Edgar Stoëbel

In the 1970s, he met an Irish woman in Montparnasse who took him to Pub Olympia, where there was a fantastic atmosphere. He sang his own songs there: "Le beau Paulo", "La fille du marinero", "La Joconde à Paulo", which met with great success. The crowd loved him, and the wonderful contact he made with young people, by singing and drawing on the tables, took him back there every night until dawn. For several years he would return home in the early hours and then get up to draw and paint in the afternoon.

In 1960, he invented his own style which he christened “Figurasynthese”. “Figurasynthese is the image one makes of an object, not the object in the form in which it appears to us: it is subjectivised and represents an unreal form in every way. The relationship between the forms is what makes the Figurasynthese.”

Stoëbel’s painting in the 1960s was part of the post-war concrete abstract movement, or concrete art, also known as Constructive Art.

From 1950 onwards, he frequented the artists’ area of Montparnasse and became friends with the enigmatic artist Anton Prinner, a friend of Veira da Silva, Pierre Loeb and Picasso. This lively band would invade the cafes of Montparnasse until very late at night, the evening often starting in La Coupole, a spot he frequented until the 1970s. He was also friends with the artists in Rue de la Grange-Batelière: Goetz, Mondzain, Michonze, Meyer-Lazar.

Between 1946 and 1950 he painted a number of figurative landscapes of Montmartre, Place Clichy and Place Pigalle.

From 1945-46 onwards, he gradually left behind music to concentrate more on painting and drawing.

This movement, as referred to by Véronique Wiesinger in her introduction to the remarkable Catalogue “Abstract Art in France and Italy 1945-1975, focusing on Jean Leppien” at the Strasbourg Museum from November 1999 to February 2000, is “far from being the phoney echo of the pre-war Ecole de Paris, or a response to American abstract expressionism, abstraction was in fact, until the middle of the 1970s, the last firework of the modern movement, lighting all the fires that still burn today”.

In December 1942, he was very proud to be part of General Clark's 1st Army, which landed in Naples and fought the Italy campaign as far as Rome and Taranto. He landed in Provence on 19 August 1943, at Saint-Tropez and Port-Vendres and took part in military operations until 1945.

In 1942, the Americans landed in Oran, meaning that Jews no longer had to wear the yellow star there. This was the start of Edgar Stoëbel’s deep sympathy for the Americans and their wonderful organisational skills.

In 1940, faced with the rise in Nazism, he returned to Algeria where he painted, drew and conducted an orchestra until 1942. There are collections in Algeria which contain figurative works from this period.

At the end of the 1940s, Edgar Stoëbel created the first Figurasyntheses, at a time when many artists in the Ecole de Paris were working in abstraction, which saw its peak in the 1950s. Stoëbel did not sacrifice his art for the abstract fashion, but instead developed his own style which saw its peak in the 1960s.

In 1931, he arrived in Paris to work on his music and studied with Professor Léon Eugène Moreau, Grand prix de Rome, who taught him harmony, counterpoint, fugue and the piano until the declaration of war in 1939, when he left to rejoin his infantry corps.

The French artist Edgar Stoëbel (December 12, 1909 – December 2001), (also known as René Teboul Yechoua), was born in Frenda, Algeria, on 21 December 1909, and died in Paris in December 2001. Stoëbel was the pseudonym he used as a painter.

Born on 21 December 1909 in Frenda, Algeria, died in December 2001 in Paris, France. From a very young age, he was attracted to music and graphic art, and these two art forms were closely linked throughout his life, giving his art a musical, rhythmic dimension.