PAUL JACOULET, 1902-1960
Paul Jacoulet was born in Paris in 1902 taken to Japan by his parents in 1906. At the age of eleven he began painting.
He accepted a position with the French embassy in Tokyo in 1920, which took him on his first trip to the South Sea. After resigning due to illness, Jacoulet pursued his art full-time from 1921.
Jacoulet took many of the subjects for his woodblock prints from the South Sea, but also from travels to Korea or Manchuria and from Japan of course. Most of Jacoulet's designs show people either in groups of two or three or as individual portraits. While his designs of the pre-war period, reflects a certain realism, the post-war woodblock prints show scenes that are a product of fantasy.
Around 1931, Jacoulet began to work with Shizuya Fujikake learning the craft of woodblock printmaking. In 1933, he established the Jacoulet Institute of Prints and by the next year, he began publishing his own designs. In 1934, Jacoulet produced his first woodblock print. He worked with professional carvers and printers, including fine artist and woodblock carver Kazuo Yamagishi, to assist him in producing his first woodblock prints. The technical requirements on craftsmanship for a Jacoulet print were so high that he could cooperate only with the very best engravers and printers.
Jacoulet published most of his prints himself. He tried to sell by a kind of subscription scheme. The number of prints pulled from one design depended on the number of subscriptions he had.
Jacoulet used elaborate techniques for the creation of his prints. This included all the known deluxe features like embossing, lacquers, micas or metal pigments. And he experimented with new techniques like powdered semi-precious stones. For his prints he used special watermarked papers from Kyoto instead of the normal Japanese washi paper. One of his assistants later remembered that they sometimes used up to 60 blocks . The format of Jacoulet prints is usually rather large.The known number of Paul Jacoulet prints is 166.
After World War II the art work of Jacoulet became rapidly famous. Among his admirers and collectors were General Douglas MacArthur, Greta Garbo, Pope Pius XII and Queen Elizabeth II.During his last years, his health got worse and worse. But Jacoulet continued to produce woodblock prints up until the time of his death in 1960. He died of diabetes at the age of 58.