André François

André François, HonRDI, born André Farkas on November 9, 1915 in Temesvár in Hungary, currently Timisoara in Romania and died on April 11, 2005 in Grisy-les-Plâtres in France, is a French painter, designer, poster artist, illustrator and sculptor. He was naturalized French in 1939. A pupil of Cassandre, he is considered one of the greatest poster artists and illustrator of the twentieth century. In the field of publishing, he has illustrated books by Céline, Jacques Prévert, Jarry, Raymond Queneau, Boris Vian, François David (Le Calumet de la paix). In the press, he signed advertising campaigns for Télérama, Le Nouvel Observateur, Punch. Since 1963 he has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker and, for nearly 20 years, to the mental health journal VST. United by a complicity with Vincent Pachès for nearly 25 years, the relationship between text and image enjoyed a magical momentum with their work. The Bestiary that the newspaper Le Monde published every week for a year was included in a work published at Le Seuil (Scenes of menagerie). The great retrospective of 2003 at the Forney Library made it possible to appreciate the considerable importance of his work on paper. The André François Center was created in 2011 at the Jean-Moulin Médiathèque in Margny-lès-Compiègne on the initiative of Janine Kotwica, one of André François' best specialists, author of a blog documented on it .