Savoir Faire des Takumi - English
Project : 'Savoir-Faire des Takumi'
Limited edition, serigraphs hand-printed by the artist.
The limited edition ‘Generous Theft’ screen prints comes from the ‘Savoir-faire des Takumi’ project - a program of exchange and collaboration between artists, designers and artisans from Paris and Kyoto.
This project allowed the meeting of Monika Jadach, fashion designer, with Riki Yoshida, textile designer and screen printer. Their common interests inspired the story of an art thief wishing to contribute to society by sharing the stolen riches. By drawing on their common passions for art, painting, street art and mosaic, each of them illustrated these adventures. The message conveyed is the one of abundance, peace and art within the reach of everyone.
The chosen technique for this project is the hand screen print technique, which evolved from traditional Yuzen dyeing technique.
The series "Generous Theft" by Monika Jadach is composed of 3 series: MCMXCVII, MCMXLV, MMX.
The title of each series is a transcription in Roman numerals of the year of the theft of the paintings, from which the works are inspired. Each of the series is composed of 3 serigraphs, 3 revisited versions of the canvases, which have thus been multiplied and reproduced by the imaginary 'thief' with a touch of playfulness and casualness, in order to make the stolen art pieces available again to all.
The 1st serie MCMXCVII is inspired by Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of a Lady".
This painting was part of a series of woman portraits that Klimt painted in the last years of his life, some of which were never completed.
This portrait, representing a young woman with red cheeks and black hair, disappeared from the Ricci-Oddi Museum of Modern Art during a building renovation in 1997 and was presumed to have been stolen.
Unexpected events happened right after the project finalization (once the project was finalized), but first, we’ll present the rest of the art-works.
The MCMXLV series are inspired by the painting « Portrait of a Young Man » by Raphaël.
It is an oil painting on wood, dating from 1513-1514, by the painter Raphael, whose character depicted is unknown, but many researchers consider it to be a self-portrait of Raphael.
During a trip to Italy in 1798, the Polish prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, acquired this painting with « The Lady with an Ermine » by Leonardo da Vinci, as well as many Roman antiquities. The painting was kept at the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow until 1939.
During the Second World War the painting was stolen from the Museum during a looting by the Nazis along with a painting by Rembrandt and « the Lady with an Ermine ». The three paintings were used to decorate the residence of a governor of Poland appointed by Hitler. This is the place where « the Portrait of a young man » was last seen in 1945. Since then, the trace of this work has been definitively lost.
The MMX series refers to the painting « Woman with a Fan » by Amadeo Modigliani.
This canvas painted in 1919 represents a portrait of Lunia Czechowska.
Lunia was a Polish socialite, whose husband was a friend of Modigliani merchant, Leopold Zborowski. Lunia posed for the artist ten times in three years, this portrait having been completed a year before Modigliani's death.
It is one of five paintings stolen from the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris on May 20, 2010 by a thief who managed to enter the Museum through a window on the first floor. The masked thief walked past a series of interior CCTV cameras, which captured his nonchalance as he committed the crime. He spent about 15 minutes removing the five canvases from their frames, before exiting through the same window. It is suspected that Modigliani's painting was destroyed.
Once our project was finalized, on December 2019, the gardeners from the Museum of Modern Art Ricci-Oddi, found Klimt’s painting that was the inspiration behind our story.
While cleaning the ivy from one of the walls of the Museum, after opening a small rusty metal door which revealed a cavity hidden by more than 30 cm of ivy, the gardeners found the canvas, partially hidden by a black trash bag. After authenticity analysis, on the 17-th of January 2020 the Italian authorities confirmed that the painting is authentic.
