EXPLORE BOURGUIGNON’S Artwork

Paul-Henri Bourguignon’s artwork depicts his memories, travels, and a wide variety of experience. As a young man, he studied with significant and well-respected art teachers. In the 1930s, he traveled widely throughout Europe and North Africa. In the postwar years, Bourguignon wrote art criticism for the Brussels newspaper Le Phare and opened his own gallery. His work brought him into contact with many modernist artists and techniques of the time. In the late 1940s, he lived in Peru and Haiti, which was deeply transformative. During this time, he didn’t paint but considered himself to be a writer and photographer. After moving to the United States in 1950, he continued to stay informed of the European art world and began painting again, interpreting through his own lens all he had learned and experienced. In the late 1970s, he began experimenting with abstraction—or, as he called it—transposition, and developed his own techniques.