A comment left today by Klaus provides me with the ideal opportunity to post this rather battered but beautiful poster designed I believe by the French artist Sonia Delaunay (1885 - 1979). Picked it for 5 new francs in Nancy 10 years after her exhibition at the Musee des Beaux Arts, it was intended as decoration for my little studio flat just up the road and I always assumed it was a silkscreen - untill I learned that Delaunay had adapted stencilling from French fashion magazines to make everything from book cover designs to fine art prints. (The designs appear to be applied using a stencil and the ink is thicker than screen prints I have seen). The photo is over-exposed but does give you a fair idea of the careless treatment it has received over the past 30 years. Stencilling itself goes back 1,000 years, to the Chinese, but it began to be used by the French fashion press from the late C19th to add colour cheaply to collotype designs in magazines. (The British artist Gwen John was so taken with them she sometimes used them as a basis for her paintings). Stencil or pochoir, as is it is usually called in relation to both Delaunay and the famous Gazette du Bon Ton (1912 - 1925), soon developped into silkscreen in the USA. Where Jungnickel's work fits in with all this, I'm not too sure. Having been a graphic artist at the Stollwerck chocolate factory immediately before his year at the Kunstgewerbeschule and his 1903 stencil 'Sunrays... ' he may have used or come across the use of stencil in his commercial work. It could also be that he was introduced to the technique by Alfred Roller. After all, for a short time the innovation of secessionist and Wiener Werkstaette designers was seminal. I do still think that Jungnickel's use of the technique was innovatory. I also think it would be before the German artists of Die Brucke took up the avant garde use of lino, which untill then had been a commercial technique. But I am sketchy about the history of pochoir in France and the role played by designers like Pierre Brissaud. I am sad that Klaus finds him more refined than Jungnickel but then Klaus is francophile - as, of course, we all are.
