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There is something undeniably stodgy and programmatic about his abstractions from the late '20s and '30s; they suffer from the earnestly Utopian look of most geometrical abstract painting in France between the wars. Many of them are scarcely better than sophisticated Art Decoornament. From then on his wife became the stronger half of the creative partnership. But his precocious early work remains extraordinary, even six decades later: an embodiment in paint of Paris' traditional nickname, La Ville Lumiere.