Raoul UBAC

Raoul Ubac – Biography, Original Lithographs, Slate Prints and Etchings

Raoul Ubac (1910-1985), born Rudolf Gustav Maria Ernst Ubach, was a Belgian photographer, painter, printmaker and sculptor who spent most of his working life in France. In the late 1930s he was one of the most inventive photographers of the Surrealist circle, known for his solarisations and for the melted negatives he called brûlages. After the Second World War he gave up the camera for slate, which he carved, incised and printed from for the rest of his life, with the steady support of the Galerie Maeght. His original prints – colour lithographs, etchings, woodcuts and slate impressions – are a direct extension of that sculptural work.

Le Coin des Arts does not currently hold any work by Raoul Ubac. The gallery follows the artist closely and offers his original prints when good impressions come to light, chosen for the quality of the printing, the depth of the blacks, provenance and condition. To be notified, use the "follow the artist" button.

A border childhood: Malmedy, Cologne and the road to Paris

Ubac was born on 31 August 1910. The Museum of Modern Art gives his birthplace as Cologne; other biographies name Malmedy, the small Ardennes town where he certainly grew up, which was German until it passed to Belgium in 1920. His family was of mixed German and Belgian origin. As a young man he walked across much of Europe, and on a first stay in Paris in 1928 met the abstract painter Otto Freundlich. He enrolled at the Sorbonne in 1929, met Man Ray, André Breton and the Surrealists around 1930, and in 1932 studied at the school of applied arts in Cologne, where he learned modern photographic techniques and made his first photograms.

Surrealist photographs, 1933-1940

Living in Paris from 1933, Ubac showed photographic collages at the Galerie Louis Cattiaux at the end of 1934, and in October 1935 took part, under the pseudonym Raoul Michelet, in a Surrealist exhibition at La Louvière in Belgium. From 1937 his images appeared in Minotaure and he began a series of solarisations; in January 1938 he was included in the Exposition internationale du surréalisme at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His aim was to make the subject dissolve into its ground: superimposed negatives, solarisation and, from 1939, negatives deliberately melted in boiling water. Key images include Le Conciliabule (1938), La Nébuleuse (1939) and Le Combat des Penthésilées (1938). In these years he also learned engraving at Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17.

British audiences rediscovered this body of work at Tate Modern in 2022: Surrealism Beyond Borders showed Le Combat des Penthésilées, lent through the Mayor Gallery in London, as an example of Ubac's superimposed and solarised negatives, an image of Achilles and the Amazon queen turned to stone.

Brussels in wartime and the break with photography

In 1940 Ubac and René Magritte launched the review L'Invention collective in Brussels; two issues appeared, in February and April. After a brief flight to Carcassonne with Magritte and the writer Louis Scutenaire, he lived in Brussels until 1946. He exhibited 32 photographs at the Galerie Dietrich in May 1941 and, between 1942 and 1944, worked as stills photographer on Henri Storck's film Symphonie paysanne. In Paris he showed photographs and paintings at the bookshop-gallery of Francis Dasté in November 1943 and grew close to the poet André Frénaud. By the end of the war he had moved away from Surrealism and abandoned photography, which, he said, ran up against something impossible to transcend.

Slate, Maeght and public commissions

Back in Montparnasse in 1946, Ubac came across slate almost by chance, and it became his material for life. His paintings turned into low reliefs of slate powder bound with synthetic resin, engraved and sanded, while his sculptures moved from slate to granite. From 1950 he was represented in France by the Galerie Maeght, whose exhibition poster he designed that year – a lithograph printed at Mourlot. Public commissions followed: a relief for the pump room at Évian (1957), a mosaic for a school at Saint-Cyr (1958), stained glass for the church at Ézy-sur-Eure (1958-59) and for the church of Saint-Valery at Varengeville-sur-Mer, where his windows sit alongside Georges Braque's Tree of Jesse. He settled at Dieudonné in the Oise.

Retrospectives, London and the late work

In 1968 the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris held a retrospective, and Éditions Maeght published a major monograph in 1970. In 1980 Christopher Hewett's Taranman Gallery in London exhibited a group of small polished slates. The 1970s brought tapestries, such as the one for the pharmacy faculty at Châtenay-Malabry (1974), and late designs for stained glass in the Romanesque choir of Nevers Cathedral. Ubac died at Dieudonné in March 1985. For his centenary, the Grand Curtius in Liège mounted a retrospective of more than 120 works (2010-11), accompanied in Malmedy by a show of lithographs, slate prints and illustrated books.

Ubac's prints: lithographs, etchings and slate impressions

For Ubac, printmaking grew out of the same gesture as carving. His slate impressions (empreintes d'ardoise) were pulled from the engraved stone itself, inked like a plate, so that the paper records the grain and furrowed lines of the reliefs. He also made woodcuts and etchings, but the bulk of his published work is in colour lithography for Maeght. The gallery's review Derrière le miroir devoted several issues to him, among them no. 142 (March 1964, eight original colour lithographs, text by Yves Bonnefoy), no. 196 (1972) and no. 251 (February 1982, two lithographs, text by André Frénaud). The Museum of Modern Art acquired a 1950 lithograph, Composition, from an edition of 50, as early as 1955.

His illustrated books are a world in themselves. In 1967 Maeght published Yves Bonnefoy's essay La Poésie française et le principe d'identité with Ubac's etchings, in 150 copies on Chiffon de Mandeure signed by author and artist, and André Frénaud's Vieux pays. We have not been able to confirm a standard catalogue raisonné of Ubac's prints that is cited on the market; impressions are best identified by publisher, date and, for Derrière le miroir, issue number. Treat any catalogue number given without an author and title with caution.

Collecting Raoul Ubac prints: a buyer's guide

Edition and numbering. Signed lithographs are usually numbered in pencil in small editions; MoMA's Composition was printed in 50, and some slate impressions in 25. Artist's proofs are perfectly acceptable. See the printing.

Signature. A pencil signature identifies the signed edition. A signature printed in the image, as on the 1950 Maeght poster, does not. See the signature.

Review plates. Lithographs from Derrière le miroir are genuine original prints, but unsigned and printed in large numbers; a central fold and text on the reverse are normal. They should be catalogued as such, with the issue number, and priced accordingly.

Posters. Maeght exhibition posters may be lithographic, but they remain posters, and later offset reprints have no value as prints.

Condition and provenance. Ubac's dense dark areas show rubbing and fading easily, so examine the sheet in raking light. A Maeght provenance or a complete book is a real advantage. See our pages on authenticity and framing.

The gallery chooses Ubac's prints with the same care as those of the artists around him, from Jean Bazaine and Pierre Alechinsky to Camille Bryen and René Magritte. Explore Surrealism, the School of Paris and our engravings and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

Ubac, monograph, Éditions Maeght, 1970 · Derrière le miroir, nos. 142 (1964), 196 (1972) and 251 (1982), Maeght · Yves Bonnefoy, La Poésie française et le principe d'identité, etchings by Raoul Ubac, Maeght, 1967 · Tate Modern – Surrealism Beyond Borders, exhibition guide · MoMA, Object:Photo – Raoul Ubac chronology · Centre Pompidou – Brûlage, 1939 · Encyclopædia Universalis – Raoul Ubac · Galerie Laurentin – Raoul Ubac biography