Artistic friendships

In addition to the artists who marked her formative years, other personalities influenced Denise Ferrier's career. They include Henry Valensi (1883-1960), who was a member and later vice-president of the committee of the "Salon des Réalités Nouvelles" artists association and encouraged her to exhibit her works.

As early as 1948, in a manifesto for the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Henry Valensi laid out and upheld the theory of musicalism. It involved "introducing time into artworks, which are no longer limited to space", by orchestrating colours and shapes similarly to a symphony.

The essential role given to perceptible colour, both in her 1953 compositions and in later landscapes of Collioure, as well as a desire to delve deeper into the mechanisms of the unconscious, were constant features of Denise Ferrier's appraoch. She would record her dreams in notebooks, which also tell us about her treatment of colour.

The position of each shade was carefully analysed in order to produce a specific rhythm in the space of the painting.

Another artist who was fascinated by the mechanisms of the unconscious, Henri Goetz (1909-1989), was aligned with the surrealists André Breton and Raoul Ubac.

While leaving much space for the imagination, his work evolved after the war towards a form of simplification where lines hold special importance. After beginning to teach in 1950, he founded his own school in the former academy of André Lhote in 1965. It was during this period that he appraoched Denise Ferrier, having already met her at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, to help him advise the students he taught in his studio.