Jean-Michel Folon

Illustrator and creator of French TV's 'blue man'

Jean-Michel Folon, graphic artist, illustrator, painter, sculptor and actor: born Uccle, Belgium 1 March 1934; twice married (one son, and one daughter deceased); died Monaco 20 October 2005.

The graphic artist Jean-Michel Folon enjoyed a lengthy career during which he went from contributing illustrations to publications such as Esquire, The New Yorker and Time in the Sixties to designing posters for Amnesty International, Greenpeace and the United Nations, and in 1989 creating the logo used to commemorate the bicentennial of the French Revolution (using his recurrent theme of birds in flight). He illustrated books by Ray Bradbury, Franz Kafka, Guy de Maupassant and Boris Vian, and the complete works of Jacques Prévert; exhibited his watercolours, etchings, paintings, prints and sculptures throughout the world; and also acted in five feature films.

Folon's animated sequence for the nightly closedown of the French television channel Antenne 2 lived long in the psyche of both native viewers and visitors to France as it lulled them to their peaceful slumbers. Set to "Emmanuel", a beautifully evocative composition by Michel Colombier, and first broadcast in 1975, Folon's creation showed an Everyman wearing a blue overcoat and floating above the clouds towards the sunset. The illustrator made light of his most famous creation, which ran on French TV for close to 10 years, saying: "My blue man, with his blue hat, clings to my skin, but he's really become part of popular culture. So let's leave him there."

Born in Uccle, near Brussels, in 1934, Folon studied architecture, going to work as a junior in a Paris practice. By 1955, he was already looking for a way out and sending drawings and illustrations to various publishers. At first, he found little favour with French magazines and newspapers but the US editors of Horizon, Esquire and The New Yorker enjoyed his muted colours and lightness of touch and began commissioning him. Folon travelled to the United State and went on to design covers for Time magazine and to contribute to Fortune and Atlantic Monthly.

His work began to appear in L'Express and Le Nouvel Observateur and, in 1968, he designed a mural for the French pavilion at the Milan Triennale. Two years later, he represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale, while his work was exhibited in Tokyo, Osaka, Paris, Brussels, Milan, New York, Chicago and São Paulo. In 1975, Folon created a huge mural - entitled Paysage (Landscape) - for the typewriter manufacturers Olivetti which adorned Waterloo Station and in 1977 the ICA in London hosted a retrospective exhibition of his work.

The Eighties saw him move into sculpture as well as stage design for theatre and opera productions. In 1985, he created the poster for the French release of his friend Woody Allen's film The Purple Rose of Cairo and in 1988 designed a striking series of posters for Amnesty International, to illustrate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In 2000, he inaugurated the Fondation Folon, located in a park near Brussels, where 300 of his works are on permanent display in 15 rooms designed by the artist himself for the purpose.

Last year, the French magazine L'Express asked Folon what his motto was. "Less is more," came the reply.

Pierre Perrone