Marie Lucie Nessi (1910 – 1992) was born into a cosmopolitan family: her father, André Nessi, was a Swiss national, and her mother, Hélène Koehne, was born in Seesen, Germany. After completing her secondary education, Nessi entered a drawing school in 1926, at the age of sixteen, following two years of preparatory study focused on plaster casts of antique sculpture.
Around 1928, she continued her training in the ateliers of Louis-François Biloul and André Lhote, enrolling at both the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts. Her period of study under André Lhote was particularly formative. Lhote’s teaching, grounded in compositional structure, measured color relationships, and a rational approach to pictorial construction, provided Nessi with a framework that would remain evident throughout her work. She belonged to a generation of artists shaped by Lhote’s pedagogy, alongside figures such as Tamara de Lempicka, Hans Hartung, or Tarsila do Amaral , who likewise passed through his studio.
During these years, she moved within the artistic circles of Montparnasse. She befriended painters such as Jean Hélion, Moïse Kisling, and Léonard Foujita, whom she met both in academic settings and in the cafés that functioned as informal extensions of the studios.
In 1932, she met Jean Valtat, a stomatologist and the son of the painter Louis Valtat. They married the same year. Although Louis Valtat encouraged her artistic activity, Nessi’s own production was necessarily limited for several years. Prior to the Second World War, however, she travelled extensively across Europe, often by car, producing a substantial body of watercolours during these trips.
From 1940 to 1944, she gave birth to three children. In 1949, following her divorce, she became solely responsible for their upbringing. To support her family, she established a ceramics workshop, which she operated throughout the early 1950s. This activity temporarily displaced painting as her primary medium.
From 1958 onward, with renewed stability, Nessi was able to return fully to painting. This period marks the consolidation of her mature work. She travelled regularly in Italy, Spain, Greece, Algeria, and Cameroon, and participated in exhibitions and Salons in France and abroad.
Her career was interrupted in the 1980s by serious health problems: a heart attack in 1982 and a cerebral hemorrhage in 1988, after which she was no longer able to paint. Marie-Lucie Nessi died in 1992.