Crépin, Fleury-Joseph
France, 1875 - 1948
During his childhood, Fleury-Joseph Crépin loved music. He married in 1901 and had two daughters. He tried different jobs before opening his own hardware store. In 1930 he met Victor Simon, a painter and psychic who initiated him into spiritualism. Crépin’s first drawing dates from 1938, when he was sixty-three; he improvised it copying a music score, guided by the symmetry of the staves. Convinced that he was inspired by his guardian angels, he then began what would become a rich artistic period, creating 345 paintings in nine years. His oil paintings are based on sketches that he transferred and enlarged onto canvases with the use of a compass and a ruler. Crépin’s paintings represent architectural themes — temples, palaces and geometrical patterns —to which he added human figures and stylized animals. Persuaded of his power to end wars, he predicted that the Second World War would end when he finished his three hundredth painting.
