from the Long Beach Press-Telegram
Jacquet, 69, was icon of French pop
NEW YORK – Alain Jacquet, a French pop artist known for his reinterpretations of famous paintings, has died, the French Embassy said.
Jacquet, who lived in New York and Paris, died of cancer Thursday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the embassy said in a statement. He was 69.
Jacquet’s work often reflected the sensibilities of pop art, which emerged in Britain and the United States in the 1950s and `60s and drew on advertising, comics and other pieces of popular culture.
He also revisited well known artworks from previous eras.
One of his best-known paintings recasts the impressionist giant Edouard Manet’s “Dejeuner sur l’Herbe,” which depicts a female nude picnicking with two fully clothed men. In Jacquet’s version, they are replaced by a gallery owner, an art critic and a painter. He also based works on two other renowned nudes, Manet’s “Olympia” and the neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ “La Source.”
Born Feb. 22, 1939, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, Jacquet had his first exhibition in France in 1961. His work is held by institutions including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of American Art in Washington and the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in France, the embassy said.