The poet, painter and graphic artist Camille Bryen (Camille Briand) is regarded a protagonist of French Tachism.
Camille Bryen was born Camille Briand at Nantes in 1907. He is an all-rounder and was not only active as visual artist, but also as writer. In 1932 he published a collection of drawings, collages and poems with the title "Expériences" under the pseudonym Camille Bryen.
As painter Camille Bryen (Camille Briand) followed a path of subjective, expressive abstraction. Together with Georges Mathieu he started the movement "Non-Figuration-psychique" in 1947. A year later Camille Bryen, Georges Mathieu and Michel Tapié organized the first exhibition for this "psychic-abstract" painting called "L'Imaginaire", "HWPSMTB" as well as "White and Black".
Camille Bryen (Camille Briand) executed his expressive-abstract works, which are close to Tachism, in various techniques. In 1947 he made abstract watercolors called "Structures Imaginaires", as of the late 1940s Camille Bryen (Camille Briand) became increasingly occupied with oil painting and graphic techniques.
Camille Bryen (Camille Briand) was quite successful with his strong abstraction as of the 1950s: He had his first grand retrospective at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes as early as in 1959, in 1973 another large exhibition at the Paris Musée National d'Art Moderne followed. International museums are in possession of works by Camille Bryen (Camille Briand), among them the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCS) in Strasbourg, the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
A catalogue raisonné of his oeuvre was released in 1975. Two years later, in 1977, Camille Bryen died in Paris.