André Raffray
Les brigades du tigre, Gouaches originales de la série télévisée, 2013
Semiose éditions
Textes de Bernard Blistène et Thierry Saumier
This book gathers the entire series of gouaches that were used during the credits of each episode of the TV show 'Les Brigades du Tigres'. These gouaches made it possible to locate the action of each episode and then pictured most of the times emblematic places or people from the early XXth century and the IIIrd Republic. Al Capone, Clémenceau or the First World War, different anarchist movements, the Roaring Twenties, as a journey into this early century where everything is moving very fast and which is experiencing the first major political crises.
Furthermore, it is also an opportunity to delve into the history of the judicial police, which has just been created by Georges Clémenceau, but also to travel from the Balkans to Italy and from the United States to Russia by all modern means of transport, from bicycles to submarines and from ships to trains.
André Raffray
André Raffray was born in Nonancourt (Upper Normandy) in 1925 and died in Paris in 2010. From 1953 to 1982, he worked as an illustrator for the Gaumont Company and entered the world of fine art in 1977, when the Pompidou Centre asked him to produce an illustrated life of Marcel Duchamp, an artist who fascinated him. Hugely enthusiastic about painting, he began an intense period of work as a copyist, reproducing in coloured pencil the works of the masters. He started with landscapes by Seurat and Constable, seeking out the sites where the works were produced, before moving on to Matisse and Picasso. Re-appropriated, started again from scratch and confronted with photos of the original site, the paintings become doubles of themselves.
In 2012, the Semiose Gallery in Paris exhibited a series of gouaches created for the credits of the TV series Les Brigades du Tigre. His work can be seen in the collections of the Brittany FRAC, the Pompidou Centre and the Musée des beaux-Arts in Rouen, which held a retrospective of his work in 2005. He is represented in New York by Moeller Fine Art.