Born in Paris in 1915, in the midst of war.
Training at the School of Applied Arts, then in the painting section of the École des Beaux-Arts. The discovery of Julio González’s sculpture and, above all, Picasso’s canvases.
A stint in Cassandre’s studio, then in Le Corbusier’s; stage and film sets, advertising, museum scenography. Artistic friendships with Lucien Fontanarosa, Max Ernst, Yves Brayer, Claude Venard.
A devastating human experience: deportation for acts of resistance, the camps, death brushed at close quarters.
A withdrawn life, spent painting in the south of France, on the coast at Bormes-les-Mimosas, or at Curel, in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence.
A few striking lines often suffice to sketch the figure of an artist.
The year of birth, the background of one’s training, influences or artistic friendships, a notable fact of a man’s life—these let us glimpse him. We think we already know him.
In the studio, Pescadère paints, standing, fully absorbed in his task. We watch him in the cool of the morning. A thin curtain, gently crumpled by the sea air, separates us from him. At the easel, the same gestures—almost—repeated for centuries.
And yet a flame ever new leaps forth.
Our morning breeze parts the curtain a little further, and we are surprised, moved, to make out on the canvas the face of an unknown woman, a room, a path through the beechwood, an unusual construction.
The inventory, dry and brittle as a winter branch, carries none of the sap.
From this cramped timeline where years stack up, nothing foretells the blossoming of this universe. The painter’s image slips away into the mystery of creation.
Of the artist, there is above all what has not been said: because we are tempted to reduce a trajectory to logic, or because we will never know; or else because it is unsayable.
It has not been said, for instance, that Pescadère, newly freed from the camps—where he fought hard to survive and saw with his own eyes so many men fall, victims of other men’s cruelty—already in his striped pyjamas was thinking of reconciliation with Germany.
The sole survivor among the twenty-one comrades of his resistance network “Corvette,” “Le Georges” would tell it all, forty-four years later, in a thick book written in a raw voice.
He had forgotten not a single instant of torture, not one detail, from his arrest to the long deportation by train, the prisoners crammed into cattle wagons for days, in shared filth, alongside the first dead. And if that was not yet hell, it would soon appear to them, at the end of long marches, and it bore the names Dora or Bergen-Belsen.
Men were properly shot there, naked, collapsing in the mud in a freezing cold. His testimony is so that generations do not forget that it happened—how bearing a number in one’s flesh amounted to a life sentence, a sentence to the indelible memory of human cruelty in its most terrible guise.
A little later, designing the poster for the Union nationale des associations de déportés, internés et familles de disparus, Pescadère signed his work: 77023–Dora–G.-H. Pescadère.
The number would henceforth be part of his identity, until the end of his life. He would choose it as the title of his book.
And yet, from the moment of his liberation, Pescadère wished for nothing so much as reconciliation with Germany, of which he wanted to be an artisan. With one of his fellow sufferers, he founded the association “Bourg Blanc” with that aim. The initiative found little echo: it was, alas, still a little too early.
It has not been said either that Pescadère loved birds—that he domesticated some who lived by his side—or that he disliked social life; that he married Anne Wemaëre and they had two sons, Marc and Roch; that he invested himself in the life of his adopted town to the point of creating an association for the Safeguarding of Old Bormes, and served as curator of the municipal Museum of Arts and History for more than ten years.
He fled the town in summer, preferring the tranquillity of his house in the Hautes-Alpes, called Savacane.
After the war, Pescadère founded the public limited company Alliance d’arts graphiques. He earned his living as a graphic designer and advertising man, a profession he pursued into the 1970s. He liked to say that he did not paint to live, but lived to paint.
We will never truly know why, though painting was his whole life, Pescadère almost always refused to show his work.
In his lifetime, an exhibition organised in 1985 at Hyères, under pressure from friends, met with great success, but did not persuade him to accept similar initiatives. His painting was spirited away, hidden in the cave of the studio, whose threshold it did not cross. It remained withdrawn even from his family. And yet, Pescadère painted every day.
The works that have reached us are, for the most part, not signed out in full on the front, as painters traditionally do to mark a work as finished and ready to meet the market.
They are, however, annotated on the back: an abbreviated signature, sometimes an indication of the place of execution—Savacane or Bormes, most often. A title seldom appears.
Almost systematically, one or more dates—to the exact day—are inscribed, fixing with certainty the period of creation. This steady practice allows us to sketch an evolution: from the nocturnal, deserted Paris streets of the 1950s, where an odd solitude surfaces, akin to that which seizes us before Utrillo or Edward Hopper, to the luminous Mediterranean landscapes and still lifes, passing through certain formal experiments of the 1960s–70s that draw on the repertoire of geometric abstraction.
Such is the profile of the production of an artist who never conducted his practice with an eye to commercial aims and who, with only his painter’s instinct as compass, let it speak.