(19 October 1927 in Saint-Gilles-lez-Bruxelles - Belgium)
As a student of typography and illustration at the Ecole nationale d'architecture et des arts décoratifs de la Cambre (Brussels), he discovered in 1945 the work of Henri Michaux de Dubuffet, the Surrealists, and became friends with the art critic Jacques Putman.
In 1949, he met Dotremont and joined the Cobra movement that same year with Asger Jorn and Karel Appel) and was one of the most productive members until the dissolution of the movement in 1951. Alechinsky took part in the first International Cobra Exhibition at the Stedjelijk Museum in Amsterdam and in 1954 he met the Chinese painter Wallace Ting who would play an important role in the development of his work.
In the 1950s, the artist spent time in the Far East, then in the United States; he became interested in Japanese calligraphy and Action Painting, which would have a lasting influence on his work.
The artist produced a very large number of lithographs and engravings; passionate about books, he illustrated poems and texts (Cioran, Butor, Yves Bonnefoy, André Frénaud, Tardieu, etc.) and published numerous works.
In 1983, Alechinsky became professor of painting at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris.
Painter, draughtsman, sculptor and designer, Daniel Jacques Allonsius (1923 - 1995), was a student of He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris from 1940 to 1943, then at the École des Arts Appliqués in Fort-de-France from 1950 to 1951.
(Petropavlovsk, USSR then Kazakhstan: 18 July 1889 - Paris: 12 July 1974)
Painter, set designer, book illustrator and editor of the leading Russian art magazine Mir Iskusstva, Yury (or Juri) Annenkov studied art at St Petersburg University with Marc Chagall. He went to Paris in 1911 to work in the studios of Maurice Denis and Félix Vallotton. His first illustrated works were published in the late 1910s, including "Twelve" by Alexander Blok (1918), which is considered one of his masterpieces. In 1922, he published "Portraits", which contains 80 images of key figures in Russian art of the time. Forced to leave the Soviet Union for good in 1924, he lived first in Germany and then settled in Paris, where he was naturalised under the name Georges Annenkoff. He then continued his work as an artist, costume designer and set designer for around a hundred plays and ballets and some sixty films.
Geneviève Asse, real name Geneviève Bodin, born in Vannes on January 24, 1923, joined the École nationale des arts décoratifs in 1940 and exhibited at the Salon des moins de trente ans and the Salon d'automne.
After the war, where she joined the FFI, she joined the Groupe de L'Echelle and met Samuel Beckett, André Lanskoy, Serge Poliakoff, Serge Charchoune, Nicolas de Staël, Bram and Geer van Velde.
Geneviève Asse now divides her work between Paris and L'île aux Moines, and is considered one of the major artists of abstraction in France. She recently exhibited her engraved work at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (2002) and her "Peintures" at the Centre Pompidou (2013).
"Behind the horizon, the dawn, shaded greys, transparent ultramarine blues, whites that disappear in the grain of the canvas, nothing outside of time. "(Working Notes, 1974)
Since the late nineteenth century, France manages several colonies in Central Africa and particularly from 1882, the French Congo which includes the current Gabon and Republic of Congo. Born August 19, 1864 in Montpellier, Jean Audema was employed as an auxiliary in Congo in 1894, then postmaster in 1898, station chief in 1902, and was finally promoted to a colonial administrator in 1904. During this period he made numerous photos in Gabon, Congo and Chad between 1894 and 1912. A large part of his photographs were used for postcards distributed in France and which were a great success and soon collected.
The National Museum of African Art's Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives has made these precious time-documents available online.
And by comparing postcards and our photographs we note on postcards that show scarification the use of the same poses and accessories.
Jean Audema is considered today as one of the pioneers of photography in central Africa, his original photographs are of all rarities, such a set never appeared on the trade.
Artist and technician of the modern book, famous among bibliophiles for his decorations of art bindings but also for his models of industrial bindings.
Born in Paris on 12 January 1923, died in Soulac-sur-Mer on 14 February 2001.
Photographer for the Service d'information de la France combattante, and aviator for the Free French Air Forces (FAFL) from 1942 to 1944 in Brazzaville, Robert Carmet is at the side of Germaine Krüll, Jean Costa and Ellebé (Robert Lefebre). After the end of the conflict, he became head of the photo section in the press and information service of the general government of French Equatorial Africa until 1955.
(born in Quiévy - Nord and died on 30 April 2018 in Dreux -Eure-et-Loire)
A pupil of Auguste Herbin (1882-1960), whose catalogue raisonné she carefully compiled, she became a member of the Abstraction-Creation movement in 1958, forever adopting a geometric language.
Internationally known and his works are present in all the major museums and a retrospective is dedicated to him in France at the Matisse Museum of Cateau-Cambrésis in 2005.
A Lyon-based artist, Jean Coulon participated in the work La Vie lyonnaise : In the past, today (1898) with 650 colour illustrations and illuminated some precious books at the request of bibliophiles.
A French press and photojournalism agency founded in 1955 by journalist Louis Dalmas, which ceased trading in 1965; it is considered to be the first "magazine" agency.
(Tokyo - Japan :27 November 1886 ; Zurich - Switzerland :29 January 1968)
Painter, draftsman and engraver, illustrator, ceramist, photographer, filmmaker and stylist.
The son of a medical general in the Japanese army during the time of Emperor Mutsuhito, he grew up learning French while studying Western painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. After graduating in 1910, he left for Paris in 1913, embarking on a long sea crossing to Marseilles before reaching the capital and, in particular, the artists' quarter in Montparnasse.
Close to Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Matisse or Fernand Léger, Foujita launched himself into painting with success during the Great War. In 1917, his first exhibition of one hundred and ten watercolours in a half-Japanese, half-gothic genre was a triumph. In 1924, he painted Youki, goddess of snow, for the Salon d'Automne. In 1930, he painted four paintings: Le Salon in Montparnasse, The Lion tamer, Three women and The Triumph of Life over Death.
After several years of a journey that took him notably to Latin America, he returned to Japan in 1933. Caught in the turmoil of war, he supported the militaristic action of his country, both through his paintings such as Senso-ga (or The Battle of the Khalka River) and his personal commitment. But, from 1945, he will know how to get closer to the United States in order to pursue his career in the West. We thus find him in New York and then in Paris in the early 1950s. Having obtained French nationality in 1955, converted to Christianity in 1959 before becoming a mystic by settling in the Chevreuse valley in Villiers-Le-Bâcle, Léonard Foujita still produced some remarkable works, such as the Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix chapel in Reims, which bears his name and where his remains now rest.
Pupil at the Académie Moderne, directed by Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant. In 1931, Blaise Cendrars and Fernand Léger advised his parents to send him to the Bauhaus. He arrived in Dessau in October 1931 and stayed for 2 semesters. He was the only Frenchman to study at the Bauhaus. He returned to Paris by bicycle in July 1932.
In October of the same year, he returned to Frankfurt, Germany, where he studied with the Constructivist painter Willi Baumeister.
When the Nazis came to power, he returned to Paris and worked in advertising design. In September 1936, Jacques Germain did his military service. War broke out a few years later, and the artist was taken prisoner and spent three years in captivity.
On his return to France, he devoted himself mainly to painting.
In 1949, he had his first solo exhibition in Paris.
Jacques Germain became one of the leading exponents of lyrical abstraction and took part in numerous international exhibitions.
(New York: 29 September 1909 - Nice: 12 August 1989)
"If I choose the non-figurative world, it's because I believe it is larger than the other. I believe that there is more to be discovered in the unknown than in the known. If the limit of the known is the unknown, then the opposite does not seem to be true."
Avant-garde artist, painter, illustrator, member of both the first independent art group, Jack of Diamond, and the Der Blaue Reiter movement. She moved to Paris in 1921 where she lived until her death.
Painter, sculptor, draftsman and engraver, Georges Gorvel illustrated many works. In 1905, he exhibited alongside Henri Matisse at the Galerie Élie Faure. Georges Gorvel made many engravings for stamps, but also for other artists such as Raoul Dufy and Charles Guérin.
Fernand Hertenberger (1882-1970)a painter and illustrator born in Rheims, a pupil of T.-H. Fleury and Déchenaud, exhibited at the Paris Salon and illustrated several works including There of Huysmans and Colonel Chabert from Balzac. An important player in the Art Deco movement, he shared with his brother and artist Claude a house-studio built by the architect Henri Glaizot in 1921 in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.
Graduated in commerce and architecture at the Beaux-Arts, was for almost 20 years the commercial director of Schwartz-Haumont, by day, and a painter by night.
His work was called Optical Surrealism by Victor Vasarely.
Lajos Kassák (Érsekújvár, now Nové Zámky, Slovakia, then part of Austria-Hungary: 21 March 1887 - Budapest: 22 July 1967)
Hungarian painter and writer.
Germaine Krull, born on 20 November 1897 in Wilda, a district of Poznań (then in the German Empire, now in Poland), died on 31 July 1985 in Wetzlar (Hessen), intèrege the Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie, Chemiegraphie, Lichtdruck und Gravüre of Munich in 1916. His association with the extreme left and the anarchist milieu led to his arrest and sentence to death by the counter-revolutionaries. She fled to Berlin and frequented the Dadaists and the expressionists. After meeting the filmmaker Joris Ivensn, she moved to the Netherlands and experimented with architectural photography and collaborated with the magazines i-10 and From Filmliga. Settled in Paris around 1925, Gallimard devoted a thin monograph to him, published in the collection Photographers New. She frequented the surrealists and collaborated on several books, including La Folle d'Itteville, published in August 1931. She then worked in Monaco for 5 years, then, after a stint in the Americas, she moved to Brazzaville, the capital of French Equatorial Africa, which joined the Free French in August 1940, where she headed the local propaganda service. She took part in the Provence landings and then in the liberation of the Struthof and Vaihingen concentration camps. As a war correspondent in Indochina from 1946, she travelled throughout South-East Asia, becoming the first director of the Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok. She returned to Germany in 1955. Her friend André Malraux, Minister of Culture, organizes her first major retrospective at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris.
Born into a family of wine merchants in Libourne (Gironde) on June 15, 1799, Pierre Théophile Lacaze learned painting by himself and saw his first painting accepted at the Salon of 1824. Rewarded in 1827 at the exhibition of the Société Philomathique de Bordeaux, from 1830 onwards he adopted a romantic style particularly influenced by the works of Delacroix.
In 1834, he took part in the Bordeaux Exhibition for the benefit of the poor, presenting seven highly acclaimed works (six watercolours and one drawing): "... I am very pleased to be able to present this exhibition. Mr. Lacaze's delicious compositions were a great draw for the audience. A warm and vigorous colour, an incorrect drawing sometimes but always spiritual, a great naivety in the poses, a wise composition, a perfect harmony of shadows and light classify Mr. Lacaze as one of the most distinguished. »
In 1838, Lacaze was awarded two silver medals at the exhibition of the Société Philomathique de Bordeaux for his pastels and for the painting "The Late Romantic". Richard and the Moorish doctor. At Salon , Jesus blessing the children, A large-sized work of art that received the Bronze Medal and was acquired by Queen Marie-Amélie during her visit to the Salon and then exhibited in her apartments. This painting entered the Louvre Museum and was deposited in the chapel of the military school of Saint-Cyr on 21 June 1890, but was unfortunately destroyed during the Second World War.
Awarded at the 1839 Salon, Richard and Dr. Moor is then acquired by the King for his personal collection.
On 17 August 1840, the Commission des monuments historiques de la Gironde appointed Lacaze as a corresponding member in Libourne, with the title of history painter. The following year, he once again took part in the exhibition of the Société Philomathique de Bordeaux and was awarded the gold medal for his history paintings.
Having become a renowned painter, he received the Duke of Orleans and the Duke and Duchess of Nemours in his studio in Libourne.
Pierre Théophile Lacaze died on September 5, 1846.
The Libourne museum, which owns several of his works, organized the first retrospective of Lacaze's work in 1963.
In twenty years, Thérèse Le Prat photographed the actors in more than two hundred and fifty classical or modern plays, including Louis Jouvet, Alain Cuny, Maria Casarès, Gérard Philipe, Jean-Louis Barrault and Jean Vilar. Using photographic realism to make the most of the combinations offered by changes of costume, make-up and lighting, she created a highly personal body of work whose chief subject of inspiration is the mystery of the human face.
Born in 1884 in Bogorodsk, Russia, Jean Lebedeff left his country at the age of 22, embarking on a long journey to France. Settled in Paris in 1909, he was received at the School of Fine Arts and frequented Russian artists living in Paris. He follows the teaching of the master engraver Paul Bornet who introduces him to xylography and chooses against the current engravers of his time, wood engraving over and over with a Japanese knife. This allows him to immediately affirm his personal style recognizable among all.
"One of the most important wood engravers of the twentieth century."
G. Dugnat and P. Sanchez, Dictionary of French and foreign engravers, illustrators and poster artists
In Montparnasse, he frequents many artists such as Picabia, Mayakovsky, Ravel, Pierre Mac Orlan, Éric Satie, Blaise Cendrars, Soutine, Modigliani and André Salmon, as well as Henri Matisse's studio in Issy-les-Moulineaux. Friends with Pierre Kropotkin, Lébéde is close to the Russian libertarian movement during the years 1920-1930.
Lebedeff illustrated hundreds of works, including the famous Eglogues (Paris, 1942) and The Centaur. He participated in the work of his friend Paul Coban and also teaches him engraving, signing some works of their two names.
Born in Rouen on 27 March 1906, died in Rouen on 30 November 1992. Collaborator at the weekly L'Illustration from 1927 to 1940, he joined Free France in 1941 and from 1944 onwards became head of the photographic department of the Colonial Office of the Provisional Government of the Republic. After the Liberation, he became director of the photographic services of the regional daily newspaper Paris-Normandie. In 1949, he and his wife opened Photo Ellebé, a professional studio on Place Beauvoisine.
Born in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, Donald Shaw MacLaughlan moved with his family to Boston and acquired his early knowledge of printers and printmaking at the Boston Public Library. He travelled to Europe, enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and pursued further studies with Jean Leon Gerome and Jean Paul Laurens. His first etchings date from 1899, He became acquainted with James NcNeill Whistler and other artists who created etchings and spent time studying the etchings of Rembrandt van Rijn and other old masters in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Both Rembrandt and Whistler would have major influences on his art. San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition showed seven of his prints and awarded him a gold medal. MacLaughlan also won medals in exhibitions in Buffalo, Leipzig and Rome. He was represented by the Albert Roullier Art Galleries in Chicago, which mounted several exhibitions of his work. London's Fine Art Society organized an exhibition of some two hundred of his works in 1926.
In 1931 he created a set of twelve etched views of Chicago, and the following year won a prize at the annual exhibition of the Society of Etchers in New York City. During his career he created some three hundred prints. In 1935 he was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design, New York City, and was elected a full member in 1938, the of his death at Marrakesh, Morocco.
Roberto Matta (1911 - 2002), whose real name was Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurre, was originally from Chile.
After unsuccessfully studying architecture, he worked with Le Corbusier before travelling around Europe, where he became friends with Rafael Alberti, Federico Garcia Lorca, Alvar Aalto, Henry Moore, Roland Penrose and René Magritte.
His meeting with André Breton turned him into a Surrealist, contributing to the magazine Minotaur and met Yves Tanguy, who was to have a major influence on his work.
(born in Deauville in 1924 and died in Paris on 28 December 1994)
Philippe Morisson painted figuratively from 1940 to 1945. Then after a short period of lyrical abstraction, he turned to geometry in 1947. He exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendants in the 1950s, and got closer to the group at the Galerie Denise René where he exhibited in 1961 with Geneviève Claisse and Hugo Demarco.
Brother of the poet Henri Pichette, James Pichette (1920-1996) exhibited for the first time at the salon des Super-independent in 1947, then Salon des réalités nouvelles in 1950. Close to Huguette Arthur Bertrand, he defended lyrical abstraction at the Salon of October 1952-53.
"A curious feast of the spirit is organized in each of James Pichette's works - but without seeming to touch it, he also suggests some of the thousand and one secrets of painting, courteously hidden under the towers and detours of a modern calligrapher monk. »
(Constantinople: 30 July 1916 - Avignon: 23 October 1985)
Greek-born French non-figurative painter of the New School of Paris. In 1942, he became friends with Raymond Queneau and collaborated with the NRF publishing house, for which he created book models and NRF cartonnages, sometimes known as cartonnages Prassinos or "reliés Bonet-Prassinos".
Cartoonist in Le Journal amusant, Le Boulevard, L'Indépendance parisienne, La Vie parisienne, Les Faits-Divers illustrés, Félix Regamey founded in September 1870, the Public Salute. Militant under the Paris Commune and had to go into exile in London for several years after the failure of the insurrection.
Friend of Rimbaud and Verlaine, he helped them financially when they arrived in England in 1872.
He then left for the United States and worked for Graphic and Harper's Weekly. In 1876, in Philadelphia, during the World's Fair, he met Émile Guimet again, whom he had met in London four years earlier. The two began a long journey that would take them to Japan, China, Southeast Asia and India before returning to Europe.
Régamey's almost ethnographic watercolours and drawings were presented at the Universal Exhibition of 1878 and published the same year in the Japanese walks of Guimet.
In 1881, he was appointed inspector of drawing for the schools of the City of Paris.
Henri de Sta, of his real name Henri de Saint-Alary, is a French draughtsman and illustrator born in Versailles in 1846, who died in 1920. He made many cartoons for the press, notably for The Black Cat (from 1892), Mame, Le Paris Bouffon (1885), The Laughter (1897) and The Charivari (1900). He also illustrated works for young people: The Moral and Wonderful Tales, The Week of Suzette and Le Petit Journal Illustré de la Jeunesse.
Pierre Tal Coat (born Pierre Jacob: 12 December 1905 - Clohars-Carnoët; 12 June 1985 - Saint-Pierre-de-Bailleul)
Born in 1905 in Clohars-Carnoët, ten kilometres from Quimperlé (Finistère), Pierre Jacob of his real name, lost his father in 1915 who died on the Argonne front. and obtained a scholarship as a ward of the Nation which enabled him to enter the higher primary school of Quimperlé. Moulder and ceramic painter at the Henriot earthenware factory in Quimper in 1924, he drew in pencil, charcoal or pastel, characters and landscapes of the Breton countryside.
Arriving in Paris in 1924, Tal Coat met the painter Émile Compard, met Auguste Fabre and Henri Bénézit, and exhibited in their gallery under the pseudonym Tal Coat ("Front de bois" in Breton). From 1930, he became friends with Francis Gruber, André Marchand, Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia, Ernest Hemingway, Alberto Giacometti, Balthus, Antonin Artaud, Tristan Tzara and Paul-Émile Victor. In 1932, he became a member of the group Forces nouvelles. In 1940, Tal Coat went to Aix-en-Provence with André Marchand, a city where many artists, including Charles-Albert Cingria and Blaise Cendrars, took refuge. In 1941, he took part in the exhibition of the Twenty young painters of French tradition organized by Jean Bazaine and exhibited at the Galerie de France in 1943. Returning to Paris in 1945, he took part in the first Salon de Mai, then returns the following year to Aix, where he meets André Masson, the philosopher Henri Maldiney and the poet André du Bouchet, who will remain his closest friends. His painting then becomes non-figurative.
With the artists of the new École de ParisThe Galerie de France (from 1943 to 1965), the Maeght Gallery (from 1954 to 1974), Benador Gallery (from 1970 to 1980), then the H-M Gallery, the Clivages Gallery and the Berthet-Aittouarès Gallery regularly exhibited his paintings. In 1956, sixteen of his paintings are presented at the Venice Biennale with those of Jacques Villon and Bernard Buffet. Alongside Joan Miró and Raoul Ubac, he collaborated in 1963 on the Maeght Foundation's work with a mosaic for the entrance wall and in 1968 he received the national grand prize in the arts. A retrospective exhibition was devoted to him at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1976.
(Malmedy or Cologne: 31 August 1910; 24 March 1985 Dieudonne - France)
Raised in Germany (Prussia), between Cologne and Frankfurt, then, from 1919, in Belgium Raoul Ubac studied at the Athénée royal de Malmedy until 1928. After the reading of the first Manifesto of SurrealismHe enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris and established contacts with the Surrealists, including Camille Bryen and Otto Freundlich, and met André Breton. His first photographs offound stone assemblies on the island of Hvar encouraged him to enrol at the Cologne School of Applied Arts. Raoul Ubac then experimented with new photographic techniques: the processes of burning, solarisation and petrifaction, which he exhibited in Paris in 1933.
Under the name of Raoul Michelet and in collaboration with Camille Bryen, he published two collections of poems and photographs, Poetic Actuation and The Adventure of Things .
He rubs shoulders with Hans Bellmer, Victor Brauner, Benjamin Péret and Raoul Hausmann, participates in theInternational Exhibition of Surrealism, à La LouvièreThis is the first surrealist exhibition in Belgium, organized by the Rupture group.
Starting in 1936, he worked on a series of photographs around the Battle of Penthesileawhich it will publish in part in the journal MinotaurThis is achieved by combining multiple processes: combining negatives, overprinting and solarisation, superimposing or shifting the negative and the positive, which gives an impression of petrifaction, blowing, smoking, burning or fogging of the plate. Ubac learns engraving in Stanley Hayter's studio and exhibits a few photographs in January 1938 at theInternational exhibition of surrealism.
In 1940, Raoul Ubac founded with René Magritte the magazine Collective Invention which will have only two issues and will feature André Breton, Achille Chavée, Fernand Dumont, Marcel Lefrancq, another surrealist photographer, Irène Hamoir, Marcel Lecomte, Marcel Mariën and Louis Scutenaire. At the beginning of the Second World War, Raoul and Agui Ubac, together with the Magritte, Scutenaire and Irène Hamoir, left Brussels, then Paris for Carcassonne (Aude) where Joë Bousquet lived. In 1941, Raoul Ubac returns to Brussels where he presents an exhibition of photographs with a catalogue prefaced by Paul Nougé. The gallery is closed by order of the occupants. Having made the acquaintance of the poet Jean Lescure who runs it, he actively collaborates in the magazine MessagesHe met Paul Éluard, Raymond Queneau and André Frénaud, who never ceased to accompany his work in a friendly manner. In 1942, he illustrated Exercise of purity of John Lescure.
The latter introduces him to Jean Bazaine and other non-figurative painters. From 1951 onwards, the Aimé Maeght gallery regularly exhibited his gouaches and canvases, prefaced by André Frénaud, Georges Limbour, Claude Esteban and Yves Bonnefoy. At the same time, Ubac never stopped engraving slates which became reliefs and of which, in 1955, he introduced fragments into his paintings. In 1958 he acquired a house in Dieudonne where he set up two workshops, for painting and sculpture.
In the 1960s, his paintings, on panels covered with amalgamated resins, achieve a synthesis and a blossoming, around the themes of Ploughs and Furrows, Bodies and Torsos, of the double work that he will continue until his death. In 1968 a retrospective of his work was presented in Brussels and at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. In 1973 Ubac received the national grand prize for the arts.
(Damville - Eure: 31 July 1875; Puteaux - Hauts-de-Seine: 9 June 1963)
Born Gaston Émile Duchamp, second son of Eugène and Lucie Duchamp, the future Jacques Villon is the elder brother of the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876-1918), the painter, sculptor and author Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and the painter Suzanne Duchamp (1889-1963).
In 1904-1905, he studied at the Académie Julian. In 1911, he organized a discussion group at home with his brothers Raymond and Marcel, which met regularly with artists and critics such as Francis Picabia, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger and others who would soon be known as the "Académie Julian". group of Puteaux.
In 1913, Villon, seven large dry points, cubist masterpieces, where the shapes break into obscured pyramidal planes. He exhibited at the Armory Show in New York and his fame grew so much that by the 1930s he was better known in the United States than in Europe.
The Louis Carré Gallery organized an exhibition of his work in Paris in 1944. In 1950, he received the Carnegie Prize and in 1954 he was named Commander of the Legion of Honour. The following year, he received the commission for the stained glass windows of the cathedral in Metz, France. In 1956, he was awarded the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale.
Born in 1878 in New York City, Herman Armour Webster went on to The Sheffield Scientific School at Yale University and upon graduation he sailed to Europe to attend the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. He reached Chicago in, 1901, and revealed to his family a desire to pursue the artist's life in Paris. After spending two years unsuccessfully pursuing a business career in America, Webster enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he joined the studio of Jean-Paul Laurens, the Paris academician and professor at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He met Donald Shaw MacLaughlan and became interested in etching after viewing a portfolio of prints made by the visionary French artist Charles Méryon. Webster also took lessons from French printmaker Eugène Béjot.
His reputation grew quickly with the issuance of additional prints, and in 1907 Webster was made an Associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers in London, as well as a member of both the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and the National Academy of Design. In 1915 Webster was awarded the Gold Medal at The Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco.
Herman Armour Webster died in Paris in 1970. In 1974 his personal papers, reference articles, correspondence, and estate prints were placed in the Archives of American Art, at the Smithsonian Institution, as part of a commemorative exhibition of his work held by the National Collection of Fine Arts, and are preserved as an archive.
Son of Victor Vasarely, Yvaral co-founded the visual art research group (GRAV) in 1960 with Horacio Garcia Rossi, François Morellet, Francisco Sobrino, Joel Stein and Julio Le Parc.