André François, Illustrator With Biting Satire, 89
DGH
André François, the French cartoonist and illustrator whose biting
satires of the human comedy influenced a generation of American
editorial illustrators to veer from traditional realism, died on
Monday, April 11, 2005, at his home in Grisy-les-Plâtres, France, at
the age of 89.
The cause was heart and kidney failure, said a friend, the children's
book illustrator Étienne Delessert.
>From the 1950's through the 80's, Mr. François's work appeared
frequently in leading French satiric magazines and in popular American
publications like The New Yorker, Holiday, Vogue and Sports
Illustrated, as well as in children's and adult illustrated books and
advertising posters.
In the 50's and 60's romantic realism and literalism were the reigning
conventions for illustration in the United States. But in Europe many
illustrators had earlier embraced abstract and impressionist art. Mr.
François's crude but sensual black-and-white brush drawings and
starkly colored paintings, employing surreal and ironic juxtapositions,
introduced serious whimsy to conservative commercial art. He also
injected a comedic eroticism that broke various taboos.
"Along with Saul Steinberg, he was the shining light of world
illustration in the 50's," said the designer and illustrator Milton
Glaser. "All of us beginning our practice at that time were deeply
inspired by him."
Born André Farkas in 1915 in Timisoara, Romania, he studied in
Budapest, Hungary. While there he became interested in mass-produced
graphic art and was influenced by the leading French Art Deco poster
artist of the day, A. M. Cassandre, whose work was ubiquitous. In 1934
he moved to Paris and was invited to study with Cassandre at the art
school that Cassandre had just opened. In 1939 he became a French
citizen and changed his name to François. The same year he married a
young Englishwoman, Margaret Edmunds. They were married for 66 years.
She survives him, along with a daughter, Catherine, and a son, Pierre,
an architect, AND . AF's surviving sister
Violette Marc of Norgent-sur-Marne, France.
Mr. François thought of himself as a painter as much as an
illustrator, but while in Paris he earned his reputation for humorous
work. His drawings were quickly rendered in black-and-whites, but he
also experimented with vibrant color and later became a devoted
collagist, combining drawings with found objects like old clock faces.
He was fascinated by vintage machinery. He regularly contributed to
satirical magazines, including Punch in Britain and Le Rire in France.
A Jewish, leftist artist, he hid from the Germans during World War II
on a farm in Savoie and afterward moved to Grisy-les-Plâtres, a small
village near Pontoise, because it was an inexpensive place to raise a
family. From his studio there flowed hundreds of cartoons for the
leftist newspapers Action and Les Lettres Françaises.
Mr. François's first book, "Double Bedside Book," was published in
1952. He later illustrated a book by the poet Jacques Prévert, and his
children's book "Crocodile Tears" was published in 1956 and translated
into 14 languages.
He soon entered the advertising business with poster campaigns for
Stemm Socks, Citroënautomobiles, Le Printemps department store,
Pirelli, Shell and the French weeklies Le Nouvel Observateur and
Telerama.
He routinely employed visual puns that often meant transforming
inanimate objects into human forms, and vice versa. In 1956 he designed
sets for a Roland Petit Ballet, and both sets and costumes for
Shakespeare's "Merry Wives of Windsor" at the Royal Shakespeare Theater
in 1956.
Walt Kelly, creator of the Pogo comic strip, wrote of Mr. François:
"He seems to capture an idea with a pounce. He throws it to the ground
in a frenzy, hacking at it with quick strokes to delineate its
likeness. He never waits to pretty it up, smoothing its fur or
arranging its limbs with the decency due unto death. His ideas are
never mummified in technique or stuffed, or tanned and stretimeched.
They are not fossils of style."
After publication of his anthologies of cartoons, "The Penguin André
François," originally published in 1952 in England, and "The Tattooed
Sailor and Other Cartoons From France" in 1953, his work became sought
after by art directors in the United States. In 1958 "The Half-Naked
Knight,"published by Knopf, attracted a growing legion of artist
acolytes with his ribald and slyly witty imagery. He was also
commissioned to make visual essays for Holiday and Sports Illustrated
and covers for The New Yorker.
In 2002 a devastating fire in Mr. François's studio destroyed nearly
all of his work. Despite failing health, his friends say, he was
determined to leave more tangible examples of his legacy than those
reproduced in books, and in his last years set about trying to produce
a body of new work.
NY Times
Andre Francois
DGH
I guess this was a duplicate, too. Sorry again.