Roger Vieillard

Surrealist Horse - Original Etching, 1946

1946

Roger Vieillard was born in Mans, France on February 9, 1907, and was classically educated in Paris. Besides being a noted international tennis player, he worked as a meteorologist in the army in 1930. In the early 1930s, he began to make wire sculptures, as Alexander Calder had done earlier and in 1934, he met Stanley William Hayter who showed him how to use the burin to create an active line on copper. He began working in the evenings at Atelier 17 and formed a close friendship with Hayter and printmaker Joseph Hecht. In 1931, he took a position with the Banque Nationale pour le Commerce et L’Industrie. In 1937, he opened his press with artist Georges Lecoq-Vallon and published his first of many illustrated books, Apollinaire’s Salomé. Vieillard married American artist Anita de Caro in 1938 and began working in his studio producing illustrated books while continuing to exhibit with Atelier 17. In 1940, he was conscripted into the army, working as a meteorologist in the French Army. Over the next 40 years, he continued to create prints, both as unique artworks and as illustrations for his own Livres d'artiste. In the early 1960s, he began to create plaster prints a technique that had been experimented with at Atelier 17 in the 1930s. He retired from the bank in 1967 and was elected president of the Société Peintres-Gravures Français in 1970. Vieillard created 332 prints between 1934 and 1989 and his work is represented in museums in France and the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Vieillard died in Paris on March 1, 1989.