James Coignard

Biography of James Coignard

James COIGNARD was born in 1925 in Tours. After a stint in Paris during his childhood, he began a career in the civil service in the 1940s.

In 1948, he was transferred to Villefranche sur Mer, where he enrolled at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Nice. It was there that he honed his skills, comparing his aspirations with those of others, and opening his eyes to a whole realm of art that had been unknown to him until then.

His encounters with Matisse, Braque, and Chagall influenced him, while also providing him with the opportunity to understand, as early as the 1950s, the strength of the painter's personal quest in relation to the artwork itself.

It was in Sweden that he exhibited for the first time, in Malmö, and left the civil service in the same year, 1953.
He set up his studio in Beaulieu sur Mer in 1956, where he met Henri Goetz, the future inventor of the carborundum engraving technique, which would soon become one of Coignard's specialties, offering him a perfect means of expressing his artistic aspirations.

During these same years, as he also turned to sculpture, he met young Spanish painters from the emerging generation, such as Clavé. Their expressions, abstract and committed, in the tradition of Antoni Tapies, resonated with Coignard's work.

In 1964, he received the Dorothy Gould Young Painting Prize in Nice, while at the same time exhibiting in the United States for the first time. By the late 1960s, his work was recognized both nationally (he became a member of the National Fine Arts Jury) and internationally (he received commissions in both Canada and Czechoslovakia).

Today, he is one of the greatest masters of printmaking. His work, which combines the "swelling" of carborundum with the incision of engraving, is one of the most impressive of our time, as if with James Coignard, the art of printmaking had taken a new flight, one of emotional relief.

© Natacha PELLETIER for PASSION ESTAMPES