Will - Lot 55

Will WILL La Femme au miroir, painting done in the 1990s, published in Mirages by Daniel Maghen in 2017. Signed. Acrylic on canvas 60 × 70 cm (23.62 × 27.56 in.) Will, the painter, is at the crossroads of several influences. Certainly the Ecole de Paris, the major inspiration of his master Jijé, who was nourished if not by the light of Saint-Paul de Vence, at least by that of Cassis, with mainly Fauvist affinities: Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Dufy... and even Modigliani, in Will's case. In this impeccably composed canvas, the subject is classical, almost out of an 18th-century genre scene: a woman, nude as an odalisque, gazes into a mirror to admire her sunflower-decorated hat, which the yellow panelling, a luminous complement to the blue bed, seems to echo. The colors are reminiscent of Van Gogh's wheat fields. On the wall, a portrait of a woman that could well be La Goulue by Lautrec. There are worse lineages...