Clot and the Nabis
Clot acted as the house printer for publisher Ambroise Vollard, developing a close working relationship with the Nabis artists Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Ker-Xavier Roussel and Edouard Vuillard. These artists collaborated with Clot on Vollard’s behalf for years on several prestigious print series — their four albums are considered to be among the era’s finest.
The intensive creative process can be traced through the countless trial proofs with written instructions and corrections in chalk, which passed back and forth between Clot and the artists.
More than a printer?
Some of the artists Vollard recruited for his print albums were less involved than others in the creative process. In many cases, they were the somewhat better established modern artists like Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin and Odilon Redon, who were less willing to throw themselves into the complex craft of colour lithography. They simply provided the master printer with a design drawing, which he then turned into a print on his own.
The critic André Mellerio disapproved of this way of working. In his opinion, it meant the printer left too strong a stamp on the artwork.
Ker-Xavier Roussel, Women in the Countryside (Femmes dans la campagne), 1900
Odilon Redon, Béatrice, 1897
Eugène Carrière, Sleep (Jean-René Carrière), 1897
Further reading
- André Mellerio, La Lithographie originale en couleurs, Paris 1898
- Pat Gilmour, ‘Cher Monsieur Clot… Auguste Clot and his Role as a Colour Lithographer’, Lasting Impressions. Lithography as Art, Philadelphia 1988, pp. 129-182
- Marije Vellekoop, ‘Een kijkje in de werkplaats. De techniek van de prentkunst’, in Prentkunst in Parijs. De rage van het fin de siècle, Amsterdam 2013, pp. 44-73