Acne Paper has released a collection of 70 portrait drawings from the René Bouché Studio Archive. For decades, the works rested quietly in portfolios at the home of the artist’s widow, Denise Bouché, preserved yet largely unseen. Curated by Dean Rhys-Morgan, the exhibition brings them together for the first time since Bouché’s final exhibition at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in 1957.

The drawings form a constellation of women central to mid-twentieth-century cultural and social life. Executed with elegance and economy of line, Bouché’s portraits capture both the outward appearance of his sitters and something of their character. Many were notable figures: aviators, patrons, collectors, society hostesses, and international personalities moving through the salons and galleries of Europe and America. In his hands, they appear poised and assured, each drawing marked by a sensitivity to gesture and posture. As he wrote in his diary, “The honesty makes the difference, not the style.”

Remembered principally as a Vogue fashion artist, Bouché became the third figure in the magazine’s “holy trinity” of fashion artists, alongside Eric and Willaumez. He moved easily among society women who shaped the language of elegance in the mid-twentieth century. With acute, often amused intelligence, he captured not only their beauty but also the quiet theatre of their lives: the gestures, attitudes and confidence that defined them. Portraiture, for him, was a form of loving criticism. As he observed, “Almost everything that goes on inside shows in the face – not on the surface.”

Seen together, these works remind us that portraiture can preserve more than appearance. Through Bouché’s line, these women come back into view.