Henri Hayden (1883 – 1970)

Biography: Born in Poland, Henri Hayden trained in Warsaw, then in 1907 went to Paris for a year, but stayed. Cezanne and Cubism were influences – but from 1922 he rejected this aesthetic and developed a more figurative manner, especially in landscape painting, which proved immensely successful. As he was Jewish, he was forced into hiding in the South of France during the German occupation. By 1950 there were signs of a return to a sub-cubist mannerism in his work, and as a result the landscapes and still lifes of his last 20 years became both more simplified and more definitely composed than the previous period.