artworks of the past. There’s undoubtedly something of this admira-tion in these works, something which ultimately elucidates his choice not to become an artist at a time when art was considered the most resolute manifestation of originality. Nonetheless, it’s also possible to see things differently by detecting in these few remaining works the foundations of what would later characterize Seydoux’s way of working, or his style. These early works, which our experienced gaze reduces to an apparent lack of inventiveness, clearly show us some-thing which can only belong to the person who created them: an affinity for printmaking techniques and the experimental freedom they offer. The search for stylistic effects specific to the technique that he’s using, which is evident in the woodcuts, explicitly reveals his predilection for manual experimentation. This predilection also leads us to understand that Seydoux found it advantageous to work while remaining incognito: as if, by apparently letting go of any claims to originality, he could more discretely and unreservedly devote himself to the pleasures of this hands-on adventure. His chosen clandestinity takes on its full meaning in the painter Paul Cox’s testimony about his collaboration many years later with Seydoux, who would become his printer-publisher: “I don’t think we fully appreciate the extent to which Eric devoted himself to each project, and to the artists. We don’t fully appreciate all that he accomplished, working patiently, ritually, in complete harmony with his machine.”1 In complete har-mony: becoming one with his machine the way he became one with Van Gogh’s world as a young man, or with the expressionist print-makers so that he might carry out each project that he worked on from the inside.

There’s an equally meaningful expression — “to lend a hand”—that Eric used when bringing up one of the defining moments of his life, one which would make him a pivotal figure of the Atelier Populaire at the Beaux-Arts (the Fine Arts School of Paris) in May 1968, out of which came most of the posters that gave a voice to the city walls. “I went to the Beaux-Arts to lend a hand”…2 The story is well known and goes far beyond what such an expression refers to, but the way in which Éric Seydoux tells it says a lot about the way he was already thinking about his role. Thanks to the painter Guy de Rougemont, who had brought screenprinting equipment over from the United States, he printed the posters that were being made at the Beaux-Arts, sharing his know-how with others without ever taking on the posi-tion of artistic director, as he could have. While assuming the role of printer-laborer who “pulled the squeegee across the screens himself