中文Few people can claim to have lived the history of screen printing as completely as Michel Caza. In his own biography he described more than six decades in the industry not simply as a career but as a form of “monomania.” For him, screen printing was never just a production method; it was an obsession, a language, a craft, a science, an art form and, above all, a way of life. FESPA, the federation he co-founded, recently honoured his memory with a tribute that traces a remarkable technical and artistic journey spanning the rise of modern print from basement workshops to a global, multi-billion-dollar industry that now spans every continent.
Michel’s story began in 1954 in Stockholm, where at nineteen he found himself working in a basement workshop while studying sociology and journalism. There he encountered screen printing’s practical world: manual film cutting, early Svantesson machines, nylon mesh and photo-stenciling, then still treated almost as a secret process. Even in that first job his energy and precision were recognised. Returning to France in 1957, he entered a period of intense learning, working with Castelli and meeting figures such as Louis Dubuit and Jacques Mounier who were shaping European screen printing equipment, inks and methods during a formative era of post-war reconstruction and breakneck innovation that set the stage for everything that followed.
What set Michel apart was combining practical skill with theory. He did not see screen printing as a crude flat-colour method. In 1961 he was already working with four-colour process and 133-line halftones; by 1963 he was exploring colour superposition and researching halftones without conventional dots, a precursor to stochastic screening. His message was clear: screen printing could be precise, subtle and technically advanced, serving art, advertising and industry alike, and deserved to be taught as a serious discipline rather than guarded as workshop lore handed from master to apprentice in a cloud of solvent fumes and half-remembered tricks.
His first major book, Techniques of Screenprinting, appeared in 1963, part of a mission to turn practical experience into shared knowledge. The 1960s also placed him at the heart of artistic screen printing. He taught at Hornsey College of Art in London and, in 1969, founded Serigraphie Michel Caza in Franconville, printing for an extraordinary range of artists including Dali, Chagall, Miro, Lichtenstein, Calder, Vasarely and Sonia Delaunay. His 1973 book La Serigraphie helped give the process what he called its “letters of nobility,” elevating it in the eyes of the art world and opening gallery doors to a medium once dismissed as merely commercial and crude, fit only for posters and point-of-purchase displays.
Michel was also a great technical moderniser. In the mid-1970s he became deeply involved in UV screen printing, working with Jacques Mounier and Jean-Pierre Vives at Dubuit to replace solvent-based systems with one ink technology, seeing the environmental and production advantages long before UV became mainstream. He published The Theory and Practice of UV Screenprinting in 1980, helping establish UV curing as a major industry step forward that anticipates today’s low-migration, low-energy, regulatory-compliant printing by more than forty years, a staggeringly early read of where the technology would go and why it would matter.
He never lost contact with production reality. After closing one company in 1978, he returned to the press for the monumental Scrolls of Fire project, 53 original prints depicting the Jewish diaspora, a turning point that sent him back to fine art, advertising and industrial printing. He adopted high-tension screens from 1984 and pushed technical limits with fine-line halftones, stochastic screening and later work at 650 pixels per inch. Recognition followed: more than 160 awards in fourteen years and numerous FESPA awards, including 22 at FESPA 1996, a tally that doubled as proof of what disciplined craft could achieve when married to restless curiosity and a refusal to accept limits.
Michel’s relationship with FESPA was central. A co-founder in 1962, he rejoined its board in 1989 and became President in 1996, having spent decades helping printers worldwide through seminars, articles, books and mentoring. His contribution can be understood in three ways: he helped transform screen printing from craft into industry; he proved it could be both artistic and industrial; and he shared knowledge generously, training and inspiring hundreds of printers who carried his standards forward into the digital age and who still quote his insistence on measurement, rigour and the courage to question accepted practice.
Michel Caza died on 23 May 2026 at the age of 91. Screen printing, while superseded in some markets by wide-format inkjet, still offers the creative touch of fluorescence, metallic, scent, glitter, varnish or structure that elevates the ordinary into the extraordinary. His life reminds us that progress in print comes from curiosity, discipline, collaboration and the courage to question accepted limits, a legacy every printer can still learn from today, and a standard worth holding as the industry reinvents itself once more for a sustainable future built on both heritage and innovation.
