through the magazine L'Esprit Nouveau), as well as the work of Fernand Léger. After a period in the cubist movement, he realized, in 1925, his first abstract painting. The following year (1926), Jean Gorin discovered the work of Piet Mondrian, which marked him, and all his life he affirmed his debt to him. Later Mondrian wrote: "Jean Gorin goes further than my work. He is the only French neo-plastician". His first sculptures, his first reliefs from 1928-1930, are among the most elegant contributions to the constructivist side of twentieth century art. At the same time, he discovered the research of Vantongerloo, with whom he immediately entered into correspondence; the latter's differences with Mondrian on the theory of color aroused his curiosity. It is difficult today to imagine Jean Gorin's working conditions at that time, which were of a heroic nature, and to imagine his absolute solitude. He came back from a trip to Paris with the idea of an expansion in space of the pictorial neo-plasticism and this is what founded the originality of his work.In 1932, the artist was invited to the Soviet Union, where he discovered Russian Constructivism; this was a further step in his creative path.In 1934, he became a member of the board of directors of the Abstraction-Création association, which was founded in 1931.Jean Gorin settled successively in Grasse (1947), then, for health reasons, in Nice in 1950; he developed neo-plastic architecture projects there until 1956. He changed region and settled in Le Perreux, then in Meudon in 1962. He creates sculptures, or rather models of sculptures that he photographs before destroying them, as he cannot keep them in his cramped studio. In his creations, Jean Gorin ends up introducing the circle, then the oblique line, while maintaining the horizontal-vertical rigor of pure neoplasticism.For Le Corbusier, architecture was a "patient search"; the expression is equally appropriate for the work of Jean Gorin, carried out with rigor and modesty, unaffected by the fashions and rumors of the art world, conceived as a model of a future human environment, for a society whose social relationships would finally be transparent.An important part of Jean Gorin's work is preserved in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes.The artist died in Niort in 1981.
  
  

  

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