Alone is an aquatint from 1972 by French artist, Michel Mathonnat. It is pencil signed and editioned 52/175. Alone is from the suite of eight prints, Black is Beautiful, created to accompany the poem Black Woman by Léopold Sédar Senghor. The suite was published by Transworld Art. It was printed at Atelier Rigal in Fontenay-Aux-Roses, France on Rives BFK wove paper. The preferred edition of twenty-five, numbered I-XXV, included a ninth print.
According to Wikipedia, Léopold Sédar Senghor was a Senegalese poet, politician and cultural theorist who, for two decades, served as the first president of Senegal between 1960 and 1980. Ideologically an African socialist he was the major theoretician of Négritude. Senghor was also the founder of the Senegalese Democratic Bloc party. Senghor was the first African elected as a member of the Académie française. He won the 1985 International Nonino Prize in Italy and is regarded by many as one of the most important African intellectuals of the 20th century.
Michel Mathonnat, painter, sculptor, and printmaker, was born in Moulins, France in 1944. He began painting at the age of sixteen years old and he studied at the l'école des Beaux Arts in Moulins between 1965 and 1967. His courses included design and printmaking, as well as painting under Alexander Bonnier. In 1967, he continued his studies in etching and engraving at the Rigal workshops in Fontenay-aux-Roses and Cadaquès, where he was introduced to several poets and writers whose works he would later illustrate, among them Jean Cassou.
His first book Bonheur du jour illustrating unpublished poems by Jean Cassou was published in 1969 by the Bibliophile associates “Les Impénitents.” In 1970, Mathonnat was commissioned by Alex Rosenberg to create a suite of nine engraving to accompany Leopold Sédar Senghor’s poem Black Woman. The suite, Black is Beautiful, led to Mathonnat’s recurring theme of nudes presented is a state of solitude. This theme carried over in sculpture once he began working in bronze in 1975, after apprenticing at the Venturi Arte Foundry in Bologna.
Mathonnat’s creative output includes over 300 prints, including engraving, lithographs, etching and mezzotint. He has an extensive exhibition history and he illustrated books of poetry by Jean Chaudier and Paul Verlaine. He also created three collaborative books with the poet Jean-Pierre Bigeault, the first in 2009, Femmes de Papier, which featured color engravings combined with collage and, the second in 2016, Elles, featuring seven engravings with collage, and the third in 2018, Jeu de Dames, featuring seven engraving after line drawings.
