A burnt stick and an empty cement bag

Photograph of Walter Spitzer from the cover of Sauvé par le dessin

A burnt stick and an empty cement bag – with these pitiful materials, Walter Spitzer made his first real drawings, in the Buchenwald concentration camp. It was, as the title of his harrowing memoir Sauvé par le dessin – Buchenwald (Favre, 2004), suggests, his talent for drawing that saved him. Destined one day for one of the “transports” to a satellite death camp, the 16-year-old artist was protected by the internal resistance (who styled themselves the Comité international de résistance aux Nazis) in return for his promise “to engrave in my memory the daily horror, to draw and draw again, to snatch up images from time in order to recall one day in front of the whole world what was happening here.”


Concentration camp, 1965
Lithograph for La Mort dans l'Âme by Jean-Paul Sartre

Spitzer has been true to his word, in paintings, etchings, and in two important sculptures. The first is his bronze Muselman, which won an international competition in 1992 for a monument to the 10,000 Jews murdered in Buchenwald. This was obviously an intensely personal project for Spitzer, who also had a retrospective of 50 years of work at the Buchenwald museum in 1995 to celebrate the presentation of the Muselman statue and the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the camp. A muselman was a prisoner condemned to die because they were too weak to work. Spitzer’s second major sculpture commemorating the Shoah is his Monument du Vel’ d’Hiv’, erected in 1994 in memory of the 12,884 French Jews rounded up by the French police and deported to extermination camps from the Vel’ d’Hiv’ in 1942. In 2000 a documentary, The Art of Survival, was made about Walter Spitzer’s story, but unfortunately I have never seen it.


Hitler, 1965
Lithograph for Le Sursis by Jean-Paul Sartre


Nazis in the street, 1965
Lithograph for Le Mur by Jean-Paul Sartre


Degenerate art, 1965
Lithograph for La Mort dans l'Âme by Jean-Paul Sartre

Born in 1927 in Cieszyn, Poland, Spitzer did survive the camps, and since WWII has lived and worked in France. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and forged a successful career as a painter and printmaker. There is a substantial book on his work, Walter Spitzer (Fragments, 2002), with a preface by Elie Wiesel and texts by Daniel Sibony, Youri, Walter J. Strachan, Emmanuel Hayman, and Joseph Kessel. I’ve also consulted Walter Spitzer, la symphonie philosophale de la peinture (Artspectives, 1982).


Prisoners of war, 1960
Lithograph for the Oeuvre romanesque of André Malraux


Soldiers and a woman, 1965
Lithograph for La Mort dans l'Âme by Jean-Paul Sartre

In 1951 Spitzer suffered a catastrophic studio fire which destroyed all his work since 1945. All he saved were two paintings, and the portfolio containing the drawings he had made in Buchenwald; this portfolio then went to the Museum of Israel, to keep it safe from any future conflagrations.


Woman with a water jar, 1960
Lithograph for the Oeuvre romanesque of André Malraux

1957 was the year Spitzer’s fortune changed. In this year he had his first solo show, at the Galerie Monique de Groote in both Paris and Brussels, and also won the Grand Prix des Jeunes Peintures.


Mother and baby, 1965
Lithograph for L'Âge de Raison by Jean-Paul Sartre

Walter Spitzer’s paintings are often on themes from the Torah. Like Marc Chagall, his inspiration wells up constantly from the Old Testament. There are, too, many paintings that evoke the lost world the shtetls.


Ploughing, 1968
Lithograph for L'Odyssée by Nikos Kazantzakis

As a printmaker, Spitzer – often working to illustrate a particular text – reworks his religious themes in human terms. As W. J. Strachan writes in his classic study The Artist and the Book in France, “Spitzer is a notable experimenter in both etching and lithography who yet never ceases to paint and exhibit easel-pictures.”


Pink nude, 1965
Lithograph for L'Âge de Raison by Jean-Paul Sartre

Taken as a whole, the art of Walter Spitzer is concerned with two great, interlinked themes: man’s inhumanity to man, and the humanity of man. Relatively little-known today, he will surely be recognized in the future as one of the great witnesses to the 20th-century experience.


Striptease, 1965
Lithograph for L'Âge de Raison by Jean-Paul Sartre

My prints by Walter Spitzer, lithographs and etchings, derive from limited editions of works by important 20th-century writers – Nikos Kazantzakis, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry de Montherlant, André Malraux, and his friend Joseph Kessel. In all of these writers the themes of war, peace, grief and compassion are central. In other words, Spitzer was never an illustrator for hire – he accepted invitations to illustrate the work of distinguished writers whose concerns chimed with his own. In the case of Sartre, for instance, Spitzer not only illustrated the collected novels with 64 original lithographs, but also made a whole series of paintings based on the same texts, exhibited at the Galerie Drouant, Paris, in 1966.


Couple by the sea, 1965
Lithograph for Le Sursis by Jean-Paul Sartre

All his important book illustrations are colour lithographs, except for the black-and-white etchings with aquatint for Kessel’s Le Tour du Malheur (La Belle Édition, 1963-64) and the etchings with aquatint for Aucassin and Nicolette (Les Impénitents, 1961).


Joseph Kessel, 1963
Etching for the frontispiece of La Fontaine Medicis by Joseph Kessel

Aucassin and Nicolette was, I believe, Spitzer’s first book commission, for the Bibliophile society Les Impénitents. I haven’t seen a copy of this book (only 126 copies were published), but several are reproduced in Walter Spitzer. Unfortunately the plate W. J. Strachan reproduces as a full-page illustration on p.275 of The Artist and the Book in France, attributed to Aucassin and Nicolette, is in fact one of the etchings from Le Tour du Malheur.


Nude, 1964
Etching for L'Homme de Plâtre by Joseph Kessel


Artists, 1963
Etching for L'Affaire Bernan by Joseph Kessel

Strachan describes the etchings for Le Tour du Malheur (The Tower of Misfortune) as “characteristic of his grimmer mood”. In a preface for the catalogue of Spitzer’s exhibition at the Galerie Romanet in 1963, Joseph Kessel writes that, “I met Walter Spitzer about 2 years ago, when he was illustrating Le Tour du Malheur with etchings as harsh and brilliant as a black diamond.”


Cockerel, 1963
Etching for L'Affaire Bernan by Joseph Kessel

These etchings are perfectly suited to the tone of Joseph Kessel’s autobiographical four-volume novel, which takes us through the life and adventures of Kessel’s alter-ego Richard Dalleau in the First World War and the inter-war years. These etchings seem to me to be a really substantial artistic achievement. There are 41 of them – 32 single and 8 double pages, and they combine pure etching, aquatint, and drypoint with confidence and flair. They show, perhaps more clearly than Spitzer’s colour lithographs, what an incredible draughtsman he is. Spitzer learned his virtuoso etching technique in the atelier of Édouard Goerg. He is a particular master of aquatint.


Orgy, 1964
Etching for Les Lauriers Roses by Joseph Kessel


Horse and cart, 1963
Etching for L'Affaire Bernan by Joseph Kessel


Armistice, 1963
Etching for La Fontaine Medicis by Joseph Kessel

The four volumes of Le Tour du Malheur were published in a surprisingly large edition of 1200 copies, of which 200 were on Arches and 1000 on Lana, plus a further 20 collaborators’ copies. This is quite a substantial print-run for an artist’s book, though there is some doubt in my mind as to whether all these books were actually printed, as at the time of writing there is not a single copy of any of the four volumes being offered for sale. In addition to a set of the books on Lana, I have managed for the first three volumes to additionally acquire one of the 100 suites of the etchings in their first state (printed on Hollande Van Gelder Zonen), and one of the 200 suites of the etchings in their definitive state with remarques (printed on handmade Japon nacré). Sometimes there is a quite extraordinary difference between the first and final states. In the etching The battle, for instance, the first state is a wild explosion of aquatint; in the final state a whole battle scene has been etched on top of this with repeated bitings of the plate and expert use of a drypoint needle. The result is extraordinarly atmostpheric.


The battle (first state), 1963
Etching for La Fontaine Medicis by Joseph Kessel


The battle, 1963
Etching for La Fontaine Medicis by Joseph Kessel

There were also 100 suites of “planches refusées” on Hollande, which I have not managed to see. The etchings were printed quite separately from the text, by the etcher and taille-doucier J.J.J. Rigal.


Opium den, 1964
Etching for Les Lauriers Roses by Joseph Kessel

I first came across Walter Spitzer’s work when I bought one of 450 suites (printed on Arches by Fernand Mourlot) of the lithographs created by Spitzer, Paul Guiramand, André Cottavoz, and André Minaux for a deluxe edition of The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel by Nikos Kazantzakis, published by Éditions Richelieu in 1968. This monumental sequel to Homer’s Odyssey is one of the most remarkable literary achievements of the 20th century. It comprises 33,333 lines of verse, in 24 books. Alternately wonderful and infuriating, it doesn’t make much sense in either Jacqueline Moatti’s French translation or the English version by Kimon Friar. The four French artists evidently felt fairly baffled by this work, and of the 48 lithographs they produced (12 each), most bear only a tangential relationship to the text.


Orgiastic rites at Knossos, 1968
Lithograph for L'Odyssée by Nikos Kazantzakis


Bull-leaping at Knossos, 1968
Lithograph for L'Odyssée by Nikos Kazantzakis

But I was impressed enough to seek out further examples of the work of all four men. In the case of Spitzer, I have added to the Odyssey lithographs one of 695 suites of his lithographs for the Oeuvre Romanesque of Malraux (Éditions Lidis, 1960-1961), one of 500 suites of his lithographs for the Le Chaos et la Nuit and Les Bestiaires by de Montherlant (Éditions Lidis, 1963), and one of 1000 suites of his lithographs for the Oeuvre Romanesque of Jean-Paul Sartre (Éditions Lidis, 1965-1966). All are printed by Mourlot on pure rag Arches. It was Fernand Mourlot himself who recommended Walter Spitzer as the right artist to illustrate the complete fiction of Malraux, which in turn led to the Sartre, Montherlant, Kessel, and Kazantzakis commissions.


Bull's head, 1963
Lithograph for Les Bestiares by Henri de Montherlant


Raging bull, 1960
Lithograph for the Oeuvre romanesque of André Malraux

In 1963 Walter Spitzer exhibited at the Salon des peintres témoins de leur temps at the Musée Galliéra, supplying a lithograph for the accompanying book L’Évènement par Soixante Peintres Témoins de Leur Temps, alongside artists such as Roger Bezombes, Yves Brayer, Jean Carzou, Roger Montané, and Kostia Terechkovitch. Of almost no other artist can it be so literally true that he has been a witness to his time. He himself has said, “I think that is my role, I have to testify.”


Avenging angel, 1965
Lithograph for L'Âge de Raison by Jean-Paul Sartre

The terrible experiences of his youth in the Polish ghetto, in Auschwitz, on the death march to Gross-Rosen, and then in Buchenwald, marked Spitzer for life. He is unflinching in his portrayal of man at his worst; Walter Strachan rightly calls his lithographs for Malraux’s Les Conquerants “violent and tormented”. But in the testimony of his art, Walter Spitzer finds room also for grace notes of redemption, tenderness, and beauty.


Girl with a bouquet, 1965
Lithograph for Le Sursis by Jean-Paul Sartre

The world in black and white

The name of the teacher, writer, and artist Walter George Raffé is hardly remembered today. He was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, in 1888, and died around 1950.


Title page of Poems in Black and White, 1922
incorporating a reduced version of Raffé's woodcut Waiting

Raffé studied at Halifax Technical College, Leeds School of Art, and the Royal College of Art. He then became a lecturer at the Northern Polytechnic, and at the City of London College. He also spent some time in India, where he was Principal of the Lucknow School of Art, and a lecturer at Calcutta University.


Rosy Greeting

W. G. Raffé was elected FRSA in 1919, and a member of the Institute of Decorators in 1921; he was also a member of the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society. He wrote a number of books, including Poster Design (1929), and Art and Labour (1927).


The Highway: A Song of Democracy

As an artist, Walter George Raffé was known for his strongly graphic Art Nouveau-flavoured woodcuts in black and white, which he exhibited at the Royal Academy and other galleries. In 1922 Raffé gathered together the best of his woodcuts alongside his own poems in the book Poems in Black and White, from which all my images come.


Love Is Not Blind

It cannot be said that W. G. Raffé was a significant writer (his poems are feeble harkings-back to the world of the Georgians and beyond them to Swinburne), or a particularly accomplished artist (some of his nudes, in particular, make one wonder whether he ever actually saw a naked woman), but there is something about his work that I like. It seems to represent a particular strain of English optimism and idealism, particularly poignant in the years just following the carnage of WWI.


The Vision of World Peace

Raffé was, it seems, a pacificist, theosophist, and socialist. Journals that had previously published some of the woodcuts in Poems in Black and White incude To-Day, Textilia, Theosophy, Drawing, The Linkman, and The Ploughshare.


Winter of War

He did have some success as an artist. Frank Rutter in The Sunday Times described one of Raffé’s woodcuts in the RA Exhibition of 1920 as “the best thing in the room”; Holbrook Jackson, editor of To-Day, said, “His landscapes are the best I have seen for many a long day.” According to the cover of Poems in Black and White, prints by Raffé were acquired for the V&A and the British Museum, though a quick online search shows no trace of these in their collections today.


The Rover's Song

The woodcuts do have a certain rhythmic vigour, especially noticeable in his treatment of skies, rays of light, and rolling landscapes, and in the graphic strength of his trees that seem to be almost holding up the sky.


A Song of the Highroad

Besides the cuts, printed from the original blocks, the most interesting thing about Poems in Black and White is the introduction, in which Raffé discusses his mystical theories of black and white, “as deep as life and as long as time”. I’ll finish with a few quotes from this, without editorial interference from me.


Farewell!

“Manifestations of black and white begin and end many operations of nature in her seasons and ages, by land and sea, in day and night, for lightness and darkness are the world’s everlasting paths.”


Love's Crucible

“Bounding all colours stand black and white, containing and demarking them, their light and shade constituting, when fully understood, a true practical key to skill with a painter’s palette.”


Fleeting Beauty

“Black and white are the Alpha and Omega of symbolic graphic art, as they are the nadir and zenith of visible creation, whence glowing webs of colour stretch between, a distracting and impermanent rainbow illusion, joyously ephemeral, splending and fleeting as music, no sooner born than dying away in the memories of which music is made.”


Let Us Dancing Go!

“Black and white, themselves cold and expressionless, yet may fully stir every passion; themselves colourless, may sugest every colour; at once the womb and the grave, they rule, enveloping in light and in darkness dispelling all.”


Waiting

It is, I believe, in the woodcut Waiting that Raffé's strength of composition and gift for finding balance between black and white is most fully realised.


Colophon to Poems in Black and White

A Mystery Solved

Over a year ago I posted about a special copy I had acquired of L'Art Belge, with a lot of signed original prints incorporated into the revue. The attribution of one of them, on which the signature was to me quite indecipherable, had completely defeated me. So a big thank you to Wally at the Etsen blogspot for writing to let me know the identity of the mystery artist.


Portrait of a young man
Etching by Henri Mortiaux

The author of this etching was by the Brussels artist Henri Mortiaux, born in 1890 in Saint-Gilles. Mortiaux studied at the Brussels Academy of Fine Art under Émile Fabry, Guillaume van Strydonck, Jean Delville, and Constant Montald. He learned the techniques of etching, aquatint, and drypoint from Auguste Danse. He died at Villers-la-Ville in 1965.

I haven't had enough time to fully explore the Etsen blog yet, but I can already tell that it is full of interesting images and hard-to-find information.

Art Nouveau

I'm very aware I have been neglecting this blog. I have quite a few long posts nearly ready, and one of them is on the etcher Pierre Vidal. Vidal is very much a chronicler of the Belle Époque, and one of his books - of which more anon - is entitled La Femme à Paris (text by Octave Uzanne). Now Vidal's work, as you shall shortly see, is fairly realistic, in a post-Impressionist sort of way. But the dustjacket of La Femme à Paris is by another artist, in a completely different contemporary style. The date is 1894.



The style, of course, is Art Nouveau, and the artist is Leon Rudnicki. Resident in Paris, and active in the 1890s, Rudnicki was presumably of Polish extraction. Does anybody know anything more about him?

Variations

When writing the other week about the portfolio Douze poètes, douze peintres, I should have noted that the idea of matching a group of poets and printmakers was hardly new, dating back at least to Sonnets et eaux-fortes, published by Alphonse Lemerre in 1869. Among the artists contributing to that work were Manet, Corot, and Millet; Victor Hugo insisted on being included among the artists rather than the writers.




Since that time enterprising publishers have kept coming up with similar ideas. Two notable examples in my collection are Variations sur l’amour (1968) and its companion volume Variations sur l’imaginaire (1972). Both were published by Philippe Lebaud, under his unenticing-sounding fine-press imprint Club du Livre, and each pairs 20 writers and 20 artists. All the illustrations are original colour lithographs.


André Masson (1896-1987_
Les incertitudes de Psyché
Lithograph 1968, printed by Fernand Mourlot

Unlike most livres d’artiste, the two volumes of Variations were published as bound books, with lavish leather bindings, rather than as folded and gathered sheets in a chemise and slipcase. Both were published in editions of 190 copies: 20 on Japon nacré, 30 on Auvergne, and 140 on Rives. The first 50 copies were accompanied by an additional suite of the lithographs, printed on Rives. All the lithographs in the suites and in the books were hand-signed by the artists, and all the texts were signed by the authors.


Jules Cavaillès (1901-1977)
Récitative
Lithograph 1968, printed by Fernand Mourlot


André Planson (1898-1981)
Ann de Saint-Jean
Lithograph 1968, printed by Jacques Desjobert

Both of my copies are on Japon nacré (pearlised japan paper), and both have one of the 50 extra portfolios of loose lithographs. I’m not going to post all 40 images, but I thought a selection would make an interesting comparison with Douze poètes, douze peintres. Interestingly only one artist features in both Douze poètes and Variations, André Minaux.


André Minaux (1923-1986)
Les amants
Lithograph 1968, printed by Fernand Mourlot

The artists in Variations sur l’amour are Yves Brayer, Jules Cavaillès, Jean Commère. Lucien Coutaud, Leonardo Cremonini, Léonor Fini, Paul Guiramand, Félix Labisse, Édouard Mac’Avoy, André Masson, Blasco Mentor, André Minaux, Marcel Mouly, André Planson, Édouard Pignon, Michel Rodde, Georges Rohner, Maurice Sarthou, Pierre-Yves Trémois, and Ossip Zadkine.


Leonardo Cremonini (1925- )
De l'autre côte du miroir
Lithograph 1968 (dated '66 by artist), printed by René Guillard


Leonardo Cremonini
Urgence du désert
Lithograph 1972 (dated '71 by artist), printed by Fernand Mourlot

The artists in Variations sur l’imaginaire are Gilles Aillaud, Enrico Baj, Lucien Coutaud, Leonardo Cremonini, Maurice Delmotte, Fred Deux, Bernard Dufour, Joachin Ferrer, Léonor Fini, Jean Hélion, Jacques Hérold, Félix Labisse, Jacques Lamy, Stanislao Lepri, François Lunven, André Masson, Jacques Monory, Cesare Peverelli, Man Ray, and Georges Rohner.


Enrico Baj (1924-2003)
Vertiges
Lithograph 1972, printed by Michel Cassé


Man Ray (1890-1967)
Imagination-subversion ou l'image y nait
Lithograph 1972, printed by Clot, Bramsen, et Georges

The reason for the relatively small overlap between the two volumes (only Coutaud, Cremonini, Fini, Labisse, Masson, and Rohner) contribute to both lies in the differing themes of the texts. Whereas Variations sur l’amour was a natural choice for lyrical postwar colourists such as Jules Cavaillès, Paul Guiramand, André Minaux, and André Planson, and for artists drawn to erotic themes, such as Léonor Fini, Blasco Mentor, and Pierre-Yves Trémois, the artists responding to the thought-provoking texts in Variations sur l’imaginaire are all Surrealists or Hyper-realists.


Léonor Fini (1908-1996)
Sphinx (Pseudo-sonnet avec un intermède)
Lithograph 1972, printed by René Guillard


Lucien Coutaud (1904-1977)
Figure de l'aire rouge
Lithograph 1972, printed by Jacques Desjobert

There are biographies of all these artists on the Idbury Prints website, so I won’t repeat all that information here. I’ll just note that each book has one posthumously-published lithograph (both, happily, signed by the artist before his demise). In the case of Variations sur l’amour the death of the Cubist sculptor Ossip Zadkine in 1967 at the age of 77, after a long and successful career, was probably not unexpected. His lithograph Haute mâlerie must be one of his very last works.


Ossip Zadkine (1890-1967)
Haute mâlerie
Lithograph 1968 (presumably executed 1966/67), printed by Maurice Pons

With Variations sur l’imaginaire, the loss was more shocking and abrupt. François Lunven was the shooting star of French art. His first works, shown at the Galerie Transart, Milan in 1970, caused such a sensation he was accorded a solo exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris the following year, but he killed himself on the eve of the show, at the age of just 29. Again, his lithograph Poète aux interstices must be one of the last works he created.


François Lunven (1942-1971)
Poète aux interstices
Lithograph 1972 (presumably executed 1970/71), printed by Michel Cassé