Jean-Michel FOLON

Jean-Michel Folon – Life, Screenprints, Posters and Original Prints by the Belgian Watercolourist

Poet of the hat-wearing everyman, of birds and luminous colour washes, Jean-Michel Folon (1 March 1934 – 20 October 2005) was a Belgian draughtsman, watercolourist, poster designer, printmaker and sculptor whose gentle, melancholy figures belong to the vocabulary of post-war contemporary art. First championed by New York magazines around 1960, he went on to work for publishers, television and humanitarian organisations, and in later life turned to monumental sculpture. Printmaking ran through his whole career: screenprints, etchings, aquatints and lithographs, alongside more than six hundred posters.

At its Paris galleries, Le Coin des Arts offers pencil-signed, numbered original screenprints by Folon – among them Souvenir d’Alice (1973) and Le Marathon (1974) – together with hand-signed offset prints and period posters, each chosen for the quality of the impression, its provenance and its condition.

A Brussels Childhood and an Unfinished Training

Born in Uccle, Brussels, on 1 March 1934, the eldest of three children, Folon grew up in Ixelles and spent his holidays at Knokke on the Belgian coast – the sea and wide horizons of his youth would recur throughout his work. An indifferent pupil, he began by studying architecture at the Institut Saint-Luc, then in 1954 enrolled in the industrial design section of La Cambre, the Brussels school of visual arts. A gifted sketcher, he nevertheless left without completing the course.

From Bougival to the Pages of The New Yorker

In 1955 Folon hitch-hiked to France and settled at Bougival, west of Paris. For some five years he drew every day, selling the occasional illustration to Belgian and French papers but earning little. Around 1960 he posted a batch of drawings to New York: Horizon, Esquire and The New Yorker published them, and Fortune, The Atlantic Monthly and Time – which ran several of his covers – soon followed. A visit to New York brought him into contact with Saul Steinberg, who urged him to study Paul Klee.

He married the French artist Colette Portal in 1961; she introduced him to colour. From 1965 he worked closely with Giorgio Soavi, art director of Olivetti, producing posters, illustrations, an animated film and a calendar for the company. In 1968 he painted a 36-square-metre mural for the French pavilion at the Milan Triennale and moved to an old farmhouse at Burcy in the Beauce, where watercolour became his favourite medium.

International Recognition in the 1970s

His first exhibition of watercolours was held at the Lefebre Gallery, New York, in 1969. Shows followed at Il Milione in Milan (1970) and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (1971); he represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale (1970) and at the São Paulo Bienal, where he won the grand prize in 1973. In Britain, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London gave him an exhibition in 1977, the year after the Deutsches Plakat Museum in Essen had shown his posters.

The decade was also one of book illustration – Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1973), Borges (1974), Apollinaire and Ray Bradbury (1978), the collected works of Jacques Prévert (1979) – and of public commissions such as a 165-square-metre mural for Montgomery metro station in Brussels (1974). From 1976 to 1983 his animated title sequences opened and closed each day’s broadcasting on the French channel Antenne 2.

Monaco, Bronze and the Folon Foundation

After settling on the Riviera – at Cap-d’Ail, then in Monaco from 1985 – Folon kept his studio at Burcy and began assembling found objects and building boats from salvaged timber. He designed stage sets, illustrated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1988) and created the emblem of the Bicentenary of the French Revolution (1989). Encouraged by César, he devoted the 1990s increasingly to sculpture in bronze and marble; in 1997 a bronze figure was placed on the beach at Knokke, where the tide submerges it.

Major exhibitions included the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1990), La Pedrera in Barcelona (1993), the Bunkamura in Tokyo (1995) and the Olympic Museum in Lausanne (1996). The Fondation Folon opened in 2000 in the former farm of the Château de La Hulpe, near Brussels, laid out by the artist himself. Appointed a UNICEF ambassador and awarded the Légion d’honneur in 2003, he died in Monaco on 20 October 2005, shortly after a final retrospective at the Palazzo Vecchio and Forte di Belvedere in Florence.

Folon’s Original Prints: Screenprints, Etchings and Lithographs

From the 1960s Folon experimented with coloured inks and with screen printing, notably alongside the Paris printer and publisher Jacques Marquet. The flat layers and soft graded tones of the screenprint suited his skies and silhouettes perfectly. His screenprints of the 1970s, such as Souvenir d’Alice and Le Marathon, were typically issued in print runs of a few hundred, numbered and pencil-signed; some impressions are marked hors commerce (H.C.).

He also worked in intaglio, producing etchings and aquatints for Maupassant’s L’Inutile Beauté and Borges’s The Circular Ruins, published as illustrated books, as well as the environmental series Notre Terre (1991), and made lithographs. His 1973 text La Mort d’un arbre appeared with a lithograph by Max Ernst as its preface.

More Than Six Hundred Posters

Folon designed over 600 posters, from Olivetti campaigns to festivals, exhibitions and towns such as Menton, and above all for humanitarian and environmental causes – Amnesty International, UNICEF, Greenpeace. Posters by Folon (Abrams, 1978), introduced by the designer Milton Glaser, reflects his international standing in the field. Posters and offset prints bearing his own signature are particularly sought after.

Collecting Folon: What to Look For

Folon’s printed work is plentiful and affordable, which makes it an excellent starting point for a new collector. To our knowledge there is no catalogue raisonné of his prints in common use on the market, so documentation rests on the information on the sheet itself, on illustrated books and on exhibition catalogues.

When examining a Folon screenprint or etching, check the technique, the print run and annotation (number, artist’s proof, H.C.), the pencil signature, the publisher or printer, the date, the provenance and the condition. His delicate colour gradations are sensitive to light, so look out for fading, foxing and creases – and choose UV-filtering glazing and an acid-free mount when framing.

Original print or reproduction? Folon’s images have been reproduced on a vast scale. An original print is numbered and hand-signed on good paper. A poster, printed in offset and carrying text, is in principle neither numbered nor signed, which is why the artist’s autograph signature adds so much to its value. Recent reproductions and postcards without signature or annotation are not part of the original print market.

Le Coin des Arts selects Folon’s screenprints, signed offsets and posters with close attention to their authenticity, provenance and condition, and advises collectors on framing and conservation. You may also enjoy the work of other Belgian artists represented by the gallery, including René Magritte, Pierre Alechinsky and Pol Bury, as well as prints by Jean Cocteau.

Sources and references

Fondation Folon, La Hulpe – Biography · Vatican Museums – Jean-Michel Folon chronology (2022) · Encyclopædia Universalis – Jean-Michel Folon · Wikipedia – Jean-Michel Folon · Jean-Michel Folon, Posters by Folon, introduction by Milton Glaser, New York, Abrams, 1978.