Pierre Tal-Coat

Pierre Tal-Coat
Born	Pierre Louis Jacob December 12, 1905 Clohars-Carnoet, France
Died	June 12, 1985 Saint-Pierre de Bailleul
Nationality	French
Known for	painting, printmaking
Movement	Tachisme

Pierre Tal-Coat (real name Pierre Louis Jacob; 1905–1985) was a French artist considered to be one of the founders of Tachisme.

He was born the son of a fisherman, in the village of Clohars-Carnoët, Finistère in 1905. He attended primary school from 1912 to 1914. In 1915, during World War I, his father was killed in fighting at the Argonne front. Apprenticed as a blacksmith in 1918, he began designing and sculpting and was rewarded with a national scholarship and entered the Upper primary school at Quimperlé. He started his working life as clerk to a notary in 1923 in Arzano. In 1924, he found work as a decorator at the Keraluc porcelain factory in Quimper in 1924, creating characters and landscapes of the Brittany countryside.

Arriving in Paris in 1924, Tal-Coat modelled for the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere, was a moulder at the Manufacture de Sèvres and met with the painter Émile Compard. In 1925 and 1926 he fulfilled his military service in Paris in the cuirassiers. He met Auguste Fabre and Henri Bénézit and exhibited in their gallery under the name of Tal-Coat (Wood Face in Breton) which he used all his life to avoid homonymy with the poet Max Jacob. Back in Paris in 1930, after a stay back home in Brittany from 1927 to 1929, he mixed with such notables as Francis Gruber, André Marchand, Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia, Ernest Hemingway, Giacometti, Balthus, Artaud, Tzara and Paul-Émile Victor. From 1932 he was a member of the "Forces Nouvelles". In 1936, he protested against the Spanish Civil War with his “Massacres” series.

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