Mourlot School of Paris
The prints offered here are from 'Affiches Originales des Maîtres de l'Ecole de Paris', a special edition catalogue illustrating 102 exhibition posters created between 1933 and 1959 by members of the School of Paris (Braque, Chagall, Dufy, Léger, Matisse, Miró and Picasso), and printed at the renowned printing house of Mourlot in Paris. The catalogue raisonné, compiled by Fernand Mourlot with the artists’ authorization, presented lithographic prints of their original posters scaled down to fit the format of the book. It was printed in different language editions and published in 1959. The edition is now hard to find, and these ‘mini posters’ are highly collectable.
Paper size: 16” x 12” / size with mat: 16” x 12”
Among the most significant artists of the 20th Century, the Russian-born painter Marc Chagall is regarded as one of the leading avant-garde figurative painters of his day. He created a highly distinctive style, combining Surrealist fantasy with Cubist spatial effects and a unique sense of color. Although he lived and worked mainly in France, Marc Chagall was born in the village of Vitebsk, Russia (now Belarus) to a poor Jewish family. For a brief period during WWII he lived in the United States, but returned in 1948 to his adopted country, France, where he lived in St. Paul de Vence until his death in 1985.
Until he developed his own very distinctive colorful and lively style for which he became famous in the 1920s, the French painter, graphic artist and textile designer, Raoul Dufy (b. Le Havre, France1877 d. 1953), was greatly influenced by Impressionism and especially Fauvism. Characterized by rapidly drawn figures on backgrounds of bright, thinly-applied colors Dufy’s technique was well suited to the scenes of horse races, regattas and other fashionable social gatherings he liked to depict. The accessibility and Joie de Vivre of his work helped to popularize modern art.
Although the French painter, sculptor & designer Fernand Léger (1881-1955) was associated with the Cubists early in his career, his curvilinear and tubular forms contrasted with the fragmented forms of Braque & Picasso, and his work gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style. Inspired by the modernist technological culture and machinery of the first half of the twentieth century, with its complex but harmonious arrangement of interlocking geometric shapes, Léger developed a unique style of painting using strong flat colors and heavy black outlines. This bold, simplified style is often regarded as a forerunner to Pop Art.
One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, the French painter, sculptor, graphic artist & designer Henri Matisse (1869-1954) came to prominence in 1905 when he and a group of friends exhibiting their work in Paris were dubbed Les Fauves (wild beasts) because of the violent brightness of the colors they used. Indeed, Matisse’s delight in color characterized his work during his long and successful career. He divided his time between Paris and the French Riviera, where his paintings seemed to be drenched in the luminosity of the sun and the colors of the South. In his final years, when he was confined to a wheelchair, Matisse developed a series of brightly colored abstract designs made from cut-out colored paper shapes, known as ‘Papiers Decoupés’ - a technique he referred to as ‘painting with scissors’.
The Spanish Surrealist painter, sculptor, graphic artist & designer Joan Miró (1893-1983) was born in Barcelona, and later attended the Academia Gali School of Art. He moved to Paris in 1921, where he became friends with his fellow Catalan, Pablo Picasso, and with Andre Breton and his circle of Surrealists, whose manifesto Miró signed in 1924. Although he did not consider his art to be part of any ‘ism’, Miró nonetheless remained true to the basic Surrealist principle of freeing the unconscious mind from the control of logic and reason.
In 1940 he returned to Spain and thereafter lived and worked mainly in Majorca. Miró was extremely prolific - he continued to produce works of art into his eighties, and to experiment with different media - painting, printmaking, collage and sculpture among others - while enjoying international acclaim as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
Born in Malaga, the Spanish painter, sculptor, ceramist and graphic artist Pablo Ruiz y Picasso (1881-1973) began his formal training aged seven, under his art professor father, José Ruiz y Blasco. He continued his studies at art schools in Barcelona and Madrid, and first visited Paris in 1900, where he eventually settled in 1904. During the first decade of the 20th century, Picasso’s style changed as he experimented with different techniques and ideas. The Blue and Rose period paintings were created during his early years in Paris, but after 1906, the Fauvist work of Henri Matisse motivated him to explore more radical styles, and he began to turn to the analysis of form. With his friend Georges Braque, Picasso formulated Cubism, a movement that rejected the naturalistic tradition of European art, and revolutionized painting and sculpture. In the 1920s he painted some of his most important work, much of it in a neoclassical style, and later began to create more violently expressive works, such as Guernica (1937), which conveyed his horror and revulsion at the bombing of the Basque capital by the Nationalist and Fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War.
After WWII, Picasso moved to the south of France. The postwar years marked a period of experimentation in ceramics and particularly in printmaking, resulting in an enormous output of etchings, woodcuts and lithographs. Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and a large fortune, becoming one of the most renowned figures in 20th-century art.