Jean Michel Folon

Jean-Michel Folon was an illustrator, painter and sculptor.  He died last month.

Folon's pictures owed something to the techniques of pointillisme, though he often worked in watercolour wash. There was an airy, and in some cases surreal, aspect to his apparently simple studies of stylised figures and animals.
 

ジャン・ミシェル・フォロンが1966年オリベッティの為にデザインした。

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from the telegraph

Jean-Michel Folon, who has died on Thursday aged 71, was an illustrator, painter and sculptor whose work stretched from drawings in The New Yorker to a mural at Waterloo station, and from idents for a television channel to statuary.

Folon's pictures owed something to the techniques of pointillisme, though he often worked in watercolour wash. There was an airy, and in some cases surreal, aspect to his apparently simple studies of stylised figures and animals (birds and men in hats were recurring motifs).

Until a major exhibition of his watercolours and engravings at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (and a subsequent show in Florence) in 1990, and a retrospective in Japan 10 years ago, he was primarily regarded as an illustrator for magazines and book covers.

He was popular as a poster artist and sold many prints, acquatints and engravings, but for much of the latter part of his life he concentrated on sculpture and was responsible for a number of large installations in bronze and marble in Brussels and Lisbon.

Jean-Michel Folon was born at Uccle, on the outskirts of Brussels, on March 1 1934. His intended career was architecture, but he abandoned his studies and moved to Paris. For five years, he drew every day, but could find no interest in his work in France, and began sending his work to American magazines such as Horizon, Esquire and The New Yorker.

After some success, he decided to move to America in 1960, and his work received sufficient notice for an exhibition of his pictures to be held in Paris four years later. During the late 1960s, Folon began a long association with Italy, where he became friendly with the writer Giorgio Soavi; his connections with literature were reinforced when, in 1967, Olivetti commissioned him to produce illustrations for books by Kafka and Ray Bradbury.

Two years later, he had his first major exhibition in New York, and in 1970 had his first shows in Japan (in Tokyo and Osaka) and Italy (in Milan); he also represented Belgium at the 35th Venice Biennale.

In 1968, Folon had made his first attempt at a mural, for the French Pavilion at the Milan Trienniale, and Paysage, commissioned by Olivetti, was unveiled at Waterloo station in 1975.

The previous year, his painting Magic City, which was a colossal 165m2, had been produced to decorate part of a new underground system for Brussels. It was a form in which he continued to work, producing large-scale pieces in Milan and Rome in 1998.

Folon added to this public work a growing number of sculptures, a form in which he had been working for many years. Among the most noticeable examples are those in Brussels: Le Messager, at the Parc Royal; Voler, at the airport; and the enormous Le Ville en marche.

He never abandoned illustration, continuing to produce work for editions of books by Jorge Luis Borges, HG Wells and Lewis Carroll, and his prints - which were usually engravings or drypoint - continued to sell well.

During the 1970s, his cartoon idents for the French television station Antenne 2 were well-known.

From the 1980s Folon also diversified into stage design - notably for operas by Puccini and by the French novelist Michel Tournier - produced stained glass windows and experimented with tapestries, often using Aubusson's designs.

In recent years he had been in poor health, but he continued to show at the Guy Pieters Gallery at St Paul de Vence.

Folon is survived by a son and daughter from his first marriage.