Georges Valmier, 1928, Les Tulipes (The Tulips), oil on canvas, 92 x 65 cm, private collection

Georges Valmier was a French painter and early practitioner of Cubism alongside Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Valmier differed from Picasso and Braque in that his paintings employed dramatic shifts in color. Born on April 11, 1885 in Angoulême, France, he studied under Luc-Olivier Merson at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris but left before finishing. Dismissing his education as too rigid, Valmier turned to the work of Paul Cézanne for inspiration. In 1914, he was drafted into the French military where he met the painter Albert Gleizes. The early 1930s marked Valmier's departure from the structure of Cubism in favor of a looser abstraction. In 1932, alongside Gleizes, Hans Arp, and František Kupka, Valmier founded the Abstraction-Création group. In parallel with his friend Gleizes, Valmier became increasingly preoccupied with religion and metaphysics with his work. The artist died on March 25, 1937 in Paris, France. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands, and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others.