Abstract
René Demeurisse (1895-1961) was an artist of the generation that fought the fire. In 1930 he exhibited a huge canvas titled "The Forgotten", at the Salon d'Automne. This masterpiece, which depicts the skeleton of a dead soldier in the humid forest of Retz, represents a sublime poetic death. But it touched the sensitive issue of the duty of memory: the stoic acceptance of death and the destructive passage of time on memory. A mirror of the soul of a painter, this unique composition that would not deny the philosopher Alain, stigmatized by the specter of a whole population poured into the impossible mourning of the Great War. Experienced as a provocation by some, Oblivion was more the evidence of a spiritual man who had suffered and accepted the inevitable cycle of life. It is certainly one of the most sincere imaging post-combat arts that we have been given.
