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Born in Paris in 1913, Claude Venard was a French artist celebrated for his distinctive style of post-Cubist painting.

After two days as a student at the École des Beaux-Arts, a young Venard abandoned his studies and instead became a restorer at the Louvre Museum. In 1936, he aligned himself with the Forces Nouvelles, a movement that rejected avant-garde currents and proselytized a return to tradition and craftsmanship. Venard did not, however, remain committed to these tenets and went on to create his own post-Cubist style that became increasingly abstract over time.

Venard’s works became known for their angular composition, wide-ranging color palette , and rich impasto. In 1944, he helped to found the Salon de Mai, a critical proponent of avant-garde abstract painters. As Hanina Fine Arts put it, “What [Venard] captures is not the outward appearance of his subject but rather its inner forces and underlying rhythms, he opens up perspectives, projecting spatial vistas into every part of the canvas, in accordance with an emotional rather than a physical order.”

Prior to his death in 1999, Venard would become internationally recognized, with exhibitions in the U.S., Argentina, Japan, and across Europe, including in the 1956 Venice Biennale. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, the Tate Modern in London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others.