Constant Detré was born in Budapest on 2 January 1891, and died 10 April 1945 in Garnat-sur-Engièvre a village of central France. He was an artist who left his native Hungary for good in rather obscure circumstances following the repression against the Béla Kun government of 1919. He settled in Paris where he mixed from 1920 to 1940 with representatives of the School of Paris and other Montparnasse artists, several of whom were Central European émigrés like himself, such as Pascin, a good friend of his.
Early life
For lack of extensive data, the artist’s biography is difficult to piece together. It has been ascertained with some degree of confidence that his forebears were all in varying degrees artists from Central Europe. His great-grandfather Clémens Dittmann was a sculptor who moved from Vienna to Budapest early during the 19th century, where he worked on several important buildings. His grandfather Eduard Diettmann was a sculptor who married a Hungarian woman. Constant Detré's father, Eduard Diettmann, a steam engine mechanic, died too early to make a name for himself as an artist. Detré studied painting in Munich with one of the greatest Hungarian representatives of 19th centuryNaturalism and Realism, the Hungarian artist Simon Hollósy, who organized study sessions in the Carpathian Mountains for his students at the private painting school he had founded in the Bavarian capital in 1886.
Career
Detré went to Paris in 1914, before returning to Hungary, but would leave shortly thereafter, perhaps as a result of the brutal anti-communist repression launched by the Miklós Horthy regime. but if so, it was not by official decree. In 1919 Detré returned to Munich and became the producer of a pantomime company. He moved to Paris in time for the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. He became an acquaintance of Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy, Tsuguharu Foujita, Moïse Kisling, Kiki de Montparnasse and a close friend of Pascin. His first marriage with the Hungarian Marie Mirkovsky ended in a divorce. On 30 December 1933 he married Claire Carnat, a young talented artist from a well-to-do French family. He became a naturalizedFrench citizen shortly before World War II, on 27 November 1936. Detré worked as a professor at the Académie Julian, teaching life drawing, art of fashion, composition, color harmony, model creation, theater art, costume design, theater history, decor, stage sets, modeling, and in situ studies at theaters throughout Paris. His ink drawings represent his indignant reaction against all forms of prevailing injustices. He illustrated books. Like Toulouse-Lautrec, he was attracted to brothels, as is evident in his so-called Dessins à la Lanterne, reflecting the mood, feeling, and his ability to understand the Parisian atmosphere during the 1920s and 1930s in Paris. Detré's pastels show great virtuosity and originality. Subjects vary from trenchant social criticism to colorful landscapes, portraits, domestic and brothel scenes not unlike those of Toulouse-Lautrec whose influence he recognized. Yet he has his own way of treating his subject-matter, with ordinary everyday scenes, peopled with nonchalant, sometimes withdrawn, but always vibrant characters. Occasionally he paints himself as a voyeur gazing from within the canvas at his unsuspecting models, so that we feel drawn into his world as if we were his accomplices. His work is rarely found in auction houses and even less so in museums. In the 1960s, a number of works were placed in public auctions at Hôtel Drouot, Paris, and elsewhere, by the artist's family and his only daughter so that examples of his production continue to delight private collectors, in Europe and possibly other places. His only daughter, in a last-ditch attempt to bring her father's life and work to the notice of all art lovers and experts who have for so long and unjustly neglected to consider her father on a par with his better-known contemporaries, has designed a website in his memory and collected all sorts of written testimonials, with reproductions of some of his best art work in a beautifully produced book .
