Dick Kleinman Fine Art Gallery

Famous the world over for his masterful preservation of the naïf style, Michel Delacroix has earned his reputation as one of the most loved artists in the world today. A self-styled "painter of the poetic past," Delacroix has devoted five decades to painting a city he calls "the Paris of then," the magical place where he was born, where he spent his boyhood, and where he continues to find inspiration to the present day.

Of course, the Paris Michel Delacroix paints is not the urban metropolis of the present. It is the dreamlike place the city became in 1940 during the Occupation, when "we suddenly jumped fifty years into the past. There were no more cars on the street, very few lights. Paris suddenly became very quiet, very dark, and though people were afraid, there was a brotherhood and a spirit that was delightful." For Delacroix, who was then a child of seven, it was "the one great adventure of my life."

And it is this special Paris - the Paris of bygone years and of innocent splendors - which Delacroix has returned to over and over again in his gentle works. These works, renowned for their graceful balance of the earthy and the urban, the cosmic and the ordinary, have captivated private collectors, museums and ordinary people throughout the world, earning the artist both universal praise and numerous awards.

In the U.S. alone, Delacroix's work has been featured in over 300 solo exhibitions from New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, Carmel, Denver, Seattle, and San Francisco. Abroad, his work has been exhibited in England, Switzerland, Germany, Luxembourg, France, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It forms a part of the permanent collections of the Musée International d' Art Naïf and the Fondation Max Fourny in Paris, the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, and private collections around the globe.

In 1994, Delacroix also became on Official Artist of the U.S. Olympic Committee when he was commissioned to produce a work marking the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta. The work that resulted, 1896 Olympics, is a triumphant celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the modern Olympic Games and a testament to the solidarity of a painter, one who will himself be celebrated by art lovers for generations to come.