1991

Stay in Spain with her friend Maria-Eugénia Ruiz de Alda and her children in Madrid.

Participation in the Salon Violet (Town Hall of the 4th arrondissement of Paris).

Publication of a book “Germaine Lacaze” completed with the catalogue raisonné of oil paintings by Editions de l’Amateur (preface by Jacques Chaban-Delmas, text by Cécile Ritzenthaler).

Our country is pictorial, since we no longer count the native or adopted inhabitants of Bordeaux who have become painters simply because it was a necessity for them.

Women too, in spite of the pitfalls, have gone into the beautiful profession of Art, Germaine Lacaze stands at the forefront with all the poetic reality that her paintings express.

Germaine Lacaze will tell you that she painted Spain because she found the light of our Bordeaux region, the warm vibrations of the Landes.

Venice with its opaline colours, the blaze of the skies at sunset, the moving water enriched by the luxuriance of the reflected palaces, transposes into playful expressions her memories of the Arcachon Basin.

A painting with southern roots in the deployment of colours, deeply rooted in French Art, the work of Germaine Lacaze, of a certain elegance, combines a mastery of tones with a rigorous construction.

                                                                                                Jacques CHABAN-DELMAS

                    Deputy – Mayor of Bordeaux – President of the National Assembly

Private exhibition at the Ruiz de Alda Gallery in Arcachon.

Private exhibition at the Ruiz de Alda gallery in Arcachon.

1993

Quoted in the book “L’Ecole de Paris 1945-1965” by Lydia Harambourg published by Editions Ides et Calendes.

Private exhibition at the Roland Maréchal gallery (formerly L’Ami des Lettres) in Bordeaux.

1994

After a stroke at the end of 1993, she died at the Rothschild Hospital in the 12th arrondissement of Paris on 1 January.

Funeral mass on 12 January at Notre-Dame de Bercy in the 12th arrondissement of Paris, followed by cremation at the Père Lachaise crematorium.

Burial of her ashes in the family vault in the Bouscat cemetery near Bordeaux.

Our friend Germaine Lacaze …

Having character, being a woman and wanting to “play” the artist, such was our friend G. Lacaze. Her Bordeaux origins gave a velvet flamboyance to her eyes and a singing note to her conversation. As others enter the orders, she dedicated herself to celibacy to better devote herself to the art of painting.

She was not afraid of large canvases. She articulated vast compositions bringing together figures in the splendour of youth, mixed with heaps of flowers and fruit, treated with a luxuriance of paste and colours. Naturally, the fireworks of this generous, lyrical and sensual behaviour were and are more than ever at odds with the gloomy contemporary productions. By affirming her attachment to the succulence of coloured matter brought to the highest degree of its brilliance, she was following in the footsteps of Bonnard and Matisse, who did not disdain, especially the former, the treatment of, as she put it, “the figure”. She considered the landscape to be a minor genre which could only be elevated to the noble genre by being populated with figures. From then on, the painting became a composition, as much as an architectural whole with rhythms and sonorities that carried you away in a solar dizziness.

Roger GRELLET

Former director of the Saint-Maur Museum. November 1994

Publication of the book ” Le Bassin d’Arcachon vu par les peintres ” by Michel Szelengowicz at Editions La Huche Corne with a note dedicated to Germaine Lacaze.