Alfred MANESSIER

Alfred Manessier – Biography, Original Lithographs and Prints

Alfred Manessier (born 5 December 1911 at Saint-Ouen, in the Somme; died 1 August 1993 in Orléans) was one of the leading painters of the post-war School of Paris. A colourist of rare intensity and a Catholic convert, he translated landscape and the liturgy into abstract structures of light, won the International Grand Prize for Painting at the 1962 Venice Biennale, and became one of the great renewers of stained glass in Europe. His printed work, roughly a hundred plates, is dominated by the colour lithograph, most of it pulled at the Mourlot workshop in Paris.

Le Coin des Arts currently offers a Manessier oil on canvas, Barques (1954), painted in the years of his North Sea seascapes, an untitled pastel of 1967, and several signed original lithographs: Le Procès de Burgos I (1971), Laudes II (1976) and three sheets from the Fifteen Lithographs on the Theme of Easter (1978). Each has been chosen for the quality of the impression, its edition, provenance and condition.

A Picard Childhood and an Architect’s Training

Manessier grew up in Abbeville; his grandfather was a stonemason and his father a wine merchant. He painted his first watercolours at Le Crotoy on the Bay of the Somme at the age of twelve and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Amiens from 1924. In 1929 he moved to Paris and, to satisfy his father, enrolled in architecture at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, while copying old masters at the Louvre. The decisive encounter came in 1935 at the Académie Ranson, where Roger Bissière taught fresco; there he befriended Jean Le Moal and Jean Bertholle, with whom he worked on the railway pavilion murals of the 1937 Paris International Exhibition.

The Occupation, La Trappe and the Turn to Abstraction

In May 1941, under the German Occupation, Manessier showed at the Galerie Braun among the ‘Twenty Young Painters of the French Tradition’ assembled by Jean Bazaine, an exhibition now seen as the founding moment of the new School of Paris. In 1943 a three-day retreat at the Trappist abbey of La Grande Trappe at Soligny (Orne), with the writer Camille Bourniquel, led to his conversion and to a lasting shift towards non-figurative painting. He was a founder member of the Salon de Mai in 1945, and his first solo exhibition opened at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in April 1949, together with his first lithographic album, Pâques. The great Passion cycles followed: La Couronne d’épines (1950) and La Nuit de Gethsémani (1952).

International Recognition, 1953-1962

Prizes came quickly: first prize for painting at the São Paulo Biennial in 1953, first prize at the exhibition of sacred art in Vienna in 1954, and the Carnegie International Grand Prize in Pittsburgh in 1955. He took part in the first three documenta exhibitions in Kassel (1955, 1959, 1964), and a retrospective toured the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover, the Folkwang Museum in Essen and the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1958-1959. In 1962, the 31st Venice Biennale awarded him its International Grand Prize for Painting, while Giacometti took the sculpture prize. British public collections followed this rise: Tate holds his painting −12° (1956), an untitled work of around 1952 and Early Spring (1966), a work on paper kept in its Prints and Drawings Room.

Stained Glass: From Les Bréseux to Fribourg Cathedral

Manessier’s windows for the small church of Les Bréseux in the Doubs, installed in 1948, were among the very first abstract windows placed in an old church. Commissions multiplied across Europe: All Saints’ Church in Basel (1952), the chapel of Sainte-Thérèse at Hem (1957), the crypt of Essen Minster (1959), the crypt of St Gereon, Cologne (1964), and the nineteen windows of the Church of Our Lady in Bremen (1966-1979). In St Nicholas Cathedral, Fribourg, he glazed the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre (1974-1976) and the rose of the nave (1988). His last great ensemble, the windows of the Saint-Sépulcre church in Abbeville (1982-1993), was a homecoming. In 1976 he and Bazaine founded an association to defend France’s historic glass after the controversy over the restoration of Chartres.

Spain, the Beauce and the Late Work

From 1963 Manessier worked repeatedly at the hermitage of Luchente near Valencia, and in 1972 he settled permanently in the farmhouse he had bought at Emancé, in the Beauce. His art also answered history: Requiem pour novembre 1956 after the crushing of the Hungarian uprising, Hommage à Martin Luther King (1968), and the Procès de Burgos lithographs of 1971, prompted by the military trial of Basque activists held in Burgos in December 1970. Tapestries, notably the cycle on the Spiritual Canticles of St John of the Cross (1969-1971), occupied him alongside painting. Shortly after a retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris (1992-1993), he was injured in a car accident in the Loiret on 28 July 1993 and died four days later.

Manessier’s Prints: Printers, Publishers and Catalogues

Manessier made etchings from 1943 and aquatints between 1955 and 1975, printed by Lacourière et Frélaut, but lithography suited his colour best. His 1949 Pâques album (seven lithographs printed by Jean Pons, 75 copies, Galerie Jeanne Bucher) was followed by decades of work at Mourlot, where the chromist Henry Deschamps assisted him. His dealer, the Galerie de France, published most of the plates from 1952 to 1981; others were issued by Nesto Jacometti’s L’Œuvre gravée (Paris-Zürich), Klipstein in Bern and the Guilde de la gravure. The two Procès de Burgos lithographs (Mourlot, 1971) measure 73 × 106 cm and were issued in 85 numbered impressions on Arches wove; Laudes II (Mourlot, 1976) in 50, with 25 artist’s proofs. The 1977-1978 Easter suite was printed on zinc by La Polígrafa near Barcelona, in 99 copies on Guarro paper.

There is no printed catalogue raisonné of the prints. The standard reference is the online catalogue of the Association Alfred Manessier, based on Laure Vallette’s 2005 master’s thesis at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne and revised by Christine Manessier. Dealers also cite the Galerie de France print catalogue of 1979 (the Burgos lithographs are nos. 25 and 26) and the 1989 touring exhibition catalogue Manessier, le regard, la couleur, la pierre. 40 ans de lithographie.

Collecting Manessier Prints: a Buyer’s Guide

Edition and numbering. Editions are small, usually 50 to 125, plus artist’s, hors-commerce or ‘exhibition’ proofs. Check that the numbering agrees with the catalogue; see the printing.

Signature. Look for ‘Manessier’ signed in pencil in the margin; read more on the signature.

Titles. The two Burgos prints have long circulated with their numbers reversed, and apocryphal titles exist (‘Figure’ for Laudes II). Compare image and dimensions with the catalogue.

Condition. Large sheets crease easily, and the deep blues and reds fade in daylight; insist on full margins and UV-filtering glazing when framing.

Pitfalls. Lithographs bound into the review XXe siècle (2,000 copies), exhibition posters and reproduction prints are not signed impressions. The 1978 Easter plates are sometimes sold as ‘etchings’: they are lithographs. Our guarantees are set out on the authenticity page.

We select Manessier’s work alongside that of his friends and contemporaries: Roger Bissière, Jean Bazaine, Gustave Singier, Maurice Estève and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Explore the School of Paris and Lyrical Abstraction and our engravings and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

Laure Vallette and Christine Manessier, Alfred Manessier. Les estampes – The Prints, Université de Picardie Jules Verne / Association Alfred Manessier, 2005-2021 · J. P. Hodin, Manessier, 1972 · Werner Schmalenbach (ed.), Alfred Manessier, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover, 1958 · Manessier, le regard, la couleur, la pierre, AFAA, 1989 · Tate – Alfred Manessier · Association Alfred Manessier – Prints · St Nicholas Cathedral, Fribourg