 |
Françoise Oury Bangor was born on the 29th April 1905 in Brussels |
|
The daughter of Marie Sordet (cf portrait by Louis Oury) , a painter and music-lover
and of Louis Oury, a painter, sculpter, an engraver of medallions
and
teacher at the Boulle School in Paris (*). (The
familly in six images told by Elisabeth Arkus)
She was also a niece of yet another painter the famous Marcel Lenoir (*) (cf. portrait by Bangor) She had had a brother and two sisters. Her brother Paul was a salemans in hand-made artifacts while her sister Juliette (Lili) became a hat designer, and her younger sister, Janine, a danser and choregrapher. Janine Solane founded a dance school (*) which her own daughter, Dominique Solane directs today. During the 1930’s Lili and Bangor worked on a series of embossed leather artworks for the candy boxes their father sold. Living in the legendary "1930's Montparnasse" Françoise Oury Bangor frequented the fashionable artists of the time. At the age of twenty started her employment for Jeanne Lanvin (*), initialy as a model and then as clothes designer. It was also at this time that she met her future husband Jean Taboureux, a doctor, whom she married in 1930. He open his medical practice at Coutances (*), in Normandy, where his parents were established as professors at a local Lycée. It was here that she started her own career as a painter using the name Françoise Bangor. The name Bangor was borrowed from a tiny village of Belle-Ile-en-Mer (*), a small island off the south-west coast of Brittany greatly admired by other artists such as Monet, Sarah Bernhardt or the great French actress Arletty. She often spent her holidays at her parents-in-law's house and she soon fell under the spell of the island's charm and painted continually the wild coast-line and many sketches of local fishermen. In Normandy, during the Second World War, a witness of both the German Occupation and the Normandy landings she took as models soldiers of all origins from the Black Americans, the Mongol to the German soldier. She also left eye-witness reports of daily life of soldiers, refugees from the 1944 bombarments and also of victory in the middle of ruined cities. The Town Concil of Coutances asked Françoise Bangor to organise formel dinner with General De Gaulle when he visited the town on the 6th of June 1945. The Story of an Autograph is told by her daughter Claudine Honegger. |