Estève, Face à face, XXe Siècle (after) 1968

Description

Lithograph on vélin paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the volume, XXe Siècle, n°30, 1968. … more Lithograph on vélin paper. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Good condition. Notes: From the volume, XXe Siècle, n°30, 1968. Published and printed under the direction of Gualtieri di San Lazzaro, éditeur, Paris, by Société Internationale d'Art XXe siècle, Paris. Excerpted from the academic article, “Promoting Original Prints, The Role of Gualtieri di San Lazzaro and XXe Siècle” by Valerie Holman, published in PRINT QUARTERLY, XXXIII, 2016, 2, Until recently very little has been written on the Italian author and art publisher Gualtieri di San Lazzaro (1904-75), yet for 50 years he chronicled the life and work of contemporary artists, produced monographs of exceptional quality, and disseminated original prints by modern painters and sculptors through his best-known periodical, XXe Siècle. Although still a relatively unfamiliar figure in the United Kingdom, San Lazzaro is one of the half-dozen great art publishers of the mid-twentieth century who, together with his exemplar, Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), and those of his own generation, Christian Zervos (1889-1970), Tériade (1889-1983) and Albert Skira (1904-73), chose to base himself in Paris, seeing it throughout his life as the centre of the art world….XXe Siècle, an illustrated periodical, was launched in 1938 and printed in editions of approximately 2,000, each issue containing both photographs and four-colour separation reproductions across a wide spectrum of visual imagery ranging from masterpieces of Western painting to popular prints from the Far East. Its large format, lively design, and close integration of text and image, were immediately striking, but its most innovative feature, introduced at the suggestion of Hans Arp (1886-1966), was the inclusion of original prints by contemporary artists in every issue. With obvious appeal for collectors, XXe Siècle was also designed to introduce a wider, international public to contemporary painting and sculpture through good quality colour reproductions and the immediacy of original prints. Comparable in price to Cahiers d'Art, early issues of XXe Siècle sold out rapidly. While San Lazzaro's own aesthetic preferences tended towards lyric abstraction, he made clear that XXe Siècle was non-partisan [publication ceased during World War II]….in 1951, San Lazzaro relaunched XXe Siècle with thematic issues that were materials based, or centred on a topic of current interest in the visual arts, particularly in Europe: concepts of space, matter, monochrome, mark-making and the sign.' A defining feature of the new series was Italy's artistic dialogue with France for, while San Laz-zaro had originally concentrated on Paris-based painters and sculptors, his aim was to create an international network, to make known the work of French artists in Italy and Italian artists in France, and subsequently extend this bilateral axis to the English-speak-ing world. The artists represented in No. I by an original print were all best known as sculptors: Arp, Laurens, Henry Moore (1898-186) and Marino Marini, San Lazzaro not only sought to show readers the full range of an artist's work, but to encourage the production of prints, a stimulus much appreciated, for example, by Magnelli…. Suffering from failing health, in 1968 San Lazzaro lost overall control of XXe Siècle to Léon Amiel, a printer-publisher who had provided financial backing and helped with distribution in America." Thematic issues now ceased and were replaced by a 'panorama' of the year, but San Lazzaro was still active as a publisher of books and albums of prints….Shortly after his death, San Lazzaro himself was the subject of two exhibitions: 'Omaggio a XXe Siècle' in Milan in December 1974 centred on graphic work by those artists closest to him late in life, while 'San Laz-zaro et ses Amis' at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1975 featured work by all those whose work he had promoted for more than 50 years: Arp, Calder (1898-1976), Capogrossi, Chagall, Sonia Delau-nay, Dubuffet, Estève, Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), Gili-oli (1911-77), Magnelli, Marini, Miró, Moore and Poliakoff. This exhibition was seen by one of his closest colleagues as an indirect portrait of San Lazzaro, a complex man whose modesty and reserve masked his unremitting drive to extend international appreciation of contemporary art, and to bring the reading public closer to its making through the medium of print.

MAURICE ESTEVE (1904-2001), was a French painter. Maurice Estève was born in the French town of Culan (Département Cher) on 2 May 1904. In 1913 he moved to Paris with his parents, where he soon began his education as an artist. Estève worked for a year as designer in a textile factory in Barcelona 1923. During his visits to the Louvre in the 1920s, Estève was particularly impressed by the painters Jean Fouquet and Paolo Uccello. Among the modern artists, Paul Cézanne had the greatest influence on Estève. Maurice Estève was largely self-educated, having only attended the free studio of the Académie Colarossi in 1924, where he tried to constructively implement of his motifs according to the model of Georges Braque and Fernand Léger, thus creating a kind of Cubist Fauvism. Estève began to move away from realism in 1928, and was influenced in the following years by Léger, Matisse, Picasso, and Bonnard. His first one-man exhibition was given at the Galerie Yvangot, Paris, 1930. He worked as assistant to Robert Delaunay on huge decorative panels for the 1937 Paris International Exhibition. In the 1940s his stylized figure, still-life and landscape compositions with strong colors gradually became completely abstract, with tight-knit interlocking shapes in rich, bold colors. Has made a number of watercolors and collages, and designed stained glass in 1957 for a church at Berlincourt in the Bernese Jura.
Estève's extensive work was not limited to the genre of painting. He was also active in collage, textile design and murals. Estève avoided the extrovert circles of Avant-garde but still belonged to the core of the artists who brought about the breakthrough of École de Paris after 1945.
Maurice Estève took part in the Venice Biennale in 1954. His œuvre, just like the works of his art colleagues Riopelle and Bazaine, established a new pictorial language: Lyrical abstractions with the aim of depicting form and color with an almost poetic attitude. His works have established themselves in many well-known museums and collections around the world. less