Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Cubist pochoirs

"Everything in nature takes its form from the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder," wrote Paul Cézanne. It was the major Cézanne retrospective in Paris in 1907, together with Picasso's discovery of African and Oceanic art around the same time, that gave rise to the Cubist movement which propelled art into the twentieth century and the machine age. Picasso's famous 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon shows Cubism in its earliest formative stage; its fractured perspectives derive, I believe, from Picasso's memories of the endless reflections he had glimpsed in the heavily mirrored brothels of the barrio chino in Barcelona, where the painting is set. In 1907 and 1908 Picasso, in close collaboration and friendly rivalry with Georges Braque, worked out the template for Cubism, an art in which the single perspective of a static onlooker is replaced by the multiple perspective of an all-seeing eye.

Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians
Pochoir after a painting
from Eugenio d'Ors Pablo Picasso 1930


Georges Braque, La Bouteille de Marc
Pochoir after a collage
from XXe Siècle, 1956


While Picasso and Braque were generous and open in sharing their discoveries with fellow artists, they were in no hurry to exhibit this ground-breaking work, and the first the general public knew of this radical new art was the Cubist room at the Salon des Indépendants in spring 1911, which showed work not by Cubism's originators but by their followers, who called themselves the Section d'Or. This same group staged an exhibition the following year at the Galerie La Boetie in Paris, to mark the publication of Du Cubisme by two of the members, Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes. America's introduction to Cubism came through a series of drypoints by Jacques Villon (who gave the Section d'Or its name), exhibited at the Armory Show in New York in 1913.

Henri Laurens, Nature Morte
Pochoir after a painting
from XXe Siècle, 1956

I've just acquired a copy of Guillaume Janneau's 1929 study L'Art Cubiste, which was enhanced by 12 pochoir (hand-stencilled) plates. The tricky task of cutting the stencils and hand-applying the gouache colour was entrusted to one of the masters of pochoir, Daniel Jacomet. I only have 11 of these plates (one by Léger is missing), but here they are, to give an overview of the movement, and the individual approaches developed by the various artists who followed in the wake of Braque and Picasso.

Georges Braque
Pochoir after a painting
from L'Art Cubiste, 1929

Pablo Picasso
Pochoir after a watercolour
from L'Art Cubiste, 1929

Albert Gleizes
Pochoir after a gouache
from L'Art Cubiste, 1929

Auguste Herbin
Pochoir after a watercolour
from L'Art Cubiste, 1929

Louis Marcoussis
Pochoir after a painting
from L'Art Cubiste, 1929

Georges Valmier
Pochoir after a watercolour
from L'Art Cubiste, 1929

Henri Laurens
Pochoir after a watercolour
from L'Art Cubiste, 1929

André Lhote
Pochoir after a gouache
from L'Art Cubiste, 1929

Pablo Picasso
Pochoir after a painting
from L'Art Cubiste, 1929

Juan Gris
Pochoir after a watercolour
from L'Art Cubiste, 1929

Fernand Léger
Pochoir after a watercolour
from L'Art Cubiste, 1929

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2 comments:

  1. Jane LibrizziSeptember 1, 2010 at 6:19 PM

    Pochoir seems to have been a popular medium at that time, but I think of it being used in commercial work - Barbier, Lepape, etc. I'm curious as to why it isn't used much anymore. Was it a victim of color photography?

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  2. NeilSeptember 1, 2010 at 10:55 PM

    Jane, I think pochoir became uneconomical after the Wall Street Crash, essentially. And then of course colour printing became much more sophisticated, and in fine art terms pochoir was replaced by serigraphy (silkscreen). But a number of the greatest livres d'artiste were executed in pochoir - Matisse's Jazz, Lanskoy's Cortège, and albums of plates such as Sonia Delaunay's Compositions, Couleurs, Idées, or (in the context of this particular post) Georges Valmier's Décors et couleurs.

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