ABOUT Michel Delacroix

Paris  France 1933

Michel Delacroix’s primitive style in his paintings and graphics combine structure and detail with rich color to convey the bustling, diverse activity of the street of Paris, his native city.

In 1994, Michel Delacroix was named an Official Artist of the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games by the U.S. Olympic Committee and commissioned to paint a work marking the hundredth anniversary of the modern Olympic Games. The work, entitled “1896 Olympics”, was used to create an Official Poster for the 1996 Games and a special Limited Edition. In 1995, Delacroix also became an Official Artist of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games which commissioned him to celebrate the site of the 1996 Games in a work entitled “Atlanta 1896-1996”. Delighted with the work, ACOG selected it to serve as a 1996 Olympic Games’ Official Poster and a Limited Edition.

Following Atlanta 1896-1996, ACOG again honored Delacroix by commissioning him to create the Commemorative Painting and Cover Art of the Official Five CD Music Box Set of the 1996 Olympic Games. Entitled The Sound of the Games, Delacroix’s painting will provide the cover image for this ambitious five-CD project, which features some of the biggest recording stars in Pop/R&B, Country, Latin, Classical and Jazz, including John Williams, Boyz II Men, Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, Vince Gill, Gloria Estefan, Jon Secada, Placido Domingo, Trisha Yearwood, Luther Vandross, R. Kelly, Diane Celine, Julio Iglesias, Willie Nelson, Amy Grant, and Patty Loveless, among others. 

Michel Delacroix is truly a French original: an acclaimed master of the Naïf tradition and one of the most popular and successful artists in the world today. A self-styled “painter of dreams and 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 live to this day.

But the Paris Delacroix paints are not the urban metropolis of the present. The viewer is not going to see what they expect Paris to look like or what they have seen Paris look like. It is the dream-like place the city became in the 1940’s, during the Occupation, when “we suddenly jumped fifty years into the past. No more cars in the streets, very few lights. Paris suddenly became very quiet, very dark, and, though people were afraid, there was a brotherhood and spirit that was very delightful.” For Delacroix, who was then a child of seven and spared by his age from understanding “the cruelties and absurdities” of war, it was “the one great adventure of my life.” 

Delacroix has been featured in over 275 one person shows in the U.S. alone. They range from New York City, Boston, Washington D.C. to Los Angelos, Carmel, Denver, Seatle and San Francisco. Abroad his work has been exhibitied in Japan, England, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, and France. He also has pieces that are part of permanent collections all around the globe.