Leprin is born in Cannes. Very young, he is adopted by Don Bosco’s Salésiens fathers, who, surprised by his drawing facilities, initiate him with the lithography. Leprin exerts several professions, before being engaged in a tiny troop of bullfighting which gives some parodies of corrida on Sundays, in village places. Then he exertes to paint on small sizes tauromachic subjects.

At this time in 1914, Leprin meets his wife, Helene, and leaves like marine fusilier on Waldeck-Rousseau board during the First World War. When he comes back in 1919, Helene has disappeared. Leprin will keep all his life a secret wound of this sentimental failure. He spends the two following years in Marseilles in a total destitution. Welcomed by the family of a merchant, Mrs Smadja, Leprin carries out a disordered life which leads him in the hot districts of the city where he loses his health.

During this period, he brushes small pochades representing bullfight scenes. A first exhibition brings him to a command : the decoration of a bar in the National street. He collaborates in a corida review with an unequalled talent to give this insane and coloured atmosphere of these noisy festivals, of movement, light and temerity.

The major work of Leprin in Marseilles is the decoration of the bar ” Pierre “. Four walls covered with high colored frescos whose principal, seven meters long, represents the panorama of the old port. Leprin decorated also one or two closed houses into the hot districts. From these topics and their daily misery Leprin only retains their human contents. All the paintings of Leprin are reflecting his various states of heart, so that no one is similar to another.

By leaving Marseilles, seriously wounded, he has already provided the foundations of his fame.

Parisian period

In 1921, Leprin forgets his past and goes up to Paris where he finds some contacts. In constant such poignant misery, he finds in Paris his mental climate and immediately adopts the Montmartre landscapes and their human reality. Misery, more visible and obvious that in Marseilles, is closer to his heart. He proposes pochades and pastels to ephemeral customers, exchanges paintings against a room which proposes to him the owner of a restaurant, ” the Catherine mother “. For her, he paints portraits, a still life, the stall of a tobacco shop, and landscapes of Montmartre in a great despaired sobriety,. Marseilles with its glares of lights and its gleaming colors is very far. In 1924, he signs a franchise agreement with Henri Bureau, a framer in Montmartre, who proposes him to help and to support his career. Free of material constraints, Leprin devotes entirely his time to painting. His first private exhibition is organized by Berthe Weill in 1925.

Itinerant period

In 1926, Leprin leaves Montmartre and its bohemian life for a tour of cities and villages of France. He is not a painter of the nature, although he has made some paintings of Chaville in 1922 and the surroundings of Fouronnes at the beginning of his itinerant period. Leprin seeks the interior of things. He only grants little interest to the escape of seasons. Only winter suits him, when the bald trees are telling their distress. The snow-covered landscapes, dressed with a new purity, born beautiful successes like ” The Moret bridge under snow “, ” The Maquis of Montmartre under snow ” or ” Snow at Menilmontant “.

This escape from Paris lightens his pallet with new colors. This provincial period also reveals in Leprin an exceptional sense of architecture which mixes rigour and lyric exaltation. This particular talent shines out with the paintings representing the Meaux cathedral, or with the Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay church.

During this period Leprin also carries out some rare engravings on the occasion of a ball he organized in Poitiers. During his stay at Villiers le Bel he paints large sizes. ” the Church of Gonesse ” is exhibited at the Autumn Show of 1927.

His tour also brings him in Moret, then in Yonne, and finally in Fouronnes and Dunkirk where he paints the fury of the port.

His most beautiful works of 1926 – 1927 are shown at the Druet gallery in april1928. Leprin regularly takes part at the Autumn Show as well as at the Independent Show. In 1929, he returns to Honfleur, crosses Burgundy, re-enters to Paris to re-examine the Louvre and leaves again for Caen where he realizes in 1930 ” The ramparts of Caen ” and ” The Church Place “.

In December 1930, Henri Bureau organizes for him a second exhibition at the Druet gallery, Royale street. The success is as undeniable as the first time.

In 1931, Leprin goes back to Normandy. The round is badly completed. The painter is abused by the middle-class society of Caen. Discouraged he drinks and takes drugs.

Leprin regains Paris in 1932 where he is quickly hospitalized.

He dies at the Tenon hospital on january 27th 1933.

The work of Leprin, stopped so prematurely has been the subject of innumerable posthumous events, from 1933 until today.

Fulgurance of an exceptional destiny, these of a suffering man in his soul and being but whose look and hand have knew, beyond the tears of his existence and his intimate despair, to deliver a work of eternity to us. The life of Marcel LEPRIN is marked by an interior loneliness, wound of the childhood prolonged by the events of his own destiny. It is also an achievement carried by the heat of sincere friendships which make him know between two abysses the happiness of an unreachable harmony.

Rigour, requirement, technical control, balance of the compositions, sobriety, those are the tension fields of his work.

To create corrida scenes, or to reveal some places so familiar for him, to bring back the emotions of trips among the routes often strew by villages and churches, to achieve a portrait with under it the shadow of his face, to make us penetrate inside a room, LEPRIN tells us about men and their truth. Subtle tones of a controlled light where greys and ochres are meeting, yellows made neutral but also the discrete exaltation of lightly colors. Richness of the matter, which expresses fluidity and movement.

” To draw with color and not to paint “.

Marseilles, Meaux, Avallon, Montmartre, Honfleur, Moret, Caen… Marcel LEPRIN takes place without contest in the ” large chain “. He is this solid and discrete link, “gift of some made to the multitude” to which he aspired secretly and in which he saw his achievement.

Even if it is impossible to quote all of them, nevertheless we must mention retrospectives and private exhibitions in the largest galleries of Paris and Marseilles, and the exhibitions in the museums of Paris, New York, Tel-Aviv, and Turin.

The paintings of Leprin are mainly visible today at the National Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art of Paris, as in the Carnavalet Museum, the Museum of Montmartre and the Small Palate of Geneva.