Albert Bitran (1931 in Istanbul, Turkey – 9 November 2018 in Paris, France) was a French painter, engraver and sculptor. Biography Albert Bitran was born in 1931, in a Jewish Sephardic family, in Istanbul, Turkey. After his studies at the French Collège Saint Michel, having both diplomas in French and Turkish, he is admitted in the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture, in Paris. In 1948, at seventeen, he arrives in Montparnasse, knowing already that he wants to become a painter, not an architect. Leaving the school after 8 months, he moves into a studio at the American pavillon of the Cité Universitaire, where he joins the circle of expatriated artists who had come to Paris for inspiration: Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman from the U.S, many South Americans, Ricardo Porro from Cuba, Jesús Rafael Soto from Venezuela, Serge Poliakoff from Russia, Pablo Palazuelo from Spain, and two young artists : Georges Koskas from Tunisia and Horia Damian from Romania, who had a most decisive influence on his debut as a painter. Bitran begins to explore a strict, geometric language. Jean-Robert Arnaud, who just opened his gallery in Saint Germain des Prés the Avant-Garde “place to be", organizes in 1951, Bitran's first solo exhibition; he also publishes one of his graphic work in the first Cimaise magazine, and in 1954, exposes one of his painting on the walls of the Theatre of Babylone, for the opening of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Henri-Pierre Roché, prestigious art collector, future author of Jules et Jim, friend of Marcel Duchamp and Brancusi, makes Bitran a generous offer: he will lease him a large room Boulevard Arago, providing him with the materials for painting in exchange of some works. There, Bitran experiments geometrical almost optical drawings on paper with coloured pencils. Denise René organizes an exhibition in her famous gallery and Henry-Pierre Roché writes the preface of the catalogue. Yet, Bitran starts searching for a more personal expression: informal, gestual, architectural, the lyrical abstraction movement with which he would be associated for the next sixty years. The Birth of a Landscape is an impressive example of his new freedom. This large collage of 1956 will be shown in the exhibition L’Envolée Lyrique, at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, in 2006 and is now in the Gandur Fondation for Art, in Geneva. In 1958, Albert Bitran becomes French citizen, marries Claude Ledoux, moves to a studio, rue des