Coming soon

Summer 2023

Louis Favre

Artist of color

July 22 – October 29 2023

Louis Fravre was a French artist, painter and lithographer. During the Second World War he became acquainted with color lithography,  which he used to reach a wider audience. In 1946 he decided to give up painting completely and focused all his attention on lithography. He lived and worked in The Hague for a while, where he printed lithographs at Mouton & Co. Favre drew inspiration for his work from artists including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

Autumn 2023

DOT.

From Pointillism to Pop Art

In the exhibition DOT. you will discover the graphic and technical connections (especially lithography) between stylistic movements such as pointillism and pop-art.

What is Pointillism?

Pointillism is a well-known painting technique, which made an emergence in the late nineteenth century as a reaction to Impressionism. In this graphic technique, artists placed coloured dots or dashes on the canvas. They mainly used primary colours.

It was the French artist Georges Seurat who initially called pointillism also ‘chromoluminarism’. Seurat had been inspired by the new printing techniques that became more popular around 1880, including chromolithography. Like pointillism, chromolithography uses small punctures of ink to compose a colour image. Lithography was also used for poster art, which gained popularity in the French capital Paris from the late 19th century. It was this art form – particularly the work of French artist Jules Chéret – that caused this cross-pollination and influence on pointillist work.

What is Pop Art?

The punctuation of chromolithography not only influenced art movements such as pointillism, but also Pop Art. This was particularly the case with the Ben Day Process, which was developed by Benjamin Henry Day in 1879. The Ben Day Process (also known as Ben Day punctuation) consisted of small (coloured) dots used to create shadows in colour or shades of grey on paper. The technique was developed as a quick and inexpensive way to print in colour. This technique was inspired by the half-tone puncturing of lithography. In the 20th century, this technique was mainly used in the production of comics in colour, so that they could be produced quickly and cheaply.

The Ben Day technique was never seen as part of the visual arts until Pop Art artist Roy Lichtenstein inspired his work on it. He worked with comic book art, reworking and enlarging it. Later, this puncturing technique was then known as the ‘Lichtenstein Dots’.