Featured Events

Paul-Henri Bourguignon
Recurring Themes
Richard M. Ross Museum
Ohio Weslyan Univ.
Spring, 2009

Paul-Henri Bourguignon
Art Access Gallery
540 S. Drexel Avenue
Bexley, Ohio
614-338-8325
5/2/08 to 6/2/08

Paul-Henri Bourguignon
A Centennial Visit
Ohio State University
Faculty Club
Columbus, Ohio
1/5/07 to 2/23/07

Paul-Henri Bourguignon
Island Weiss Gallery
New York, New York
11/10/05 to 1/30/06

Paul-Henri Bourguignon
A Retrospective
Gallery V
Columbus, Ohio
10/19/01 to 11/24/01

  History

1947–8: Visits Haiti. With the support of his newspaper, he stays 15 months. Writes travel reportage and, later, fiction. Is much affected by strong visual and human impact of Haiti, which remains in his work for the rest of his life. Helps to promote the new Haitian primitive art movement. In addition to writing, Bourguignon is now active photographer. Meets future wife, Erika, an anthropologist.
1948–50: Visits Peru. Some of his Peruvian adventures are later recounted in fictional form in his novel, The Greener Grass. Bourguignon is active in writing and photography and in collecting folk and pre-Columbian art. No painting during this period.
1950–88: In 1950, Bourguignon settles in Columbus, Ohio, where his wife, Erika, is teaching at the Ohio State University. Here he takes up painting again, no longer working in pastels but, for several years, in gouache and later in acrylics, as well as in charcoal, graphite, and pencil. He draws heavily on the visual images he collected in his travels, including landscapes, figures, and genre scenes, loosely derived, remembered, or imagined.
Bourguignon begins to show his work, first in several one-person exhibitions at the Ohio State University and other venues such as Grinnell College and the Blanden Gallery, both in Iowa, then at the Columbus Museum of Fine Art (now the Columbus Museum of Art) (1964), at Battelle Memorial Institute (1965), and in Edmonton, Canada, at the Jaycox Gallery (1966).
After a period of withdrawal, he begins to exhibit again in 1987 at Gallery 200 in Columbus. He dies in September 1988.
1989+: In addition to a large number of paintings, Bourguignon left a substantial number of graphic works.

Bourguignon’s paintings, drawings and photographs now appear in hundreds of private and public collections worldwide.