(b Noyelles-sur-Sambre, Nord, July 24, 1892; d ?Paris, April 11, 1971).
French painter and designer. He was set to follow a legal career and received little formal artistic training. From 1910, however, he frequented the studios of Montparnasse, assimilating Matisse’s style through tuition from Henri Le Fauconnier at the Académie de la Palette and from Félix Vallotton at the Académie Ranson. He exhibited six canvases at the Salon des Indépendants of 1911. He continued to draw while serving in the Army from 1913 to 1919 but was wounded on the Somme in 1916. From 1919 he devoted himself to painting and to writing about art and the cinema. His post-war paintings were marked by an admiration for the Flemish and to a lesser extent German Expressionists and for the work of Fernand Léger, although Gromaire later repudiated the Expressionist label. From 1920 he exhibited regularly at the Salon d’Automne and at the Salon des Indépendants and in 1921 held his first one-man show at the Galerie La Licorne in Paris; the gallery’s owner, ...