Max Papart was a French painter and printmaker whose distinctive Cubist-derived idiom, bright, fragmented, populated by musicians, lovers, circus performers, and cyclists, combined the formal language of mid-twentieth-century Parisian abstraction with the colour and temperament of the Mediterranean coast where he was born.
Max Papart (December 19, 1911 – 1994) was a French painter and master printmaker, born in Marseille and trained at the city's School of Fine Arts before moving to Paris in 1936, where he began exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants and studied at the École du Louvre. The Second World War interrupted his Parisian career: he returned to Marseille, studied briefly at the Auzias Academy, and joined the French Resistance, taking part in the liberation of the city before returning to Paris in 1950 to resume his studio practice.
His mature work fuses Cubist spatial construction with a strongly Mediterranean colour palette and a recurring repertoire of musicians, lovers, circus performers, animals, and cyclists arranged across flat planes of bright pigment. From the late 1950s his painting moved toward greater abstraction, and through the 1960s and 1970s he absorbed iconographic references from Aegean and pre-Columbian Aztec cultures into his vocabulary. He was an exceptionally accomplished printmaker; in 1960 he adopted the carborundum etching technique recently invented by his friend Henri Goetz, and his subsequent prints, often combining carborundum, aquatint, and collaged handmade paper, are among the most technically distinctive French graphic works of the postwar period. He taught printmaking at the University of Paris VIII in Vincennes from 1969 to 1973.