“I preferred the interest and the pleasure of traveling inside painting, to the obligation demanded by the art market to stick to repetition in one and the same way of paint identifiable. ”
Professor in several academies and schools of Fine Arts, responsible by the Ministry of Culture, after May 1968, for the implementation of the reform of artistic education, art historian, editor and director of the dictionary of artists , the famous Bénézit, pioneer and host of the great post-war salons, Jacques Busse is a “considerable contemporary”. In the finally restricted circle of authentic creators, it is one of the “sure values”. He exhibited regularly in groups and personally, both in France and abroad. Student of Othon Friesz and co-founder of the Groupe de l’Echelle in 1942.
Humanist and man of culture, which was not uncommon among artists of his generation, Jacques Busse maintained a fertile dialogue with poets like Raymond Queneau or Christian Morgenstein. He translated from the German language the Songs of the Gibet. From André Frénaud, he illustrated the collection La sorcière de Rome. Jacques Busse also published a theoretical work on impressionism and a small book with squeaky humor Propos d’ivrogne, published by Obsidiane editions.
Because he was, precisely, a man of culture, Jacques Busse always refused to take seriously the humorless followers of Marcel Duchamp, the intellectual terrorism of the impotent theorists of “the death of art” and the dictatorship of the unconditional ones “installations” and other “videos”. Far from sterile games and intellectual fashions, painting was for him a total adventure, sensual, physical and mental.
