Discover the Artist
Alain Bonnefoit
He was born in 1937 in Paris’s Montmartre district.
Beginning in 1953, he attended the École des Arts Appliqués, and from 1956 studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1959 he also enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, in the “Engraving and Sculpture” section.
In 1961 he joined the School of Applied Arts in Paris and worked in the studio of the Italo-French sculptor Antoniucci Volti, who became his artistic mentor. With Volti he shared a fascination for the female form and forged both a close professional relationship and a deep friendship.
In 1965 he moved to Campiglia Marittima (province of Livorno) in Tuscany, while maintaining his Paris studio—thus becoming, in effect, an adopted Tuscan. Alain Bonnefoit intelligently drew on Matisse’s floating line, Arp’s sculptural fullness, and Dufy’s spontaneous rhythm, all suffused with Tuscan light and color. Just before relocating to Italy, he had begun to delve deeply into the depiction of the nude. There, he started experimenting with a wide range of techniques—mixed media on paper, oil, watercolor, lithography, ink, and sculpture—with the sole aim of creating infinite variations on the female body within a mood of serene eroticism.
English 
Italian