Zoum WALTER

(Ixelles 1902 - Paris 1974)

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Pastel on dark blue-grey paper.
Signed with initials and dated Z.W. / 70. at the lower right.
Stamped with the vente stamp on the verso.
321 x 289 mm. (12 5/8 x 11 3/8 in.) [sheet]
Zoum Walter had a particular affinity for the medium of pastel, which accounts for much of her finest work. She seems to have begun experimenting with the pastels she found in her father’s studio as a young child, with her first works in the technique dating from around 1916, and her love of the medium never left her. As she later recalled, in an interview of 1965, ‘There was, I think, an immediate harmony between pastel and myself. Its matte substance, its colours both powerful and straightforward, soft in their sharpness, its consistency and, knowing it so well after countless exercises, the speed and surety of its application, all contribute, I hope, to the freedom and unity that I love.’







A gifted painter and pastellist, Julienne (known as ‘Zoum’) Walter was the daughter of the Belgian artist Jean van den Eeckhoudt, and began to paint at a very young age. Her early work was made up primarily of landscapes of the South of France, executed in both oils and pastel, the latter a medium she was to become particularly adept. Following her marriage to François Walter in 1928, Zoum took French citizenship and settled in Paris, where she began painting studies of nudes. Her first solo exhibitions were held in Paris and Brussels in 1929, and in the succeeding years she took part in the Salon d’Automne, the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon des Indépendants. A series of religious compositions painted in the years after the Second World War were followed by a group of small-scale paintings and pastel landscapes. Later works were more abstract but a burst of creativity in the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s found Walter returning to landscape motifs; views of the Alpilles of Provence, the forests of the Vosges, the coast of Normandy around Houlgate, the Alpes Maritimes around Nice, Menton and Roquebrune, the North Sea town of Koksijde, and elsewhere. She had a special interest in studies of skies, depicting vast, atmospheric landscapes devoid of details and traces of a human presence.



Walter exhibited at Salons in both France and Belgium, and also exhibited at galleries in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Oslo and elsewhere. After her death in 1974, exhibitions of her paintings and pastels were held in Paris in 1991 and 1992, while retrospective exhibitions were presented by the Musée de Pontoise and the Musée Ingres in Montauban in 1992. Works by Zoum Walter are today in the collection of the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, as well as in the museums of Épinal, La Rochelle, Uzés and Ixelles.

Provenance

The vente Zoum Walter, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 16 October 2006, lot 234.

Additional Works

 

Zoum WALTER

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