Henri privat livermont biography of williams

Renowned Belgian artist Henri Privat-Livemont is primarily known for his sensuous art nouveau posters but also for producing some of the finest examples of ‘sgraffiti’ wall decor.

(The artist’s letterhead noted that he was a purveyor of ‘Art posters and prints. This provided the motivation to focus on posters.

Begins work as a draughtsman and correspondent for Le Monde Illustré. While in Paris, Livemont worked at the studios of Lemaire, Lavastre, and Duvignaud as an interior decorator. His works were well-received and were included in Les Maîtres de l’Affiche (Masters of the Poster) publications that were published by Jules Chéret between 1896 and 1900.

On his return to Belgium in 1889 he settled in Schaerbeek, in the northern part of Brussels. He would receive numerous accolades for sgraffiti, collaborating with various architects.

1904

Solo exhibition in Haarlem, The Netherlands.

1906

Solo exhibition in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

1936

Died in Schaerbeek.

Biography

One of the leading artists of the Belle Epoque in France and Belgium, Henri Privat Antoine Livemont, known as Privat-Livemont, studied at the School of Decorative Arts in Sint-Josse-ten-Noode before earning a scholarship to complete his training in Paris, where he lived and worked for six years, between 1883 and 1889.

Trained as an interior decorator, Livemont is most remembered for his Art Nouveau style poster art. Privat-Livemont’s career as a painter, decorator, lithographer and commercial and magazine illustrator was a very successful one. Privat-Livemont worked with several architects and designed the interiors of a number of private homes in Brussels, as well as painting murals for a theatre in Ostend.

Nevertheless, he worked in the studio of the scenographer Jean-Baptiste Lavastre, where he created stage designs for a production of Hamlet at the Théâtre Français, where he also worked on the interior decoration of the theatre. Among his best-known posters are those for the Casino de Cabourg and such products as Absinthe Robette or Van Houten cocoa, as well as for the Brussels International Exposition of 1897.

Sgraffiti’.) He became especially known as a designer of Art Nouveau posters, which he began producing in 1890, when he produced a striking poster for an exhibition in Schaerbeek, and this soon led to other commissions for posters, notably for the Cercle Artistique de Schaerbeek. As the contemporary Belgian art critic Octave Maus, writing in 1900, noted, ‘it was easy to discover certain analogies between the posters of Privat Livemont and those of [Alphonse] Mucha…Perhaps the enquiry, far from hurting M.

Privat Livemont, would be in favour of the Brussels artist whose first posters go back to 1890, that is to say, to a period when the name of Mucha was unknown.’ In his later years Privat-Livemont taught at the Académie in his native municipality of Schaerbeek.