Click image for BBB rating
See our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Spaightwood Galleries, Inc.
120 Main Street, Upton MA 01568-6193
You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
We blog regularly on Facebook and announce special events and special sales on both sites.
Last updated: 7/11/2017
Gérard Titus-Carmel (French, b. 1942): Drawings
Titus-Carmel is one of the most written-about contemporary French artists, having been the subject of studies by Jacques Derrida, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Gilbert Lascault, Werner Spies, Jean Pierre Faye, Denis Roche, Jean Louis Schefer, and many others. He is also one of the most widely shown artists of his generation (b. 1942), having received over 150 one–person shows at museums and galleries including The Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris (1971), the 1972 and 1984 Venice Biennales, the Royal College of Art in London (1972), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1973), the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels (1975), the Centre Georges Pompidou / Musée National d'Art Moderne (1978), the Museums of Dusseldorf (1979), Bielefeld (1980), Kassel (1980), Nuremberg (1981), Oslo (1981), Lubceck (1981), Les Sables d'Olonne (1981), Luxemburg, Calais, (1984), Nice, Carcassonne, and Lille (1985), Quebec (1986), Budapest, and Châteauroux (1987), Caen (1989), Montaubon and Avignon (1990), Tokyo (1991), Suite Grünewald (Collège des Bernardins, Paris, 2009).
In addition, the French Cultural Ministry also organized touring exhibits at the Instituts Français of Stuttgart, Hamburg, Munich, and Bonn (1985), Damascus, Aleppo, Alexandria, Cairo (1990-1991), and Palermo, Naples, and Rome (1991). His works are in the permanent collections of over 90 public institutions including the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (N.Y. and Paris), the Chicago Art Institute, the Bibliotheque National and the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and many others. Museums have twice organized complete retrospectives of his prints (in 1979 and 1991), each time publishing catalogues raisonnés. He has been the subject of seven films, including one produced by the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou and RTL Télévision, Luxembourg, and innumerable books, essays, exhibition catalogues, and reviews. Among his awards are first prize at the 2nd International Exposition of Original Drawings at Rijeka (1970), the Grand Prize at the 6th International Print Biennial at Krakow (1976), and the Jurors’ Special Award of Honor at the 1977 World Print Competition in San Francisco. Titus-Carmel is deservedly one of the best-regarded painters, draftsmen, and printmakers in the world today
UN ... [DE]SSIN. Original color chalk and ink drawing, 1967. One of Titus' rare early drawings. See Machida 14-18 for prints executed in 1966-67 similar in style to this. Signed and dated top right, obscurely titled beneath the glove top left. Although not, strictly speaking, a member of the Pop Art movement, Titus-carmel shared with Johns and Rauschenberg (and Willem de Kooning) an interest in taking common thinngs apart to see how they worked and in taking common themes and reinventing them. Image size: 256x208mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.
MYSTE[RE] ... [O]BJECT. Original color drawing, 1967. One of Titus' rare early drawings. See Machida 14-18 for prints executed in 1966-67 similar in style to this. Signed and dated left center, obscurely titled behind the central figure over the chair. Image size: 256x208mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.
COUS[SIN] ... D'AIR. Original pen and ink drawing with watercolor on Cupid's arms, 1967. One of Titus' rare early drawings. See Machida 14-18 for prints executed in 1966-67 similar in style to this. Signed and dated lower right, obscurely titled behind the floating island. Image size: 270x210mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.
Composition avec tombe (série étude). Original Mine de plumb, drawing, 1969. One of Titus-Carmel's early works, part of a series on imaginary constructions, here a tomb for 3 Irish writers (lower level, left to right: Sean O'Casey, Brendan Behan, and Liam O'Flahert) and 3 French philosophers (upper level: Victor Segalen, Ernst Renan, and Theodore Botrel). See Machida 19-24 for prints executed in 1969 similar in style to this and see Machida 27-33 for the series of 7 Constructions possibles executed in 1970 similar in theme to this drawing. Signed and dated lower right. Image size: 440x640mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.
Dessin I. Original mixed media drawing combining mine de plomb and crayon de couleur (graphite and green, lime, blue, and purple conte crayons), this drawing defines "the idea of a form" rather than simply "the veracity" of the form itself as Titus explores the relationship between the line (the stroke) and the "signed, scratched surface." For Titus-Carmel, "Drawing is work on the sign. The miage is really drawn, when it is designated, it is discened because of its sign." Singed and dated in pencil bottom center. Illustrated as plate 19 of Titus-Carmel, catalogue of an exhibition at Galerie Buccholz in Munich in 1973. Signed and dated "Janu. 1973" in pencil bottom center. Image size: 519x744mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information 000.
Suite Italienne: Guido Cavalcanti (Bielefeld 1980 n. 120). Mine de plumb, sanguine, and papier calque, 1976. One of Titus-Carmel's early masterpieces, Guido Cavalcanti (named for a poet who was one of Dante's friends and rivals) was shown in a major retrospective of Titus' drawings held in 1980 at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld and illustrated in the catalogue of the show. It is about showing and concealing. Image size: 960x650mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.
Eclats: Petit Chrome 1 (see (Reperes 1, p. 32). Mixed media, 1982. Combining mine de plomb, encre de chine, crayon sanguine, and crayon de couleur (graphite pencil, sanguine, conte crayon, and ink). Between 1980 and 1982, Titus-Carmel worked on a series of large mixed-media drawings based upon reflections in a lamp. The series was first shown at Galerie Maeght in Paris and was featured in the first issue of repères: cahiers d'art contemporain, published by Galerie Maeght and devoted to Titus' Eclats & Caparacons 1980/1982. Our drawing, reprodcued in black and white, serves as the frontispiece to the catalogue. The series of Eclats consisited of 3 sets of 10 drawings ranging from large to very, very large and three small etchings (Machida 128-130). Signed, titled, and dated center bottom. Image size: 655x800mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.
Spaightwood Galleries owns almost every print Titus-Carmel has made since 1975 (and a few before that), 5 paintings, 7 watercolors, 3 collages, and 6 drawings. If you are interested in a piece we have not yet illustrated on our web-site, please call or e-mail us (see below for details). In 1992 Spaightwood published Gérard Titus-Carmel: Forging the Real. With 43 illustrations, an insightful essay, a list of one-person exhibitions, and a full but selective bibliography of writings about Titus-Carmel, it’s the best available introduction to his work (up to 1992) in English. Available for only Please call or email for current pricing information.00 plus shipping via priority mail for Please call or email for current pricing information.20.
We also have copies of the 1992 Catalogue Raisonne of his prints published in Tokyo by the Machida Museum with text in Japanese and French and illustrations of every print Titus had made up until the date of its publication (about 200 works). Three thousand copies were printed, and almostall sold in Tokyo. Rare in Europe and America. Mint copies availabe for Please call or email for current pricing information.
Spaightwood Galleries, Inc.
To purchase, call us at 1-800-809-3343 (1-508-529-2511 in Upton MA & vicinity) or send an email to spaightwood@gmail.com.
We accept AmericanExpress, DiscoverCard, MasterCard, and Visa.
We also accept wire transfers and paypal.
For directions and visiting information, please call. We are, of course, always available over the web and by telephone (see above for contact information). Click the following for links to past shows and artists. For a visual tour of the gallery, please click here. For information about Andy Weiner and Sonja Hansard-Weiner, please click here. For a list of special offers currently available, see Specials.
All works are sold with an unconditional guarantee of authenticity (as described in our website listing).
Go back to the top of this page.
Visiting hours: Saturday 10:00 am to 5:00 pm and Sunday noon to 6:00 pm and other times by arrangement.
Please call to confirm your visit. Browsers and guests are welcome.
