Sur la plage

A few years after moving to Paris in 1903, a young Ludwig Markus met Cubist painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and poet Guillaume Apollinaire. They influenced Markus's style and also his name; it was Apollinaire who suggested he change it to Marcoussis, after a village just south of Paris. After 1930 Marcoussis largely devoted himself to printmaking. More than other Cubists, he evoked a sense of nature and personal feeling in his works, as demonstrated by the intertwined hands below the couple here. The year he made this print, Marcoussis also illustrated a book by Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara. In pencil, the artist inscribed this print to Tzara and his wife, painter Greta Knutson.