Atelier Populaire vs Grapus
アトリエ・ポピュレール / グラピュス
Atelier Populaire comes from Printmaking and Social Movements and Grapus from Regional Graphics. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Atelier Populaire
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In the Paris uprising of May '68 students occupied the art school and ran its print workshop. One-color silkscreens, simple figures and declarative slogans came off the press nightly under rules of anonymity, no sale and street posting, which became the prototype of protest graphics.
Grapus
The French collective was born out of May '68. Hand-scrawled letters, splatters and graffiti over photographs brought a festive roughness to posters for politics, theater and city halls, and made resistance to polish into a style.
| Atelier Populaire | Grapus | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | May–June 1968 | 1970–1991 |
| Family | Printmaking and Social Movements | Regional Graphics |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | One-color silkscreen / Simplified figures / Declarative slogans / Anonymous mass production | Rough hand-drawn lettering / Splatter and graffiti / Interventions on photographs / Anonymous collective authorship |
| Best used for | Rally notices that must be printed and pasted onto walls the same day · Protest posters stating one claim, produced anonymously as collective work | Posters for rallies and unions that shout in the voice of those involved · Cultural programmes for public theatres and city halls needing their stiffness broken |
| Type | Near-handdrawn bold letters, one short line filling the sheet | Headlines written directly with brush or marker, slant and bleed kept |
| Composition | Two elements only, a figure and a line, the rest left bare white | A large photograph beneath, lettering and scrawl laid over the margins |
| Material | One silkscreen color on cheap stock, misregistration accepted | Splatter and finger marks kept in the plate, plus one fluorescent ink |
| Caution | Once a signature and a price are attached the principle drains away and only a protest-looking graphic is left standing. | Manufacturing the roughness with a filter removes the necessity of the hand, and what remains is a costume of political heat that trivializes the subject. |