Galerie Paul Prouté

Henri Neugeboren was born in 1901 in the Carpathian mountains. He was the descendant of a family of German Protestant pastors who had emigrated to Transylvania. As a child, he regularly accompanied his architect father on building projects in Hungary and Romania. Introduced to music at an early age by his mother, a soprano singer, Henri Neugeboren entered the Berlin Academy of Music in 1923, where he studied piano with Egon Petri and Ferruccio Busoni. It was also during this period that he produced his first abstract drawings. After several stays in Paris, he settled in the Montparnasse district in 1929, where he lived until his death. A protean artist, Henri Neugeboren painted and sculpted alongside his activities as a composer. After the war, the artist adopted the French pseudonym Henri Nouveau and exhibited in several Parisian galleries and Salons. While his pre-war paintings, most of which were figurative, borrowed heavily from Surrealism, his pictorial and graphic work after 1947 showed a radical move towards geometric abstraction.