Landscape with a little girl ROBERT FONTA

Robert Fonta, born Robert Fontaine on October 29, 1922, in Lorient and died on April 14, 1976, in Saint-Cloud, was a French painter, draftsman, and engraver.

Biography

Born to a very young, penniless mother and an unknown father who was a legionnaire, the name Fontaine was given to him by his adoptive father, a career soldier [1], who was very violent.
Caught in a roundup in Paris in 1943, where he was living homeless and without papers, he was sent to the STO in Germany, then, following a failed escape attempt, to a repression camp, from which he returned in 1945, very weakened. [2] A regular at the Café de l'Académie, located opposite the Beaux-Arts school, he frequented many artists there. On the advice of a professor at the Beaux-Arts school, he attempted to continue his apprenticeship in a studio. "When the professor saw my painting the following Friday and the use I had made of his advice, he gave me a wise and final recommendation to go sweep the street; and above all, to avoid dirtying any brushes in the future..."

During these years, he met Bernard Buffet, with whom he shared a bohemian lifestyle.
In the early 1950s, Fonta frequented the artists of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, including Jacques Prévert, author of the famous poem "La chasse à l'enfant" (The Child Hunt), a tribute to the children of the Belle-Île-en-Mer penal colony, set to music by Joseph Kosma. In 1953, at the café "Chez Moineaux" on Rue du Four, he met Guy Debord, who would remain deeply influenced by his accounts of his adolescence in the harsh penal colony of Belle-Île-en-Mer[3] and paid tribute to him two years after his death in 1976 by including a photographic portrait of him in his film "In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni," shot in 1978 and released in May 1981, alongside other companions from that era who were regulars at the venue: Ivan Chtcheglov, Gil J Wolman, Ghislain de Marbaix, and Éliane Pápaï[4].

Works

Robert Fonta is included in the collections of several French museums, including the Musée National d'Art Moderne[5] and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes[6]. His works, purchased by the French state, have been entrusted to embassies. Robert Fonta's work is marked by a difficult childhood, his youthful years in the Belle-Île-en-Mer penal colony, his captivity in Germany during the Second World War, "his taste for the circus, having worked there," as he said, and his friendships in the contemporary artistic and literary world of post-war Paris, including Antoine Blondin, Bernard Buffet, and André Dunoyer de Segonzac, his mentor.
Robert Fonta's engraved work is also well represented in the print room of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, with his favorite subjects such as difficult childhoods, mainly etched[7],[8], clowns[9],[10],[11], and prison[12].
In 1950, he produced engravings to illustrate Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Large painting on panel depicting a lively landscape of houses with a little girl, possibly made in Spain by ROBERT FONTA, signed below.
Montparnasse frame.
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