Lucien Adrion: Snow In The Suburbs, New Year's Day 1928

Do you also get this feeling of unfamiliarity on New Year's Day, when, depite yourself, you wonder if the world has changed with the new year? I feel artist Lucien Adrion manages t convey this perfectly in the present important work.

Lucien Adrion was born in 1889 in Strasbourg in the Alsace. At the registry of his birth, was actually given the "Alsatian" nationality! Lucien left home aged 16 to become an artist, a career his parents opposed. To make a living, he worked as a fashion illustrator in Paris, London Munich and Frankfurt. He was drafted into the German army during WW1 - the poor Alsatians were always piggy in the middle - and after his demobilisation remained in Berlin to study engraving with Franz von Struck, who was Marc Chagalls teacher as well.

He eventually returned to France and took a studio in Montparnasse and allied himself primarily with young Eastern European painters such as Chaim Soutine, Pinchus Krmgne and Michel Kikoine.

In 1921 Lucien Adrion had his first solo exhibition at Parisian Galerie Chron and in 1926 his first major exhibition in the Salon des Indpendants. In the same year, he and Paul Signac organised an exhibition of French artists in Berlin, as part of the Berlin Secession. Lucien travelled widely, with exhibitions held as far afield as Los Angeles. Our painting presented here dates from this particularly exciting inter war period. Adrion's paintings were praised for their ability to capture the movement and transience of urban life, and this is very much what he see in our 1928 New Year's Day scene.

Lucien Adrion exhibited at the Salon dAutomme from 1940, and from 1941 in the Salon des Tuileries. A retrospective exhibition of his art was held in 1955 at the Museum of Strasbourg and in 1973 in Cologne.

Our oil on canvas with a stamp by Lucien Lefevre-Foinet measures 73 x 60 cm and is signed and dated at the lower right. A tiny weak spot in the canvas has been professionally conserved. The overall size including an elegant frame is 79 x 92 cm.