Twelve poets, twelve painters

Douze poètes, douze peintres, is the title of an interesting cross-fertilization of the literary and graphic arts, published in 1950 by the Association des Amis de Peinture. 180 copies were printed, all on Marais Crève-Coeur paper, of which 134 were for sale, the rest being reserved for the contributors. There’s a preface by René Huyghe, followed by poems from the “douze poètes”: Lucien Becker, René Guy Cadou, Jean Cayrol, Gino Della Franca, Pierre Descargues, Maurice Fombeure, Jacques Hébertot, Loys Masson, Frédéric Maigné, Jean Rousselot, Toursky, and Guy Weelen. The text wraps up with the justification page and printer’s colophon, followed by three blank pages. And then, just when you’re beginning to wonder what happened to the “douze peintres”, you find a sheaf of twelve loose original prints, hand-signed by the artists and justified out of 180. Luckily, poets and artists are paired up on the flaps of the paper cover; otherwise it would be anybody’s guess which image was supposed to match which poem. My copy is missing one of the poems (by Jacques Hébertot) and one of the prints (by Paul Aïzpiri), but insofar as I can I will try to give a flavour of this patchy but intriguing document of existentialist Paris. I will only quote fragments of the often quite lengthy poems.


Abram Krol
Original engraving for the poem En te renversant sur le lit by Lucien Becker

En te renversant sur le lit,
tu donnes à la clarté, la forme meme de tes seins.
Le jour enfermé dans la chamber
fait sans cesse le chemin qui va de tes yeux à mes yeux.

Abram (Abraham) Krol was born in Pabianice, Poland, in 1919. An Hasidic Jew, whose masterwork is an edition of the Torah with 187 engravings, he emigrated to France in 1938, where he spent the rest of his life. Krol's first intention was to become a civil engineer, to which end he enrolled at the University of Caen. When war was declared in 1939 he joined the Foreign Legion. Krol was demobilised in Avignon, where he worked as a mechanic in a garage, while devoting his sundays to a course in sculpture at the Beaux-Arts, Avignon. From 1943, he also began to paint. Armed with false identity papers, Krol went to Nazi-occupied Paris. There, after the war, he learned the art of engraving from Joseph Hecht. His first exhibition was in 1946 at the galerie Katia Granoff; his most recent was in 2008 at the Dijon public library. In 1960 he was invited to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. Alongside his copious output of individual engravings, from 1949 Krol began creating livres d'artiste; in 1952 he won both the prix du livre illustré and the prix Daragnès. In Britain, Krol's achievement was honoured in the 1994 exhibition at the V&A, Three Masters of Engraving: Roger Vieillard, Albert Flocon, Abram Krol.


Jean Vinay
Original linocut for the poem Quelque part et plus loin encore by René Guy Cadou

Quelque part dans une maison pavée de carreaux rouges
Derrière un bois très loin à la limite de la neige
Après le rail
Et plus loin encore si tu peux
Au-dessus de la vieille photographie sans cadre
Très loin
Il y a une lampe

Jean Vinay was born in Saint-Marcellin (Isère) in 1907. He went to Montmartre, Paris in 1933, supporting himself with odd jobs while he formed his art without any formal training. He did receive advice from the Fauve painter Albert Marquet, whom he knew in Algeria where both had fled the German occupation; Marquet allowed Vinay to work in his studio. Jean Vinay returned to Paris in 1946, exhibiting in group shows and the Paris salons, and having solo shows at the galerie Raspail and galerie Durand-Ruel. Many exhibitions later, Jean Vinay was accorded a retrospective, 40 ans de peinture de Jean Vinay, at the Abbaye Saint-Antoine, where a Musée Jean Vinay was established in 1979, the year after his death.


Maurice Rocher
Original lithograph for the poem J’arriverai a défaire la mort by Jean Cayrol

J’arriverai a défaire la mort
fil après fil
que la robe soit inutile
que toute morsure soit d’or

Maurice Rocher was born in Évron (Mayenne) in 1918. He studied at the school of applied arts in Mans from 1934-1936. After a time in Belgium, where he made connections among the Belgian Expressionists, Rocher entered the Atelier de l'Art Sacré run by Maurice Denis and Georges Desvallières. This was a significant choice of art school, for Rocher was to become one of the major religious artists of the twentieth century. In 1948 he was one of the founders of the Centre d'Art Sacré, at which he taught until 1952. In 1949 he was one of the laureates of the Hallmark Prize, with a painting entitled La Nativité; in 1952 he won the Priz de la Jeune Peinture. From 1965 Rocher largely abandoned overtly religious themes, instead painting the human condition from a point-of-view of spiritual torment. He died in 1995.


Norman Rubington
Original etching with aquatint for the poem Le matin suit le matin by Gino Della Franca

Le matin suit le matin
ébouriffé et nu au vent
sous le charme.
Enigmatique figure
où s’ébauche un sourire
la première lune dans cette nuit
…ce long sommeil

Norman Rubington (1921-1991) studied at Yale before serving in WWII as a mapmaker. After the war he went to Paris, supported by his GI loan, to become an artist. There, Norman Rubington became a central figure of the group of existentialist ex-pats centered around the Paris Revue and Merlin, who included Alexander Trocchi, Richard Seaver, and Christopher Logue. Like others in this group, Rubington supplied erotic fiction to the Olympia Press list, writing under the pseudonym Akbar del Piombo. Some of these novels were illustrated by Rubington with collages in the manner of Max Ernst's Une semaine de bonté. At the same time, Rubington was establishing a successful career as a serious artist. He competed for and won the prestigious Prix de Rome, subsequently spending three years in that city. He also won the Guggenheim and Tiffany Awards, and the Religious Arts Award for his work in churches, including a Crucifixion in the Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. Rubington returned to the USA in the early 1970s. There was a retrospective at the Berman Museum of Art in 2005, Norman Rubington: Full Circle.


Mireille Glodek Miailhe
Original lithograph for the poem Le boniment mythologique by Pierre Descargues

Je t’ai parlé d’un soleil vieux qui coucherait à notre tête
Je t’ai parlé d’un vent léger comme tes bras et comme l’herbe
Je t’ai parlé longtemps comme à toutes les filles
Qu’on place un soir de bal le dos à l’arbre offertes
Et nous voici au bout du monde

Mireille Glodek was born in Paris in 1921, into an East European Jewish family. She received early artistic advice and encouragement from the painter Mané-Katz, a friend of Chagall. A passionate anti-fascist, Mireille Glodek was active in the French Resistance in Toulouse, and married one of its leaders, Jean Miailhe, After the war she found her natural artistic home in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture (so named from 1953), which was the focus of leftwingers, radicals, and existentialists in the graphic arts. In 1950 Mireille Glodek Miailhe won the prestigious Prix Fénéon. In 1952 she travelled to Algeria to document conditions there, accompanied by the artist Boris Taslitzky and the poet Jacques Dubois, which resulted in the book Deux peintres et un poète retour d'Algèrie (1952). Mireille Glodek Miailhe is slowly being recognized as one of the most important female voices in French art since WWII, with the publication in 2007 of the first book on her work, Froment & Rollin-Royer, Mireille Glodek Miailhe, Oeuvres. Hers is the only print in my copy to be signed in the stone, but not pencil-signed.


Maurice Verdier
Original lithograph for the poem Que d’animaux! by Maurice Fombeure

Je suis las d’aigles, de bourriques,
De lapins qui jouent du tambour,
De crustacés dissymétriques,
De chiens à pattes de velours.
J’aime mieux l’humaine bobine:
Réseau de rides au bord des yeux,
Les Arlequins, les Concubines,
Les seins innocents et soyeux.

Maurice Verdier was born in Paris in 1919. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, where he allied himself with fellow-students Gaëtan de Rosnay, Paul Aïzpiri, and Roger Montané. This group of colourful post-war neo-realists was influenced by the work of Bernard Buffet and André Minaux. Maurice Verdier began exhibiting in group shows and the Paris salons in 1944. His first solo show was at the galerie Roux-Hentschel in 1947. There followed a long association with the galerie Francis Barlier, culminating in a retrospective in 1997, since when Verdier has exhibited with the galerie Déprez-Bellorget.


André Minaux
Original lithograph for a poem by Jacques Hébertot (title unknown)

André Minaux (1923-1986) is well-known internationally as a painter, sculptor, and printmaker. Minaux was born in Paris, and studied at the École des Arts Décoratifs with Brianchon. André Minaux won the Prix de la Critique in 1949; in the previous year he made his first lithographs in the Mourlot studio. In the following decades Minaux made a great number of lithographs, almost all printed by Mourlot. He also executed drypoints, etchings, and engravings on copper.


Gaëtan de Rosnay
Original lithograph for the poem Essai d’un cantique de pitié a la craie by Loys Masson

Ce sera un matin tout comme les autres, avec seulement
ce soufflé renversé
tremblant comme les pirates vaincus
- et la pierre triumphant envahira la mer. Partir! Est-il un pays encore?

Gaëtan de Rosnay, who was of Basque origin, was born in Mauritius (l'Île Maurice) in 1912, and died in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne in 1992. In 1930 he entered the atelier of Paul Colin, learning the arts of the poster and of set design for the theatre. In 1934 he returned to Mauritius to work on a plantation. In 1939 he returned to France, intending to devote himself to his art, and to spend the summers in his native Basque country. Demobilised in 1940, Gaëtan de Rosnay returned to his family in Biarritz. To avoid being sent to Germany as forced labour (Service du travail obligatoire), de Rosnay hid in a small apartment, painting only what he could glimpse from his window. After the war Gaëtan de Rosnay allied himself with other neo-realist young painters in a movement that came to be known as "misérabilisme", the graphic equivalent of Sartre's existentialism. These painters included Bernard Buffet, André Minaux, Maurice Verdier, Roger Montané, and a fellow-Basque, Paul Aïzpiri. Gaëtan was one of the founders of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, and co-founded of the Biennale de Paris. Among his honours were the Prix Robert Antral in 1951 and the Prix de la Société nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1956. As well as producing paintings, lithographs and silkscreens, Gaëtan de Rosnay put his early training in set design to good use, creating the decor and costumes for Albert Camus' play Les Justes at the théatre Hébertot in 1949.


Roger Montané
Original lithograph for the poem Le bel anneau by Frédéric Maigné

Le bel anneau qui scelle no deux doigts
disent tant de chansons qui le voudraient briser
que dure le serment moins que le sceau d’un roi
mais dure la chansons moins que notre baiser

Roger Montané, born in Bordeaux in 1916, was championed by Quentin Bell as one of a new wave of French realists, along with André Minaux, Jean Vinay, and Ginette Rapp. By using the word realist, Bell was contrasting Montané with abstract artists; stylistically, Roger Montané is very much a post-impressionist with a special debt to Pierre Bonnard. Like Bonnard, Roger Montané revels in light, colour and texture. It is very difficult to convey on a computer screen the intense saturation of colour in his work. In 1977 Roger Montané was elected one of the official Peintres de la Marine.


Robert Savary
Original lithograph for the poem Nous portons notre sang by Jean Rousselot

Nous portons notre sang comme un péché.
Celui qui git, qui voit le sien s’épandre,
Cerner le pave gras de frondaisons de cendre
Rougit de sa nudité.

Maurice Robert Savary, usually known simply as Robert Savary, was born in Paris in 1920. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris under Nicolas Untersteller and Maurice Brianchon, between 1940 and 1949. In 1950 he won the Prix de Rome. On his return from Italy, Robert Savary was appointed professor at the École des Beaux-Arts de Rouen. From 1957 he settled in Paris, spending his summers in Collioure.


Roger Dérieux
Original lithograph for the poem Le mauvais pays by Toursky

C’est un boulevard qui s’envole
Avec tristesse dans le soir.
Les amoureux qu’on y peut voir
Y déambulent sans paroles.

Roger Dérieux was born in Paris in 1922, and has divided his life between Paris and the Ardèche. He studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the École des Arts Décoratifs. He also received advice and encouragement from Francis Picabia. He started exhibiting in 1951, and has since had numerous collective and solo shows, most recently at the Galerie Olivier Nouvellet, Paris, in 2005, and at L'atelier de Cheyne, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in 2007. There was a major retrospective in Lyon in 1987. Influenced by Cubism, the art of Roger Dérieux has grown increasingly abstract, especially in his collages.

The original print by Paul Aïzpiri for the poem Tapisserie des trios soleils by Guy Weelen is missing

Soleil, grande hampe
dans le granit fichée
Porte, haut hissée
Sa flame chrome et calcinée.

Paul Augustin Aïzpiri was born in Paris in 1919, but raised in his ancestral Basque country; his Basque heritage is said to have influenced the hot colours and expressionist style of his work, though a more likely explanation lies in the artist’s great admiration for Vincent Van Gogh. Paul Aïzpiri studied at the Beaux-Arts, Paris, for three years from the age of 17, in the studio of Sabatté. At first Aïzpiri struggled to establish himself as an artist, making a living by repairing furniture and cleaning pictures, before achieving success. In 1939 Paul Aïzpiri escaped from a German prisoner of war camp in Brittany and made his way back to Paris. In 1946 Aïzpiri won a prize at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, where he exhibited alongside artists such as Bernard Buffet and André Minaux. In the years following WWII, Paul Aïzpiri exhibited to great acclaim all over the world; his art is particularly appreciated in Japan. In the absence of his contribution to Douze poets, douze peintres, here is a colour lithograph by Aïzpiri from 15 years later:


Paul Aïzpiri
Pasiphaë, 1965

Quite extraordinarily, seven out of the twelve representatives of “la jeune peinture” who collaborated on this project appear to be still alive, 59 years later.

The guardian angel

Carl Larsson
Before the Mirror
Reproduction of an oil self-portrait of 1909

Carl Olof Larsson was born to a poor family in Stockholm in 1855. At the age of 13 he entered the first rung of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. On graduating, like many other young Scandinavian artists, Carl Larsson travelled to France, then the centre of modern art. He soon gravitated to the Scandinavian art colony at Grez-sur-Loing. There he met his future wife, the artist Karin Bergöo. Carl Larsson is now best remembered for the watercolours he painted of their home and family life in Sundborn; these, by recording and popularising Karin Larsson's radical stripped-down decorative schemes and loose aesthetic-style dresses, created what we now think of as Scandinavian style. This style has proved so powerful and enduring that it still prevails in the furniture of Ikea and the clothes of Gudrun Sjödén.


Carl Larsson
Empire: Dansös vid göteborgs Teater, 1891
Etching
Published in 1892 by der Gesselschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in the survey of international etching Vervielfältigende Kunst der Gegenwart

The 1997 exhibition at the V&A, Carl and Karin Larsson: Creators of the Swedish Style (with an excellent catalogue edited by Michael Snodin and Elisabet Stavenow-Hidemark), rightly gave Karin equal billing and equal attention, a shifting of gender perspectives that has proved equally fruitful in assessing other Scandinavian artistic partnerships of the time, such as Anna and Michael Ancher, Marie and P. S. Krøyer, Oda and Christian Krohg, and Sigrid Hjertén and Isaac Grünewald, whose work was explored in the exhibition Nordic Artist Couples Around 1900 at the Skagens Museum in 2006, with a short but informative catalogue by Margareta Gynning.


Carl Larsson
Dagmar Grill
Lithographic facsimile after a colour drawing, 1904
Published in 1905 by der Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in Die Graphischen Künste

Carl Larsson’s oil paintings and murals now seem rather heavy-handed and overworked, but his watercolours have retained their freshness and charm, and the same is true of his etchings. Larsson made 112 etchings, aquatints, and drypoints; colour lithographs were also made from a number of his watercolours. Many of the etchings were published by the Swedish Association for Graphic Art, Föreningen för Grafisk Konst. His original graphics have been catalogued by Bertil, Gunnel and Svenolof Hjert in Carl Larsson: Grafiska Werk (1983), which unfortunately I have not yet seen.


Carl Larsson
Skyddsängeln, 1898
Etching
Published in 1905 by der Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in Die Graphischen Künste

Carl Larsson died in 1919. Because of the widespread distribution of his work in cheap reproductions – books, postcards, posters, calendars – and the sentimental context in which those reproductions have been published, he is perhaps not as widely admired today as he should be for the sheer draughtsmanship of his watercolours and etchings. Nor is it sufficiently recognized how important a development it was that a major male artist should make the home and the family the supreme focus of his life’s work.


Carl Larsson
Karin och Kersti
Etching, 1904
Published in 1905 by der Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in Die Graphischen Künste

The tenderness and delicacy of Carl Larsson’s depictions of Karin and their children, and his celebration of the home as a shared work of art, are very striking in their acceptance of the feminine as a vital component of the artistic life. Although Karin Larsson’s essential contribution to the Larsson’s experiment in living was subsumed in the more public and commercial of her husband, there is no doubt in the work itself that this was a partnership of supportive equals.


Carl Larsson
Modellen ved kaminen
Etching with aquatint, 1908
Published in 1909 by the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Paris

The finer points of Pointillism

Pointillism, invented by Georges Seurat, applies colour theory to painting in a radical way, substituting dots of colour for brush-strokes, and allowing the colours to mix naturally in the eye. It’s basically the same as modern colour printing, where all the colours in a reproduced image are made up of dots of black, cyan, yellow, and magenta. A remarkably wide range of artists adopted the Pointillist (or Divisionist) approach, if only temporarily, and at least three – Seurat, Signac, and Cross – produced masterpieces in it. But I never expected to find a monochrome Pointillist. His name was John Jack Vrieslander, a German artist, born in 1879, After studying at the Düsseldorfer Akademie from 1897 to1898, Vrieslander went to Munich, where he lived from 1901 to 1905. Then he moved to Paris, where he lived for the years 1905 to 1908. It must have been here that he encountered Pointillism (still an active force in neo-Impressionism, although Seurat had died in 1891), and experimented with it in his etchings. Both of my etchings by John Jack Vrieslander depict Parisian scenes, and were almost certainly executed there. The influence of Seurat is strongly felt.


John Jack Vrieslander, Place de la Concorde

They were published in 1910 by Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst to accompany a short article on Vrieslander’s etchings by Ernst Schulz-Besser. Schulz-Besser writes admiringly of Vrieslander’s elegance of line and mastery of the distribution of forms. He remarks, “His technique, as applied to these two etchings, appears somewhat laborious, but the elaborate method produces a refined shimmering effect.” Unfortunately one of my etchings, Place de la Concorde, is rather discoloured with yellow staining from the tissue guard, and foxing in the margins. It’s still an attractive piece, though. Luckily the second, Jardin du Luxembourg, is in much better condition.


John Jack Vrieslander, Jardin du Luxembourg

John Jack Vrieslander’s career does not seem to have taken off, and he is now a virtually forgotten artist. Besides his etchings, he published a number of portfolios of black-and-white drawings, often of theatrical or lightly erotic scenes, such as Varieté, Schlafende Frauen, Rose Mirliton, and Paris. Beyond that, I can’t find out much about him. He died in 1957, having long outlived his brief fame.

Barnett and Claudia Freedman

Reading Alan Powers’ excellent book Art and Print: the Curwen Story (Tate Publishing, 2008) got me thinking about the exciting flurry of artists’ autolithographed books in Britain in the 1930 and 40s. The Curwen Press was at the heart of this, though there were other fine printers specialising in this area, such as the Baynard Press. But presses wanting to encourage lithography (and in the case of Curwen, pochoir as well) still needed publishing patrons to make it all happen. They needed connoisseur’s book clubs such as the Limited Edition Club, and most especially they needed Noel Carrington. Carrington, the brother of the Bloomsbury artist Dora Carrington, was enthused by the cheap lithographed children’s books published in Russia and France, and wanted to introduce the same kind of work to the British market. He did this with a three-pronged attack: as publisher of Country Life Books, as editor of the Puffin Picture Books series for Penguin, and as proprietor of Transatlantic Arts. I was lucky enough to know Noel Carrington in his later years, and now of course am full of questions I wish I had asked him…

Anyway, this subject is so huge it needs to be cut up into small chunks, so I shall today just write about two of the artists associated with Curwen and with Carrington, Barnett and Claudia Freedman.


Barnett Freedman
Lithograph for Lavengro

Barnett Freedman was born in Stepney, East London, to East European Jewish parents. Freedman studied under Paul Nash at the Royal College of Art, and it was Nash who introduced him to Harold Curwen of the Curwen Press, with whom Freedman had a long and fruitful association. Working with the artisans at Curwen (and also at their friendly rival, the Baynard Press), Freedman became one of the pioneers of colour autolithography in England. Barnett Freedman was also a successful commercial artist (producing posters for London Transport, for instance), and his love of lettering and typography is evident. Powers calls him “the undisputed master of the lithographic book jacket, poster or illustrated book between the wars”. Freedman was an official War Artist in WWII.


Barnett Freedman
Lithograph for Lavengro

I don’t have much of Barnett Freedman’s work, but I do possess what I think to be his finest book, the two volume Lavengro printed by Curwen for George Macy’s Limited Editions Club in 1936, for which Freedman created 16 gorgeously evocative colour lithographs. Alan Powers reproduces one of these (“One day it happened that, being on my rambles”), and notes that “Freedman’s plates for this book were his first to develop a full colour range”. Learning how to create the painterly quality for which his lithographs are celebrated caused Freedman considerable effort. In her book Artists at Curwen (Tate Gallery, 1977), Pat Gilmour quotes a letter from Barnett Freedman to “My dear Ruth”, the wife of Oliver Simon, Curwen’s chief typographer:


Barnett Freedman
Lithograph for Lavengro

“The misery occasioned by the enormous amount of work I have had to do for Lavengro – the getting up at six o’clock every morning for three months – the journey to Plaistow in crowded and overheated trains – the faces of wage slaves and breadwinners, their coughs and sneezes, their smells, their conversations and newspapers. The close approximations of their bodies to my own (this sometimes was not so bad)- the rush and roar of the works at North Street – the bickerings of the printers – the inexperience of the lithographic department making me often leave the works at eleven at night – all these things and many more are completely mitigated and relieved by your most kind and delightful letter.”


Barnett Freedman
Lithograph for Lavengro

Of Barnett Freedman’s Lavengro lithographs, Pat Gilmour writes, “The colour pages are very subtle, employing to great effect rose-pink, tan, gold, blue and green in charmingly lit landscapes and character sketches.”


Barnett Freedman
Lithograph for Lavengro

Barnett Freedman is quite rightly held in the highest regard by those who are interested in such things. But his wife Claudia is almost forgotten. She was born Claudia Guercio in Formby, Liverpool, of Anglo-Sicilian parentage. She studied at Liverpool School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Working initially under her maiden name, she took the name Claudia Freedman on her marriage to Barnett Freedman in 1930. Compared to her husband, Claudia Freedman's output was relatively small, but works such as the autolithographed book My Toy Cupboard (undated but published in the 1940s by Noel Carrington's Transatlantic Arts) show that she had a talent equal to his.


Claudia Freedman
Lithograph for My Toy Cupboard

Their son Vincent was born in 1934, and My Toy Cupboard, one of the gems of the brief flowering of British autolithograpy in the mid-twentieth century, is an eloquent testament of a mother's love (even including one of Vincent’s own pictures signed with his initials, VF). It was printed not at Curwen, but at C. J. Cousland and Sons in Edinburgh.


Claudia Freedman
Lithograph for My Toy Cupboard

Lavengro was published in a signed limited edition of 1,500 copies, and I imagine most of those copies are still sitting on a shelf somewhere. My Toy Cupboard was printed in an unnumbered, unsigned, cheap popular edition of goodness knows how many copies. I would be surprised if more than about 20 are still in existence.


Claudia Freedman
Lithograph for My Toy Cupboard

There’s one in the Opie Collection in the Bodleian Library, but that’s the only one I’ve so far traced in a public collection. It is a tiny book, 130 x 95 mm (roughly 5 x 33/4”), 16pp long, printed on flimsy (probably wartime) paper, and only about a millimeter thick.


Claudia Freedman
Lithograph for My Toy Cupboard

It’s a stunning little thing, probably literally worth its weight in gold.


Claudia Freedman
Lithograph for My Toy Cupboard

Some forgotten post-Impressionists

All the etchings below were published by the revue of art and literature L’Artiste in the 1890s. L’Artiste had been going since 1831, and had been a second home to Delacroix and Baudelaire, and the staunch champion of the Barbizon School of artists. It ceased publication in 1904. Received opinion has it that by the 1890s the journal was in terminal decline, but at least in terms of the quality of the original graphics I believe this to be a harsh judgement. The original plates published in the 1890s – mostly etchings or lithographs – represent the current artistic movements of Symbolism and post-Impressionism with remarkable images, many by artists who are hardly remembered at all today. The major names contributing original work in these years are Félicien Rops (see my last post), Rops’ pupil Louis Legrand (about whom I’ll write separately), Henri Fantin-Latour, Charles Cottet, Alexandre Lunois, Edmond Aman-Jean, and Eugène Carrière. But for me the real surprises have been from the unknowns. For the first of these, William Julian-Damazy, author of a stunning impressionistic etching of the Place de la Concorde, I don’t even have a date of birth or death.


William Julian-Damazy, Place de la Concorde
Etching, 1892

Julian-Damazy is an incredibly shadowy figure. He was active from the 1880s to the 1920s, but I haven’t been able to turn up any background except that he was born in Paris.


William Julian-Damazy, La danse
Etching after Jules Chéret, 1892

François Courboin was born in 1865 and died in 1925. He seems to have been most active as an original artist in the 1880s and 1890s, after which he turned his attention increasingly to documenting the history of French printmaking. His Sur la plage is a beautiful little etching, harking back to the beach scenes of Boudin, which so inspired Claude Monet.


François Courboin, Sur la plage (Trouville)
Etching, 1892

Among other important works, Courboin wrote and compiled a massive four-volume Histoire illustré de la gravure en France, which was published between 1923 and 1929, the last volumes appearing posthumously. But looking at his lovely Étude of a Belle Époque lady with a chignon revealing a tantalising glimpse of the creamy nape of her neck, one can’t help regretting the triumph of the scholar over the artist.


François Courboin, Étude
Drypoint, 1894

Eugène Decisy is a slightly more substantial figure in art history. Born in Metz (Moselle) in 1866, Decisy studied under Boivin, Bouguereau, and Robert-Fleury. His Étude is an original aquatint, a study for the aquatint Bouillie d’avoine (“Porridge”) which he exhibited to acclaim at the Salon du Champ de Mars in 1892, and also at L’Exposition Internationale de Bruxelles in 1897. The study shows a young woman in a traditional Breton headdress; in Bouillie d’avoine this same women is shown cooking.


Eugène Decisy, Étude
Aquatint, 1892

Decisy was a member of the Société des Artistes Français, and exhibited at their Paris Salon from 1886. In 1898 he was also elected a member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. He died sometime around 1936.


Eugène Decisy. Hiver
Aquatint, 1895

The name of Eugène Delâtre (1864-1938) is one frequently mentioned in studies of French prints, but generally as a printer rather than a printmaker. The Delâtre family were “taille-douciers”, running perhaps the finest specialist studio for printing intaglio plates on a hand press. Eugène took over the studio from his father Auguste.


Eugène Delâtre, Parisienne
Colour etching, 1893

As an artist, Eugène Delâtre trained under his father and under the artist John Lewis Brown (who despite being saddled with a name “si terriblement anglais”, was in fact a Frenchman of remote Scottish descent). Eugène Delâtre in turn taught printmaking techniques to a host of modern artists, including Picasso.


Victor Vignon, Nature morte
Etching and aquatint, 1894

My final artist rescued from obscurity is Victor Vignon. Of them all, his is the most surprising disappearing act, for Vignon, known for landscapes and still lifes, is one of the direct links between the Barbizon School and the Impressionists. Victor Alfred Paul Vignon was born in Villers-Cotterets (Aisne), and died in Meulan (Yvelines). Vignon was a pupil of Corot around 1869. In 1874-1876 Vignon was living in Auvers-sur-Oise, in intimate companionship with Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne; like them, Victor Vignon no doubt had the freedom of the etching studio in the house of Dr Paul Gachet, who collected Vignon's prints. Victor Vignon's close association with various of the Impressionists, including Renoir, Degas, and Guillaumin as well as Pissarro and Cézanne, led to his exhibiting with the Impressionists in 1880 and 1886. In 1884 Vignon's own solo exhibition was a great success. Victor Vignon was also a friend of both Theo and Victor van Gogh. Original prints by Victor Vignon very rarely come on the market; none has been offered at auction since 1995.

My carnal life I will lay down

I’ve always been fascinated by the Shakers, and so was pleased to come across this etching of a female Shaker at the piano, leading the congregation in song – A Handful of Gospel Love, perhaps, or Walk Softly; Simple Gifts, or Come Life, Shaker Life. It could be any one of scores of haunting Shaker songs. It’s a softground etching (vernis mou, in French) with additional drypoint, and I think it a very powerful piece of work. The combination of the elongation of the woman’s body, the spidery agility of her fingers, and the transfixed intensity of her stare, combine to convey a sense of spiritual rapture and otherworldliness.

The artist has scratched the placename Buffalo and the date 88 in the plate with the drypoint needle. He has also etched in his own initials, F.R. And this is where this post takes a weird turn, because the author of this scene of joyful austerity is none other than Félicien Rops, the Belgian Symbolist known for his decadent and Satanic images of absinthe drinkers, prostitutes, and lost souls. I wasn’t even aware that Rops had visited the USA, never mind contrived to visit a Shaker community.


Félicien Rops
Une pianiste Shaker
Etching, 1888
ref: Exsteens 274 iii/iii

When published in its third and final state in the revue L’Artiste in 1893 (with the alternative title Diseuse de psaumes chez les Shakers), the etching was accompanied by a letter from Rops dataed 12 avril 1893 to “Mon cher Alboize” describing his experience. I won’t transcribe the whole letter, but here is the most relevant part:

Les dames qui aident les Shakers à reproduire leur sous-genre, passent leur dimanche à chanter des terribles psaumes, tristes à faire pleurer les oiseaux, et qui célèbrent les futurs voluptés et les petites folies d’outre-tombe. C’est moins gai que le Moulin-Rouge, mais à Philadelphie c’est déjà de la “festivité”.
Je suis arrive, avec l’astuce particulière des aquafortistes, à pénétrer dans un de ces salons piétistes, et j’en ai gardé une mélancolie que la lecture des articles du joyeux Brunetière n’a pu dissiper, depuis.
J’y ai croqué la Chanteuse de psaumes, car cela se chante, ou bien on les dit “mélopéiquement” comme à la Comédie-Française, et cela n’en est pas plus jolie. Voilà tout!

The rather wonderful word mélopéiquement means, I believe, in recitative.

The source

After my recent post on the various Secessions, I can’t resist posting this perfect representative of the art of the Vienna Secession. I particularly love the way the lettering is incorporated in the image. It’s an etching with aquatint by the German Symbolist Max Klinger, created in 1889. Two years earlier, Klinger (1857-1920) had met the older Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901), and this etching is a kind of tribute or homage to Böcklin. Essentially it is a playful reinterpretation of one of Böcklin’s classic images, the 1875 painting Flora. But Klinger uses Böcklin’s painting simply as a starting point, finding it necessary, among other adjustments, to remove the lady’s clothes.


Max Klinger
Die Quelle
Etching with aquatint, 1889

So this is no simple interpretative work, copying the original as closely as possible; it is a completely new work of art, wittily and gracefully commenting on its model. The title is Die Quelle (The Source), and it is item 325 in Hans Singer’s catalogue Max Klinger: The Graphic Work. The lettering etched in the plate reads, Die Quelle, mit benutzung eines bildes von Arn. Boecklin. Which in my translation means, The Source, with apologies to a painting by Arnold Böcklin. Benutzung literally means “making use of”.