The impact of full colour lithography on French illustration was just as profound
as it was in the rest of the industrialised world.
Even so it would be quite a few years before far cheaper
one and two colour printing would fade away to redundancy.
Born in 1867 Abel Faivre was one of any number of illustrators whose career straddled the two
centuries and although he continued to produce monochrome cartoon illustration for magazines
such as Le Rire and L'Assiette au Buerre he also took full advantage of colour when it
was available, and demonstrated an equally accomplished use of paint.
Others whose careers had begun in the later 1800s found themselves in the same fortunate position.
Albert Robida, who had previously had to create his science fantasy
illustrations in black and white could now paint in any medium and have it reproduced
on the covers of the weekly science fiction story La Guerre Infernale.
And with the the same freedom the caricaturist Sem could now produce
his comical observations of Parisian society with colour fully integrated into the image.
The rapidly expanding advertising industry offered commissions to create full colour posters and
previously unheard of financial rewards. And before long a generation of younger
illustrators started to take the availability of colour for granted.
Born in1872 Félix Lorioux illustrated many traditional folk and fairy tales
with a highly decorative style using line and washes of watercolour.
He was extremely prolific in children's publishing and his engaging animal characters
in particular made him one of France's best loved and most enduring artists.
Strictly speaking Edmund Dulac shouldn't be included here as he worked almost
all his career in britain and even became a British citizen.
But he was born French and he's just too good to leave out.
Dulac moved to London as a young man and in 1905 received his
first commission to illustrate novels by the Brontë Sisters.
Although these stories were somewhat grim for Dulac's style they were well received and led
to more suitable commissions for fantasy and fairy tales from around the world.
All of which he brought to life with a sensitive
line and watercolour technique only equalled by Arthur Rackham.
Superficially the illustrations of Jean-Jacques Waltz, more commonly
known as Uncle Hansi, were charming and innocuous.
But many were also quietly hostile to the Germans who
insisted that the Alsace region belonged to them.
Hansi became particularly successful with his book Professor Knatschke created in 1912.
He also came to be a champion of French Alsace,
and suffered several spells of imprisonment by the Germans.
Gus Bofa, whose real name was Gustave Blanchot,
began his career with cartoons for both Le Rire and Le Sourire in 1900.
Bofa had a particularly modern gestural way with
his line work and although deceptively casual it was also very expressive.
And within a couple of years he started being offered more lucrative poster work too.
In 1914 the territorial squabbles of the kind seen in Alsace coalesced into a world
war and many French illustrators put down their pencils to fight for their country.
Although he was by now in his 30s Bofa was one of
them and before long he was seriously injured in battle.
Consequently he he had to settle for spending the rest of the war producing
bleakly humorous drawings of life in the trenches.
The magazine Le Rire continued as Le Rire Rouge in tribute to the bloodshed, and artists such as
Charles Léandre also applied their skills to scathing mockery of Germany and its leaders.
As one of the key battlegrounds France suffered more than most and illustration was harnessed
to help the French war effort through propaganda, mostly in the form of posters.
After four brutal years of war the French set to
repairing their country and by this time were more than ready for a little fun.
Polish-born Zyg Brunner had arrived in Paris at the turn
of the century and had success with his cartoons before war broke out.
After the war ended demand for his unusually modernist styling
and frivolous light touch grew considerably, and his cheerful
occasionally erotic illustrations appeared in virtually every popular French magazine.
Joseph Hémard enjoyed similar success.
He had a penchant for depicting the sins of the flesh with a light comic
touch but he was better known for his more respectable magazine work.
His line style was more endearing and organic than Brunner's and despite its
loose simplicity his work always managed to be comically and emotionally expressive.
The magazine Le Sourire had first appeared in 1896 but had been abandoned during the war.
It resurfaced in 1918 as an upbeat amusing magazine with an abundance of cartoon
erotica provided by the leading illustrators of the day.
And although La Vie Parisienne had been around since the 1860s it only came into
its own as the most stylish and provocative of French magazines at the start of the 20s
with a lavishly illustrated and sexually permissive new identity.
Both these magazines are often referred to as being stylistically art deco but
most of the iillustration was more organic and
representational than the geometric approach for which deco was known.
The work of Georges Léonnec in La Vie Parisienne was certainly too delicate
and traditionally rendered to be considered art deco.
And the same could just as easily be be said of of Chéri Hérouard,
who had a remarkable 45 year long working relationship with the magazine.
And there was also Maurice Pepin who used the name Pem and whose charming
pinups featured in many issues of Le Sourire.
Although René Vincent produced similar magazine illustration he was also a particularly successful
poster artist and for his advertising work he intuitively understood that a flatter more
graphic approach was called for and he used it with considerable skill and design sense.
Around the same time Achille Mauzan, born in 1883,
also had an immensely successful career as a poster artist.
Unusually for an illustrator Mauzan was also a good businessman and set
up publishing and print companies in Paris, Milan and Buenos Aires.
During his career Mauzan designed more than 2,000 posters,
using a range of styles and approaches which made him impossible to categorise.
But if not everyone had gone overboard for the deco movement
there were many others who embraced it wholeheartedly.
And following the 1925 paris exposition which gave
the style its name the French pretty much took ownership of the movement.
George Barbier was born in 1882 and is generally classified as a
fashion illustrator, which he was but he was also much more.
Even in his 20s he received many commissions to design theatre and
ballet costumes for high profile productions.
and he went on to apply his elegant classically styled figure work to illustrate books such
as Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and to produce distinctive haute couture fashion illustrations
which invariably put his models into some form of romantic or glamorous context.
And even more iconic and glamorous was the work of Erté.
Erté was born Romain de Tirtoff in Saint Petersburg, but moved to Paris in 1910 and
immediately acquired his new name. By 1915, he had secured a substantial
contract with Harper's Bazaar magazine, and launched a remarkable career that eclipsed
George Barbier's and also included designing costumes and stage sets.
In addition to Harper's Bazaar, his illustrations would also appear in
a wide range of stylish magazines around the world including the pages of Vogue in America.
And with Erté's profile arguably as high as that of many Hollywood stars, In 1925 Louis B.
Mayer invited him to Hollywood to design sets and costumes for the silent movie industry.
Roger Broders, born in 1883,
forged his reputation with travel posters in a particularly geometric deco style.
Like bBarbier and Erté, Broders used elegant well dressed figured and
placed them in exotic and romantic settings, usually on the Riviera.
His contemporary Paul Colin was an equally influential pioneer of art deco.
His reputation for stylish illustration began when he shot to fame in 1925 with
his posters for the immensely popular Revue Nègre,
and later went on to apply his talent to advertising more mundane products.
But it's impossible to discuss art deco or French illustration without
considering the work of the style's greatest illustrator and designer A. M. Cassandre.
He was born Adolphe Mouron in 1901 in the Ukraine, to French parents.
He changed his professional name to A. M. Cassandre and moved to Paris,
just in time to win first prize for his poster work at the 1925 exposition.
His critical and financial success grew very quickly
and he soon set up his own advertising agency.
And whether he was creating posters or magazine covers his remarkably well considered
images proved that illustration was every bit as relevant and aesthetically satisfying as fine art.
Sometimes the work shows the influence of surrealism or cubism or even both but it
is always recognisably his, and rightly it has enduring iconic global status and influence.
Although many cartoonists weren't too comfortable with the geometric
constraints of art deco there was one at least who made a significant success of it.
Gilbert Viardot is sadly now no more than a name and a handful of internet images.
Nothing - not even a date of birth or death - is known but we can date some of his work
and stylistically its obvious he was one of a select few who could turn
deco styling into broadly appealing humour and do it with apparent ease.
Alain Saint-Ogan was another comic stylist who while not as extreme
as Viardot obviously embraced the modernity and precision of art deco.
In 1925 he created the popular comic strip Zig et Puce for a weekly newspaper supplement and he
followed these with a range of others, most notably Monsieur Poche in 1934.
Albert Dubout also enjoyed success over quite a few decades starting in
1905 with cartoons for Le Rire and other magazines.
His was a consciously simplistic and modern comic technique which was
strongly influenced by early American comics. And in the 30s and 40s he was much in demand
for movie and theatre posters. And unlikely as it seems he also
illustrated classics of literature by the likes of Cervantes and Voltaire.
Jean de Brunhoff's Babar the Elephant was one of the first and certainly one
of the most successful children's books to embrace a considerably
less elaborate style than seen previously with artists such as Lorioux and Dulac.
And the deliberately under-drawn and rather flat approach to colour has
become a virtual template for many others who have followed.
Edmond-François Calvo was an immensely popular children's illustrator in 1930s and 40s France,
but that popularity never really converted to international status.
In addition to creating colourful versions of children's classics he wrote and illustrated
books such as the highly rendered Les Aventures de Rosalie and long running
comic strip Moustache et Trottinette, showing equal skill with black and white.
But all this frivolity, fashion and fun came to an end in 1939 with the
sickening inevitability of the Second World War.
Once again France was very much at the sharp end of the conflict.
And once again illustration was co-opted for
propaganda purposes and for the next 5 years fun would be in short supply.
So we'll pick up next time with French illustration in the postwar years.