In the 1930s Bicat worked extensively as a set designer for the theatre including a New York production of Murder in the Cathedral by T S Eliot and productions for Windsor Repertory Theatre and the Mercury Theatre. From 1966 to 1974 Andre Bicat worked as a tutor in the Printmaking Departments at the Royal College of Art and the City and Guilds Art School in London, where he was known as an inspiring and committed teacher. Bicat’s attention to the details of his craft and the intensity with which he passed on these skills, helped many younger artists to find their feet. As his fellow artist, Merlyn Evans remarked:
In neither his painting nor his gravure is there any danger of his being caught up in the trivia of technical virtuosity, the parlour tricks of texture and matiere, pursued as ends in themselves…. Both painting and etching, however abstract, are rooted in things seen and they create their own ambience with rich glowing colour.
From 1947-1985 Bicat lived in a converted barn at Crays Pond, near Reading. He later lived in London.
Bicat exhibited widely in the UK and Europe, with one-man exhibitions in London, Paris, Dublin, Reading, Colchester and Swansea. He showed regularly at the Royal Academy and at the Redfern Gallery, London and had numerous solo shows at the Leicester Galleries, London (1949-1968) and from the Bohun Gallery, Henley (1975-1984). His work has been bought internationally for a number of private and public collections, including the British Museum, the National Gallery of Wales, Oxford University, Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Fine Art, and Cleveland Museum, Ohio. Nine of his prints are in the collection of the Tate Gallery and thirty-one prints are in the Government Art Collection. Retrospective exhibitions were held at Reading Museum and Art Gallery in 1966, the Attic Gallery, Swansea in 1997 and the Merriscourt Gallery, Sarsden in 1999.
Jenna Burlingham Fine Art represents the Estate of Andre Bicat.
