Cassigneul, Jean-Pierre, La Curieuse, 1991

1991

Original lithograph in color on Arches paper for Toquades by Françoise Sagan, Paris, Mazo Lebouc S.A. Éditions, 1991, pl. 8

59 x 42 cm

Numbered in pencil lower left of 200, signed by the artist in pencil lower right

Catalogue raisonné : Lebouc et Takahashi 8

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In 1991, author Françoise Sagan published Toquades, a collection of eight texts exploring a character’s love affairs, each with a portrait of a mistress. Illustrator Jean-Pierre Cassigneul accompanies these stories with numbered and signed full-page lithographs. 230 copies of the book were printed on Arches vellum, with the text published by Imprimerie Nationale. Of the 230 copies, 20 are numbered and accompanied by two rejected plates, signed by the artist, while 180 copies are numbered from 21 to 200, and a further 30, hors commerce, up to XXX.

In each text, Sagan highlights a different mistress, and Cassigneul’s illustration doesn’t just depict these women: it embodies the iconography of a particular character trait, a flaw, that both seduced the character and led to the breakup. Through this collaboration between writer and artist, each lithograph becomes a visual vision of the flaw that shapes the dynamics of love, illustrating the paradox between attraction and disillusionment.

“I left her the day I found her bent over again, in front of a lock, which was my living room lock. I was supposed to be chatting there with an old friend (whom I’d left for a moment to look for a book) and she was all the more bent over as she tried to find me there. I patted her on the shoulder, she turned around and realized quite quickly. It was her last indiscretion (…)”(1)

The book also includes two color lithographs, a bandeau and a cul-de-lampe.

(1) Françoise Sagan, “La Curieuse”, Toquades, 1991

About the author

Jean-Pierre Cassigneul (born 1935)

Jean-Pierre Cassigneul has built up a personal body of work on the bangs of contemporary artistic circles and preoccupations. Women, saturated-colored gardens in bloom in the heart of summer, and the seaside are among the subjects that have most captured his attention. Mostly alone, in profile, elegantly dressed, wearing a hat, his figures evoke Verlaine’s famous lines about women “who are, each time, neither quite the same nor quite another” (Poèmes saturniens, 1866).

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