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

Fractured perspectives

The first person to incorporate elements of Cubism in book illustration was probably Jean-Émile Laboureur, but others, especially in the Jazz Age, saw value in the fractured perspectives of Cubism, and also in its elements of repetition and modernity. One of these was Chas Laborde (1886-1941), who was born in Buenos Aires to French parents. One of the most brilliant illustrators of the 1920s and 30s, Laborde had been gassed in the trenches in WWI. According to his friend, the author Pierre Mac Orlan, Chas Laborde died of grief on seeing the conquering German Army march past on the Place d'Étoile in 1941. Laborde and Mac Orlan were two more regulars at the salon of Jean-Gabriel Daragnès, and the etchings below, done in 1926 for an edition of Juliette au pays des hommes by Jean Giraudoux, were printed by Roger Lacourière on Rives laid paper. 317 copies were printed, coloured à la poupée, plus 50 suites in black-and-white.

Chas Laborde, Cubist portrait

Etching, 1926

Chas Laborde, Bicyclists

Etching, 1926

Chas Laborde, Travelling by train

Etching, 1926

Chas Laborde, Juliette

Etching, 1926