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JEAN MICHEL FOLON
"The Tree with Eyes"
Original Vintage 1972 Framed Exhibition
Gallery Poster Print
From the 1972 Brussells Exhibition
with Artwork by Legendary Modern Artist Jean Michel Folon Framed in Metal and Glass - 25 in. x 20 in. Excellent Vintage Condition (see photos) Email with any questions....thank you.
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Jean Michel Folon (1934-2005):
Known by only his last name, Folon created art that was popular in France and in the United States from the 1960's to the present, on posters, in books and magazines and in various advertising campaigns.
His most widely seen piece was the 1989 logo for the bicentennial of the French revolution: three soaring birds. Birds, butterfly people and soaring winged men were among his recurring symbols, which he rendered in a precisionist yet beguilingly ironic childlike manner.
Folon was fond of making grand statements in intimate, compact spaces. Even his large posters, collected in the 1978 "Posters by Folon," started as small drawings and prints. His work was defined by contrasts. His pen line was simple, bordering on naïve, and his luminous watercolor palette was intentionally optimistic, but his subject matter was often downbeat, criticizing what he believed was relentless urban conformity and the loneliness it caused.
Folon began as an architectural draftsman, and many of his drawings feature wall after wall of impenetrable skyscraper facades marked with obsessive rows of broken lines that evoke prisons. Another frequent metaphor was directional arrows explosively springing from humanlike figures and other forms, shooting in many directions...
"Arrows," he once said, "are the symbols of confusion of an entire era. What would happen if, one night, someone were to remove all the traffic signs from the face of the earth?"
Folon was best known for his forlorn though oddly endearing Everyman figure, always alone in an urban landscape, dressed in blue or gray, with brimmed hat and raincoat that conceals a large lumbering body.
"Modest, vulnerable, and sometimes confused, he is not a comic figure," wrote William S. Lieberman, in the catalog "Folon's Folons," for his 1990 solo exhibition of the same name at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. "He is a city dweller, Folon suggests, perhaps an office clerk. He carries either an attaché case or a newspaper. No athlete, he can, however, fly."
Born in 1934 in Uccle, near Brussels, Folon drew obsessively from the time he was 6. In 1960 he moved to Paris, where he began to receive editorial assignments. His more significant breaks came from American magazines like Horizon, Esquire, The New Yorker and Time. Art directors found his symbolic approach a relief from the overly realistic dominant style.
In 1969 he had his first solo exhibition at the Lefebre Gallery in New York and shortly afterward was one of the earliest illustrators for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, working in the surrealist conceptual style for which it was noted in its early days.
Various commissions to illustrate books followed, notably Kafka's "Metamorphosis." He also made drawings for books by Jacques Prévert and Ray Bradbury.
In 1975 Folon met his most important patron, the writer and art director Giorgio Soavi of Olivetti, the Italian typewriter manufacturer, with whom he collaborated on many books published by the company, including "Letters to Giorgio," a collection of beautifully illustrated, free-form, self-generated missives.
A long friendship with Milton Glaser resulted in another intense collaboration. "We used to sit together and have long conversations, even though he did not speak English and I do not speak French," Mr. Glaser recalled, "so we decided to celebrate our misunderstanding and do a book together. The book is a back and forth continuous tableau titled 'The Conversation."'
Given his many magazine covers and advertising campaigns, Folon's distinctive style should have been immune to plagiarism. But in the 1980's a magazine and television ad campaign so closely copied his Everyman theme that he took legal action.
Folon also produced many campaign posters for Greenpeace and Amnesty International, including an illustrated edition for the 40th anniversary in 1988 of the United Nations "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," done for Amnesty. Folon's reason for accepting the project was simply this: "Everyone talks about it, no one reads it."
While he continued to illustrate books like "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison and the fables of La Fontaine for Nuages, since the early 90's Folon spent increasingly more of his time in Italy, creating large sculptures of some of his favorite themes, especially the Everyman. Many of these were exhibited in Fort Belvedere in Florence.
His marriage to his first wife, the artist Colette Portal, ended in divorce. He was survived by his wife, Paolina, and his son from his first marriage, François; a sister; Dany; and a brother Christian.
"Some have intimated that he is merely and illustrator," Ray Bradbury wrote in the Metropolitan Museum catalog. "Merely! As if illustration were mere! But he is more than that. Folon is interior, his ideas bounce off the insides of his own head. Being so trapped, they are inspirations rather than illustrations."
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Email or Text any Questions.....thank you.
Due to special packing necessities for framed art items, shipping times may take a few days longer depending on the item and shipping destination location. Email through for more information.
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Email or Text any Questions.....thank you.
Due to special packing necessities for framed art items, shipping times may take a few days longer depending on the item and shipping destination location. Email through for more information.
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