(1930)
Claude Garache (Paris, 20 January 1929 – Paris, 29 August 2023) was a French painter, etcher and lithographer who devoted more than sixty years to a single theme: the female nude, observed from the living model and rendered in a narrow register of reds – vermilion, crimson, pink – against white. Represented by the Galerie Maeght from 1965 and closely bound up with the poets Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet and Jacques Dupin, he treated etching and aquatint as seriously as painting. His original prints are held by the Centre Pompidou, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Le Coin des Arts follows Claude Garache's work and offers his original etchings and lithographs whenever good impressions come our way, chosen for printing quality, edition, provenance and condition. To be told when one arrives, simply 'follow the artist' on this page.
Garache grew up in Paris, studied the piano alongside his schooling and made his first independent work in 1948, when he was taught drawing and sculpture by Robert Coutin. He also attended the studios of Fernand Léger and André Lhote and the mural workshop of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts. From 1950 he spent much of the decade travelling and working abroad – the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Turkey and the Middle East. In 1955, on his first visit to America, he served as artistic adviser to Vincente Minnelli on the Van Gogh film Lust for Life and worked at MGM in California. In 1957 he married the sculptor Hélène de Lapasse; a travel grant in 1958 took him across Spain and Portugal.
Back in Paris in 1959, Garache began working from the model in his studio, and the body became his sole subject. He visited Alberto Giacometti, whose long, patient scrutiny of the sitter confirmed his own approach. A circle of poets formed around him – Jean Follain and André Frénaud among them. In September 1964 a letter from Jacques Dupin opened the door of the Galerie Maeght; he took part in a group show there in 1965 (recorded in Derrière le miroir no. 150), and the critic Dora Vallier described his painting as 'post-abstract'. In 1972 Raoul Ubac wrote the catalogue text for his exhibition at the Galerie Vokaer in Brussels, and in 1974 the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence mounted a retrospective of the years 1965 to 1974.
His first solo exhibition at the Galerie Maeght opened in 1975, followed by others in 1977 and 1980. That same year he contributed six etchings to Yves Bonnefoy's L'Ordalie. In 1976 he made a print for Maeght's Placards series to accompany a poem Philippe Jaccottet had dedicated to him. 1980 saw the publication of Arguine, an album of ten etchings worked on over several years and issued by Pierre Bérès and Hermann, followed at Maeght by the lithograph suites Suite rouge sur Ingres rose foncé and, in 1981, Suite vermillon sur Ingres gris clair. In 1983 the Musée Grobet-Labadié in Marseille showed his paintings; in 1988 Jean Starobinski published a monograph on him with Flammarion; and in 1991 the Musée de l'Hospice Saint-Roch at Issoudun showed his paintings, while Edmond Jabès's Désir d'un commencement, Angoisse d'une seule fin appeared with his prints at Fata Morgana.
In the English-speaking world, Garache has long been approached through poetry as much as through exhibitions. The poet and critic Michael Edwards – born in England, a scholar of French and English poetry – wrote Claude Garache: Painting and Repetition (1994) – a title that names the heart of the matter: the same pose, the same colour, taken up again and again. Bonnefoy's essays on art, widely translated, carried the name further. For British collectors, Garache's prints offer a direct route into this work: intaglio from some of the leading Parisian workshops, often in small editions.
From 1999 Garache worked with the intaglio printer René Tazé. Books continued to appear: Starobinski's La Caresse et le fouet (1999, four etchings, Editart-D. Blanco, Geneva), Jaccottet's Année (2006, four etchings), Florian Rodari's À voix nues (2010), Pierre-Alain Tâche's Le Corps unique (2013) and Cor Magis (2019, seven lithographs). In 2012 the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, having acquired the large canvas Yvie et Sauve (1977-1999), honoured him with the display Dans la couleur de Garache. In 2022 he gave a group of artist's books and prints to the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The Fondation Zervos at Vézelay showed his books and prints from 15 June to 17 September 2023 – the last exhibition of his lifetime. He died on 29 August 2023, a few months after his wife Hélène. In the summer of 2024 the Château de Ratilly in Burgundy, where he had exhibited in 1976, paid tribute to him with Stabilité et mouvement, organised with the Fonds Hélène et Claude Garache and curated by the writer Amaury Nauroy.
Garache began etching in 1965 at the Maeght workshop run by Robert Dutrou. In 1972 he moved to Maurice Felt, who had just opened his studio in rue Saint-Sauveur in the Marais, and in 1999 to René Tazé. His intaglio prints frequently combine etching with aquatint, the tonal process that lets him lay down red in broad, even fields and model the body by density of colour alone; MoMA holds the aquatints Ixe II (1977) and Dode (1978). His colour lithographs for Derrière le miroir (no. 213, March 1975; no. 222, February 1977) were printed by Adrien Maeght's Imprimerie Arte. As far as we are aware, no catalogue raisonné of his prints has been published; the key reference remains the retrospective of his printed work from 1965 to 1985 at the Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University. A Garache print is therefore identified by title, date, technique, publisher and edition, and a Derrière le miroir plate by its issue number ('DLM 222'). See our guide to intaglio printmaking.
Edition. The aquatints of the late 1970s were printed in small editions – MoMA's impression of Dode is numbered 23/50 – and artist's proofs marked 'H.C.' are common. See edition and printing.
Signature. Separately published prints are normally signed in pencil. Lithographs bound into Derrière le miroir are unsigned; only the numbered deluxe impressions carry a hand signature.
Book plates. Many etchings come from fine press books such as L'Ordalie or Arguine; a loose plate should be sold as such.
Posters. Maeght exhibition posters reproduce his red nudes but are not original prints.
Condition. Red on white shows every flaw: toning, light-staining, old mount marks. Insist on full margins and UV-filtering glazing when framing. Our guarantees are set out on the authenticity page.
Alongside Garache, the gallery selects prints by artists close to his path or to the Maeght stable: Raoul Ubac, Alberto Giacometti, Georges Braque, Jean Bazaine and Henri Matisse. Browse our etchings and lithographs, illustrated books and contemporary art.
Jean Starobinski, Claude Garache, Flammarion, 1988 · Michael Edwards, Claude Garache: Painting and Repetition, 1994 · Entretiens avec Claude Garache, Hazan, 2010 · Fondation Zervos – tribute · MoMA – Ixe II · Toledo Museum of Art – Derrière le miroir 222 · Centre Pompidou – Claude Garache · Les Douves, Onzain – Claude Garache
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