John-Franklin Koenig "His life and work" at the Angers fine arts museum

Crédit picture : wikipédia

The Angers fine arts museum hosts, since a few days and up to april, the works of an american painter, John-Frankin Koenig. The city museum inherited from the artist ten of his abstract paintings beacuse he loved Angers and even thought to live there.


Better known in Europe and Japan than in his native country,  Koenig was an international artist. Born in Seattle in 1924, he became interested in art at a young age, particularly the Asian art he found at the Seattle Art Museum. Drafted into the army in 1943, Koenig fought in Europe until the end of the war.

Credit Picture : Angers museum

Returning to the U.S. after the war, Koenig studied French and French literature as well as design and art during that period. On finishing his degree in 1948, John moved to Paris where he would live for the following 30 years. In Paris, he began working on collage and later paintings, inspired by European artists, and also by Oriental works he saw on nearly a dozen trips to Japan.

His paintings and collages have been shown in nearly 150 solo exhibitions around the world and are part of collections in a number of international museums : Paris, Tokyo,Montreal, Luxembourg and Seattle. Koenig returned to his native city in 2006, where he died in January 2008 at the age of 83.