Little information has come down to us about the life and career of Marcel Couderc. He spent many years in Morocco, teaching drawing at the Lycée Poeymirau in Meknes from 1932 to the end of the 1940s. It was during this period that he was chosen to decorate the superb Caméra cinema, built by Antoine Sandeaux in this northern city, which was then in full revival. Couderc proposed several frescoes in the art deco style depicting elegant and worldly women in the middle of a landscape, or an allegory of the seventh art. These monumental and majestic compositions, with nuanced colours and stylised figures, made his reputation. He also worked in Algeria, where he received the grand prize of the Algiers Academy of Fine Arts in 1938. It was in this country, and directly from the artist between 1940 and 1960, that a lacquer panel with a stylized decoration of Fishes was acquired by a family living in the capital, as well as another, African Woman and Child, from 1953, and oils on panel. These works show the influence of the naive art of Douanier Rousseau, illustrated in particular in the tenuous link between nature and man, but also that of the art deco world, in particular on the lacquer panels, where fish and human figures adopt geometric forms and sinuous, stylised lines... eminently decorative creations emblematic of an era.
 

Source : La Gazette Drouot