Who was the woman artist and painter Marie Raymond?

Marie Raymond was a French painter and art critic. A major artist, Raymond made a place for herself in the post-war Parisian art scene. She was also the mother of the famous artist Yves Klein.

Born in La Colle-sur-Loup in the South of France on 4 May 1908, the painter came from a Provençal bourgeois family. As a teenager, Raymond began practising yoga, which was still uncommon in Europe at the time. The artist’s unusual passion for yoga and the occult came from her older sister Rose. Marie Raymond decided to become a painter after visiting the studio of Alexandre Stoppler, a painter based in Cagnes-sur-Mer. He trained the young woman artist by instructing her to paint from nature. The colours and light of the South of France would have a decisive influence on Marie Raymond’s work as an artist. Raymond later met the painter Fred Klein. The couple married in 1926 and their son Yves Klein was born two years later. Marie Raymond studied at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Nice. At the end of the war, Raymond made a departure from her previous post-surrealist style, choosing definitively to pursue the path of Lyrical Abstraction. The woman artist opened the doors of her apartment and studio every Monday until 1954, in what became her regular “Lundis de Marie Raymond” (“Marie Raymond’s Mondays”) events. The receptions brought together artists such as Pierre Soulages, Raymond Hains, François Dufrêne, Jacques de la Villeglé, César, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Tinguely, Hans Hartung and Nina Kandinsky, among others. Marie Raymond was also an art critic, publishing numerous articles throughout her career—notably for Kunst en Kultuur, a Dutch magazine for which she worked as the Paris correspondent from 1939 to 1958.

If you would like to find out more about the French painter Marie Raymond and her works, please visit the artist’s dedicated page.

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