Houtin

The French printmaker François Houtin (1950- ) is an artist whose work has been devoted almost exclusively to the depiction of imaginary gardens. Houtin was born and grew up in Craon, near Mayenne, in the rural Haut-Anjou region. He moved to Paris in 1971, from which time he worked as a gardener and floral designer, while training to become a landscape architect. Finding his horticultural visions at odds with real-world constraints, he sought alternative means of bringing them to life, and began studying etching and engraving at evening-classes under the direction of Jean Delpech, who also trained such notable printmakers as Phillipe Mohlitz and Erik Desmazières.

Houtin’s first album of etchings, Vie Folle, Folle Vie, Débile was published in 1976. His early prints have an overt surrealism about them which gradually faded as his style evolved and matured. Other publications followed, notably the series of forty etchings Jardins, which appeared in 1978. The year after that, Houtin quit his day-job and became a full-time artist. Since then, there have been many exhibitions of his work in Europe and North America, and several more publications, including: Topiaire (1980); Cinq Jardins, Cinq Sens (1982); Fantaises Romaines (1985); Les Quatre Eléments ou La Fête à Versailles (1988); Les Cabanes de Jardinier (1999) and Nymphées (2002).

Also in 2002, a complete Catalogue Raisonné of Houtin’s work was published: a joint effort by Richard Reed Armstrong Fine Art (Chicago) and the Galerie Michèle Broutta (Paris). I obtained a copy of this catalogue a few days ago, which has been my source for the images here. I’m grateful to Peacay, of Bibliodyssey renown, for introducing me to the work of this artist, nicely described by his friend and collaborator Gilbert Lascault as ‘the printmaker-gardener, the draughtsman-nurseryman, the demanding dreamer, the landscape artist, and the arboriculturalist-etcher.’ These images are all copyright © François Houtin, and have been reproduced without permission, only for as long as no-one objects to their presence on this site.

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Mélancolies

Between October 13th ’05 and January 16th ’06, an exhibition was staged at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais in Paris entitled Mélancolie: Génie et folie en Occident (‘Melancholy: Genius and Madness in the West’). As well as the exhibition catalogue itself, a hefty, richly-illustrated volume containing numerous essays, at least one other book was published to coincide with this exhibition: Mélancolies; Livre d’images, a compilation of related imagery edited by Maxime Préaud, curator of the département des Estampes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Apart from the first image above, one of a series of four engravings by the German printmaker Virgil Solis (1514-62) representing ‘the four temperaments,’ which was lifted from the exhibition catalogue, the present details are of scans from Préaud’s livre d’images. The second image above, Melencolia, was the work of another German engraver, Hans Sebald Beham (ca. 1500-50). Dürer’s famous 1514 print Melencolia I was likely the prototype for both of these engravings.

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As well as personifications of the melancholic humour, Préaud’s book also includes sections on depictions of the dejected Christ; on Death, and the Devil; on Love-Melancholy and Art-Melancholy; meanwhile touching on the related concepts of acedia, desidia (or sloth), ennui, and the saturnine. The pair of details above are from, respectively: ‘Amymone Changed into a Fountain,’ an engraving by the painter and printmaker Girolamo Mocetto (ca. 1458-1531); and ‘The Man Cloaked in Malice,’ an etching (ca. 1630) by Abraham Bosse.

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The details above are taken from ‘Guillot the Dreamer,’ a 17th-Century engraving by an unknown French printmaker; and ‘Philosophy’ an etching made in 1707 by Sébastien Leclerc (1637-1714). The first of the details below is another anonymous French print, and etching this time, after Georges de la Tour’s painting ‘The Penitent Magdalen.’ Lastly, the final image shows part of an etching by Henri-Simon Thomassin (1687-1741) after Domenico Fetti’s 1622 canvas ‘Melancholy.’

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Préaud’s book also contains several images I’ve posted here before: Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione’s Melancholy; Saturn as Melancholy by Zacharias Dolendo (after Jacques de Gheyn); Giulio Campagnola’s Saturn; Serpent Speaking to a Young Man by Marcantonio Raimondi; Rodolphe Bresdin’s La Comédie de la mort; and Salvator Rosa’s Democritus.

Ciafferi, Poli & Poli

Pietro Ciafferi (1600-54), also known as lo smargiasso (‘the braggart’) was a Tuscan painter and draughtsman, a minor figure in anyone’s history of art, most (but not all) of whose few surviving works are on maritime themes—depicting shipwrecks, naval battles and port scenes. The following pair of details show parts of a pendant pair of paintings of imaginary waterfronts, the scenery in which is based in part on Ciafferi’s native Livorno.

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I don’t know how Ciafferi earned his nickname, but his skill as a draughtsman seems to have been well worth bragging about. The first of the pair of details that follow shows a woodland scene dominated by an anthropomorphic tree-figure, while the second depicts a ship undergoing repair.

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Imaginary seascapes also feature in the œuvre of Gherardo (1675-1739) and Giuseppe Poli (1704-67), although this father-and-son team’s capricci were oftener land-bound, featuring grand ruins set in dramatic landscapes, or crowded cityscapes. The first of the details below shows a sketchy landscape, where the stylised vegetation and rock-formations apparently betray the influence of Jacques Callot’s etchings. The second detail (alas, in black-and-white) is of a more extraordinary work entitled Casa che Brucia (‘Burning House’), which at one time was attributed to Poli & Poli, perhaps owing to its slight likeness to landscapes such as the one below.

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Many of Poli & Poli’s canvases follow the same formula: a vast, ruined edifice towers above some figures milling about in the foreground, against a backdrop of picturesque scenery. The detail immediately below shows part of one of dozens of such works. The last detail opens on to an example of an urban cappriccio by the duo: one of a series of four peculiar visions of Paris, seemingly based on an etching of Callot’s, but also incorporating some local Tuscan architectural elements too.

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All of the images above were scanned from a book I acquired recently, entitled Fantastiche Vedute. Dal Ciafferi al Poli. La pittura di capriccio in Toscana.

Greetings from...

Occasionally, printers will run disposable sheets of paper through the press several times in order to fine-tune the press, or to clean the rollers. The resulting “setup sheets” often display random overlays of images and type from various unrelated print jobs.

A great resource for those of us who cannot afford a real Rauschenberg, setup sheets have long been admired and collected by graphic artists for the happy incidents that adorn them. In fact, certain recent designs could be described as software-assisted attempts to recreate that fortuitous look. Here are some examples from my collection, which I hope you will enjoy.

1. View of Saint Mark’s cathedral in Venice + sura + unidentified crest + bits of Italian text. The sura is the powerful and oft-recited Al Fatiha (the opener). The chance meeting of Venice and Koran is an inspired one, given that city’s long-standing relations with the East. Verso, not reproduced: Manhattan skyline + still life with flowers and book (another Koran, surely?)

2. This one is for misteraitch: Herrevadströmmen, Sweden + Sorrento, Italy. Sorrento wins, thanks to green sixties babe in bikini and bangs.

3. Milan of yesteryear + beach. Or, to paraphrase the May 68 slogan, au dessus du pavé, la plage!

4. Isola del Giglio + young woman + ugly seaside development. The woman says Ciao fusto—corny old fashioned Italian that roughly translates as “Hey big stud!”

5. Venice’s Bridge of sighs + Rome’s monument to Vittorio Emanuele II by night. Sarcastically nicknamed “the typewriter”, the latter monument features prominently in Peter Greenaway’s 1987 film The Belly of an Architect: from its terrace, the protagonist jumps to his death. I love how the light streaks and countless Fiats from Rome’s traffic blend with Venetian waters. Like a blurry recollection of a too-short Italian vacation.

6. Tango of death. Caught in a jaguar’s deadly grip, a giant anteater sticks out its tongue for the last time. This is a picture of a ratty old diorama from Milan’s Museum of Natural Science, which the faulty printing in yellow and black only renders more alarming. In recent years, photographers have mined nature dioramas extensively; they are a good source of instant Surrealism.

Normally, setup sheets are discarded at the plant. The examples in this collection are unusual in that they were trimmed and shipped with the finished product, i.e. postcards to be sold in news-stands across Italy. Each one was found as the last one in a stack of normal cards, perhaps meant to protect them from the grime that seems to settle on anything that’s left out on Italian streets. Finding them among ordinary postcards added a certain charm to their intriguing imagery: one wonders, what country do they come from? What language do they speak there? Can I visit, if only for a short vacation?

The cards reproduced here were bought in Piazza Duomo, Milan and in smaller cities in Northern Italy and Southern France. The vendors’ responses to my queries were varied: most would smile and, after trying to dissuade me—“why don’t you buy a proper postcard instead”—would give them away. Some would glance as if to say, “look at this chump, he did not even notice that it’s misprinted. Let’s hope he does not come back asking for a refund”. Others refused to sell them and would not budge at better offers.

For unknown reasons, the supply dried up only a few months after my discovery, about twenty years ago. There must be other collectors out there but I have not met any.

The scans above cannot do justice to the originals’ colours. All the cards were printed with the conventional four-colour process; however, with multiple, superimposed hits, the colours acquire an unexpected depth and richness, especially in the blue range. Thus I could not include the finest examples, simply because they would appear too murky on screen.

These postcards are published here for the first time, with the exception of number 4, which appeared on Paper Placemats, a project by J&L Books.

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