Cover Design for L'Assiette au Beurre

The gouache presented is a cover design for the French satirical weekly „L'Assiette au Beurre”. Louis Marcoussis created it together with the illustrator Zygmunt Brunner. The illustration, titled „Les nuits de noce”, appeared in issue no. 562 of 20 January 1912. Louis Marcoussis, real name Ludwik Kazimierz Markus, after studying in Kraków under Jan Stanisławski and Józef Mehoffer, left for Paris. There, besides painting, he also worked on illustration for magazines such as „La Vie parisienne” and „L'Assiette au beurre”. At the end of the first decade of the 20th century, as a result of an artistic crisis, the artist destroyed his output and abandoned painting for several years. In 1910 he returned in extraordinary style. At the urging of the writer Guillaume Apollinaire he took the name Marcoussis and, together with such giants of world painting as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris, laid the foundations of Cubist art. It is for these oil compositions that he is best known, and his canvases are an extraordinary rarity on the Polish auction market. PROVENANCE: - private collection, Poland - Drouot - 75009 Paris (22.03.2018, lot 38)