Andrée Le Coultre

Training under Albert Gleizes and Antoine Chartres is recorded. The recorded working language is French. Places of work recorded in the authority are Lyon. Work by Andrée Le Coultre is recorded in the collections of Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon and Musée Paul-Dini.

• Name — Andrée Le Coultre • Birthplace — La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland • Died — 6 July 1986 • Education — École des Beaux-arts de Lyon • Known for — cubist painting • Spouse — Paul Régny Andrée Le Coultre (1917 – 6 July 1986) was a French painter in the cubist tradition coached by Albert Gleizes. She was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland but spent her entire life in Lyon where her parents moved when she was an infant. She acquired French nationality in 1942 after her marriage to Paul Régny.

Le Coultre and Paul Régny met while taking evening classes from Antoine Chartres at the École des Beaux-arts de Lyon, where she also met Louis Bellon, Maurice Férréol. She was married to Régny in 1942. She and Régny attended evening classes together from Eugène Claudius-Petit. In 1941, she and Régny visited the potter Anne Dangar who was participating at the Moly-Sabata artist colony created by Albert Gleizes. In 1942 she participated in an exhibition at Marcel Michaud Folklore gallery ("Peintures féminines") where she also worked for some time as a secretary. Both attended the Académie du Minotaure created by René-Maria Burlet. Le Coultre's mission was to rapidly find direction and meaning to her work. She read a lot of books on art and artists, and was influenced by Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse, Robert Delaunay, André Lhote, Léger, and others. The art of the Middle Ages was also an influence, especially the reds and the blues of the stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral. Her quest, shared with her husband, turned to the thought of Albert Gleizes, who she first contacted by correspondence in April 1945. Le Coultre wrote, "Gleizes influenced my work towards a structured figurativism." Her plans at that point were that she and Régny would move either to the artist colony, or nearby Gleizes in St-Rémy-de-Provence; however, in the end, these plans did not come to fruition. Andrée Le Coultre died on 6 July 1986. On the 12th, according to the wishes of her husband Paul Regny, her coffin was at St. Joseph Church in Tassin, surrounded by the many paintings Le Coultre had painted on the walls of the Church.

In 1946, René Deroudille exhibited a retrospective of Le Coultre's paintings at the Maison de la Pensée Française. The couple started working that year according to the principles of Albert Gleizes, whom they finally met in 1947 and with whom they remained in regular correspondence, concerning paintings they submitted to him. Le Coultre exhibited regularly, sometimes in Paris at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, often in group exhibitions, and annually at the Lyon salons (the Salon d'Automne, the Salon Regain and starting in 1981 at the Salon du Sud-Est). Her works were regularly exhibited in galleries: at Paul Mauradian's Pantographe, Folklore, Galerie de l'Institut in Paris, l'Oeil Ecoute, and, posthumously, at the Galerie Malaval and at Olivier Houg (Red Room). } She participated with her husband in the decoration of the new Saint Joseph Church in Tassin-la-Demi-Lune, created a Virgin for the church of St. Anne de Menival (Lyon), and a large oil ("l'Imaginaire") for the Jacques Prévert pre-school in La-Demi-Lune. In 2017, ten of her pieces were exhibited in the Musée de Beaux Arts de Lyon, honoring the donation of eighteen paintings to the museum by their son, Marc Régny.

After her debut with Antoine Chartres, she turned toward a more geometric style inspired by André Lhote and Fernand Léger, developing figurative compositions characterized by the colors of Matisse and the stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral. Le Coultre was influenced by her 1946 meeting with Albert Gleizes, who subsequently followed her oeuvre. Le Coultre's work became characterized by non-figurative paintings or gouaches composed, following Gleizes's theories, of geometric shapes in muted colors, open circles, and broken lines. But very soon, Le Coultre and Régny began to introduce their own variations to Gleizes's themes and practice, as Gleizes himself wished. In the 1950s and 1960s, Andrée Le Coultre started exploring themes of her own, alternating non-figurative motifs with a return to specific topics such as religious subjects, where one can feel the influence of medieval art and Irish art, drawn for example from the Old Testament or from the Apocalypse, which gives space for her more imaginary visions to take flight; but also of scenes of daily life where constructions, rhythms, modulations and color harmonies like reds and blues can come into play.

In 2017, eighteen of Le Coultre's works were donated to the Musée de Beaux Arts de Lyon by their son, Marc Régny, occasioning an exhibition of her works, juxtaposed with two by Albert Gleizes in the museum's permanent collection, Danseuse espagnole (1916) and Terre et ciel (1935).

• La Musique, 1945, oil on canvas • Composition, 1951, oil on cardboard • Corsage rouge, 1958, oil on hardboard • Composition, 1960, oil on paper laminated onto cardboard • Composition, 1963, oil on canvas • Laitone, 1967, oil on canvas • La Coiffure, 1968, oil on canvas • Naissance de Gargantua, 1971, oil on paper laminated to cardboard • Untitled, circa 1980–1986, oil on paper laminated to cardboard • Vertiges, 1962, oil on canvas