?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
JEAN MICHEL FOLON (1934-2005) FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL DU FILM CANNES. 1979. 61x45 1/4 inches, 155x115 cm. Ets Saint Martin, Asnieres. Condition A: minor tears at lower left edge; minor crease in upper right image. Born in Belgium in 1934, Jean-Michel Folon attended architecture school, but abandoned that career in the 1960s, moving to New York and then Paris to work on his art. He quickly distinguished himself as a talented illustrator and was known for watercolor paintings that featured wide gradations of color and recurring symbolic figures with simple outlines. Two of the most frequent motifs in his work were a featureless, hat-wearing man with glowing eyes in a deserted urban landscape, and a bird alighting from an outstretched hand. While producing a large body of work in many mediums, such as watercolor, silkscreen, sculpture and glass, Folon is best remembered for his iconic posters and his animation for French television. With his friend, composer Michel Colombier, Folon created the credit titles for Antenne 2, the French public television station, which were broadcast from 1973 to 1984. Here, for the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, he uses the same little hat-wearing character as seen in the animated Antenne film and a complex twelve-color background gradient, which he obsessively supervised until it was printed to his satisfaction. In his surrealistic style, he transforms the hat into a movie screen with a "third eye" glowing in the forehead. Towards the end of his career, he moved to Monaco and devoted himself to sculpture and designing stamps and posters for Amnesty International and other human rights groups. Variety magazine lists this among "the top ten iconic Cannes posters throughout the years."
