VICTOR SPAHN: Painter of Movement

Since the 1980's, Victor Spahn has demonstrated his unflagging passion for sports in the contemporary French pictorial landscape. To the point of being named "the painter of movement". Meet him here.

Victor Spahn has always been obsessed with sketching. Since childhood, he has drawn everything, all the time, to the great distress of his teachers and his parents of Russian origin. "If I was a very mediocre student, on the other hand, I never worried about what I was going to become. I have always had the impression that something outside of myself was pulling me...". At the time, of course, no one spoke yet of talent! That would have been incongruous.

The principal of the school where, after a fashion, young Victor bounced along, had tried to reassure the anxious father, "Don't worry, your son will be a painter." Premonition or a simple answer? "It's true, I drew all the time. Last in my class and continually punished, I knew of nothing else to do. School for me was not an essential thing on condition that I felt that I had something else. Today, I live for my painting, and every day I tell myself it is magic. You must realize that for fifty years now, the only thing of interest to me is drawing, and selling my drawings."

Training at the Ecole Superieure des Arts Modernes, supported by several small jobs here and there (waiting tables, groom at Claridge's) Victor Spahn begins by designing mosaics. Moreover, in 1970 he wins first prize in New York City for a mosaic table. But finally, through the influence of the Russian master Andre Lanskoy, he finds his style: oil based painting, figurative, luxurious, simple. He is barely thirty years old and the adventure is beginning. At top speed. Very quickly, the painting of this artist is noticed.

(Translated from a magazine article titled "Victor Spahn: le peintre du movement" : The Best in the World, No. 70)