Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, November 2, 2022: Henri-Georges Adam, a French sculptor, engraver (#1689)

Henri-Georges Adam (1904 – 1967) was a French engraver and non-figurative sculptor of the École de Paris, who was also involved in the creation of numerous monumental tapestries. His work in these three areas is regarded as among the most extensive of the twentieth century.

Henri-Georges Adam was born in Paris to a father from Picardy and mother from Saint-Malo. During his childhood he spent his summers in Saint-Malo and Saint-Servan. In 1918, after attending a watchmaking school, Adam started working the studio of his father, a jeweler and goldsmith in the Marais district of Paris, where he learned to carve and later to engrave.
Training and education

In 1925 Adam took evening classes at a drawing school in Montparnasse and after a stint at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1926, became a drawing professor of the Ville de Paris. Beginning in 1928, Adam began to make satirical sketches and political caricatures. "His spirit of cynical and apocalyptic derision is of the same nature as that of Rouault illustrating Miserere de Guerre. Anarchist, pacifist, antimilitarist, Adam reverses all taboos. He does not care about the myths of his country, of his family or his religion", notes Waldemar George.

In 1934, Adam got involved with engraving, etching, the use of the burin and the environment of the surrealists, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard. He made his first exhibit in 1934, with a preface by Jean Cassou in 1936 after which he began his violently impressionistic engravings entitled, Désastres de la guerre, in response to the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, Adam joined the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, where he met painters Maurice Estève, Alfred Manessier, Édouard Pignon, and Árpád Szenes. He took part, along with Picasso, Matisse, Rouault, Dufy, Fernand Léger, Chagall, Chaïm Soutine, Zadkine, Roger Bissière and Édouard Pignon in the exhibition Quatorze Juillet by Romain Rolland at the Théâtre de l'Alhambra, in which Picasso painted the curtain scene.

Adam tackled sculpting in 1942, and in October 1943 he, along with Gaston Diehl, Léon Gischia, Jean Le Moal, Manessier, Pignon, Gustave Singier, became one of the fifteen founders of the Salon du Mai. That same year, he created the sets and costumes, masks and two four meter-tall statues for Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Mouches which Charles Dullin assembled. Adam also carved Le Gisant, a tribute to the French Resistance and martyrs, which would be exhibited in the Salon de la Libération. Adam became friends with Picasso, who lent him his studio in the rue des Grands-Augustins where he worked more at ease until 1950.

From 1955, the first retrospective of Adam's work was organized at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. In 1956 and 1957, Adam developed one of his most famous suites of engravings, Dalles, Sable et Eau showing scenes of the sea, sand and granite of Penmarc'h, and a series of sculptures named Mutationes marines. He made new tapestries for the French Embassy in Washington in 1957, Meridien for the Palace of UNESCO in 1958, and Galaxie for Air France in New York City in 1961.

After a project for Monument du Prisonnier Politique Inconnu in 1951, Adam's Le Signal was erected in front of the Musée du Havre in 1961, the first of his monumental sculptures. The number of Adam's sculptures multiplied.

In 1959, Adam was appointed professor of engraving at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and later head professor of the workshop of monumental sculpture.

Mobilized in 1939 and taken prisoner, Adam was assigned as the auxiliary nurse at the hospital Saint-Jacques de Besançon, where he made many drawings of surgeons, soldiers and the wounded. He was eventually released at the end of 1940.

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