Celle que J'amais seul m'aime encore.... from: Planches du Salut

Louis Marcoussis

The Cubist planes in this print are created only by lines, not shading. This is a pencil signed proof from an edition of 11 before the plate number was added to the lower left. In the portfolio "Planches du Salut" Marcoussis pays homage to some of his favorite writers: Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, Rimbaud, Shakespeare, Gerard de Nerval, and Apollinaire with the poems selected by the artist. The preface was written by Dada/Surrealist poet Tristan Tzara. The title of this work roughly translates to "The one I love still loves me.." and was the beginning of a poem.

Provenance: This impression was offered for sale by the William H. Schab Gallery, Inc, catalogue 62, item 69, page 97, illustrated. The catalogue entry states: "...in 1930 and 1931 Marcoussis executed suites of etchings for two books: Gérard de Nerval's 'Aurélia' and Tristan Tzara's 'Planches du Salut.' Dieter Koepplin in the exhibition catalogue 'Kubismus' comments that in these etchings Marcoussis' cubist forms 'tend toward a surrealist suggestiveness.' This tendency is apparent in the work of most important artists of this circle. Surrealist artists had found in turn new paths opened by the cubist idiom. In works such as the present, the flat transparent planes and rhythm of cubism with the empty spaces and dreamy mysterious shapes of surrealism."

Louis Marcoussis was born Ludwig Casimir Ladislas Markous in Warsaw, Poland on 14 November 1878. In 1901 he entered the Academy of Fine Arts of Kraków to study painting with Jan Grzegorz Stanislawski. In 1903 Markous moved to Paris, where he worked briefly under Jules Lefebvre at the Académie Julian and became a friend of Roger La Fresnaye and Robert Lotiron. The first time his work was selected for a major exhibition was for the 1905 Salon d'Automne and in subsequent years he continued to exhibit at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon des Tuileries.

In Paris he made his living by selling caricatures to satirical periodicals, including La Vie Parisienne and Le Journal. He frequented the cafés, such as the Rotonde, Cirque Médrano and the Ermitage, where he met Edgar Degas about 1906 and Braque, Picasso and Apollinaire in 1910. In 1907 Markous abandoned painting and when he began to paint again in 1910, he discarded his earlier Impressionist style to adopt the new Cubist idiom. About 1911, at the suggestion of Apollinaire, be began calling himself Marcoussis, the name of a village near Monthéry in the suburbs south of Paris. In 1912 the artist participated in the Salon de la Section d'Or at the Galerie de la Boétie in Paris. By this time his circle included Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Jean Metzinger and Max Jacob. Marcoussis served in the French army from 1914 to 1919, returning to Poland for a visit after his demobilization.

Marcoussis exhibited in 1921 at the gallery of Der Sturm in Berlin with Albert Gleizes and Jacques Villon. He was given his first one-man show in Paris at Galerie Pierre in 1925. This was followed by solo exhibitions in 1928 at the Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels and at the Galerie Georges Bernheim in Paris in 1929. Between the years 1934 and 1935, he stayed for several months in the United States, where one-man shows of his prints opened at The Arts Club of Chicago in 1934 and M. Knoedler and Co. in New York in 1935. Marcoussis worked almost exclusively in graphics from 1930 to 1937 and he illustrated a number of books including Alcools by Apollinaire and Aurélia by Gerard de Nerval.

A retrospective of his prints took place at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1936. The artist traveled in England and Italy in 1938, and during the following year was given a solo exhibition at the London Gallery. In 1940, as the German army advanced, Marcoussis left Paris for Cusset, near Vichy, where he died on October 22, 1941.