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Utrillo was one of the few painters of Montmartre to have been born
there. The son of a local model and an amateur painter, Utrillo was
born into the world of Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, and Degas, for the
most part absorbing the work of those around him without formal study.
He began painting the sights around him, and started to be taken seriously
by his contemporary artists, who saw in his work a new way of representing
Paris, despite his interest in the impressionism of Sisley and Pisarro,
and a strangeness that was determinedly modern. He placed a great emphasis
on texture, sometimes incorporating sand, plaster, or lime into his
paint, and became a master of the subtle, reductive palette. Critical
acclaim followed, with his international reputation being firmly established
by the 1920s; he was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1929. He produced
painted scenery and designed costumes for Diaghilev, his style lending
itself well to the stage. His work is held in major collections throughout
the world.
Daniel Jacomet and the pochoir process
The modern French tradition in the art of printmaking 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, and numerous others. The
Atelier Jacomet was founded in 1910 by Daniel Jacomet, and today is
in the hands of his grandsons. It specialises in stencil (pochoir),
the oldest technique of multicolour reproduction.
The Pochoir is a technique making use of templates. It was popular at
the beginning of the twentieth 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.
The pochoir process, characterized by its crisp lines and brilliant
colours, produces images that have a freshly printed or wet appearance.
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. A craftsman known as a découpeur
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 The stencils were originally
made of aluminium, copper, or zinc but eventually the material of choice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 découpeur would be passed on to the coloristes.
The coloristes applied the pigments using a variety of different brushes
and methods of paint application to create the finished pochoir print.
The manual aspect of pochoir has been both one of its most valuable
attributes and one of its greatest failures as a medium. Pochoir is
both labour-and time-intensive, making it an expensive and slow process
of printmaking. As a result, techniques such as lithography and serigraphy,
mechanized in nature, have replaced pochoir as a method of reproduction.
Pochoir has been used in conjunction with other medium such as engraving,
lithography, or photography as a means of adding colour to a print.
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