2. Artists & stock
3. Jean Pons
4. Biography

Notes of biography

Jean Pons is born in Paris on the eve of World War I in 1913. He is a student at the Estienne School in Paris. Quite remarkable practitioner and discoverer, in 1938 he founds a lithography workshop which is immediately attended by many contemporary artists of Paris of utmost importance and, particularly, by Russian artists: Nicolas de Staël, Lanskoy, Charchoune, Poliakoff, Delaunay, Kandinsky, Zadkine. . . Artists, accomplices, most of them become true friends; the activity of the workshop is intense.
Along with his studio, Jean Pons constructs step by step an important work; expressionist and fauvists in his debut, the artist creates still lifes, landscapes, and portraits. Gradually his work becomes more elliptical and his art evolves, around 1948, toward abstraction, an abstraction often built on lines and the right angle, with collages and mixed media. "Abstraction came to me because of my attraction to risk taking," writes the artist in 1986.
In the late 50s, probably influenced by the New Figuration, the artist reveals again the figure treated with a violent chromaticism. Jean Pons returns to less tumultuous work in the mid 60s. Isn’t the man leading one of the most important workshops of lithography at the time? Needless to say that John Pons happily practices the art of lithography, which is, according to his own words, "a means of expression, not a means of impression”; the graphic work of Jean Pons is very important and follows, of course, the evolution of his work as painter, illustrator and sculptor.
Jean Pons creates several illustrated books, working, among others, with Aimé Césaire (“Batouque”, 1945) and Charles Estienne ("Rose of the insult", 1952).
The artist exhibits his work in significant exhibitions (Salons of Independents, Salon of Mai, New Realities Salon, Salon of Autumn, Salon of October which he co-founds, etc.) in France but also abroad (Ljubljana, Cincinnati, Cambridge, etc.); similarly, many solo exhibitions are devoted to his art, the first in 1952, is held at the Suzanne Michel Galery, Paris. His works is exhibited at the La Hune Galery, at Colette Allendy, at the Iris Clerc Galery, at the Modern Art Museum of Paris in 1984, etc.
It would take too long to list those who work, over time, in the lithography studio of Jean Pons, in close collaboration with the master: those of geometric abstraction and the New School of Paris (Helion, Bazaine, Esteve, Manessier, Hartung, Gilioli, Domela, Dewasne, Schneider or Soulages) those who were regrouped under the banner of lyrical abstraction (Arp, Bissiere, Cesar, Debré, Deyrolle, Masson, Sugaï and many others), "nuagistes" (as Laubies, Messagier or Sima...), the "cobra"(Constant, Corneille, Appel, Atlan, Alechinsky, Doucet, ...), but also artists whose expression come from other pictorial backgrounds (Gen Paul, Pignon, Michaux, Villeglé, Boisrond, Combas, ...). A lifetime in the service of art! The painter’s daughter Babette leads the workshop in 1973; she still continues nowadays a dialogue beyond the frontier and the promotion of lithography.
"I walk with my painting," says Jean Pons, a man of commitment who has set the goal to reach the venerable age of 103 years!
He leaves us in 2005; he is 93 years old.

Artists are sensitive to the lithographic proof, not because it represents their work, but because it is their work. Jean Pons

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