Lithograph on velin d'Arches paper. Paper Size: 10 x 7.5 inches. Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued. Notes: From the album, Prints from the Mourlot Press, exhibition sponsored by the French Embassy, circulated by the Traveling Exhibition Service of the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution 1964-1965, 1964. Published by Fernand Mourlot, Paris, in collaboration with the Embassy of France, Washington, D.C., and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; printed by Mourlot Freres, Paris, October 27, 1964. Excerpted from the album, This exhibition is a manifestation of Franco-American friendship and we would be very happy if it is of interest to all those who visit it. I wish to thank Mrs. Annemarie Pope for proposing and organizing this exhibition of the work of the artists who have used our press. We are honored that Mr. Herve Alphand, Ambassador of France to the United States, and Mr. Edouard Morot-Sir, Cultural Counsellor at the French Embassy in New York, will sponsor this exhibition. I express to them my thanks and appreciation. As for the artists themselves, who executed the originals contained in this catalogue, I can only say simply, "Thank you." They are all friends. We would have liked to include not just the twenty-four illustrations in this small book, but many more. During the year 1963, we lost three great artists who were faithful friends of our press. Thanks to Mrs. Georges Braque, Mr. Louis Carre, and Mr. Edouard Dermit, who have been able to pay our respects to Georges Braque, Jacques Villon and Jean Cocteau. The great Henri Matisse is also with us, since Mrs. Du-thuit-Matisse and her brothers have allowed us to use an unpublished original lithograph. Thanks to them all for their generosity. -Fernand Mourlot. The lithography at Mourlot printing press by Jean Adhemar, Curator of prints at the Bibliotheque nationale. Acknowledgments, Fernand Mourlot has long been the acknowledged master printer of France in every field, from lithographs to fine books to posters. The unfailing quality of his work commands the respect of museums, collectors, and most important of all, the artists themselves. Every product of his workshop bears the mark of Mourlot's discipline and craft and can truly be called an ideal collaboration between artist and artisan. The result of years of thoughtful planning, this special exhibition presents an accurate portrait of the Mourlot Press. We are greatly indebted to Fernand Mourlot, who made the selection, supervised the production of the catalogue, and gave endless time and energy to the details of preparation. This album was finished in Paris on 27th october 1964. The original lithographs and the reproductions were printed on the presses of Mourlot. The Imprimerie Nationale, Director Andre Brignole, was responsible for the typography. The edition has been limited to MM examples on Velin d'Arches and CC on Velin de Rives, reserved for the artists, the staff and the friends of the Imprimerie Mourlot. PAUL JENKINS (1923-2012) was an American Abstract Expressionist painter. In the late 1940s, joining a wave of aspiring painters moving to New York, Mr. Jenkins used the G.I. Bill to study at the Art Students League and soon met Jackson Pollock and befriended Mark Rothko. In 1953 he resettled in Paris, but maintained a lifelong connection with New York. Early on he adopted a tactile, chance-driven method of painting that privileged almost every technique over brushwork. Dribbling paint Pollock-like onto loose canvasses, he allowed it to roll, pool and bleed, and he sometimes kneaded and hauled on the canvas - "as if it were a sail," he said once. His favorite tool for many years was an elegant ivory knife, which he used to guide the flow of paint. The billowy, undulating results could look like psychedelic landscapes or what Stuart Preston, reviewing his work in The New York Times in 1958, described as "Abstract Expressionist rococo." Influenced by the theories of Jung and by the visionary imagery of Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau, Mr. Jenkins described himself as an "abstract phenomenist," and from the 1960s on, all his paintings' titles began with the word "Phenomena." "I have conversations with them," he said of his paintings, "and they tell me what they want to be called." His work attracted collectors and museums in the United States, but he had a stronger following in Europe, where, with his flowing hair and beard - a friend said he looked like Charlton Heston's Moses - he seemed to embody an old-fashioned archetype of the avant-garde artist. In a 2009 review of work from the 1960s and '70s, Roberta Smith wrote in The Times that Mr. Jenkins's paintings were "more a popular idea of abstract art than the real thing" and "too gorgeous for their own good." William Paul Jenkins was born - during a lightning storm, according to his official biography - in Kansas City, Mo., on July 12, 1923. As a boy, he met both Thomas Hart Benton and Frank Lloyd Wright. (Wright suggested that he should think about a career in agriculture rather than art.) He worked weekends at a ceramics factory, where watching the master mold-maker's handling of shape and color, he said, had a profound effect on his ideas about painting. By the 1970s and '80s, his art career had provided him with a glamorous life, divided between France, where his work graced a Pierre Cardin boutique, and New York, where he kept an airy loft near Union Square that had previously belonged to Willem de Kooning. The first lady of France, Danielle Mitterrand, once visited the studio, and the party he gave for her was attended by guests like Paloma Picasso, Robert Motherwell and Berenice Abbott. In 1971, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Art organized a retrospective of Mr. Jenkins's work. But he got much more exposure in 1978, when his paintings had a starring role in the Paul Mazursky movie "An Unmarried Woman," in which Alan Bates plays a smoldering, heavily bearded Manhattan artist. The paintings supposedly done by the Bates character were actually his work. Mr. Jenkins spent weeks teaching Mr. Bates how to approximate his methods of paint-pouring and canvas-wrestling, a way of making art that he described as tempting fate. "I try to paint like a crapshooter throwing dice, utilizing past experience and my knowledge of the odds," he said in 1964. "It's a big gamble, and that's why I love it." In 2011, Paul Jenkins' painting, Puma Pass - Eye of the Storm, sold for $168,899 USD at Christie's London, setting a world record for the artist.