Jacqueline Debutler

Jacqueline Debutler (b. 1932, Compiègne) is a French painter and printmaker whose work spans painting in oil and gouache, etching with aquatint, sculpture in polished aluminium, and tapestry. She trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Amiens before completing four years of post-graduate study in Paris under Johnny Friedländer, the celebrated École de Paris engraver whose atelier shaped a generation of post-war French printmakers.

Jacqueline Debutler — selected exhibitions

Debutler's early work was shown widely in the late 1950s and early 1960s — at the Salons Cimaise de Paris and Contraste in Lyon, the Salon des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, and a touring exhibition with GEDOK in Munich. Her first solo shows were at Galerie Ror Volmar in Paris and Vichy in 1963, followed by Galerie Chardin (1965), Galerie Camille Renault (1966 and 1980), Galerie du Marais (1973), Galerie Pierre Hautot (1974) and Galerie Claude Hémery (1976). She also showed internationally at the Biennale di Montecatini (1969), the World Bank Art Society in Washington D.C. (1971), Galerie Flat 5 in Brugge (1972), and at Pictures for Business on Third Avenue, New York in 1977 — a New York show announced in the New York Times Spring Art Showcase that April.

Her exhibiting career extended well into the 1990s. She returned to New York in 1984 for the Profile Gallery group show Our French Connections (curated by Jochen Michaelis, concurrent with Art Expo 84), showed twice more with Pierre Hautot in Paris (1987 and 1989), and developed a sustained tapestry practice presented at Galerie Tisca, Paris in 1990, 1992 and 1994. Other late presentations included Galerie Matisse in Vichy (1980), Salon UNESCO (1979), Galerie Alain Durvil at Port-Grimaud (1976), La Garde-Freinet (1989), the Airborne show-room (1992) and Espace Ugap at Bercy (1994).

From the late 1960s onwards her etchings circulated through several specialist publishers: Editions AAA (Associated American Artists) in New York, Éditions de la Tortue in Paris, Editions Hautot — who published her 1974 portfolio of eaux-fortes originales — and Lublin Graphics of Greenwich,Connecticut, who editioned her plates from c. 1972 onwards. Examples of her work are held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris.

The mature prints — typically printed on heavy mould-made papers with full deckled edges, in modest editions and signed in pencil — are characterised by a distinctive lyrical-abstract vocabulary: lines etched with a light, alert hand, softly-toned aquatint fields, biomorphic forms set against expansive grounds, and the occasional disc of pure colour acting as a tonal anchor. Critics from her early career onwards consistently singled out her rapports de tons — the controlled, intelligent intervals of tone that give the work its quiet authority.