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Print Collection 12: Prints, Popular Art, Images d'Epinal

Le Bon Français travaille pour nos soldats, Guy Arnoux

The nationalistic spirit of war provoked a return to a traditional style of printing in France. Artists like Guy Arnoux and Pierre Abadie-Landel began producing art prints in the spirit of images d'Épinal — a simple, folkloric style suffused with familiarity. Originally conceived in 1796 by Jean-Charles Pellerin in his native village of Épinal (Vosges), the images d'Épinal were inexpensive woodcuts and lithographs of religious and historical content intended for the common consumer. During the Napoleonic wars, these images became extremely popular as Pellerin's printing house, Imagerie d'Épinal, cornered the market on commemorative historical prints. During the Great War, the traditional style of these prints appealed to French artists looking to show their patriotism, as in the eyes of an increasingly anti-German public, the image d'Épinal came to represent a distinctly French product unmarred by foreign influence. The prints had a further appeal in that their minimalist form allowed many artists to stay true to the modernist ideals of their time.

Printing houses and periodicals also published popular serialized prints, targeting a public interested in commemorating the historical time they were experiencing. These prints were often tinged with propaganda, like those of Hansi and Raoul Dufy, and invoked the iconography of nationalism. Still other artists, such as Jean-Jacques Berne-Bellecour favored a more photorealistic style — also favored by the French art community of the time for rejecting abstraction, which was considered a German preference.

Scenes of battles, life in the trenches, military hospitals, "typologies" of soldiers, the alleged atrocities of the enemy, allegories of international cooperation and military and political portraits are typical of the images in the Collection. Much of the wartime popular art helped spread patriotism and create antipathy toward the enemy. In its depiction of war, it rarely strayed from the limitations of the image d'Épinal format — an expression that has come to mean a sentimental and naive depiction that ignores any unpleasant reality.

See more about print artists represented in the Collection.

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