Henri GOETZ

Henri Goetz – Biography, Carborundum Prints and Original Etchings

Henri Goetz (born in New York on 29 September 1909, died in Nice on 12 August 1989) was an American-born painter, pastellist and printmaker who settled in Paris in 1930 and took French nationality in 1949. Moving from portraiture to Surrealism and then to a dense, freely composed lyrical abstraction, he is best remembered as the inventor of carborundum printmaking – the ‘Goetz process’ – a technique taken up by Joan Miró, Antoni Clavé and Antoni Tàpies. He was also one of the most generous teachers in post-war Montparnasse.

Le Coin des Arts currently offers a unique oil on canvas, Composition en bleu, together with a group of signed original prints: several untitled engravings (Sans titre), a Composition in etching and aquatint, and Réminiscences, a large engraving from the 1970s numbered from an edition of 40. Each sheet has been chosen for the depth of its inking, the relief of the carborundum and the condition of the paper.

An Engineer Turned Painter: Boston to Paris

The son of an electricity-plant owner, Goetz enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1927 to read electrical engineering, then attended art-history lectures at Harvard, where he resolved to become an artist. After the Grand Central School of Art in New York he sailed for Paris in 1930, working at the Académie Julian and the Grande Chaumière and, for a time, in the studio of Amédée Ozenfant. His first pictures were portraits. In 1935 he married the Dutch painter Christine Boumeester (1904-1971), whom he had met at the Grande Chaumière, and through Hans Hartung he came to know Fernand Léger and Wassily Kandinsky. By about 1936 his painting had become non-figurative.

Surrealism and the War Years

Goetz and Boumeester held their first exhibition together at the Galerie Bonaparte (Van Leer) in Paris in January 1937. He met André Breton in 1938 and drew close to the Surrealists. Under the Occupation he was involved, alongside Christian Dotremont and Raoul Ubac, in La Main à plume, the first Surrealist publication to appear in occupied France, and with Christine he illustrated Georges Hugnet’s La Femme facile. As an American citizen he left Paris for the south, returning only at the Liberation in 1944. His printmaking began in 1940: Christine, who had trained as an etcher, taught him the craft. A large untitled painting of 1941-1945, given by the artist in 1981, belongs to the Musée national d’art moderne.

Teacher of Montparnasse

In 1947 Alain Resnais filmed the short documentary Portrait de Henri Goetz. On the Riviera the couple frequented Picabia, Magnelli, Arp and Nicolas de Staël. During the 1950s his painting moved towards an abstraction close to that of Hartung and Gérard Schneider; from 1960 landscape and objects returned, notably in his pastels. The Musée national d’art moderne holds a Peinture of 1956, and his work is also found in the museums of Grenoble, Saint-Étienne and Tourcoing. From 1950 he taught at the Académie Ranson, then at the Grande Chaumière and the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, never charging for his classes. In 1965 he opened his own academy in the former premises of André Lhote’s school, which ran until 1984, and from 1969 he ran a painting and etching studio at the new university of Vincennes.

The Goetz Process and Its Reception in Britain

Goetz perfected carborundum engraving in the second half of the 1960s and set out the method in La Gravure au carborundum, published by Maeght in 1969 with a letter from Miró dated 18 January 1968 by way of preface. Christine Boumeester died in Paris on 10 January 1971. Goetz spent his summers at Villefranche-sur-Mer, where the Musée Goetz-Boumeester opened in the citadel in 1983, with some sixty works by the couple and around fifty from their own collection, among them Picasso, Miró, Hartung and Picabia. In Britain, a retrospective was mounted in 1987 at the Crawshaw Gallery in London, and another at the Alliance Française in Edinburgh. In London, Phillips has since singled out Miró’s carborundum prints – the best-known fruits of the Goetz process – in its Editions sales, quoting Miró’s letter to Goetz on the power of the new material.

The Printmaker: Etching, Aquatint and Carborundum

Before carborundum, Goetz used the full range of intaglio – etching, aquatint, burin, drypoint and soft-ground – as well as lithography. His process replaces the incised line with relief: powdered silicon carbide is fixed to the plate with a varnish or resin; the grains hold the ink and, under the press, yield velvety blacks, deep half-tones and a strongly embossed sheet. It lends itself to large formats and combines easily with etching and aquatint. Introduced to it by the printer Robert Dutrou, Miró adopted it in 1967; Clavé, Tàpies, Matta and James Coignard, whom Goetz encouraged, followed.

His prints were published chiefly in Paris and Nice – La Hune, Jacques Goldschmidt, Hervieu, the Galerie Bellechasse (whose 1978 suites were printed by Maurice Rousseau in Nice) and the Maison de la gravure – and in Stockholm by Sonet. Three catalogues matter. Bergström and Tisari, L’Œuvre gravé de Goetz (Sonet, Stockholm, 1973), illustrates the first 167 prints (1940-1972). K. Masrour, L’Œuvre gravé de Goetz (Art Moderne, Paris, 1977), lists 280 and supplies the numbers most dealers quote (‘Masrour 110’). Stanko Josimov’s research at Paris IV-Sorbonne numbers plates by year, so ‘Josimov 78-05’ is the fifth plate of 1978. His study draws on the 205 prints of 1969-1985 held by the print department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the natural first stop for anyone checking an impression. Prints from 1985-1989 remain poorly documented.

Collecting Henri Goetz: A Buyer’s Guide

The catalogue number. Ask for a Masrour reference (or Bergström for 1940-1972) and, for 1969-1985, the Josimov number.

Edition size. Goetz’s editions are small: 36, 40, 50 or 55 impressions are typical. See our note on the printing.

Signature. Edition impressions are signed and numbered in pencil; see the signature.

Paper and relief. Carborundum plates were usually printed on Arches wove or thick handmade paper. Crisp embossing and a velvety tone mark a good impression; a deep mount and framing that keep the glazing off the surface will protect the relief.

Condition. Wide 1970s margins often show foxing, light-staining or old hinge marks: check before buying.

Pitfalls. The 1969 treatise (reissued in 1974) is an illustrated book whose plates are reproductions, not prints. Be wary of exhibition posters and unsigned sheets offered as proofs. Our guarantees are set out on the authenticity page.

We show Goetz alongside the artists he knew and those who worked his process: Hans Hartung, Raoul Ubac, Gérard Schneider, Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies. Explore the School of Paris and lyrical abstraction, Surrealism and our engravings and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

Henri Goetz, La Gravure au carborundum, Maeght, Paris, 1969 · Bergström and Tisari, L’Œuvre gravé de Goetz, Sonet, Stockholm, 1973 · K. Masrour, L’Œuvre gravé de Goetz, Art Moderne, Paris, 1977 · Henri Goetz, ‘Ma vie, mes amis’, Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, no. 10, 1982 · J.-P. Geay, Goetz, Cercle d’art, Paris, 1989 · Phillips – Joan Miró: New Methods of Printmaking · Stanko Josimov – L’Œuvre gravé de Henri Goetz · Centre Pompidou – Sans titre, 1941-1945 · Encyclopædia Universalis – Henri Goetz · Musée Goetz-Boumeester, Villefranche-sur-Mer