Like the Originals

Painter Georges Braque cast a narrowly appraising eye at five still-lifes on the wall of a Paris gallery last week. The colors and surface textures of all five pictures were as alike as peas in a pod; the only apparent thing that distinguished the four reproductions from Braque's original was the trademark "Aeply" in their margins. Braque passed a blunt forefinger over one of the pictures. "This is amazing," he said. "These pictures are more than mere reproductions; they are reconstitutions of the original." Added Braque: "But the artist must still produce an original work before these facsimiles can be made."

Other paintings on display at the gallery--each in four to six copies--were by Picasso, Dufy, Klee, Vlaminck, Signac and Derain. The facsimiles had been made by 28-year-old Janine Aeply and her husband Jean Fautrier on hand presses in a little studio ten miles outside Paris.

The Aeply method could not be patented; it was mostly a matter of loving care in the use of old crafts. Most art-reproduction firms, Janine explained, "concentrate on color alone. But a painting has texture as well. To simulate that we use dozens of materials: cardboard, paper, stencils, canvas, silk screens . . . Sometimes we use as many as seven different processes to reproduce one original." Janine and Jean had built each blob of pigment up to the same thickness as that in the original paintings. They made as many as 600 facsimiles of each painting, sold them for $15 to $20 in Paris. The copies will soon be retailed in the U.S. at $40 each.

Paris art critics praised Aeply's facsimiles as the best yet, agreed that they would give artists "a much greater audience than ever before." One wrote that they "might result for the painter in the loss of his prerogative, some of his mystery." They could also cut into artists' incomes; buyers might well prefer perfectly reproduced masterpieces to lesser originals.

Janine and Jean made their first facsimile a year and a half ago; since then they have reproduced a new original each month. In 1950 they expect to work back through the impressionists, and afterwards tackle Rembrandt, whose thick underpainting overlaid with transparent oil glazes will be particularly hard to simulate. Old masters, they point out, have limited lifetimes. "By making facsimiles before [the originals] deteriorate and then reproducing the facsimiles we can prolong their lifetimes indefinitely."

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