Adventures in the Print Trade: Francisco Goya

Friday, July 16, 2010

The caprices of André Villeboeuf

In 1934 the Paris art world was in a ferment of Surrealism. Salvador Dalí was at the height of his powers. Everyone was delving into the subconscious. One artist, André Villeboeuf (1893-1956), published in that year a remarkable album of 16 Surrealist etchings, entitled Lubies (Whims, or Whimsies). 26 copies were published "Aux dépens des Cinq-Vingt". I have copy 25, which was Villeboeuf's own.

Each etching is signed, justified and titled in pencil, but low down the sheet rather than directly below the image. The etchings are printed on Hollande van Gelder wove paper, presumably by the artist himself, as no printer is mentioned.

These etchings look beyond the modish self-regard of the Surrealists to locate the surreal in a long artistic tradition. There are touches in them of the grotesqueries of Hieronymous Bosch, the absurd animal/human hybrids of J.J. Grandville, even the fairy fantasies of Richard Doyle. But the artist they reference most is the one André Villeboeuf revered above all others: Francisco Goya. In 1799 Goya published a sequence of 80 etchings entitled Caprichos, which use elements of the supernatural and the surreal to satirize society's injustices. All 80 Caprichos can be seen here; they get weirder as the series progresses. André Villeboeuf didn't call his portfolio Caprices - he probably felt it would be ridiculously self-aggrandizing - but the debt to Goya is clear in this sequence of startling and unsettling visions. I'll let the images speak for themselves.