KunstenaarFrench
Max Papart
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Max Papart was born on 19 December 1911 in Marseille, the port city whose saturated light and Mediterranean warmth would saturate his art for the rest of his life. He left for Paris in 1935, enrolled at the Ecole du Louvre, and set himself up in the city as an artisan printer. That grounding in the physical craft of printing - the press, the plate, the hand-mixed ink - gave his subsequent work as an artist an intimacy with materials that purely painterly training rarely produces.
His early canvases were shaped by Cubism, but Papart's version of it was never dry or theoretical. Circus performers, musicians, lovers, cyclists, birds in flight: the subjects were cheerful and the treatment exuberant, flat planes of contrasting colour and texture arranged so that the eye reads movement even across a static surface. Critics placed him among the most significant second-generation Cubists of the twentieth century. His palette carried the heat of the Riviera into work that could have turned cold in less confident hands.
The decisive technical turning point came in 1960, when Papart adopted carborundum etching - a technique invented by his friend and fellow Paris-based artist Henri Goetz. Carborundum is applied to the plate as an abrasive compound that holds ink in dense, heavily textured deposits. When printed, it produces surfaces of extraordinary tactile depth: deep veined passages that feel almost geological alongside the softer, mottled tones achieved with aquatint. Papart became one of the foremost practitioners of this method, combining it with lithography, mixed media, and collage in works that pushed print beyond the flat plane it usually inhabits. He used handmade papers, added textured elements, and treated the printed surface as a material object rather than a transparent carrier for an image.
From 1969 to 1973 he taught printmaking at the University of Paris VIII-Vincennes, passing on both the carborundum technique and a broader philosophy of making that treated technical rigour and expressive freedom as inseparable. He continued overseeing the hand printing of his own plates until his death in Paris on 29 August 1994.
His international exhibition record spanned France, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, the United States, and Mexico through the 1960s and 1970s. His work entered the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the National Gallery London, the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence, and the Musee Cantini in Marseille. The breadth of that list reflects a career that was genuinely international while remaining rooted in the Parisian print tradition.
On Auctionist, 34 Papart lots are recorded, with particularly strong representation at Bukowskis Stockholm, Bukowskis Malmö, Stockholms Auktionsverk, and Crafoord Auktioner Lund. The lots include carborundum etchings, colour lithographs, mixed-media works on paper, and gouache compositions. Titles include works from the Candide series of carborundum etchings, colour lithographs described as Komposition, and the signed print ABC. Recorded prices in the current Swedish market have ranged from around 385 to 3,400 SEK for works on paper, which places Papart's prints at the accessible end of the secondary market for a printmaker of this institutional standing.