Artist: Roger Bissiere French (1888-1964)
Title: Bissiere Exhibition 1959
Plate: ML. 05
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: 21 in x 29 in 53.2 cm x 74.3 cm
Price: $225.00
Poster for Roger Bissiere’s 1959 exhibit Musee National D’Art Moderne, Paris.
Roger Bissière (French, 1888–1964)
Roger Bissière was a French painter associated with the École de Paris. Having befriended André Lhote and George Braque in Paris, Bissière was encouraged to develop a more humanized version of Cubism. As such, he enriched orthodox Cubism by applying the Fauve technique of heavy brushwork to its usual pictorial vocabulary. Simultaneously, Bissière was engaged by Pablo Picasso's research into advancing Cubism, which brought him to Neo-Classicism. Bissière’s unremitting investigations into the survival of Cubism ultimately pushed him to abstraction.
Bissiere in his studio
Bissière left Paris in 1939, and, in the 1940s, began a series of wall hangings inspired by medieval tapestry, using rectangular forms made from fabric, roughly stitched together. Bissière also created sculptures out of iron machinery and pieces of wood, exemplifying the bricolage aesthetic.
After undergoing treatment for glaucoma, he painted almost exclusively in egg tempera on cardboard, wood, and paper. In the late 1950s, he returned to oil painting, and later designed stained-glass windows for the Metz Cathedral. (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)