Eye, 1967 (image from www.museum.ru). Click to enlarge

All through his artistic life Bruyere was working in the most cosmopolitan language of art – abstraction. All his cycles of paintings refer to studying the Universe and trying to crack its code.

The “Unified Fields” of the 1970s were huge canvases covered in a frequent net of black-and-white lines, expanding crystal lattices. The “Temple” cycle started in the 1980s, and which is still being developed today, reveals the philosophical and mystical interests of the artist. The huge canvases are very up to date.

William Bruyere’s art sprouts from experience of Russian avant-garde. In the late 1960s he worked as a journeyman in the well-known Leningrad Experimental graphic workshop. There he passed a course in avant-garde, which was impossible to get anywhere else. The outstanding masters of lithography Vera Matuh, Gerta Nemenova, Pavel Kondratyev, and Valentin Brodsky – many of which studied from avant-garde masters of the 1920s – shared professional techniques and experience and semi-forbidden memoirs with young William Bruyere.

Series «Etrus», 1988 (image from www.museum.ru). Click to enlarge

Having left his native Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1970 at the age of 24, Bruyere avowed the principle that it’s “better to be the second, or even the tenth, in your homeland, than the first in emigration.”

Bruyere first ended up in Israel, then he moved to New York, and then on to Paris. For the last seven years the artist has been living in Normandy.

Hardly any other Russian artist can brag that they were introduced to New York’s art scene by the emperor of Conde Nast publishing house, Alex Liberman.

Today, canvases of the artist are not only in numerous private collections, but also in NY’s Metropolitan museum, the Guggenheim museum NY, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and many others.