ANDRÉ FRANÇOIS
Michel Ragon
Michel Ragon: ANDRÉ FRANÇOIS. Paris: Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 1970. First edition. Text in French. Slim square quarto. Thick photo illustrated wrappers. [58] pp. 46 black and white photogravure images. Catalog designed by Robert Delpire and André François. Boldly signed by André François on front free endpaper. Wrappers spotted and binding brittle. One 4-page signature loose and laid in. Light wear overall. A good copy with artists’ signature.
8.25 x 8.25 softcover exhibition catalog with 58 pages and 46 black and white photogravure images. Catalog for an exhibition at the Pavillon de Marsan, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, from May 27 to September 8, 1970.
André François (1915 – 2005) was a graphic arts master whose protean career forms a bridge from the beginnings of modern graphic design to the present. André François was born November 9, 1915 in Timisoara, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that shortly afterwards became Romania. He briefly attended the Beaux-Arts school in Budapest before moving to Paris to study with the great A.M. Cassandre. On the latter’s recommendation, young André designed his first posters for the famed French department store Galeries Lafayette, and then was commissioned to produce graphic works for the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris.
At that same time François also began creating cartoons. Since the 1940’s, his exquisitely witty and elegantly executed illustrations have earned him an enduring international career, appearing in such well-known newspapers and magazines asAction, Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Elle, Le Fou Parle, Haute Société, Le Nouvel Observateur, Réalités, Record, La Tribune des Nations, Vogue, Lilliput, The Observer, Punch, Fortune, Holiday, Look and The New Yorker, for which François created a total of 57 covers.
François has been illustrating books since 1946, including the works of Diderot, Jacques Prevert, Alfred Jarry and Boris Vian, as well as his own. Robert Delpire, with whom François has enjoyed a long friendship, publishes many of his books, including the well-known Crocodile Tears. Their other collaborations include numerous posters for Citroën and Nouvel Observateur, to name but a few. In England, François became friends with Ronald Searle and Germano Facetti, art director of Penguin Books, for whom he designed countless book covers. He also designed playing cards for Natasha Kroll, art director of Simpson Piccadilly.
François designed sets and costumes for theater in England and France, including Le Velumagique for Roland Petit, Pas de Dieuxfor Gene Kelly’s ballet at the Paris Opera, The Merry Wives of Windsor for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Brouhaha by Georges Tabory for the Aldwych Theater in London. Since 1960, his time has been devoted mainly to painting, engraving, collage and sculpture.
François has had numerous one-man shows, including the Galerie Delpire, Museé des Art Decoratifs, and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; the Wilhelm-Busch Museum in Hanover, and the Galerie Bartsch-Chariau in Munich; the Mitsukoshi Museum in Tokyo and three other museums in Japan; as well as in Belgium, Austria, other cities around France, and in Chicago. François has been a major influence on many of the best-known illustrators and designers of the past five decades working in the United States, Europe and Japan, earning a unique affection among his peers. After a tragic fire burned his studio to the ground in December 2002, destroying most of his works, an outpouring of letters from colleagues around the world urged him on. Illustrator Guy Billout summed up the sentiments of the others when he wrote, “Your legacy is very much in the hearts and souls of many of us, and it is eternal.” — The Art Directors Club