We acknowledge the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of the Country on which the Art Gallery of NSW stands.

Euro pop

Alain Jacquet, Déjeuner sur l’herbe (diptych), 1964

Focus work

Alain Jacquet
France 1939 – USA 2008
Déjeuner sur l’herbe (diptych) 1964
photo screenprint on canvas, two panels
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1983
© Estate of Alain Jacquet/ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney

In the 1960s, French artist Alain Jacquet made a series of works based on famous paintings from art history. They highlighted the way some works of ‘high art’ had infiltrated popular culture through their wide circulation in mass reproduction.

This work imitates 19th-century realist painter Edouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe 1865. Jacquet restaged Manet’s composition with his own friends posing in a modern setting, by a swimming pool. Rather than capturing the scene in paint, he photographed it, then used a screenprinting process to replicate the image. The enlarged Benday dots allude to the offset printing colours of cyan, yellow, magenta and black. The resulting optical effect reveals the work’s mechanical production, and exaggerates the print technique and graphic visual style of mass media.

See also

This work also appears in the children’s labels.

Issues for consideration

  • Compare Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe with Jacquet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (diptych). Why do you think Jacquet chose Manet’s work to appropriate? What has he added and/or taken away? Discuss how Jacquet also references his own world in this image, including mass-media printing techniques used at the time.
  • Think about how the European pop artists responded to their world. Why do you think they reworked ‘old masters’ and critiqued consumerism and Americanisation?
  • Find examples by pop artists across Europe and discuss the distinct regional differences in their approach to artmaking.