Joel Elgin. Athraigh Print Studio: Printmaking in the Time of COVID-19. “Henri Matisse, Selected Pochoir Prints”

COVID – 19 has been the motivation for the run of depression era prints I’ve posted most recently. The themes of breadlines, unemployment and financial crisis seem to be repeating.

To cheer youall up, today’s video features the Fauve rich color of Henri Matisse and a peek into how he made the color happen in his prints.

The career of Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954) encompasses nearly all media and numerous areas of content. The possibilities of colorful cut shapes printed using the pochoir technique, first utilized to reproduce his Jazz Portfolio in 1943, enchanted Matisse, and caused him to leave painting and concentrate on his famous cut outs.

So what is pochoir?

Pochoir is a direct technique for hand coloring through a stencil usually in conjunction with intaglio or lithography. A stencil was cut from a thin metal and the stencil and stencil-brush were used to create the complete image or to add color selectively to a printed image. A separate stencil was created for each color. On occasion, up to forty stencils were used.

Pochoir printing was most popular in Paris, from the late 19th century through the 1930’s. At the peak of its popularity, there were dozens of studios in France using this technique, each employing up to 600 workers.

By the mid twentieth century, pochoir was replaced in popularity by more mechanized forms of color printing such as lithography and serigraphy. Pochoir’s expense and time intensive process help relegate the practice to the dusty shelves of most printmaker’s techniques.

Odalisque au Tambourin, 1929.

Color pochoir (hand-colored stencil print after a study for the painting of the same title).