The painter known as Armand Manago Guérin (1913-1983) was born in Paris and grew up as part of a family of successful artists. Both his father, Vincent Manago (1880-1936) and his older brother, Dominique Manago, were respected artists...but they painted in radically different styles...styles that were so far removed from that of Armand that he used Guérin as his last name when signing his work.
He entered the School of Fine Arts (Ecole des Beaux Arts) in Paris where he studied with Jean-Pierre Laurens, until 1939. He is listed in Bénézit as well as other art compendiums and is a noted figure with regards to the French naïve school style of painting. (A group that includes Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rousseau, Gauguin).
In 1947, he married Marianne Grunberg-Manago who later became a famous scientist in molecular biology. As they both used to say, in order to become a good scientist you also have to be an artist and in order to become a good artist you also have to be a scientist...
During WWII and the occupation of France by Germany, he was caught up in a raid in 1944, and was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, and to the Stassfurt salt mines kommando. There, he recreated every day a view of Paris, in imagination. Luckily, he escaped death several times, notably when an SS soldier broke his rifle on his back to punish him for a trivial mistake. Surviving a death march where thousands of prisoners died, he was finally freed by the Russians in May 1945. He then weighed less than 32 kilos.
He reflects on painting and, little by little, comes to refuse the Western perspective of Leonardo da Vinci (since the Renaissance) to adopt that of the primitives, as other contemporary painters did, such as the Douanier Rousseau, Bombois or Beauchamps. Like all these painters, he prefers to be called "modern primitive" rather than naive.
Guérin's work is also Paris tenderness, a dreamed Paris, recomposed, sometimes even imagined. This fresh, happy look on this capital, its quays, its barges, its monuments, an old carriage and this young girl who is waiting for her lover, is not the usual approach of the naive painters to whom he is often assimilated.
This is something other than the exact, medicinal reproduction of reality dear to le Douanier as to its epigones. We draw especially in this soft-colored Paris with its flapping flags,
This obstinate search for happiness that the prisoner must find in him every morning by his will, as the philosopher Alain has taught us ...
Some exhibition venues: :
1946: Exhibition at the Clausen gallery - Paris
1948: Exhibition at the Boudy gallery - Paris
1948: Exhibition in Tokyo
1956-1972: exhibitions in Caracas, London (Malborough Gallery), Milan (Finarte Gallery), New York (Duvien, Level, Far... Galleries), Brussels (European Gallery), Geneva (Ferrero Gallery), Los Angeles, Stockholm, Düsseldorf (Gallery Nibelung)
1972: Petit Palais Art Museum - Geneva
1972-1974: Florence - Milan
1976: Brazil
1982: Exhibition at the Verrière gallery - Lyon
1983: Exhibited at Villeurbanne town hall, at the Guiot and Marcel Bernheim galleries (Paris), Jan de Moere gallery (Brussels)
1999: Exhibition at the Krannert Art Museum - Urbana (USA)
Source: https://www.cimetiere-russe.org/en/armand-manago-6260
