André Jacquemin, an outstanding printmaker from the Vosges
André Jacquemin was an illustrious French painter, printmaker and watercolourist who was born in Épinal, in the Vosges region of France 3 September 1904.
At the age of six, he started at Saint Goëry school where he soon became known for his drawing skills. Cigar boxes decorated by Jacquemin would change hands in the school yard for a few liquorice bootlaces. At 17 he left for Paris to attend the École des Beaux-Arts, where he learned the art of printmaking with Charles Albert Waltner. In 1928 with eleven other printmakers he founded an association named La jeune gravure contemporaine. He quickly began to collect awards: the Blumenthal Prize in 1930 and in 1936 the Grand Prix National des Arts, becoming the first printmaker to be awarded this prize. In 1937, he represented French printmaking at the Venice Biennale.
At the beginning of 1932, he became a member of the Peintres graveurs français society, sponsored by Laboureur and Dunoyer de Segonzac, whom he saw as his spiritual father. In 1934 he married Andrée PONCELET, sister of painter Maurice-Georges Poncelet. She was also a painter, working under the pseudonym Andrée JACLET.
In 1953 he became curator of the Musée Départemental des Vosges, where among other things he would organise the Epinal prints section and the contemporary art collection, which he enhanced with three Picassos. In 1974 he left the museum in Epinal to return to the capital. His studio on the ninth floor of a building in the Palais-Royal quarter had a splendid view across the rooftops of Paris towards the Sacré-Cœur. He was at the peak of his career at this time. As well as producing art, he also gave numerous talks on printmaking and the works of his beloved Rembrandt. The exhibitions, which had never stopped, soon gave way to important retrospectives organised by prestigious institutions: the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1981, La Monnaie de Paris in 1983, the Musée du Luxembourg in 1989, Vosges Departmental Council in 1990.
In March 1981, André Jacquemin was elected to the printmaking section of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, taking over the seat of painter and lithographer Pierre-Eugène Clairin. He presided the Académie in 1989. He died in Paris on 16 January 1992 at the age of 88.
Commemorative plaque in Épinal.
An outstanding printmaker
In printmaking he represented the great intaglio from life tradition, constantly renewed artistic expression in black and white. Space or landscape… Jacquemin’s great talent was to be able to evoke these two aspects of nature through the purity of the composition and structures. There is a profound creative, but often barely figurative human presence, while the place is real. Expanses stretching as far as the eye can see, field of snow, fields of wheat, bodies of water… all themes close to his heart. But if there is one area where he excelled, it was in depicting snowy landscapes: they have a supernatural dimension to them. He alone has been capable of transforming the white of the paper into snow and materialising its density, of conveying the silence that reigns in these spaces. His talent as an alchemist never fails to surprise and enthral. It is a revelation in white and black. The same could almost be said of his variations in atmosphere.
© André Jacquemin – Print on Velin d’ARCHES® paper – 1989
He drew and engraved from nature. He would always remain faithful to this method and it shows in his work, as he projected his purest feelings and impressions onto the plate with the synthetism and abstraction required by engraving; he imbued his works with an astonishing sensitivity and truth. He avoided deferred creation with an intermediate drawing stage, finding it desiccating for this form of expression. From the outset his work had this singular appeal, and the masterpieces he produced over the course of his career can only be dated because he engraved dates in the copper.
His landscapes, mostly engraved with a burin on a copper plate, hang in numerous museums in France and abroad.
© André Jacquemin – Epinal, Orchards in August – Aqua fortis on Velin d’ARCHES® paper – 1964
© André Jacquemin – Village on the Vosges Plain – Print on Velin d’ARCHES® paper – 1970
An artist with multiple skills
André Jacquemin also produced a large number of drawings, pastels, watercolours and paintings. He produced portraits, animal pictures, prints of nudes, genre and type scenes and still lifes as well as illustrations.
1938 marked the beginning of his career as an illustrator. He dreamed of illustrating La Colline inspirée, the Vosges-set masterpiece by Maurice Barrès, and a set of illustrations was commissioned from him by the Société des Bibliophiles franco-suisses. The dramatic story of the Baillard brothers set in the Sion-Vaudémont area he loved and knew so well would be his first “great battle”: eighty-five original plates printed from aqua fortis etchings done in two years. It would immediately establish him as one of the masters of modern illustration.
© André Jacquemin – Beech Forest near Plombières – Drypoint on Velin d’ARCHES® paper – 1983
His work as an illustrator included thirty-one books by established authors: Barrès, Montherlant, Colette, Giono, Brillat-Savarin, Bernanos, Malraux, Pourrat, Bosco, Mac Orlan, among others. Jacquemin always adapted his technique to the writer’s style. He did his engravings in the places where the action took place, attempting to find the real, to establish a communion, a complicity with the land, the characters and the author.
He left a powerful, authentic and substantial body of work: landscapes, animals, faces, nudes, elegantly etched in copper or drawn on paper, all suffused, as he was, with a profound love of nature and a dazzling joie de vivre.
André Jacquemin, Vosgian painter and printmaker (andre-jacquemin.com)
