Pierre Jacob, who in 1926 adopted the pseudonym Tal Coat ("wood forehead" in Breton) to distinguish himself from the poet Max Jacob, was born in 1905 in Clohars-Carnoët, in Finistère. The son of a fisherman killed in the First World War, Tal Coat moved from job to job during his youth while teaching himself to paint. He arrived in Paris in 1924 and began exhibiting at the Fabre gallery in 1926. His early work, which was openly figurative, was influenced by various modernist movements, such as Fauvism, Cubism and Expressionism. He would make several important encounters in the 1930s, including with Francis Gruber, Alberto Giacometti and Gertrude Stein. The artist became known in avant-garde circles, and his work was shown at New York’s Julian Levy Gallery in 1938. His painting was marked by the troubles of his day—a series titled Massacres, for instance, was inspired by the Spanish Civil War. Mobilised in 1939, then demobilised in July 1940, Tal Coat settled in Aix-en-Provence, where many artists and writers had taken refuge from the Second World War. Three years later, he moved to the Château Noir, at the foot of the Sainte Victoire Mountain - the very spot where Cézanne used to paint. In Provence, Tal Coat's work underwent a full transformation: his palette became at once more fluid and more restrained, and his figures evaporated into a formalism that seemed to synthesize and essentialize the visible realm. Tal Coat would pursue this new mode of painting unceasingly over the following decades. He began exhibiting at the Galerie Maeght in 1954, and he was chosen to represent France at the 1956 Venice Biennale. In 1961, he moved to Saint-Pierre-de-Bailleul, in the Normandy countryside, where he worked until his death in 1985.