Thursday, December 30, 2010

A new moon

Despite its harvest theme, I think this ravishing colour etching by Arthur Illies a suitable image for the turn of the year. It was published by the Jugendstil art revue Pan in 1896. Its title, Mondaufgang, means Moonrise, though this print also seems to be known as Ripe Cornfield, Evening, under which title it is one of the treasures of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at Birmingham University. A gallery assistant at the Barber, Sarah Brown, writes eloquently about it here. As she writes, "The variety of colour throughout this image is immense, as gold, sienna and turquoise bring the mass of corn to life." This is landscape imbued with that spiritual potentiality that Gerard Manley Hopkins called "inscape".

Arthur Illies, Mondaufgang
Etching, 1896

The painter and printmaker Arthur Karl Wilhelm Illies was born in Hamburg in 1870, and died in Lüneberg in 1952. Illies studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Art, after which he returned to Hamburg, under the patronage of the director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle, Alfred Lichtwark. In the 1890s Illies worked in a Symbolist mode allied to Jugendstil. Arthur Illies was an innovative printmaker who, tired of the limitations of conventional colour etching, developed his own methods to bring a painterly richness of hue and tone to his etchings. He did this through multiple bitings of the etching plate in layers of aquatint, and also invented a method of printing colour etchings from a single plate by combining high and low pressure on the press.

I assumed from what I had read of Illies' printing methods, and from the subtle colour gradations of the etching itself, that Mondaufgang was printed "à la poupée", with the colours hand-applied to the plate and all printed at once, rather than one colour at a time. But I have since found the excellent site of the Arthur und Georgie Illies Familien-Stiftung (the Illies Foundation in Lüneburg), and it seems that in 1896 Illies was still using the more traditional au repérage method, with a separate plate for each colour. In the case of Mondaufgang, four plates were used. Illies printed the edition himself, an ambitious undertaking in the case of an etching for Pan, which had a print-run of 1300 ordinary copies on wove paper, plus some de luxe copies on Japan; the Illies website gives the total edition as 1600 copies. Alfred Lichtwark, who was on the editorial board of Pan, allowed Arthur Illies to set up a printing workshop in the former reading room of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Even with assistants (probably eager young art students), it took Illies fourteen working days to print the edition, according to his diary. It was no doubt because of the complexity and ambition of his colouring that Illies preferred to print his own etchings on his own hand press.

On Mondaufgang the artist is credited as Artur Illies, but as reference books and the Illies website spell his forename Arthur, I assume that is the correct spelling. A mystery surrounds the title of the etching, which again is printed on every copy, as the Illies website gives it as Ährenfeld, Cornfield, rather than as Mondaufgang.

I will summarise here a few biographical details gleaned from the biography by Oliver Fok on the Illies website. From 1895-1908 Illies taught at the Women's Art School run by Valesca Röver. In 1908 he was appointed to run the life class at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg, where he was made Professor in 1926. In 1933 he retired to Lüneburg, where the city provided him with a studio in an old department store. In WWI Illies was a War Artist on the Eastern Front in Russia. As a Nazi supporter, he was able to continue exhibiting through the Nazi era and WWII. In 1945 he and his second wife Georgie were evicted from their home, and retreated to the department store studio. Illies married twice. In 1900 he married Minna Schwerdtfeger, who died the following year giving birth to their daughter Helga. In 1905 he married Georgie Rabeler, who had been his student at the Röver Malschule für Damen, with whom he had four children, Kurt, Herta, Harald, and Anke.

Oliver Fok estimates the total artistic output of Arthur Illies at 2,600 paintings, 1,200 drawings, and a large body of graphic work. Even in this extraordinarily productive life, the creation, printing, and publication of Mondaufgang, or Ährenfeld, must have been a highlight.

Friday, December 24, 2010

Merry Christmas every one

Adventures in the Print Trade wishes all its readers a merry Christmas and a peaceful 2011.


Hermine David, Angel of the church bells
Drypoint coloured à la poupée, 1943
From one of 50 coloured suites of Hermine David's drypoints for an edition of Sagesse by Paul Verlaine. printed by Georges Leblanc on china paper

Thursday, December 16, 2010

The etchers' guru - Maxime Lalanne

The name of Maxime Lalanne would once have put thrills down the spine of many a keen young etcher - because it was Lalanne's Traité de la gravure à l'eau-forte (Treatise on Etching), first published by Alfred Cadart in 1866, from which thousands taught themselves the art of etching. Walter Franklin Lansil from my last post was one such young hopeful - and he had the pleasure of seeing his first ever etching published in an 1880 American edition of Lalanne's work. But Lalanne was not just seen as a teacher, he was revered as a master of etching. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, for instance, an etcher himself and editor of The Portfolio, which published many original etchings, wrote that, "No one ever etched so gracefully as Maxime Lalanne." The etcher and lithographer Joseph Pennell went further, saying that "His ability to express a great building, a vast town, or a delicate little landscape has never been equalled, I think, by anybody but Whistler." So are their contemporary judgements still valid today?

Maxime Lalanne, Une rue de Rouen
Etching, 1884
Villet 152, state ii/II

In my view, Maxime Lalanne was a supremely competent etcher, who in some plates - maybe a dozen out of around 200 - captured not just a sense of harmony and beauty, but the true atmosphere of a place. I don't have many Lalanne etchings, and wish I could show you at this point his Rue des Marmousets of 1862, his Un effet du bomdardement of 1870-71, or his Vieux quartier d'Amsterdam of 1881. But I do have one of his stunners, Une rue de Rouen, a relatively late work etched in 1884 and published the following year by The Portfolio.

Maxime Lalanne, Traveller on a Road in a Forest
Etching, 1866
Villet 32, state iv/VI

A while ago I had cause to be in touch with Jeffrey Villet, the leading expert on Lalanne. I had been offered a plate by Lalanne, published in 1889 by G. Barrie in Philadelphia, with what appeared to be a drypoint remarque by another hand in the margin. We managed to work out that the remarque was almost certainly by the Philadelphia artist Frank Le Brun Kirkpatrick - a piece of information now generally available to the public in the latest edition of The Complete Prints of Maxime Lalanne: Catalogue Raisonné, Lithographs and Etchings (3rd ed., expanded; Washington: 2010), of which Jeffrey Villet has been kind enough to send me a copy. It's a model of its kind, guiding the collector and connoisseur through a bewildering number of "states" of each of Lalanne's prints, which are almost never hand-signed and numbered as they might be today.

Maxime Lalanne, À Séville
Etching, 1866
Villet 33, state iv/VI

François Antoine Maxime Lalanne was born in Bordeaux in 1827, and died in Nogent-sur-Marne in 1886. A pupil of Jean-François Gigoux, he exhibited at the Salon de Paris from 1852-1886, chiefly etchings and charcoal drawings. His first prints in the 1850s were lithographs, but by 1862 he had switched to the newly-popular technique of etching (though interestingly he never embraced the use of aquatint, which enables the etcher to draw on tone as well as line in compositions). Maxime Lalanne was one of the earliest etchers of the French etching boom, and was commissioned by that movement's ringmaster, the publisher Alfred Cadart, to write his highly influential guide to the art of etching, Traité de la gravure à l'eau-forte, in 1866. Lalanne was one of the founding members of Cadart's Société des Aquafortistes in 1862, and the bulk of his etchings were published by Cadart or his successors.

Maxime Lalanne, Souvenir de Bordeaux
Etching, 1878
Villet 124, state iii/III

Maxime Lalanne was devoted to etching and drawing, and died with a stick of charcoal in his hand, despite suffering from the crippling bone disease osteomalacia. Despite all the praise he garnered in his lifetime, Lalanne's star faded with the arrival of Impressionism, besides which his meticulously detailed etchings began to seem fussy and overworked. The extent to which Lalanne's organization of his compositions results in a sense of harmony and balance that reflects the artist's individual vision, rather than simply recording what he saw, has only recently been recognized.

Maxime Lalanne, Le simoun
Etching after Eugène Fromentin, 1878
Villet 126, state iii/IV

After a long period of neglect, the gently perceptive and unfailingly harmonious art of Maxime Lalanne is once again appreciated.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

A homemade etching

This is the first - and so far as I can tell, the last - etching by the Boston-based marine painter Walter Franklin Lansil. We know exactly how it was executed, from a description by Sylvester Rosa Koehler, the first curator of prints at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston. Koehler writes: "It is eminently 'home-made.' The ground was prepared according to the recipe given; the points used were a sewing-needle and a knitting-needle; the tray in which it was etched was made of paper covered with stopping-out varnish; even the plate (a zink plate, by the way) did not come from the plate-maker, but was ground and polished at home."

Walter Franklin Lansil, Ships in Boston Harbor
Etching, 1879

Walter Franklin Lansil was born in Bangor, Maine, in 1846. He studied originally under J. P. Hardy in Bangor, alongside his younger brother Wilbur. In 1872 the brothers moved to Boston, which remained their base. However in 1888 they headed for Paris, to study at the Académie Julian. Walter F. Lansil was profoundly influenced not by the Impressionists but by their precursors, the plein-air artists of the Barbizon School, and also by the Barbizon painter of Venice, Félix Ziem. Although the bulk of Walter Lansil's work reflects his home territory on the coast of New England, he continued to visit and paint Venice for the rest of his life. Ships in Boston Harbor (also known as Vessels in Boston Harbor) was made in 1879, before his time in Paris, but already shows the Barbizon influence. Walter Franklin Lansil died in 1925.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Magnolia grandiflora

This voluptuous flower-maiden dates from 1885. At first glance you might take her for the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but he had died three years earlier.  His influence is certainly strongly present in this ravishing early work by George Woolliscroft Rhead.

George Woolliscroft Rhead, Magnolia grandiflora
Etching printed in brown, 1885

George Woolliscroft Rhead was born in North Staffordshire in 1855, into a family with a long association with the Potteries. His father, George Woolliscroft Rhead senior, was a talented pottery designer, and the younger George Woolliscroft Rhead and three of his siblings - Frederick Alfred, Louis John, and Fanny - were all apprenticed at Mintons. When Mintons set up an art pottery studio in Kensington in 1871, under the directorship of W. S. Coleman, George Woolliscroft Rhead moved to London to work there. He then gained a scholarship to study at the South Kensington School of Art. He studied painting under the Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown, and etching under the French master Alphonse Legros. A painter, etcher, and designer of stained glass and ceramics, George Woolliscroft Rhead was a central figure of the English Arts and Crafts Movement that arose from the Pre-Raphaelites. Especially talented as an etcher, he was elected RE in 1883. He was married twice, to Louise in 1894, and to the Scottish artist Annie French in 1914. His brother Frederick Alfred Rhead remained in the Potteries, and four of his children, including the designer Charlotte Rhead, followed him into ceramics. Louis John Rhead moved to New York in 1883, becoming an American citizen; he is regarded as one of the most important artists of American Art Nouveau. George Woolliscroft Rhead remained in London, where he died in 1920.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Sujet: La Jeune Peinture

It is not often that one can see a complete overview of an art movement, but this is the case for the post-war French figurative school known as La Jeune Peinture, whose members practically all contributed to the series of print portfolios Sujet. I have the first five issues of Sujet, published between 1950 and 1953, and I believe that that is the complete set. Sujet was published by the artist Philippe Cara Costea (1925-2006), who was the organizing force behind the screenprinting collective that produced it. According to a website devoted to Cara Costea, the group was formed in 1949. The first issue is undated, but can be confidently dated to 1950 as several of the artists dated their prints '50, and the second issue came out in January 1951. Issues 3 and 4 also appeared in 1951, but the last issue was not published until June 1953.

Sujet 1: Io, vierge à cornes de vache


Paul Aïzpiri (1919- )

Antoni Clavé (1913-2005)

Gaëtan de Rosnay (1912-1992)

André Minaux (1923-1986)

Jean Souverbie (1891-1981)

Maurice Verdier (1919- )

Sujet contained no text save for a list of contributing artists, and the whole thing was quite economically produced. All the prints are silkscreens (serigraphs), and almost all are in black (there are a very few with a second colour). These are not the vivid, colour-saturated, garish silkscreens we associated with Pop Art, but sombre and restrained works that essentially seek to mimic the effect of original lithographs. I don't think that before WWII silkscreen had any acceptance in France as an artistic medium, so the choice of silkscreen for Sujet was an innovative one. I suspect that the reason for it was financial, as assuming Cara Costea had the necessary equipment, he could produce the whole thing without paying a separate printer, so the only costs were the paper, the ink, and the artists' time. I imagine each artist printed their own work, with the assistance of Philippe Cara Costea.

Sujet 2: Les mères



Antoni Clavé (1913-2005)

Paul Collomb (1921-1998)

Michel de Gallard (1921- )

Édouard Goerg (1893-1969)

Philippe Lejeune (1924- )

Paul Rebeyrolle (1926-2005)

As the title suggests, each issue centred on a particular topic. Sujet 1 was Io, vierge à cornes de vache. Sujet 2 was Les mères. Sujet 3 was Job. Sujet 4 was Autoportrait. Sujet 5 was La Mort. Io, virgin with a cow's horns; mothers; Job; self-portraits; Death. Each issue contained a selection of original silkscreens by various artists, almost all hand-signed apart from one by André Minaux (which is signed in the plate, suggesting he knew he would be unable to hand-sign) and except for three of the four works contributed by more established artists who were invited to be the star guest in each of the first four issues. These older artists, who were evidently regarded as mentor figures by the younger ones, were Jean Souverbie, Édouard Goerg, Roger Chastel (Chastel did sign his print), and Bernard Lorjou.

Sujet 3: Job



Paul Aïzpiri (1919- )

Philippe Cara Costea (1925-2006)

Nicolas Carrega (1914-1992)

Roger Chastel (1897-1981)

Roger Montané (1916- )

Orlando Pelayo (1920-1990)

The total number of prints published by Sujet is 54, of which 50 were pencil-signed by the artists. The edition was restricted to 200 copies. Of course not every artist associated with La Jeune Peinture is represented, but the only major omission is that of Bernard Buffet, whose spiky style and muted palette are typical of this anxious and sombre group. These artists who came of age during the horrors and privations of war are still gripped by a sense of loss and sorrow. It is notable that of the five portfolios, two depict characters who are archetypes of suffering - the nymph Io and the Biblical figure Job - while the last looks Death straight in the eyes. No wonder one popular word at the time for French art in the post-war period was Misérablisme. That said, some of these artists cheered up over time, and in future posts I will showcase some of their more colourful and vibrant work. For this post I have chosen 6 silkscreens from each of the five portfolios.

Sujet 4: Autoportrait



Philippe Cara Costea (1925-2006)

Daniel du Janerand (1919-1990)

Bernard Lorjou (1908-1986)

Orlando Pelayo (1920-1990)

Claude Roederer (1924- )

Claude Schurr (1921- )

Some of these artists are, or course, more famous now than others. Philippe Cara Costea is not a name I had come across before (and there is confusion about whether his surname should be hyphenated as Cara-Costea or not; he signs with no hyphen, but gives himself a hyphen in the contents). He is one of only two artists who contributed to all 5 issues, the other being Gaëtan de Rosnay. But whether their stars are still on the rise or have suffered a temporary eclipse, all of the contributors to Sujet enlarge our knowledge of the French art scene in the confused and confusing years after the Second World War, when Paris had lost ascendancy in the art world to New York, but did not quite realise it yet.

Sujet 5: La Mort



Nicolas Carrega (1914-1992)

Gabriel Dauchot (1927- )

Jean-Claude Vincent Guignebert (1921- )

Jean Jansem (1920- )

Abram Krol (1919- )

Jacques Yankel (1920-2004)

Those who remember my post on the 1950 portfolio Douze poètes, douze peintres will notice that six of the artist contributors to that are also contributors to Sujet: Aïzpiri, Krol, Minaux, Montané, de Rosnay, and Verdier.

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Port d'eaux-mortes - George Grosz in France

George Grosz (1893-1959) is best remembered for his violent satirical drawings of the decadent Berlin of the 1920s, which depict a corrupt world of leering businessmen pawing at prostitutes. These drawings were collected and reproduced in publications such as Ecce Homo (1923). Ecce Homo was seized by the Public Prosecutor, and in February 1924 Grosz was tried for obscenity and fined 6,000 marks. It was perhaps this that prompted an extended trip to France, for the whole of April and May of 1924, resulting in his first French exhibition in that November, and a further extended spell in France from June to October in 1925. Grosz had studied in Paris in 1912 at the Atelier Colarossi, at which time he met likeminded artists such as Moise Kisling and Jules Pascin, and made friends with Bohemian figures such as the writer Pierre Mac Orlan. It was to Mac Orlan that Grosz turned for guidance to the new post-war Paris. As Hans Hess writes in his excellent biography George Grosz, "In April 1924 Grosz travelled to Paris for the first time since the war. With his old friend, Pierre Mac Orlan, he visited Pascin, and with Francis Carco and Man Ray, explored 'Montmartre at night', making the typical remark all visitors make that they 'went to those hidden places which no foreigner ever gets to know'." The kind of hidden places Mac Orlan and Carco favoured is made clear in the subjects of Grosz's Paris drawings: the brothel Le petit moulin, another famous maison close in the rue Blondel, or the seedy Bar du Dingo, full of pimps and their girls.

George Grosz, Port d'eaux-mortes: Prix 300
Lithograph, 1926

George Grosz, Port d'eaux-mortes: Au Beau Patron
Lithograph, 1926

It was probably the following year that George Grosz made the eight original lithographs in this post, for a novella by Pierre Mac Orlan entitled Port d'eaux-mortes (eaux-mortes means a neap tide rather than the literal "dead waters", though no doubt Mac Orlan liked the metaphorical heft of the phrase). The book was published in 1926 by Au Sans Pareil, in a total edition of 1260 copies, plus 120 suites of the lithographs on Chine, 40 on Hollande, and 20 on vieux Japon. The title page reads: Pierre Mac Orlan, Port d'eaux-mortes, récit orné de huit lithographies originales de Georges Grosz. The lithographs were printed by Duchatel, Paris. The bulk of the edition (including my copy) was printed on vélin Lafuma de Voiron.

George Grosz, Port d'eaux-mortes: Oncle Paul, accordéoniste
Lithograph, 1926

George Grosz, Port d'eaux-mortes: La Chance
Lithograph, 1926

George Grosz, Port d'eaux-mortes: Filles dans la rue à Brest
Lithograph, 1926

The lithographs for Port d'eaux-mortes reprise many of Grosz's Berlin themes, but with a slightly less savage eye - though the frontispiece does set a dark tone, with its despairing and suicidal man sucking on a cigarette and cradling a bottle of brandy, with a pistol on the table and a noose hanging overhead, never mind the faceless prostitute mutely holding up her card reading Prix 300. The main action of the story takes place in the port of Brest, centering on the café-cum-brothel Au Beau Patron. Towards the end the narrative moves to Limehouse in London, before the villain Judat is hanged in Pentonville Prison (or Pontonville, as Mac Orlan insists on spelling it). Perhaps the most successful of the lithographs is the fourth, which I have called La Chance (all the titles are mine), in which a group of card-players remain enthralled by their game, while a murdered prostitute lies dying in her crib, and her slayer makes his getaway. But all of them have a great deal of  suggestive power - just look at those phallic streetlamps that illuminate the girls on the street. Another thing that strikes me about these images is the subtle organisation of space - Grosz really fills up the available picture-space with exceptionally balanced and well-thought-out compositions.

George Grosz, Port d'eaux-mortes: Pub à Limehouse
Lithograph, 1926

George Grosz, Port d'eaux-mortes: Filles dans la rue à Limehouse
Lithograph, 1926

A copy of Port d'eaux-mortes from Harvard College Library was included in the exhibition The Artist and the Book, 1860-1960 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1961; see the catalogue of the same title by Eleanor M. Garvey, cat. no. 129, p. 91).

George Grosz, Port d'eaux-mortes: La prison de Pontonville
Lithograph, 1926

The presence of George Grosz in Paris had an electrifying effect on several Paris-based artists associated with Pierre Mac Orlan and Francis Carco. You can trace the influence on André Dignimont, on Chas Laborde, on Marcel Vertès, on Pierre Falké. Below is just a little gallery of images from these artists from 1926-1930, which show the impact of Grosz on the French scene. In the case of Laborde especially this case could be made more strongly with other material - etchings from Rues et visages de Paris (1926), for instance. Of course all these artists were also influencing each other, and were also working in the shadow of Pascin, but I think there is an identifiable shift towards a more expressionistic vision, especially in the art of Dignimont and Vertès.

Marcel Vertès
Drypoint for Francis Carco, L'amour vénal, 1926


Marcel Vertès
Drypoint for Francis Carco, L'amour vénal, 1926

Marcel Vertès
Lithograph for Pierre Mac Orlan, Les jeux du demi-jour, 1926


Marcel Vertès
Lithograph for Pierre Mac Orlan, Les jeux du demi-jour, 1926

Marcel Vertès
Lithograph for Raymond Hesse, L'age d'or, 1926

Marcel Vertès
Lithograph for Raymond Hesse, L'age d'or, 1926


Marcel Vertès
Lithograph for Georges-Armand Masson, Tableau de la mode, 1926


Marcel Vertès
Lithograph for Georges-Armand Masson, Tableau de la mode, 1926

André Dignimont
Etching for Tristan Bernard, Amants et voleurs, 1927

André Dignimont
Etching for Tristan Bernard, Amants et voleurs, 1927

André Dignimont
Etching for André Beucler, Un nouvel amour, 1927

André Dignimont
Etching for Francis Carco, Bob et Bobette s'amusent, 1930

André Dignimont
Etching for Francis Carco, Bob et Bobette s'amusent, 1930

Pierre Falké
Etching for Francis Carco, Les vrais de vrai, 1928

Pierre Falké
Etching for Francis Carco, Les vrais de vrai, 1928

Chas Laborde
Etching for Jean Giraudoux, Juliette au pays des hommes, 1926