Max Papart

Painter, printmaker, illustrator and collagist, Max Papart was one of the most accomplished master printmakers of post-war France. Moving with ease between figuration and abstraction, he built over more than five decades a body of work of rare harmony, in which geometric structures, luminous planes of colour and richly textured surfaces come together with a gentle douceur de vivre and a discreet, knowing irony. His carborundum prints and collages, admired from Paris to New York and Stockholm, remain among the most distinctive graphic works of their time.

Max Papart was born in Marseille on 19 December 1911. His father, Noël Papart, a former cavalry captain gravely wounded in the war of 1914 and himself an amateur painter, passed on his passion for painting early: the young Max was already filling his school exercise books with drawings at the age of four, and received his first box of watercolours for his seventh birthday. He attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Marseille only briefly, preferring to teach himself.

Settling in Paris in 1936, he earned his living as an artisan printer, a trade that would shape his entire career. He exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, made his first engravings and held his first solo exhibition in 1938. During the war he took part in the liberation of Marseille, and in 1946 he exhibited at the Galerie Sébire in the city of his birth. His love of the printed page drew him to fine illustrated books, and he created engravings for works by Jacques Prévert and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. For Prévert's Le jour des temps, a collection of seven unpublished poems, he produced a dozen prints in which the most direct poetry in the French language found expression in compositions that were barely figurative, if at all.

From the late 1950s his work moved away from a post-Cubist idiom towards a language that borrowed its pictorial reasoning from abstraction. Painter, lithographer and engraver, he worked constantly in mixed media and collage, and friendships with painters such as Jean-Michel Atlan and Antoni Clavé left a deep mark on his art. A decisive step came when he added to his etchings the carborundum technique devised by his friend Henri Goetz, which gave his prints their characteristic relief and depth of texture. He taught printmaking at the University of Paris VIII in Vincennes from 1969 to 1973, and continued throughout his life to make his own plates and oversee the printing of his editions.

His later career was marked by growing international recognition, with galleries and museums showing his work in New York, Stockholm, Geneva and the south of France. Towards the end of his life he designed a collection of jewellery based on his own paintings, a project still unfinished at his death. Max Papart died in Paris on 29 August 1994. He rests in the small cemetery of Les Longs Réages in Meudon, his grave facing that of his friend Alberto Magnelli, beneath a simple inscription: Artiste peintre graveur.