Joseph Kuhn-Régnier was born Walfrid Joseph Louis Kuhn in the sixth arrondissement of Paris, and only later assumed the maternal name Régnier as his working signature. He entered the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in the 1890s as a pupil of Fernand Cormon, the same atelier that had taught Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Émile Bernard. The discipline of that training, with its insistence on studying the naked body and multi-figure historical composition, can be seen everywhere in his work. His earliest commercially identifiable design is a cover for La Jeune Revue, founded by Francis Laur, in June 1899.

He exhibited at the Salon d’Automne of 1904 with a painting called L’indifférente, and was subsequently admitted to the Salon des Humoristes, but after that Kuhn-Régnier the painter all but vanished and Kuhn-Régnier the illustrator took over. From the early 1900s until 1938 he was a steady contributor to La Vie Parisienne, Le Sourire, Fantasio, and Lectures pour Tous, supplying full-page coloured compositions, advertisements and cartoons. From the early 1920s he became Fernand Nathan’s illustrator for the Contes et Légendes series of children’s books, a long-running collection whose two-tone plates are still in use today.

The deluxe bibliophile work for which Kuhn-Régnier is principally remembered occupied a short five-year span at the start of the 1930s. He was commissioned by Simon Kra to illustrate Pierre Louÿs’ Les chansons de Bilitis, the opening volume of that publisher’s Byblis collection. This was followed almost immediately by a commission from the prestigious Les Centraux Bibliophiles to illustrate Maurice Donnay’s classic drama Praxagora, and his most ambitious portfolio, sixty-four pochoir prints for a four-volume Œuvres d’Hippocrate for Javal et Bourdeaux, came very soon afterwards.

After 1934 Kuhn-Régnier went quiet, possibly due to ill health. The magazine work tailed off by 1938, and his last book, Epicure’s Doctrines et maximes, translated by Maurice Solovine and published by Les Centraux Bibliophiles, appeared in 1940, the year of his death.

Similar artists

George Barbier – French art-deco pochoir master of elegant fashion and neoclassical subjects.
Paul-Émile Bécat – French illustrator of refined erotic fine editions.
Umberto Brunelleschi – Italian-French art-deco master of elegant pochoir illustration.
Antoine Calbet – French belle-époque painter and illustrator of sensual subjects.
Chéri Hérouard – French Vie Parisienne illustrator of elegant erotic scenes.
Georges Léonnec – French Vie Parisienne illustrator of light erotic scenes.
Gerda Wegener – Danish art-deco painter of elegant, explicit erotica.