Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

André Dignimont, Christmas
pochoir, 1943

A characteristic Dignimont scene of Christmas festivities in a maison close, hand-coloured with pochoir stencil by Maurice Beaufumé. From one of 132 separate colour suites of Dignimont's illustrations to La Belle Amour by Jean Galtier-Bossière. I hope all my readers are having this much fun today.

Rare, medium, well done

The different techniques of printmaking are often described, but it is rare to be able to compare the same image in several different mediums (or media, if you prefer). I have a few examples that allow me to make some tentative comments about the pluses and minuses of one medium or another for the expression of a particular artistic vision.

One is an image by Lucien Mainssieux (1885-1958) that I have as a pen-and-ink drawing, as an etching, and as a lithograph. It started, I would guess, as a simple pencil drawing of a young couple waking up in the morning – probably from life.


Lucien Mainssieux, L'Éveil, drawing

I would regard the pen-and-ink drawing as a firming-up of this initial (supposed-and-guessed-at) pencil drawing. It is one of a set of ink drawings I have for all the etchings by Mainssieux in the book La Nuit de Fès by the brothers Jérome and Jean Tharaud (real names Ernest and Charles Tharaud), published in 1930. The drawings are very close to the etchings, but of course they feel very different. Some of the preliminary drawings I have acquired are on very unprepossessing paper, but these by Mainssieux are on BFK Rives. The ink has absorbed happily into this lovely wove paper, and the resulting drawing has a sketchy impressionistic softness that really feels as if you were standing in the bedroom observing the scene.

The etching based on this drawing is a much harder, more definite, more intense image, bitten quite deeply into the plate and then hand-printed on Japan paper by Edmond Rigal. The book La Nuit de Fès is fairly typical of the French livre d’artiste or livre de luxe in being printed on a descending order of fine papers: 25 copies on Japan (of which 5 also had suites of the prints), 25 on Madagascar, 50 on Hollande van Gelder, and 750 on BFK Rives; as you can see, even the cheapest copies were on beautiful paper. There were also 40 hors-commerce (not-for-sale) copies, of which mine, with all the original drawings, was copy I. The hors-commerce copies were on a variety of the above papers, mine being on Japan.


Lucien Mainssieux, L'Éveil, etching

The immediately obvious difference is in the extraneous detail. The couple in bed are pretty much as in the drawing. The wall behind them is much more intensely worked with cross-hatching and the suggestion of a latticed headboard to the bed, whereas in the drawing this whole area is merely indicated with some insouciant scribbled lines. To the bottom right are a tea or coffee pot and two cups on a table, added since the drawing. The loss between the drawing and the etching is a certain spontaneity and immediacy; the gain is a greater specificity, more detail, and that indefinable texture and depth you get with an etched line rather than a drawn one. There’s always a sense of a third dimension in an etching.

My third example of this same image, titled L’Éveil (Waking Up), has none of this third dimension, for it is a planographic image – a lithograph, in which no line is etched or incised, as in intaglio prints such as an etching or engraving, or raised, as in relief prints such as wood engravings. Instead a lithograph is drawn on and printed from the flat plane of a lithographic stone (or zinc or aluminium).


Lucien Mainssieux, L'Éveil, lithograph

The lithograph retains the table with the pot and cups, eliminates the fussy etched detail of the headboard and wall, and adds some bits of decoration and a mirror on the far wall. It also reverses or flips the whole image. The result is not as immediate as the drawing, or as definite as the etching, but it has a sense of tenderness that neither of the others quite achieves.

The lithograph is one of a suite of 20 printed on vélin d’Arches, accompanying the first 20 copies of Éloge de Lucien Mainssieux (In Praise of Lucien Mainssieux), published by Bruker in 1950 in a total of 200 copies; the books were printed on vélin de Rives. Twenty years had passed between La Nuit de Fès and Éloge de Lucien Mainssieux, but this image evidently still haunted the imagination of the artist, so much so that he decided to reinterpret it as a lithograph as one of seven original prints for this celebration of his life’s work.

Only one of those seven prints, the etching/aquatint Medina, is in colour, and this is an indication, I think, of Mainssieux’s essential flaw as an artist, which is that he was a draughtsman, not a colourist. His etchings, drawings, and black-and-white lithographs are subtle and expressive. Their loose confident line and their characteristic subject matter of North Africa and the female nude both drew comparisons with the work of Henri Matisse. But Matisse was a master not just of line but also of colour, and there Mainssieux could not follow.


Lucien Mainssieux, Medina, colour lithograph, signed and justified 3/20

Lucien Mainssieux was born in Voiron (Isère), and studied under Jules Flandrin and Jean-Paul Laurens. Probably the biggest influence on his style, however, was his close friend, the printmaker André Dunoyer de Segonzac, another artist whose posthumous reputation is compromised because he was a master of black-and-white rather than colour. But what the art of Mainssieux does have in abundance is a sense of rhythm and harmony – not surprising, as Lucien Mainssieux was also an accomplished violinist, and the music and drama critic of the revue Le Crapouillet.

Falling between two schools

One of the tricks art history plays on us is to maintain the fiction that artists fall neatly into schools – this one an Impressionist, that one a Symbolist, etc. Of course these movements exist, as tides in the history of art, and of course artists do ally themselves to them. Some artists cause the tides, others are swept along by the current. But life is never quite as neat as history, and one of the results of this way of categorizing art is that artists who fall between two schools tend to get unfairly ignored.

This is true of the two artists I intend to discuss today, who also happened to be close friends, Edmond Aman-Jean and Albert Besnard. It was Aman-Jean and Besnard who founded the Salon des Tuileries, in 1922. The art of both is alternately described as Symbolist and Impressionist, without either label being really satisfactory. In Achille Segard’s Peintres d’aujourd’hui (1914), Aman-Jean and Besnard are treated in a volume entitled Les Décorateurs, alongside other hard-to-classify artists - Vuillard, Denis, La Touche, Chéret, Baudouin, and Henri Martin.

Aman-Jean is celebrated especially as a painter of women, whom he represented as withdrawn and mysterious, rapt in their own thoughts and ultimately unknowable. Both of the recent books on him have the word “femme” in the title: Patrick-Gilles Persin’s Aman-Jean, Peintre de la Femme (1993), and Baligand et. Al., Aman-Jean, Songes des Femmes (2003). Aman-Jean’s friend Ernest Laurent depicted women in a similar dream-like and withdrawn manner.


Ernest-Joseph Laurent, Soir d’Octobre, lithograph, 1898

Edmond François Aman-Jean was born in Chevry-Cossigney (Seine et Marne). His real name was Edmond François Jean Amand. Orphaned at the age of 10, Edmond Aman-Jean was taken in by an uncle in Paris. He commenced his art studies in the atelier of the sculptor Justin Lequien; one of his fellow pupils was Georges Seurat, and the two became close friends. In 1878 Aman-Jean and Seurat moved on to the Paris Beaux-Arts together, to study in the atelier of Henri Lehmann. Aman-Jean, Seurat, and fellow-student Ernest Laurent fell under the spell of Impressionism at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition of 1879, and resolved to leave the Beaux-Arts. Although closely associated with Seurat, Edmond Aman-Jean was more influenced by Symbolism than Pointillism, perhaps because of his close friendships with the Symbolist poets Mallarmé and Verlaine (of whom he made a ghostly lithographic portrait in 1891).

In 1881, Aman-Jean discovered the work of Puvis de Chavannes, and from 1883 he worked with Puvis on the grand "Bois Sacré" that decorates one wall of the staircase of the Beaux-Arts de Lyon. Aman-Jean produced his first lithographs around 1890, encouraged by Léonce Bénédite. My lithograph Sous les fleurs, from 1898, is typical of Aman-Jean’s colour lithographs; it was published by L’Estampe moderne.


Edmond Aman-Jean, Sous les fleurs, lithograph, 1898

Edmond Aman-Jean took up etching in 1908 under the influence and tutelage of his close friend Albert Besnard. Aman-Jean etched between 20 and 30 plates, starting with sketches of dogs and geese, then studies of his children and Besnard's, and ending with a series of studies of a female model. Aman-Jean seems to have made these etchings for his own pleasure without any intention of publishing them; he pulled a few proofs of each subject and set them aside.


Revue de l’Art ancien et moderne, exemplaire XI

In 1926, André Dezarrois, editor of the monthly Revue de l’Art ancien et moderne, interviewed Aman-Jean about these etchings, and chose one to publish in the Revue. This etching, La femme à la corbeille (Woman with a basket of fruit), an astonishing tour-de-force, showing the influence of the Fauves. Aman-Jean told Dezarrois, "Les autres planches que vous aimez sont faites d'après un modèle assez beau, que j'avais à l'époque. Oui, on le reconnaît bien avec ses fruits, ses corbeilles." La femme à la corbeille is so far as I know the only one of Aman-Jean’s etchings to be formally published. I don’t know how many copies were printed; I would guess the Revue had a print run of 500 or so. There were also about 20 special copies printed for the Revue’s Comité de Rédaction (6 members, including Dezarrois and Bénédite) and Comité de Patronage (8 members). These were exemplaires nominatifs, with a special title page, numbered in sequence and named to a specific person. They also had the original graphics in two states, the extra plate usually being printed on better paper, and often hand-signed by the artist. I’ve been lucky enough to acquire one of these, with the Aman-Jean etching printed on Japan paper and hand-signed in pencil. Because he was so casual about them, signed Aman-Jean etchings are almost non-existent, so this is a true rarity.


Edmond Aman-Jean, La femme à la corbeille, 1908

After mastering the art of etching with such enthusiasm, Aman-Jean then abandoned it, fearing it would distract him from his painting. Before WWI Aman-Jean had considerable success as a painter, in the United States as well as in France. The Salon des Tuileries mounted an exhibition of his work in homage in the year after his death. More recently there was a retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Paris in 1970, and another in Douai, Carcassonne, and Bourg-en-Bresse in 2003-4.


Albert Besnard, Étude de nu, etching, 1905

Albert Besnard was born in Paris and studied at the Beaux-Arts under Cabanel. Besnard made his debut at the Salon of 1868 at the age of just 19. As an etcher, Albert Besnard was influenced by Whistler and also by his friend Anders Zorn. Besnard’s etchings were intensely admired in his day, with a 1920 catalague raisonné by André-Charles Coppier, Les Eaux-fortes de Besnard. This was just one of at least 8 monographs on Besnard published between 1913 and 1933, but I can find only one subsequent work, Albert Besnard, L’oeuvre grave, published by the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1949. So he is an artist absolutely ripe for rediscovery.


Albert Besnard, Portrait de Madame Roger-Jourdain, interpretative etching by André-Charles Coppier, 1900

Besnard, like Aman-Jean, was particularly known for studies of women. One of my Besnard etchings is an interpretative etching by André-Charles Coppier after Besnard’s 1886 portrait of the Society hostess and famed beauty Henriette Roger-Jourdain, which is now in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Mme Roger-Jourdain was also painted by John Singer Sargent and by Giovanni Boldini.


Albert Besnard, Femme nue, etching, 1911

My original Besnard etchings include two nudes, in a style not far from that of Renoir, and a very striking study of a girl with dishevelled hair, wrapped in a blanket; she could have stepped out of a Toulouse-Lautrec.


Albert Besnard, Étude, etching/aquatint, 1906

Besnard lived in London in the 1880s, where he was friendly with Whistler and Tissot. It was at Besnard’s London home that Tissot, grieving for his mistress and model Kathleen Newton, asked the famous medium William Eglinton to hold a series of séances to try to contact her. On the night of May 20th 1885, Eglinton fell over in a trance. Clouds of luminous smoke formed around him, which materialised in the form of a woman. One contemporary claimed that this was really a model who worked for Besnard, but Tissot was convinced it was Kathleen; he recorded the experience in an oil painting and a mezzotint. Tissot also later etched a portrait of Eglinton for a biography by the lexicographer and pornographer J. S. Farmer.

A great etcher before God

Before Impressionism shook everything up, the printmakers of the French etching revival had two icons. The first was Rembrandt. Many etchers – for instance Norbert Goeneutte – started out by copying Rembrandts. Rembrandt’s mastery of light and shade, and his masterly use of the drypoint needle to add intricate detail to the etched plate, were the model to be followed, and his very name had a talismanic quality.


Lisière d’un bois Vendéen
Etching after Victor Hugo by Henri Guérard, 1876

The second icon was the writer Victor Hugo. Etchers found in Hugo’s prose the exact literary equivalent of an etching plate, deeply bitten, fiercely cross-hatched, brimming with tension and possibility. Artists such as Célestin François Nanteuil found a never-failing well of inspiration in Hugo’s work.

This veneration of Hugo reached its apogee in the short-lived weekly journal Paris à l’eau-forte, which was published between 1873-1876. In 1876 its editor, Richard Lesclide, pronounced Victor Hugo the greatest etcher of the century. He argued that, “It is not necessary, to be a great etcher before God, to produce etchings.”

Hugo was in fact a keen amateur artist – many of his drawings now hang in the Maison de Victor Hugo in the Place des Vosges. But he never did take up etching. To make up for this deficiency, Lesclide commissioned the great etcher Henri Guérard to produce two etchings after drawings made by Hugo while working on his novel Quatre-vingt-treize.


Une forêt dans le bocage
Etching after Victor Hugo by Henri Guérard, 1876

These are very powerful works, both showing woodland scenes. Guérard, as well as producing fine work in his own right, was highly-regarded as an interpretative etcher; he was for instance entrusted with the task of making etchings after paintings by Édouard Manet.

When Paris à l’eau-forte failed, Richard Lesclide became Victor Hugo’s secretary; the Boswell to his Johnson.

Autograph hunting

One of the first things anyone said to me when I started buying prints is that, “Unsigned prints are worthless.” Now it is true that a print hand-signed by the artist is going to be worth more than an unsigned print, but there are many other elements that define the worth of a print beside a mere signature. Aesthetic value, subject, rarity, and above all authenticity, play their part. By authenticity, I mean this: if a print is supposed to be signed, it should be signed; if it is not supposed to be signed, it should, in general, not be signed.

I have, for instance, a set of Picasso linocuts issued as Picasso Linogravures in 1962. These are magnificent things, but they are immaculate facsimiles, authorised and approved by Picasso, not original Picassos. The linocuts were first issued in signed editions of 50 by Galerie Louise Leiris, printed by Arnéra. Because of the reduction method invented and used by Picasso, which uses just one plate of linoleum instead of a separate one for each colour, it would have been impossible to make any more prints from the original plates. Instead, new linoleum plates were made at 42% of the original size, and it is from these that my linocuts were made.


Pablo Picasso, Bacchanale au taureau, 1959 - unsigned facsimile linocut

Because they are so beautiful, and so obviously genuine relief prints rather than reproductions, they are frequently offered for sale without any of the above information being pointed out, and, mysteriously, with the signature of Pablo Picasso in pencil in the bottom right. Now if anyone seriously believes that Picasso sat down and religiously signed each plate in Picasso Linogravures they are welcome to do so, but I prefer my copies unsigned, as they were issued.


Oskar Kokoschka, Mädchenbildnis, 1920 - signed original lithograph

Of course there are exceptions to this rule. An obvious one is my Oskar Kokoschka lithograph, Mädchenbildnis (Portrait of a girl). This was one of the original prints included in the 1923 edition of Die kunst des radierens (The Art of Printmaking) by Hermann Struck. This book was published by Paul Cassirer, who was also Oskar Kokoschka’s dealer. The lithograph is initialled OK “in the stone”, and that is how it was issued. But I was surprised and delighted to discover that my copy had also been hand-signed in pencil by Kokoschka, with his distinctive zigzagged signature, and the inscription, “Orig. lithographie Oskar Kokoschka 1920”. I have no doubts as to the authenticity of this signature, or the date, which sets this work back three years into the heart of Kokoschka’s most creative and vital phase. Kokoschka may have signed some copies in Cassirer’s office; or perhaps he signed this for a friend; whichever way, I am glad he did.


Henry Detouche, Le Toucher, 1904 - original etching with aquatint, signed in the plate

The convention of having the artist hand-sign and justify each copy of a print only evolved in the early twentieth century, anyway. Before that, a signed print would probably be a “bon à tirer” proof, signed as a guide to the printer as to how each subsequent proof should look, or possibly an individual gift from the artist to a friend, usually with an inscription. Nineteenth century prints may be signed or initialled within the plate, or credited in type below the image; they are not generally hand-signed. I have, for instance, a copy of an exceptionally scarce portfolio of Art Nouveau etchings with aquatint, Les Cinq Sens by Henry Detouche, published in 1904 in 60 numbered copies. Mine is one of a small number of additional artist’s copies, marked Exemplaire de Présent. It is very warmly inscribed on the title page and signed by Henry Detouche, but even though there are only five etchings, I don’t believe it occurred to him to hand-sign the individual prints. They are signed H. Detouche in the plate; to add a hand signature would have been superfluous.

Because many of my print acquisitions have been sets of prints rather than individual images, I have many examples where the individual prints are signed in the plate or completely unsigned, but the justification page that states the limitation of the edition, and specifies the printer, the paper, and the publisher, is hand-signed by the artist. In my view, a copy of this provided with the print supplies much of what a collector really wants, which is a cast-iron guarantee of the rarity, quality, and authenticity of the print.

Otherwise, print collecting becomes just a branch of autograph hunting.

The secret art of Albert Marquet

Albert Marquet, Figures on the Pont des Arts, lithograph, 1950

Think of the Fauve artist Albert Marquet and you think either of his iconic views of the Seine, leaden under a lowering sky, or of his bright and optimistic North African scenes. I have original prints by Marquet in both these modes – lithographs of Paris, and engravings of Algeria.


Albert Marquet, Minarets, engraving, 1947

But I also have a portfolio of lithographs of quite a different and unexpected order. Its innocent-sounding title is L’Académie des Dames: Vingt Attitudes. The nature of the contents is only given away by the insouciant made-up address of the publisher: New York: Sixty-ninth avenue. The portfolio was actually published in Paris, the name of the publisher being given as Éditions des Quatre-Chemins Éditart.


Albert Marquet, L'Académie des Dames, lithograph, c.1905

The portfolio contained 20 lithographs (I only have 19 of these) portraying two nude female models in a variety of erotic postures. It was issued in 25 copies on Japon imperial and 300 on vélin d’Arches, of which mine is no. 281. The work is definitely by Marquet – not just because the title page says so, or because the lithographs are signed in the stone with his initials, but because the freedom of line chimes completely with, say, the lovely quick sketches he made to illustrate Bubu of Montparnasse. It’s not the style but the subject matter that surprises.


Albert Marquet, L'Académie des Dames, lithograph, c.1905

If you look at photographs of Albert Marquet – sitting, for instance, in the beautiful light studio at 19, quai Saint-Michel that he took over from Matisse – he looks respectable and buttoned-up. You might take him for a successful small shopkeeper. You certainly wouldn’t expect him to have a portfolio of explicit lesbian lithographs tucked under his arm.


Albert Marquet, L'Académie des Dames, lithograph, c.1905

The portfolio isn’t dated. However, Le Dessin Fauve: 1900-1908, the catalogue of a 2002 exhibition at the Musée Cantini in Marseille, reproduces on page 130 two drawings by Marquet that are clearly linked to the Académie des Dames lithographs, showing the same models in similar poses. Another stylistically similar lewd drawing by Marquet reproduced in Le Dessin Fauve, dated 1905, shows the painter Charles Camoin with a nude model, in an attitude that suggests the young Fauves were enjoying a period of sexual freedom and louche behaviour at this time of artistic and personal self-discovery. Although the lesbian drawings are not precisely dated, this allows us to suggest a date c.1905 for the lithographs. Marquet would therefore have been a young man of about 30 when he made them. On the other hand I see that Wikipedia, which isn’t always wrong, dates “the illustration of a work on lesbian lovers” to 1910-1914. Whichever date is correct, we can certainly assume that the lithographs are pre-WWI, and pre-Marquet’s marriage.

In 1923 Albert Marquet married Marcelle Matinet, who wrote books under the pen-name Marcelle Marty. I suspect Mme Marquet would have taken a dim view of any further hot girl-on-girl modelling sessions. So the daring Académie des Dames lithographs, with their lithe, supple line and their tender sense of shared intimacy, remain perhaps our best chance to get to know the respectable artist as a passionate, young, unmarried man.


Albert Marquet, L'Académie des Dames, lithograph, c.1905

Like the rest of the Fauves, Pierre Léopold Albert Marquet came from a humble background. He was born in Bordeaux, where his father worked on the railways. When he was 15 it became clear that the boy should study art, drawing being his only interest, so mother and son went to Paris, where Marquet’s mother and her neice opened a dress shop to bring in enough money to fund his studies. It was at the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs that Marquet met his lifelong friend Henri Matisse. When the two went on the Beaux-Arts to study under Gustave Moreau, they widened their circle to include Henri Manguin, Henri Evenepoël, and Charles Camoin.

Mariette Lydis and Suzanne Ballivet

Mariette Lydis, Nude - hand-coloured drypoint, 1949

Several websites make the claim that the Buenos Aires-based artist Mariette Lydis also worked under the pseudonym Suzanne Ballivet, both for clandestine erotica and for risqué trade publications. Because Ballivet's Initiation Amoureuse claims to have been printed in Buenos Aires in 1943, and because although Ballivet’s work is cruder and more hurried, there are definite stylistic affinities between the two women, for some time I thought that this identification was quite likely. After all, it's hardly likely that there could have been two different French women artists obsessed with lesbianism and erotic transgression living and working in Buenos Aires at the same time. And the pseudonym would have given Lydis the opportunity to have a second crack at commercially-attractive texts by writers such as Baudelaire and Louys.

However, it turns out that Lydis and Ballivet are, in fact, two completely different women. Suzanne Ballivet was an artist in her own right, who studied at the Beaux Arts de Montepellier in the 1920s, where she met the illustrator Albert Dubout, whom she was to marry in 1968. Initiation Amoureuse was actually published in Paris by Georges Guillot around 1950; the Buenos Aires claim is just a piece of flim-flam of the kind beloved of clandestine publishers.


Mariette Lydis, Nude torso - hand-coloured drypoint, 1949

Both Lydis and Ballivet worked with Georges Guillot around the same time, which is another possible source of the confusion between the two. I have an edition of Verlaine's Parallèlement published by Guillot in 1949, illustrated with original drypoints by Mariette Lydis. There were 520 copies, of which 190 had the drypoints (plus 5 planches refusées) delicately hand-coloured by the publisher's wife, Nadine Guillot. My copy also has one of 90 additional suites of the drypoints in black.