Marcel storr biography

Born 1911, Paris, France; Died 1976.

Born in Paris, Storr was abandoned at the age of two and endured a difficult childhood. He was sent to work on farms and eventually packed off to Alsace to be cared for by nuns. By 1932, he had begun creating his first drawings of churches, but his art-making was a deeply personal, secretive activity. In time, Storr became increasingly deaf. He also suffered from psychiatric ailments about which not much is known today. He supported himself by doing odd jobs and in the mid-1940s worked at the Les Halles food market in Paris. Almost two decades later, he married and became a street sweeper in the Bois de Boulogne, the large public park in the western part of the French capital.

Meanwhile, Storr’s artwork was developing through several distinctly visible phases. Until the early 1960s, the pictures he had made of churches were marked by attention to details and an effort to portray his subject matter with a certain realism. During the late 1960s, his drawings grew larger; in them, Storr began depicting fantasy structures of imposing scale and character, including palatial cathedrals whose forms brought to mind such icons of religious architecture as the Basilique du Sacré Coeur in Paris or the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Storr f

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French, 20th century.
Born 1911, Paris, France; died 1976, Paris, France.

It would be an understatement to say that Marcel Storr had a difficult childhood. Abandoned by his mother at the age of two, Storr spent the early part of his life as a ward of the state, ending up in the care of Alsatian nuns. In his youth, he apprenticed as a farmer in the French countryside. However, Storr's life in the rural Yonne and Tarn-et-Garonne regions of France was far from bucolic. As a farm laborer, Storr was often physically abused and malnourished; he received little, if any, education and was frequently in poor health. Indeed, Storr eventually became deaf due to recurrent contractions of tuberculosis. 

In 1932, Storr moved back to Paris and found various odd jobs, ranging from janitor to dishwasher. In 1946, he is known to have found a job as a load-handler for Paris’s Les Halles market. The subsequent 18 years of Storr’s life remain a historical lacuna; very little is known of his personal, professional and artistic life during this period.

By 1964, Storr had changed jobs once again, this time sweeping leaves in the Bois de Boulogne, and was married to a primary school caretaker named Marthe. Storr’s wife would come to play an important