Alfred Latour (27 August 1888 – 2 March 1964) was a French painter and engraver who also worked extensively as a graphic designer and as an advertiser. He was notoriously against the opposition between so-called major and minor arts, and was passionate about all the expressive possibilities of visual arts, crafts, and modes of expression.
His work includes hundreds of oils, watercolours, drawings, illustrated books, advertisement posters, vignettes and printed fabrics, some of which are still produced by the Abbaye de Fontenay. All his works express both his sense of freedom and his rigorous seriousness. His Fauve palette is combined with essential lightness and simplicity of form. His works can be seen in museums in France (Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Arles, Martigues), in Great Britain (The British Museum and The Victoria and Albert Museum), and in National Library of the Netherlands. They are also part of many private art collections around the world.
Latour was always highly independent and reserved, and had no inclination to draw attention on himself. In 2004, the Alfred Latour FoundationAlfred Latour Foundation was established in Fribourg, Switzerland. It is presided by Claude Latour, Alfred Latour's nephew, and is dedicated to preserving and promoting Alfred Latour's work.
Biography
Alfred Latour was the youngest of four brothers; his father was a printer and typographer at the Imprimerie Nationale. He was born on 27 August 1888 in a working-class neighbourhood of the 12th arrondissement in Paris. From early childhood his love of drawing—his parents' slight resistance notwithstanding—marked him to become an artist.
His formation was very diverse. He started with evening classes in his neighbourhood, in Rue d'Aligre, and for a short time he was a student at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts. However, he was rapidly turned off by the academicism of the teaching. He preferred to spend his time in the National Museums of Paris where he took many notes and made many sketches and drawings. In 1908, he received a grant from the City of Paris to attend the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs. At that school he received a solid technical formation and trained his eye and his hand while searching for his own style. After he sold his first canvases, he went on a journey to the south of France, which proved to be a form of revelation whose enchantment would last all his life.
However, Latour was conscripted in 1909 and stationed in Granville, in Normandy. While on his leaves, he discovered the coast of Normandy and Brittany of which he produced many sketches and pochades: small sketches that captured the outline and colours of the landscape.
In 1913, he settled in Paris again, on the Ile Saint-Louis, which was still at the time a sort of village at the heart of the capital. He lived off the sale of canvases and drawings (mostly views of Paris and scenes of Parisian life), but also off set design for the theatre and graphic design patterns for household objects (boxes, plates, lamps and the like). That year, he presented his work for the first time at the Salon d'automne.Biography on the website of the Foundation Alfred Latour.
During that period, he started his work as a wood engraver. His professionalism, skilfulness and taste for meticulous and rigorous work quickly drew the recognition of his peers. The symbolist painter Émile Bernard, who was practically his neighbour, commissioned the engraving of his drawings illustrating Ronsard's Les Amours and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, which Ambroise Vollard then published in 1914 and 1916.
With the start of World War I in 1914, Latour was mobilized, and on 22 September he was seriously wounded in Picardy. While convalescing in hospital he met Madeleine Cosnard who would become his wife in 1917 and the mother of his two sons, Jacques and Jean. During these war years Latour produced a large number of drawings and snapshot-like sketches of silhouetted comrades in their daily lives and of the landscapes he passed through.
After the war, he returned to the Ile Saint-Louis where he dedicated himself exclusively to perfecting his art as a woodcutter and graphic designer. His work clearly belonged to the French tradition, but he also radically renewed that tradition with his use of colours and his acute sense of simplicity in decoration. His talent did not go unnoticed; he started to exhibit his works regularly at the Salon d'Automne, at the Petit Palais, where he was the recipient of several prizes, and art patrons started to include him in their collections.In June 1921, financier and famous art collector Otto H. Kahn (1867–1934) purchased several of Latour's woodcuts to donate them to American museums, in particular to the (now closed) Musée d'Art Français in New York. In 1925, American banker Jules Bache (1861–1944), a prominent entrepreneur and art collector who owned a splendid collection including pieces by Rembrandt, Dürer, and Velasquez, purchased six woodcuts which he donated to the New York Public Library. In 1926, the curator of the Department of Prints wrote to Latour to tell him about an important exhibition on four centuries of the art of woodcutting; in that letter, the curator wrote: "We are very pleased to have works of yours in the collection." In 1925, he was awarded the Grand Prix for book illustration at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs. That same year, he created graphic and typographic vignettes for the Deberny and Peignot foundry. Latour's innovative idea was to create iterative motifs that could be combined ad infinitum like the letters of the alphabet; the motive would prove to be a commercial success for many years.
In 1927, he settled in Montparnasse, the hub of Paris artistic and intellectual life that attracted many painters, writers and musicians, many of whom were exiles. He became involved with the art book milieu, starting to work on bookbinding, embellishments and illustrations of more than thirty books.Louis Koopman, a scientist, high-tech entrepreneur, art connoisseur and book lover particularly fond of French literature, included Le Voyage d'Urien, along with other books illustrated by Latour, in his famous collection of rare books. The collection is currently in the holdings of The National Library of the Netherlands. This work enabled him to become friends with many authors including poet Paul Valéry, novelist André Gide, and art historian André Focillon.In 1920 art historian Henri Focillon commissioned Latour to illustrate his book "L'Ile oubliée" ("The Forgotten Island"); in 1953, he published an article titled Estampes en couleurs gravées sur bois ("Colour Woodcuts and Prints") in Arts et Métiers Graphiques (N°29, 1953) where he wrote: "Latour considers that wood is not simply the substance of graphic speculation, but that it also offers rich plastic possibilities that can admit the dreams of a painter." It also led him to receiving several prizes in international exhibitions, which he shared with renowned artists such as Bonnard, Chagall, Degas, Dufy, Picasso, and Rouault. His modernist aesthetic and his sober and refined style also drew the attention of the Lyon silk manufacturers Maison Bianchini-Férier who commissioned him several designs for their exclusive fabrics.
He then turned to photography, and became the Paris correspondent of an international press agency.Documents belonging to the Latour family (available upon request for consultation, please contact the Foundation). His favourite subjects were street scenes, fairs and the fishermen on the banks of the Seine. He captured these slices of life for the newspaper L'Ami du peupleLaure Albin Guillot who photographed the Parisian intelligentsia of arts and letters photographed Latour for her exhibition titled "Portraits of Men" that included portraits of Paul Colin, Julien Green, Moïse Kisling, Louis Lumière, Robert Mallet-Stevens and Darius Milhaud. with his quick look and his original sense of framing.
In 1932, he broke away from Parisian metropolitan life for which he had no affinity and bought a "mas" (a former sheep stable) in Eygalières at the foot of the Alpilles mountains. In the long-desired solitude of the Provence, he launched on a quest for renewed freedom; he gave up the constraints of woodcutting to devote himself freely to watercolours.In 1932, Latour showed his work at the Galerie La Tortue in Paris. The exhibit was very favorably reviewed in the magazine Les Echos des Arts: "It comes as no surprise that [Latour's] painting should be as bold, as innovative in its lines, as profound in its composition and as meticulous in its design as his woodcuts were".
In 1934, he started to work for the wine merchant Nicolas. Their collaboration would last 30 years during which Latour produced much of the advertisement for the company, including posters and the yearly catalogue of fine wines, which artists such as Raoul Dufy, Van Dongen and Bernard Buffet had illustrated before him.In 1928 the dynamic director of Vins Nicolas, the wine company to which he gave his name, started a luxurious yearly catalogue of his products. Designer and publicist Cassandre was mandated with the typography. In 1940 Latour took over the mandate and continued with this work all his life. On the other hand, when the printing house Draeger that produced the material for Nicolas offered Latour to become their Artistic Director, he turned down the offer saying: "I don't want a collar on my neck, albeit a golden one."
Latour always observed at a distance the vanguard artistic movements of his time. Between 1935 and 1936 he joined the UAM (the Union des Artistes Modernes) a movement founded in 1929 by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens in reaction to the academicism of the era and the established hierarchies between major and minor arts. Prominent members of the UAM included Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand, Sonia Delaunay, Man Ray, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró and Walter Gropius. In the UAM pavilion of the 1937 Paris International Exposition, Latour presented works in three categories: Art Books and Illustration, Graphic Art, and Advertisement.
When the Second World War broke out, Latour was revolted by the armistice France signed with Germany, which he considered a humiliating capitulation. Ostensibly, he led a quiet life as a painter in Eygalières, returning to oil painting, which he had abandoned 20 years previously. At the age of 52, however, he decided to join his son Jacques who was fighting with the partisans of the French Résistance.Jacques participated in the actions of the S.O.E. and was in charge of organizing the connections with England and the airdrop of armed groups placed under the authority of Commander Buckmaster in London. In France, the Zone Sud, where Latour and his son resided, was commanded by Peter Churchill. (He was not related to Prime Minister Winston Churchill). In 1944, Jacques was arrested and deported to Dachau. He survived and became the curator of the Arles museums after the war. Latour managed to escape arrest thanks to an early warning and hid in Lyon in a hospital administered by a religious order. This forced retreat gave him time for reflection, meditation and produced in him a late awakening to religious faith.