MAURICE
UTRILLO (French) (1883 –
1955)
HAND
COLOURED POCHOIRS AFTER GOUACHES BY MAURICE UTRILLO
POCHOIR
PRINTS AFTER GOUACHES BY MAURICE UTRILLO
PRODUCED
IN PARIS IN 1950 AT THE ATELIER JACOMET
CREATED
FOR THE PORTFOLIO “LE
VILLAGE INSPIRE”
DEPICTING
SCENES IN THE MONTMARTRE DISTRICT OF PARIS
Image
sizes all approximately 31cm x 25cm
PRICED
AT £580
EACH FRAMED IN HAND FINISHED FRENCH STYLE FRAMES
DANIEL JACOMET
& THE POCHOIR PROCESS
The modern
French tradition in the art of print making is represented in the prestigious
work of Daniel Jacomet who worked to produce beautiful Pochoir prints in
collaboration with modern Masters such as Picasso, Braque, Foujita, Klee,
Matisse, Renoir, Gris, Utrillo and numerous
others. Jacomet was born in 1894 and was
apprenticed in Paris at the age of 14 to the printer and publisher Andre Marty,
taking over the business on Marty’s
death in 1921 and founding the Atelier Jacomet.
The Pochoir is a technique making use of templates. It was popular at the beginning of the 20th
Century, for instance in Art Deco. To
arrive at subtle shades of colour, an ingenious but
time consuming and very complicated method was later invented by Jacomet which
produced stunning results. Pochoir
begins with the analysis of the composition, including colour
tones and densities, of a colour image. Numerous stencils were designed as a means of
reproducing an image. The Craftsman,
known as a Decoupeur, would cut stencils with a
straight edged knife. The stencils were
originally made of aluminium, copper, or zinc but
eventually the material of choice was either celluloid or plastic. Along with
this transition of stencil materials, there was a shift away from the use of watercolour towards the broad, soft, opaque layers of
gouache. The technique was further
refined in an effort to create the most vivid,
accurately coloured reproductions. Stencils created by the Decoupeur
would be passed on to the colourists. The colourists applied
the pigments using a variety of different brushes and methods of paint
application to create the finished Pochoir print.Pochoir has been used in conjunction with other
medium such as engraving, lithography or photography as a means of adding colour to a print.
“Le
Chateau de Saint-Bernard” IMAGE IMAGE
“Un
Coin du Village” IMAGE IMAGE
Maurice Utrillo
was born in Paris in 1883. His mother, Marie-Clementine
Valadon, was an artist’s
model and it is thought that his father was an artist named Boissy. His mother later became the protégé of
Toulouse-Lautrec and it was he that introduced her to Degas who taught her to
paint. When Maurice Valadon was still a
child, Miguel Utrillo, a friend of his mother, legally recognized him as his
son. Maurice did not do well at school
or in his career as a bank clerk. By the
time he was eighteen he had become an alcoholic and spent some time in an
asylum. He was given occupational
therapy and his doctor recommended to his mother that Maurice should take up
painting as an emotional outlet. This
proved to be very successful and Maurice Utrillo went
on to produce many thousands of paintings in various mediums. By 1920 he was internationally known and in
1929 he was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor by the French Republic. The dealer Libaude organised his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Blot
in Paris in 1913 but it was unsuccessful.
However, recognition followed an exhibition (with Suzanne Valadon) at
the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in 1923. In 1935 he
married Lucie Pauwels (Valore) and moved with her in 1937 to Le Vésinet on the outskirts of Paris. In his
last years, watched over by his wife, he divided his time between painting and
religious devotions. Utrillo is regarded by many critics and artists as the 20th
century’s
greatest painter of urban scenes. He was
fascinated by the streets of Montmartre particularly as it existed before the
First World War. But he also painted
some of the great cathedrals and views of Corsica and Brittany. But he is best remembered for his paintings
of Paris and his work is appreciated by those with sophisticated as well as
simple tastes. He died at Dax in the
Pyrenees in 1955
Work by Maurice
Utrillo is in the following Museums and Art Galleries: Art
Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan;
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hermitage Museum,
Saint Petersburg; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Musée d'Orsay, Paris;
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California; Tate Gallery,
London; The Royal Collection, London; Amgueddfa Cymru -
National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, British Columbia;
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford;
Brooklyn Museum, New York City; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Courtauld Institute of
Art, London; Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, Dublin, Ireland;
E.G. Bührle
Collection,
Zurich; Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma;
Harvard University Art Museums, Massachusetts; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; Jewish Museum in Prague, Czech Republic; Joslyn Art Museum,
Omaha, Nebraska; Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany; Lille Metropole Musee d'Art Moderne, France; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Magyar Nemzeti Galéria
(Hungarian National Gallery), Budapest; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota; Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris; Musée des Augustins, Toulouse, France; Museu de Arte de São Paulo,
Brazil; Museum of Modern Art, New York City - Provenance Research Project; National Gallery of Victoria, Australia; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; San Diego Museum of Art, California; Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago;
U.S. Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City; Winnipeg Art Gallery, Manitoba.
