A Brief Historical Overview

Éric Seydoux

When I was in high school, my father was a diplomat stationed in New York. I took my baccalaureate exam in philosophy at the Lycée Français, then undertook art studies at the Art Students League where I became acquainted with painting, drawing, intaglio printing and lithography. I also worked with an artist by the name of Dan Stacy, a professor at MoMA, who had a studio in Greenwich Village and who taught me woodcut printing and painting. At the time, New York was a dynamic, joyful city, and not too expensive. When I came back to Paris, around 1966-1967, I worked with Claude Georgin, a friend of Dan Stacy’s who taught at the École des Métiers d’Art. I continued to do intaglio printing at the Calevert-Brun studio, in the same neigh-borhood as the Santé Prison, and I took up serigraphy, also called screenprinting, at the Atelier Paris-Arts located on the rue Tournefort, near the rue Mouffetard. The workshop was run by Jean-Jacques de Broutelles and Pierre Launay. We worked for many artists, includ-ing Rancillac, Corneille, Zeimert and Klasen. I also saw the making of many beautiful Dubuffet prints.

After New York, Paris seemed quite calm to me, but they arrived... the Events of May 1968. When I got to the École des Beaux-Arts (the Fine Arts School) one afternoon in early May, to see if I could help, I ran into Guy de Rougemont whom I’d met at the Atelier Paris-Arts. He’d brought screenprinting equipment with him that he’d purchased in the United States. The May posters were being printed in lithography on “bêtes à cornes” hand presses at a desperately slow rhythm. That same evening, we printed the first serigraphed poster in the history of the École des Beaux-Arts at a rate of 200/300 prints per hour. A few days later, the Atelier populaire was equipped with several print-ing stations, simultaneously producing different posters every night with the help of volunteers who showed up in the evenings to print, cut the sheets of paper or hang them to dry on clotheslines. The projects were debated beforehand during the General Assemblies, the sessions of which were open to all, and the debates were highly animated. The posters were made using the most rudimentary mate-rials. The screens were prepared directly with an adhesive paste or Drawing Gum, then clamped to ordinary tables using door hinges. We