giclée
giclée
French
“The French word for a squirt of liquid became the fine-art world's preferred term for a high-quality inkjet print — because calling a $500 poster an 'inkjet print' did not sound expensive enough.”
Giclée comes from the French verb gicler, meaning to squirt or to spray. The past participle giclée means 'squirted.' The word was borrowed into English art-market vocabulary in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker in Los Angeles who needed a term to distinguish his high-resolution IRIS inkjet prints from ordinary desktop printouts. He chose a French word because French sounds more refined than 'sprayed ink on paper.' He chose giclée specifically. Whether he knew the word's vulgar secondary meaning in French slang is a matter of debate.
The IRIS printer, developed in the late 1980s for commercial proofing, could produce prints of extraordinary color accuracy and detail. Duganne and other printmakers realized the machine could reproduce paintings and photographs with a fidelity that traditional lithography could not match. But the art market needed a word. 'Inkjet print' sounded cheap. 'Digital reproduction' sounded mechanical. 'Giclée' sounded like something you would hang on a wall.
The term spread rapidly through galleries, print shops, and art fairs in the 1990s and 2000s. Museums began offering giclée reproductions in their gift shops. Living artists sold signed and numbered giclée editions as original multiples. The word did real marketing work: it separated a $15 poster from a $500 giclée, even when the technology was identical. The difference was paper quality, color management, and the word on the label.
French speakers have always found the term amusing. Gicler, in colloquial French, carries sexual connotations that the American art market did not intend. The gap between how the word sounds in English (refined, European, expensive) and how it sounds in French (crude, physical, funny) is a small comedy of transatlantic marketing. The squirt became fine art.
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Today
Giclée appears on gallery price lists, museum shop labels, and artist websites worldwide. The word has done its commercial job well: it transformed an industrial printing technology into a fine-art product category. Whether the distinction between a giclée and a high-quality inkjet print is meaningful depends on whom you ask.
The word is a marketing invention that became a real term. Language does not care whether a word was coined cynically or sincerely. Giclée is now in dictionaries. The squirt became permanent.
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