André VERDET : Icare, 1972 (signed)

By VERDET André

André Verdet (1913–2004)

Icare (Icarus), 1972

Original linocut printed in colours on Arches wove paper, printed by Imprimerie Arnéra, Vallauris

Numbered 78/175 in pencil lower left, titled “Icare” in pencil lower centre, signed and dated “A. Verdet 1972” in pencil lower right

Dimensions: Sheet 50 × 66 cm (19.7 × 26 in.); Image 40 × 49.5 cm (15.7 × 19.5 in.)

Condition: Very fine. Fresh, saturated impression with clean edges to the colour areas and deckle edges preserved. A few scattered foxing spots in the lower margin; image area unaffected. Unframed.

Private collection, France

Against a dense black ground, a figure of crimson, peach and orange forms opens its arms towards a burning orange disc — Icarus at the instant of the fall, the great cut shapes reading simultaneously as wings, limbs and flame. Verdet reduces the myth to five or six flat, hard-edged planes whose silhouettes carry the whole movement, a language he shares with the Vallauris circle in which he worked. Poet before he was a painter, a member of the Resistance deported to Buchenwald, Verdet settled at Saint-Paul-de-Vence and became the friend and interlocutor of Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Léger, Chagall and Prévert, publishing conversations and essays with them; it was at the urging of Picasso and Matisse that he began to paint and sculpt in his own right. Through the 1960s and 1970s he worked at the Imprimerie Arnéra in Vallauris — the workshop that printed Picasso’s linocuts — where he produced the series of abstract colour linocuts to which this plate belongs, most of them drawn, as here, from Greek myth.

Estimate: €100–200 (market estimate based on realised auction prices for the artist’s colour prints, not a formal appraisal)

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Price : 150,00 € ( 170.00 USD )