NAÏVE ART BY PICASSO'S SHOEMAKER
BOARETTO, Ange.
Twenty-two large prints with paint and ink additions, five large photographs of Boaretto in his studio by Jean-Yves Giscard, and an exhibition guestbook/scrapbook with signatures, cuttings, ephemera, and photographs.
France, 1960s–1980s.
Two reversed calf portfolios (each c. 495 x 340 mm), the first containing 22 colour lithograph prints, with various levels of additional work in paint and ink (c. 560 x 380 mm), and 5 mounted gelatin silver prints of Boaretto in his atelier (350 x 490 mm, stamp of the Centre Georges Pompidou to verso); the second an exhibition or studio guestbook, with press cuttings, over 50 gelatin silver prints (various sizes, including portraits, images of Boaretto’s work and atelier, vernissages, etc.), a few small drawings and lithographs and numerous signatures and inscriptions.
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Twenty-two large prints with paint and ink additions, five large photographs of Boaretto in his studio by Jean-Yves Giscard, and an exhibition guestbook/scrapbook with signatures, cuttings, ephemera, and photographs.
A fascinating archive relating to the work of the master shoemaker and naïve artist Ange Boaretto (b. 1920), known as ‘Ange’ and ‘Le Bottier’, providing a behind-the-scenes glimpse of his unusual artistic technique – which utilised his shoemaking equipment – and of his important 1979 exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou.
Boaretto, born in Padua, but raised and naturalised in France at Cagnes-sur-Mer in Provence, crafted shoes for clients including Picasso and Surrealist poet Paul Éluard (he later married the bookseller Cécile Eluard, daughter of Paul Éluard and Gala Dalí), and at around age forty also turned to painting and printing, slowly refining an unusual – and perhaps unique – technique that employed the same press he used for leather work. Boaretto’s unusual technique allowed for almost infinite variation in strength, tone, hue, and paper type, as well as augmentation with overpainting and hand-stamps.
Boaretto exhibited regularly in the South of France from the 1950s, a member of the group ‘Naïfs en liberté’, but the high point of his career was the exhibition of ‘La Bible du Bottier’, at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1979, a group of images with accompanying text for which the poet Francis Ponge wrote an introduction. Two prints from the exhibited series (‘Le denicheur’ and ‘La chasse au canard sauvage’) are included here, the first in two different versions, as are a group of five large mounted photographs showing Boaretto in his atelier, also included in that exhibition. The nineteen other prints here represent a total of ten subjects, two in multiple versions (‘Coucher de soleil’ and ‘Danse du feu’). Deceptively simple rural scenes, they also have darker notes – a cockfight, a boar cornered by dogs, a lurid village festival.
The guestbook covers a period from 1960 to the mid-1980s, and particularly the Pompidou exhibition, and includes cuttings and ephemera, a wide array of photographs, two letters from Blaise Gautier (who wrote a blurb on Boaretto for the Pompidou exhibition) and one from the photographer Lucien Clergue, a card with an original drawing by Jean-François Ozenda, and an invitation (with an original print) to a 1974 exhibition of Boaretto’s work at the bookshop of Cécile Eluard. Also included are tributes and signatures from, among many others, the surrealist Louis Aragon (‘de la part de Cécile’), the writer Gerard Oberlé, the editor and translator Henri Parisot, and Isabelle, Princess of Orléans-Braganza.
