POCHOIR - AN FINE AND NEARLY FORGOTTEN PRINTMAKING PROCESS
Reproduction of works of art in all mediums has been a tricky thing to get right. Printmaking — silkscreens, etchings, stone lithography, and later photo-lithography — represented an increasingly efficient means of recreating popular art for commercial consumption. But printmaking in and of itself is an art form.
An early method of reproducing art was called Pochoir — translated as, literally, “stencil”, from the French. But the process and the technique of pochoir was very labour-intensive, required many people, and tens to a hundreds or more of little cut out stencils from which to create an accurate but scaled down reproduction. Pochoirs are works of art in themselves. It was a favoured technique of artists including Léger, Picasso, Braque, Chagall, Delaunay, Mondrian and more, for one important reason: the detail and depth of colour most closely matched the original. And the key difference between pochoir and a mechanical reproduction is that the artist himself oversaw the resulting image.
To create a pochoir, and atelier of (almost exclusively) women, called coloristes, used mostly gouache but also pastel and gold or silver foil, and apply using different sized brushes (that look very much like a shaving brush) and sponges with stencils called patrons (stencil-plates or templates), usually made from zinc.
Paris was the centre of pochoir ateliers in the early 20th century and much of the intensive pochoir work was utilized for reproduction of fashion illustrations in the high end magazines of the day. The effect of a pochoir is brighter, stronger, and more visually accurate than most other means of reproduction.
Many important artists of the 20th century were reproduced in art books, portfolios, and magazines. One of the most reliable methods of reproduction, which gave the work an intensity and feel of the original painting, was pochoir.
Fernand Léger, 1881-1955, French painter of often brightly coloured abstracts and figures, utilised primary and bold colours, usually gouache. Léger was at the forefront of Cubism and Modernism as popular art movements of the early 20th Century. He is also considered to be an early influence on the development of Pop Art. Several of his abstract pieces were reproduced in pochoir in the E. Tériade Éditions Cahiers d'Art of 1928. Not only would he have approved and overseen most of these pochoirs, but each one was finished by the hand of a careful woman.
Pochoir after Fernand Léger, “La Feuille Jaune” From the E. Tériade Éditions Cahiers d'Art, (14 Rue Du Dragon Paris) 1928, produced in an edition of 800. This pochoir is from No. 567 of 800.
