Lot n° 245
Estimation :
200 - 250
EUR
André Verdet: Icarus, 1972 (signed) - Lot 245
André Verdet: Icarus, 1972 (signed)
Original color linocut on Arches vellum, printed by Imprimerie Arnéra, Vallauris
Numbered 78/175 in pencil in the lower left corner, titled “Icare” in pencil at the bottom center, signed and dated “A. Verdet 1972” in pencil in the lower right corner
Dimensions: Sheet 50 × 66 cm (19.7 × 26 in.); Image 40 × 49.5 cm (15.7 × 19.5 in.)
Condition: Very fine condition. Fresh, richly saturated print with crisp solid areas; untrimmed edges. A few scattered foxing spots along the lower margin; the subject is unaffected. Unframed.
Private collection, France
Against a dense black background, a figure composed of carmine, peach, and orange shapes opens its arms toward a glowing orange disc—Icarus at the moment of his fall, the large cutouts reading simultaneously as wings, limbs, and flames. Verdet reduces the myth to five or six flat planes with clean edges, whose silhouettes alone convey movement—a visual language he shared with the Vallauris circle where he worked. A poet before becoming a painter, a member of the Resistance who was deported to Buchenwald, Verdet settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence and became a friend and confidant of Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Léger, Chagall, and Prévert, whose interviews and essays he published; it was at the encouragement of Picasso and Matisse that he began painting and sculpting himself. In the 1960s and 1970s, he worked at the Imprimerie Arnéra in Vallauris—the studio that printed Picasso’s linocuts—where he created the series of abstract color linocuts to which this plate belongs, most often inspired, as here, by Greek mythology.
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