Created between 1965 and 1966 at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, Charenton is one of José Luis Cuevas’ most celebrated print portfolios. Its title refers to the asylum at Charenton-Saint-Maurice, near Paris, where the Marquis de Sade spent the last years of his life. Rather than illustrating episodes from Sade’s biography, Cuevas uses Charenton as a symbolic setting in which he explores questions of sanity, confinement, power and desire through his own highly personal imagery.

The portfolio consists of twelve lithographs together with a frontispiece, title page, contents page and colophon. Although Sade himself appears in several prints, he is only one of many figures inhabiting Cuevas’ unsettling world. Doctors, patients, visitors, grotesque hybrid creatures, and the artist himself all become participants in a psychological drama in which the boundaries between observer and inmate, victim and persecutor, reality and imagination are deliberately blurred.

Lithography proved an ideal medium for Cuevas’ expressive draughtsmanship. Rich blacks, fluid tonal passages and spontaneous line allow his distorted figures to emerge from deep shadow with remarkable physical presence, while preserving the immediacy of drawing that remained central to his work throughout his career. Even at their most grotesque, the figures resist caricature and remain recognisably human, reflecting Cuevas’ lifelong fascination with vulnerability, isolation and those living on the margins of society.

The complete portfolio comprises:

Frontispiece: Sade-Pig
   1.    Justine and the Marquis de Sade 
   2.    Doctor Laforet and His Patients 
   3.    Double Portrait of Doctor Laforet 
   4.    Ghosts of the Asylum 
   5.    Tortured Ones 
   6.    Visions of Marquis de Sade 
   7.    Visitors 
   8.    Happenings in Charenton 
   9.    Procuress with Meat 
10.    The Marriage of Arnolfini 
11.    Beast Eating 
12.    Worm Pit