Pochoir Prints

Pages from the book Art Deco: The Golden Age of Graphic Art and Illustration (image from amazon.co.uk)

I’ve been given a copy of the book Art Deco: The Golden Age of Graphic Art and Illustration by Michael Robinson and Rosalind Ormiston which has lavish illustrations, many of them labelled “pochoir print”. The image above shows pages from the book with two 1920s pochoir prints by George Barbier.

Curious to know what a pochoir print is and how it is made, I went on an internet hunt and here’s what I found:

What is a Pochoir Print?

See more detailed information in the sources I read:

Pochoir is the French term for stencil. I learned that a pochoir print is painted by hand using many (20, 30, 50, …) stencils to build up shapes, tones, and intensity in multiple layers, one over another, in a pre-determined sequence. Even if the same stencil sequence is used time and again with the same paints, no two prints will be identical because they are handmade! Pochoir prints typically reproduced paintings for expensive art books or to hang on walls.

The images of stages in the pochoir process shown below are reproduced from the book Traité d’enluminure d’art au pochoir by Jean Saudé, 1925. I found them in the French version of The Art of Pochoir at PochoirWorld:

After 32 manipulations – the final print!

The final print has 32 layers of stencilling! The artist of the original painting was Beauzée-Reynaud.

Pochoir Ateliers

The pochoir technique was popular during the late 19th and early 20th century, especially the Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods when prints were produced in batches of @ 300 by sweatshop-like ateliers in Paris, France.

Atelier Daniel Jacomet et Fils (from PochoirWorld)

A master artist-craftsperson would view an original painting and figure out how to reproduce it with stencils. He or she would plan a series of stencils to be cut in thin metal by artisans. When the stencils were completed, each stencil layer would be painted on a print by a team of painters. The workshop in the above photograph shows the cramped work tables and the piles of prints.

The Firestone Library at Princeton University provides an example of a metal pochoir stencil that is part of its collection:

The Firestone Library’s metal pochoir stencil

The above stencil was used in printing the 1925 book Traité d’enluminure d’art au pochoir by Jean Saudé. Saudé had a number of prestigious pochoir ateliers in Paris. His book was the definitive guide to the pochoir process.

Another old photograph from PochoirWorld shows a woman applying paint to a stencil with a large mop brush:

Artists such as Picasso and Matisse commissioned ateliers to produce limited edition pochoir prints of some of their paintings.

The old ateliers were labour intensive and were gradually overtaken by modern colour reproduction, photography, and digital technology.

However, pochoir art is still very much alive, read on…

Contemporary Pochoir Art

Stencils (pochoirs) have become popular in modern art and, over the past 20 years, in street art. See for example Banksy.

Here’s a YouTube video of S.P.Stencil creating a contemporary, monochrome pochoir with 17 layers:

Notice the artist lines up reference marks cut in each stencil to locate it in the correct position (there’s a little square cut into each corner of the stencil).