Georges Goursat

Poster artist, caricaturist, Chronicler society man, Illustrator and late writer, Georges Goursat known as Sem inaugurates in 1900, a Parisian career which is prolonged today in sale-rooms to New York or in Japan. It was born with Périgueux in 1863 and died in Paris in 1934.

Life and works of SEM

All its life, Sem gave graphic answers to various situations of communication, which go from the press to publicity while passing by the creation of albums which will be its trademark. It accompanies the change by the supports to the turning of the century, renewing the life of the images, creating and using of new practices, multiplying the supports of images like the Publicité on the place of sale. In an appetite of creation which does not embarrass borders arts applied - plastic arts , it contributes to the rise of new uses, accompanying the beginnings by what will become the visual communication. From this point of view, it belongs entirely to its time, which tries at this beginning of century to make a synthesis of arts and to make communicate industry and artistic expression.

Sem becomes Parisian in 1900, it has thirty-seven years and control perfectly its style; its signature is fixed, Georges Goursat became SEM , in homage to Amédée of Noah says Cham of which he admires work. If it moves away from the satirical tradition and the Cham Master, it is for an original treatment of the caricature, halfway between portrait in situ and portrait load . A very readable synthetic representation: flat tints of color encircled of black, use of funds coloured with character in foreground, form an effective and esthetic vocabulary. Flat tints of color and features of nervous contour will replace little by little the characters Lilliputians with giant head, inherited the caricatural tradition.

The press is a required passage of all the draftsmen. After Périgueux, its birthplace, Bordeaux and Marseilles, where it knew to show the local figures, women and men of little , workers of the streets, Sirs of the bar , in review in the local newspapers, Sem is confronted with Parisian life. Autodidact, it is his success near the readers of the local press and the passion of the albums of Bordeaux which give him legitimacy to carry on its way. He benefits from the golden age of the caricature, and finds in the drawing of the silhouettes, the object of his work. He will bring to the caricature the esthetic guarantee of the kind which one could define as a art without art . The Parisian press will accommodate its drawings with interest. They will find echo at a fond of delicacies public of images, portraits of personalities. At spring 1900, Sem arrives in full World Fair. Paris intends to make the demonstration of its power, the day before the First World War. The colonial exposure, window of a rich France of a broad empire and a flourishing industry which can contribute to the rise of arts, occupies all the Parisian ones.

Sem will embark in this effervescence, and will contribute to forge the myths of the beginning of the 20th century: faith in the modernity and with the conquests of progress. It is with the album Racing that it will conquer Paris.

1900-1914

The world of the races gives to Sem its passport for the fashionable life, the observation field of all its production. 1900 with 1914, 14 albums will leave the notebooks of Sem. Sem follows the rich and fashionable company in its territories; it will produce in a few months the gallery of portraits which provide its models to Proust, Sacha Guitry or Jules Renard.

Its first album, however singular leading object, will propel it in the foreground of the fashionable scene. It will find there the support of its work, its customers and her friends, in a paradoxical way. This carefree company the conduit in all the places with the mode, coffees and theaters Parisian, beaches with Deauville, casino with Monte Carlo. The albums, drawn with very a small number of specimens, one hundred to five hundreds, are sold by the printer.

In 1909: the success of Sem is established with Paris, it organizes street Royale with Roubille a Diorama, installation sails very about it at the beginning of the century. Anonymous silhouettes cut out in reinforcing plate, animals, horses, harnessed cars form a procession on the way for the races.

1914-1918

War correspondent for the Newspaper , its writings gathered in a Peking on the face , will have the naivety of tone of the hero of Stendhal to Waterloo, and the sincere emotion which will surprise a company which sends its men to the battle field, as with the last spectacle with the mode. The illustrations which accompany these texts return to a traditional drawing, treated with the charcoal and raised pencil of watercolour. Sem will see face only what the Grande Muette wants to let to him see: however the spectacle of the men and the abused animals, moves it. One will be able to reproach him his lack of strength to denounce the living conditions of the trenches, when artists engaged in the war criticize the butchery of 1914-18 violently. But the pencil of Sem is put at the service of a palpable sincere emotion still today. In 1918, it will give 68 courtroom sketches of the lawsuit Bolo-Pasha.

1918-1934

The shortly after the war, Sem will take again its notebooks and will observe a company in change: the car replaced the horses, the dresses of the women and the behaviors of the men changed, the jazz, the tango make irruption in Paris which seeks to become again capital of the pleasures, turning the back on the horrors of the war. The fairy electricity changes the life of the Parisian ones. New figures occupy the scene, industrialists, sportsmen. Sem returns count in the albums entitled from there the new world ; in parallel it publishes the Night round . The centers of the artistic life move towards Montparnasse and Montmartre. Sem is done less present, on the artistic scene. However its participation in the living room of the Spider animated by Gus Bofa, attaches it at a community of young artists of return of the face, who will form the European avant-garde. Sem will be there exposed on several occasions confirming that it still counts among the artists of its time.

In 1927, Sem publishes its last album, White Bottom . On the end of its life, it will multiply the voyages in England. It will have delivered about thirty albums, composing the saga of a medium which will have adopted it, but there knew to remain remote.

He will die in 1934, greeted by the whole of the press like an artist and a man of spirit which will have marked one definitively completed time at a few years of the second world war.

Comprehensive approach

One discovers today, under the fixed figure of caricaturist society man who was Sem, a remarkable artist, even if Sem claimed neither to be a caricaturist, nor artist. Near to the English artists ``craftsman-artist' `, who assume the design and the manufacture of their works, Sem follows the manufacture of the albums attentively. Starting from a very excavated work, graphic research, assemblies, foldings, joinings, it produces the original drawing, whose Cocteau said: It is beautiful as all work where unites labor and spontaneousness . They are the characteristics of the work of Sem. The apparent facility of its layout is contradicted by the observation of its copies or the studies, whose repentances reveal the recovery; one needed the sharp-edged eye of the artist to operate rigorous selections before final pullings. The same care is taken to the realization of the albums; he works with craftsmen esthètes; he buys itself paper, for economic reasons on the one hand, but also esthetic. He is surrounded in his work of professionals meticulous person, of which the colourist Jean Saudé, colourist and master craftsman illuminator, who produces his stencil key sets, but also those of Rodin, Sucès, Devambez.

Press

Parallel to its albums, Sem benefitted very largely from the golden age of the illustration in the press. In Paris, he collaborates regularly in the Journal , the Gaulois , the Illustration , the Figaro and the Excelsior . He holds for the Journal reports illustrated on subjects far away from the topicality and the policy. Its discretion on the great societal debates like the Affaire Dreyfus does not prevent it from delivering through its chronicles, thus for Turkey, another image that the picturesque one awaited after Pierre Loti. Sem is not an analyst, his glance does not intend to change the world, but to show it such as it feels it. Its contemporaries did not complain any; the historians of the press will be for their expenses, unless seeking in Sem a witness of the history of manners.

Posters

The advertizing poster has already its Masters when Sem produces its first posters. Chéret, Cappiello, Mucha defined guns and formed the taste of the public. Sem will simplify graphics, taking again the synthetic style inaugurated by Toulouse-Lautrec, which privileges the gesture on the decorative aspect.

Publicity

Sem knew to find styles very different and to adapt its drawing to meet the needs for the advertizing communication. It can direct its production with the service of a sales point and uses the graphic narration, constant or not by the text, with spirit. This capacity of plastic adaptation was worth to him to be renewed until in the last years of its life.

Books

Sem had tardily an activity of illustrator and writer, where it knew to give a tone of chronicler far from the agreed accounts and picturesque awaited in this kind. Its publications: the Night round (Beech, 1923), the Cathedral of Rheims (Plon, 1926), a Beijing on the Face (Lafitte, 1927), are accounts significant, and as incisive as the drawings crunched on the sharp one of Sem. It illustrated the Rounds of Leather of Courteline. One finds many drawings of Sem in various works published post-war period: In the world where is been mistaken (Beech, 1926), Hier in Paris of max Aghion, préf. of Francis Carco (Marchot 1940), special issue on the caricature of the review Arts and trades graphic 1932, special issue (29) of the magazine Crapouillot on the Beautiful Time (1955), and more recently: Bordeaux, art and the wine (the chimerical horizon, 1995).

In 1979 is appeared with the ED. Fanlac, Périgueux, SEM by Madeleine Bonnelle and Marie-Jose Méneret, a largely illustrated biography which one does not find unfortunately any more but in library. The book is again available near the Fanlac editions to Périgueux: new edition entirely re-examined in 1990, ISBN 2-86577-144-X

SEM and its contemporaries

All along its life, it accompanies the successive movements by creation. Animated of a great curiosity, it is attentive with the irruption of new, which they are the contributions of photography, the cinema, the mode. No sporting exploit, no innovation or artistic creation leaves it indifferent; its production will nourish topicality unceasingly. Its multiple interests and its curiosity make him cross different universes, that it can keep remotely. Paul Berthelot, journalist and critical will say of him in the foreword of the Album of Bordeaux: ``It hates servilities, the fold of the trade, the ``Mister artist' `, it displeases to him to cause proceeded with the indifferent ones or the jealous laymen to distill epithets of art….The tepid shower of the compliments inspires to him only by the slow or sorry smiles. It with the air, in its English correction, of an elegance pinch, small a sportsman to which a punter would vainly try to tear off the pipe of the day. It is modest and a silencer. ' `It will remain foreign in art with the cubism and any movement made up, even if it feels near to the surrealist ones. Heir to Chéret, related to Cappiello, friend of the ``painter society man' `Boldini, near to Helleu and Abel Faivre, Sem is maintained in a very singular way on a line at the same time heiress of the 19th century and integral, sometimes anticipating in a personal way the contributions of the 20th century. Sem will cross, during its thirty years passed on the artistic scene, the figures which will make rock the century in modernity, and will share with these celebrities the changes of her time, which it is about the artistic world (Cocteau, Foujita, Rodin), of the mode (Coco Chanel, Paul Poiret), of the theater (Mounet-Sully, Guitry, Brasseur, Sardou, Rostand), of the literature (Colette, Jules Renard, Valéry, Tristan Bernard). With the image of an elder sound and Cham model, nothing of what surrounded it left it indifferent. The sporting life, which will become a true fact of company, the new, the original figures captivate it, as enter other its attachment testifies some to Santos-Dumont.

Conclusion

The work of Sem sticks so much to a time that it cannot make direction seems it out of a contextualisation, from where its aspect of testimony over one completed time. It however develops an internal coherence which can be read through this will to see and to include/understand the spirit of its time, through those which marked it and worked. Paradoxically, the presence of a prone and a subjective glance which is never extracted from the things seen, is an eminently modern position. The position of the caricaturist in the middle of the representation, which appears by the many self-portraits, indicates the omnipresence of the author, animated by an almost panoptical will to seize reality, without melting itself there. This device places the production of Sem in very contemporary problems. No separation enters the artist, his production, and the conditions of its diffusion. Sem represents the model of a singular trajectory: that of a creator who composes with artistic reality of his time. Far from the illusion romantic of a work to be defended, atypical in the operated choices, it brought to the tuck pattern and the caricature an artistic dimension, and changed the statute of the caricature by moving the horizon of waiting of the public with regard to this kind.

article by Francoise Beauchamps, Paris 2006

External bonds

site information artist

Random links: