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Legacy of French modernist printmaker Goetz celebrated in Carborundum exhibition
By Brian Fitzgerald
Welcome to America, Henri Goetz, once again.
It has been half a century since the French-American artist, who died
in 1989, last exhibited in the United States, when his abstract paintings
wowed audiences at the Circle and Square Gallery in New York City. Now
a significant collection of his work is back on this continent -- at Boston
University -- until April 6.
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| Henri Goetz | |
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Carborundum Printmaking: Henri Goetz and His Legacy is being exhibited
at the Boston University Art Gallery. It showcases Goetz and several of
his contemporary followers: Dikran Daderian, Hélène Laffly,
and Denise Zayan. These artists employ a technique that Goetz invented
-- the Carborundum printmaking process, in which silicone carbide is used
as an abrasive, creating a granulated and textured surface. Printmakers
worldwide have since used this technique.
“Henri Goetz was a member of the French Resistance, which fought
Nazi occupation during World War II,” says Stacey McCarroll, acting
director and curator of the BU Art Gallery. “He led an incredibly
interesting life, and he had a nontraditional visual painting style. But
he was more influential as a printmaking teacher. That is where he made
his most lasting impact.”
The exhibition will mark a homecoming of sorts: Goetz not only was born
in New York, but also had ties to the Boston area. He studied at Harvard
and MIT before moving at age 23, in 1932, to France, where he traveled
in intellectual circles and was a friend of painters Pablo Picasso and
Jean Miro, as well as of the French surrealist poets Paul Eluard and Andre
Breton. Rooted in the surrealist tradition, he made his debut in Paris
at the Salon des Surindépendants in 1935. Goetz’s first engravings
date from the outbreak of the war, and he soon became a master.
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| Untitled, 1969 |
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As the fighting began to escalate in Europe, Goetz and his wife, the
painter Christine Boumeester, worked with the Resistance making false
passports for those being hunted down by the Gestapo in occupied France.
They were forced to leave Paris for the southwestern part of the country,
where Goetz met and mingled with members of the Belgian surrealist group
that included René Magritte and Raoul Ubac.
Shortly after the Liberation, the Goetzes returned triumphantly to Paris.
During a period now referred to as the “heroic years,” their
studio was a gathering place for artists and friends. However, it was
in his role as a printmaking teacher beginning in 1950 that Goetz most
influenced scores of students over the years. In 1949, Goetz and his wife
had become naturalized French citizens, and he cofounded the Graphics
Group the same year. He began teaching at the Ransom Academy and then
at the Grande-Chaumière, where he opened two ateliers (workshops)
in 1955. From 1953 to 1966, Goetz was also director of an atelier in the
American Conservatory at Fontainebleu. He founded his own academy, the
Atelier Goetz, in 1965.
The exhibition at the BU Art Gallery, which includes 30 of Goetz’s
works, was organized by the Boston University Paris Program in conjunction
with independent French curator Nelly Chadirat to celebrate the renaming
of the Paris street where the program is located to Rue Jean Pierre-Bloch.
A personal friend of Goetz’s, Chadirat was also a French Resistance
figure, as was Pierre-Bloch, who escaped from a POW camp in 1940, the
year France fell to the Nazis. Pierre-Bloch and his wife, Gaby, helped
arrange some of the first Allied parachute drops of agents, arms, and
equipment into France, and he later became a spokesman for human rights
causes. Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe will attend the renaming ceremony
on Sunday, March 2.
The Goetz exhibition comes to the University’s Charles River Campus after being shown at the BU Paris Program’s new headquarters, which opened in 2001 on the Left Bank, near the Eiffel Tower. “Two years ago, we wanted to do something on the occasion of the inauguration of our new facility,” says Gerald Honigsblum, director of the program. “Our walls were empty, so we contacted Nelly Chadirat, an experienced gallerist, who put together our first exhibition. As soon as we took it down, we said, ‘We’ll have to do this again.’ We’ve had a total of six exhibitions -- Goetz’s was our fifth. Now the building, in addition to serving as a college campus, has become a bona fide art gallery.”
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| Untitled, 49” x 64” | |
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Honigsblum credits McCarroll, along with Chadirat, Paris Program instructor
Catherine Blais, and CAS Art History Professor Jonathan Ribner, with “doing
yeoman work on this great transatlantic adventure -- Goetz’s posthumous
return to his homeland.”
McCarroll points out that the cultural diversity demonstrated among the
other artists in the exhibition, Daderian, Laffly, and Zayan -- from Beirut,
Paris, and Cairo, respectively, and students in Goetz’s inner circle
-- “represents the international appeal of Goetz’s teaching
methods. He is less known in the United States, and this is an opportunity
to expose more people to him and the Carborundum printmaking process.”
The BU Art Gallery is on the first floor of the College of Fine Arts, 855 Commonwealth Ave. Gallery hours are Tuesdays through Fridays, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. The exhibition is free and open to the public. For more information, call 617-353-0295.
21 February 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations