About

Born in 1943, he has been teaching as a University professor, he directed museums and has been organizing numerous exhibitions in France and around the world, all the while authoring a large number of publications about art.

One may be surprised.
As early as his teenage years, he drew, explored black and white photography, filled with drawings his High School notebooks and began to paint with gouache.

Attentive to what could be perceived as a vocation, two teachers were decisive in his evolution: in High School, André Guédron, professor of drawing who advises him to read the Traité du paysage et de la figure («Treaty of the Landscape and the Figure») d’André Lhote and that of the journal L’OEil («The Eye”) and offers him a book about the Bauhaus; then in University where Jacques Thuillier, this professor of art history and a secret artist, encourages his practice and asks him to organize at the Faculty of Letters of Dijon the exhibition of his paintings and those of other students. His teaching came in addition to that of André Guédron: it was necessary to study Lhote and the Fundamentals of Art History of Heinrich Wölfflin to know how to read a painting, a sculpture or an architectural work.

How to distinguish between painting to better understand art in order to transmit or paint as a vocation: both are the same for Serge Lemoine.
From André Lhote to the Bauhaus, from Piet Mondrian and Bart Van der Leck to Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse, only one way: that of a rational practice, not sentimental, abstract with simple and geometric forms in a composition where all the elements are justified.
The same process of geometrization is seen in ancient painting. Only one example: the Descente de croix (« Descent of the Cross ») by Rosso (Pinacothèque in Volterra) that Serge Lemoine did admire early on, where the vertical, the horizontal and the obliques are emphasized while the volumes are affirmed and the colors recomposed.

Very early, he received encouragements: Jesus-Rafael Soto the first buys him a painting for his museum in Venezuela, Pierre Quarré, comes to choose at home for the Museum of Fine Arts of Dijon of which he is the chief curator a painting just finished. Without opting for the career of painter: he devoted himself to research and teaching, while continuing his artistic activities with more or less intensity depending on the degree of responsibility assigned along his career.

The artists who Serge Lemoine wrote about and contributed to make known were his masters.
All rational but ultimately all different: Aurelie Nemours is not François Morellet, nor Jan Schoonhoven, much less Camille Graeser or Auguste Herbin. Many of them, whom he admired, did pursue their pictorial creation into graphic design and architecture, two forms of expression that
fascinated him: He himself designed posters, furniture and organized exhibitions, wrote books.