silkscreen and two generations of printers, artists and publishers are thus brought to the fore.

When Éric Seydoux and his associate Jack Pesant opened L’Atelier on the rue Pernety in the 14th arrondissement of Paris in 1974, a decade-long market boom for editioned prints was ending and a serious eco-nomic crisis was underway. At that time, about ten fine art print-making workshops in France, most of them in Paris, were producing screenprints–up to several thousand prints per year–with both artists and publishers.

The oldest and the most productive of them was the Arcay print shop, created in 1951 in Meudon. Working with the publishers René Bloc and Denise René, Cuban artist Wifredo Arcay was the instigator behind abstract painters’ interest in screenprinting in France in the early 1950’s. Arcay printed all the collective or individual portfolios signed by Mondrian, Arp, Herbin, Vasarely, Mortensen and Dewasne which appear in the early part of this history. In 1969, after having changed locations several times, he set up his workshop on the rue Boulard in Paris. In 1983, in his responses to Françoise Woimant’s questionnaire, he mentions that up until 1973, the year that marked the beginning of the economic recession that had a profound impact upon the art mar-ket, 60% of his activity was dedicated to commissions for Denise René’s publications.7 Up until the early 1980’s, the Arcay shop remained one of the primary workshops making and diffusing screenprints of works by artists experimenting with geometric art, Op Art, minimal art and conceptual art, namely Vasarely, Morellet and Buren.

In 1955, four years after Wifredo Arcay, Jean-Jacques de Broutelles, a painter by training, opened Paris-Arts, a silkscreen print shop in Paris. Among the prints that he produced were poster reproductions of masterworks, which were considerable technical feats requir-ing great delicacy of execution. Several silkscreen printers learned their trade with him, including Éric Seydoux, who’d arrived from the USA in 1966, Jack Pesant and Michel Kizlik. In 1974, Jean-Jacques de Broutelles and Michel Kizlik, who was initially trained as an archi-tect, created a new print shop, La Sérigraphie, where they worked most notably with Jean Dubuffet producing most of his screenprints. Jean-Jacques also trained his son, Frédéric, who began working with Éric Seydoux in the early 1980’s shortly before Jack Pesant’s departure.