Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination by Ghislaine Kenyon

Author:Ghislaine Kenyon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441168832
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-03-12T05:00:00+00:00

Inside, Blake was enthralled by a selection of black-and-white lithographs, which originally appeared in the nineteenth-century French weekly illustrated newspaper Le Charivari, published in Paris between 1832 and 1937. In the book, these images, containing both political satire and social comment, are reproduced at actual size, and are full of the wit and, even more importantly, the sense of everyday drama that were later to characterize Blake’s own work so strongly. It was also the most expensive book he had ever bought, costing two guineas, and he remembers his mother asking him (in a concerned but sympathetic way, Blake emphasizes) whether he really wanted to spend all that money on a book. This memory also nicely illustrates the point about what home does and doesn’t contribute to a young person’s development – Blake, the best-known book illustrator of his times, remembers very few, if any books at home. His mother’s incomprehension at the sum of money spent and his own certainty about the book’s value to him both suggest how confident Blake already was to follow the path that seemed to be opening up before him.

In 1952, a couple of years after leaving school, Blake was able to visit France for the first time. He went to Bordeaux with a school friend to visit another who was at the university there. Here too the memories are of book buying: a volume of eighteenth-century French drawings which he found in a bookshop in the Place Gambetta, and another of French posters of the Belle Époque by artists such as Steinlen and the innovative poster-designer Cappiello. All three of these books of French art are still in Blake’s possession, and he says that he realizes now how much the works he found in them were to mean to him later. Taken together, the art in these three volumes points towards some key aspects of Blake’s work, the ones which make his production so unmistakable and so powerful. In addition to the humour and drama of Daumier’s lithography, there is the fluid and elegant drawing of the French eighteenth-century masters such as Watteau and Fragonard, and lastly, in the book of posters, comes a strong sense of both design and colour: how to use a page for greatest effect and, maybe most important of all, in works such as a poster by the illustrator Cappiello advertising an aperitif, the fact that these kind of images are really both about art and about ordinary life at the same time.

One other French artist should be mentioned in the context of French heroes, but, unlike the others, this was a man who Blake met and got to know a little: the artist and illustrator André François (1915–2005). François had been born into a Hungarian family but moved to Paris at the age of 19 where he stayed for the rest of his life. He studied at the Atelier Cassandre, where he learned a great deal about design from its eponymous founder. Cassandre developed among other things

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