Jean Michel Folon; NY Times obituary (Great)
Hyfler/Rosner
Steven Heller, NY Times
Jean-Michel Folon, the Belgian-born illustrator, poster
designer and sculptor, whose surreal watercolors of lost
Everymen and soaring birdmen helped to define the conceptual
approach to editorial illustration, died on Thursday in
Monaco. He was 71.
The cause was leukemia, said his art dealer and publisher,
Cristina Taverna of the Nuages Gallery in Milan.
Known by only his last name, Folon created art that was
popular in France and in the United States from the 1960's
to the present, on posters, in books and magazines and in
various advertising campaigns.
His most widely seen piece was the 1989 logo for the
bicentennial of the French revolution: three soaring birds.
Birds, butterfly people and soaring winged men were among
his recurring symbols, which he rendered in a precisionist
yet beguilingly ironic childlike manner.
Folon was fond of making grand statements in intimate,
compact spaces. Even his large posters, collected in the
1978 ''Posters by Folon,'' started as small drawings and
prints. His work was defined by contrasts. His pen line was
simple, bordering on naive, and his luminous watercolor
palette was intentionally optimistic, but his subject matter
was often downbeat, criticizing what he believed was
relentless urban conformity and the loneliness it caused.
Folon began as an architectural draftsman, and many of his
drawings feature wall after wall of impenetrable skyscraper
facades marked with obsessive rows of broken lines that
evoke prisons. Another frequent metaphor was directional
arrows explosively springing from humanlike figures and
other forms, shooting in many directions.
''Arrows,'' he once said, ''are the symbols of confusion of
an entire era. What would happen if, one night, someone were
to remove all the traffic signs from the face of the
earth?''
Folon was best known for his forlorn though oddly endearing
Everyman figure, always alone in an urban landscape, dressed
in blue or gray, with brimmed hat and raincoat that conceals
a large lumbering body.
''Modest, vulnerable, and sometimes confused, he is not a
comic figure,'' wrote William S. Lieberman, in the catalog
''Folon's Folons,'' for his 1990 solo exhibition of the same
name at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. ''He is
a city dweller, Folon suggests, perhaps an office clerk. He
carries either an attache case or a newspaper. No athlete,
he can, however, fly.''
Born in 1934 in Uccle, near Brussels, Folon drew obsessively
from the time he was 6. In 1960 he moved to Paris, where he
began to receive editorial assignments. His more significant
breaks came from American magazines like Horizon, Esquire,
The New Yorker and Time. Art directors found his symbolic
approach a relief from the overly realistic dominant style.
In 1969 he had his first solo exhibition at the Lefebre
Gallery in New York and shortly afterward was one of the
earliest illustrators for the Op-Ed page of The New York
Times, working in the surrealist conceptual style for which
it was noted in its early days.
Various commissions to illustrate books followed, notably
Kafka's ''Metamorphosis.'' He also made drawings for books
by Jacques Prevert and Ray Bradbury.
In 1975 Folon met his most important patron, the writer and
art director Giorgio Soavi of Olivetti, the Italian
typewriter manufacturer, with whom he collaborated on many
books published by the company, including ''Letters to
Giorgio,'' a collection of beautifully illustrated,
free-form, self-generated missives.
A long friendship with Milton Glaser resulted in another
intense collaboration. ''We used to sit together and have
long conversations, even though he did not speak English and
I do not speak French,'' Mr. Glaser recalled, ''so we
decided to celebrate our misunderstanding and do a book
together. The book is a back and forth continuous tableau
titled 'The Conversation.'''
Given his many magazine covers and advertising campaigns,
Folon's distinctive style should have been immune to
plagiarism. But in the 1980's a magazine and television ad
campaign so closely copied his Everyman theme that he took
legal action.
Folon also produced many campaign posters for Greenpeace and
Amnesty International, including an illustrated edition for
the 40th anniversary in 1988 of the United Nations
''Universal Declaration of Human Rights,'' done for Amnesty.
Folon's reason for accepting the project was simply this:
''Everyone talks about it, no one reads it.''
While he continued to illustrate books like ''Invisible
Man'' by Ralph Ellison and the fables of La Fontaine for
Nuages, since the early 90's Folon spent increasingly more
of his time in Italy, creating large sculptures of some of
his favorite themes, especially the Everyman. Many of these
were exhibited in Fort Belvedere in Florence.
His marriage to his first wife, the artist Colette Portal,
ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Paolina, whom
he married four years ago; his son from his first marriage,
Francois; a sister; Dany; and a brother Christian.
''Some have intimated that he is merely and illustrator,''
Ray Bradbury wrote in the Metropolitan Museum catalog.
''Merely! As if illustration were mere! But he is more than
that. Folon is interior, his ideas bounce off the insides of
his own head. Being so trapped, they are inspirations rather
than illustrations.''