Manessier Exhibition 1959

Artist: Alfred Manessier French (1911-1993)

Title: Manessier Exhibition 1959

Plate: ML. 01

Description: Condition A+

Original Lithograph, backed on linen.
printed by Ateliers Mourlot in Paris 1959.
Special Provenance: This original exhibition poster was part of a complete set of 1950's and 60's Mourlot exhibition posters in covers purchased directly from the Mourlot family by Chris Yaneff (gallery founder) while travelling in France during the early 1970's.

Sheet Size: 19 1/4 in x 28 3/8 in 48.8 cm x 73 cm

Price: $255.00

Manessier stained glass window of église Saint-Bénigne, France

Alfred Manessier was a French artist whose abstract stained-glass windows, tapestries, and paintings renewed an interest in sacred art. Manessier’s use of luminous colors and dynamic shapes merged the influence of Paul Klee with a Christian reverence for light. “It's the passages between things which interest me,” he once said. “Something circulates amongst all forms of human experience ensuring a profound unity.”
Portrait of Alfred Manessier, 1949 © Jeanne Bucher Jaeger

Born on December 5, 1911 in Saint-Ouen, France, he began a degree in architecture in 1929, before following his aspirations to be an artist and studying with Roger Bissière at the Académie Ranson in Paris. In 1937, Manessier began working with Sonia and Robert Delaunay as part of a team of 50 artists collaborating on large murals in Paris’s transportation hubs. Throughout his career, Manessier also decorated chapels and created décor for theatrical productions. The artist died on August 1, 1993 in Orleans, France. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Musées de Lorraine in France, among others. (Artnet.com)

Fernand Mourlot (left) with Henri Matisse at Ateliers Mourlot, Paris

Ateliers Mourlot. In 1852, Francois Mourlot opened Ateliers Mourlot in Paris as a commercial print shop that primarily produced wallpaper. When Francois’s grandson Fernand Mourlot took over the shop in the 1920s, however, he converted it into a studio dedicated to the printing of illustrated books and lithographic posters. Though lithography had more or less gone out of style during the 19th century, Fernand brought it back with a single-mindedness that would change printmaking forever.

Over the next four decades, Fernand brought in the greatest Modernists of his day to produce color lithographs. French painters Maurice de Vlaminck and Maurice Utrillo were among the first to work with Mourlot, though it was not long before the atelier began to reach an even broader crowd including Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Henri Matisse, and Fernand Léger. Lithographs were conceived as announcements for exhibitions, ads for tourism or even illustrations for political events that were posted throughout the streets of Europe, and in windows of shops and cafés. (Artnet.com)