Garden Fish just finished scoring and editing a documentary about the life of master printmak
er Aldo Crommelynck.
Aldo Crommelynck was a master printmaker and midwife to the genius of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Georges Braque as well as younger artists such as David Hockney, Richard Hamilton, Jasper Johns and Jim Dine.
Crommelynck was much more than a mere technician. While he had an absolute command of intaglio, aquatint and etching techniques, he was also endlessly inventive and open to new ideas. Tall and gaunt, with piercing eyes and long, spindly fingers stained with ink and nicotine, he cut a distinctive and eccentric figure. Artists adored him and he understood them. His patience was endless, and he remained calm through the most tempestuous tantrums.
The American artist Jim Dine acknowledged his influence in his painting The Crommelynck Gate and a bronze sculpture of the same name featuring a pair of gates bedecked with hammers, wrenches, clamps and other engraving paraphernalia. In 2007 Dine held a one-man tribute show at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris entitled Aldo et Moi.
But Crommelynck was best known for his work with Picasso. He and his younger brother Piero collaborated sporadically with the artist for some 20 years and produced all his prints after 1961. In August 1963 they established a workshop with a small printing press in a former bakery at Mougins, not far from the Riviera villa where Picasso and his wife Jacqueline had moved two years earlier. An extraordinarily fruitful partnership ensued. Between 1963 and his death in 1973 Picasso produced some 750 intaglio plates, virtually doubling his lifetime’s production as a printmaker.