Ruine du Temple is an engraving from 1975 by the French artist Roger Vieillard. It is pencil signed, titled, and editioned 54/200. The reference is Guerin & Rault 590, state viii/viii. Ruine du Temple was printed by the artist on ivory wove Rives paper and the platemark measures 14-11/16 x 10-5/16 inches. An alternate title for this work is La destruction du Temple.
Vieillard revisited some of his early architectural engravings in the mid 1970s, essentially recreating them with subtle differences. The composition for Ruine du Temple is based on Chute du temple, a 1937 Atelier 17 engraving depicting the blinded Samson destroying the temple of the Philistines. In 1975, Vieillard engraved this version of that image, the major difference being the addition of an abstracted, running female figure (Delilah?) in the bottom right of the composition, replacing a nude female, seated and turned away from Samson. There is also a revised, simplified image of the god Dagon above the altar. Vieillard next engraved another version, a reprise linéaire, of this composition titled Moment architectural using only the exterior linear elements.
Roger Vieillard was born in Mans, France on 9 February 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 making wire sculptures, as Alexander Calder had done earlier and, in 1934, Vieillard 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, Vieillard took a position with the Banque Nationale pour le Commerce et l’Industrie. He opened his own press with artist Georges Lecoq-Vallon in 1937 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 own 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 forty years Vieillard continued to create prints, both as unique artworks and as illustrations for his own livres d'artiste. In the early 1960s he created plaster prints, a technique which had evolved at Atelier 17 in the 1930s. He retired from the bank in 1967 and was elected president of the Société Peintres-Gravures Francais 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.
Roger Vieillard died in Paris on 1 March 1989.
