MPS MEN PORTRAITS SERIES n°5 version française
SLEEP English translation : Ann Menuhin
menportraits.blogspot.com © Francis Rousseau 2011-2020
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Paul Cadmus (1904-1999) Study of a sleeping man Private collection
Paul Cadmus was an American painter, pastellist and designer. His technique of drawing was academic and referred to the Baroque era. The body of Cadmus's drawings is very extensive, consisting mostly of male nudes, mainly dancers drawn during their exercises or their rest period between exercises (like here). Cadmus worked extensively on tinted paper, and never stopped mixing techniques and tools to achieve a very personal style. His use of large hatching, superimposed in small areas for the modelling of bodies is a hallmark of his drawing style. Over the years, his love of the aesthetics of the male body was increasingly present in his work, eventually becoming the sole object of his production in the second part of his career, where academic nudes abound. His audacity worthy of the great masters who influenced him, such Caravaggio, Rubens or even Hieronymus Bosch, earned him the suppression of several of these canvases and drawings in federal exhibitions or establishments. In an America still puritanical despite the movements of the 1970s, indignation grew with each of his exhibitions, coincidentally providing him with excellent publicity. It also made him one of the pioneers of the visibility and the emergence of homosexuality in society, although this was never his aim. In 1980 there was a great resurgence of interest in his work. Although he stopped painting for several years, Cadmus continued to draw in his home in Weston, Connecticut. In nearly seventy years of career, Paul Cadmuspainted 190 canvases and drew countless drawings, many of which are included in the collections of numerous American museums.
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The Faun, Barberini c. 220 Marble copy o f the Greek original in bronze Copy after derestoration Munich Glyptothek
The Faun Barberini, an ancient Greek statue from the Hellenistic period, represents a satyr asleep. The tail that differentiates him from human beings is visible on his right side. The statue itself was discovered in a rather mysterious way in the CastelSaint-Angelo, in Rome, under the pontificate of Urban VIII (1623-1643). It immediately entered the collections of the Pope's family, the Barberini, which gave it its name. Cardinal Maffeo Barberini then commissioned Bernini to restore the statue, specifically the right leg, a part of the hands and the head. It is not known whether the work was carried out by Bernini himself or one of his disciples. Bernini accentuated the homoerotic aspect of the statue which very quickly acquired great notoriety. In 1700, it was referred to as the "Faun of the Palace Barberini" illustrating "natural sleep”, by Abbé Raguenet in his Monuments de Rome. It was sold by the Barberini family in the second half of the 18th century, during the great dispersal of their collections. It belonged for a time to a sculptor and merchant, before being bought in the 1810s by King Ludwig I of Bavaria, then crown prince, to be installed in Munich in the Glyptothek, the museum specially created to accommodate his new Greek sculpture collection. It is still kept there today. Two meters 15 centimetres high, the statue is in white marblehaving acquired a dark yellow patina over the centuries. We do not know the antique context of this statue: was it an element of a group or an isolated statue? Was it a religious offering or a decorative work? The power of expression, reminiscent of the school of Pergamon as well as the mastery of three-dimensional representation, allow the experts to place this work in Asia Minor at the end of the 3rd century BC. No ancient copies of the Barberini Faun are known, but a bronze variant was found in the Villa of the Papyrus of Herculaneum, which predates the 1st century BCE and attests to its fame in the ancient world. On the other hand, many modern copies of Barberini Faun are listed, oftenworks of residents of the Villa Medici in Rome. Among these, we can mention: - The copy by Edmé Bouchardon, executed in 1726 (top image) and exhibited successively in Paris at Parc Monceau, at Parc de Saint-Cloud then at Jardin du Luxembourg, before being placed in the Louvre Museum. - The copy of Eugène-Louis Lequesne, executed in 1846 (bottom image) currently preserved at the National School of Fine Arts (ENSBA) in Paris.
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. Reaymond Voinquel (1912-1994) Louis Jourdan, 1939 .
Raymond Voinquel was a French still photographer who photographed 160 films and collaborated with the famous Studio Harcourt (1940-1944) favouring photos of movie stars. In 1939, a troubled time if there was one, he photographed the young but already famous actor Louis Jourdan, in simulated sleep. Louis Jourdan born in 1921, the pseudonym of Louis Gendre, achieved the feat of being one of those French artists who made films during World War II, under the German occupation, while categorically refusing to participate in the film productions of Nazi propaganda. In reality, he joined the French Resistance very early on and worked for them in the shadows despite his father's arrest by the Gestapo. During this period, Louis Jourdan mainly filmed with the famous french directour Marc Allégret (L’Arlésienne, La Belle Aventure, Les Petites du Quai aux Fleurs, Félicie Nanteuil) and with Marcel L'Herbier. After the Liberation, he flew to Hollywood where, crowned with the prestige of war hero, he had a second resounding career. He spent the rest of his life there until his death in 2015.
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Konstantin Somov (1869–1939) Reclining naked man, 1938 Private collection
The reclining nude in this painting was the favorite model of Konstantin Somov, Boris Mikhailovich Snejkovsky, aged 28 years old here. Somov painted him his entire life! A unique story between a model and his painter, a story that was far from calm. Boris committed suicide on February 24, 1978 , age 77, and was buried at the Russian cemetery of SainteGeneviève-des- Bois where many Russian emigrants are buried... including Somov himself. In this composition, where horizontality triumphs - as is often the case in paintings with sleep as the theme - Boris is painted nude, on a bed in a rather cramped room where a chimney purrs. A small white dog sleeps at his feet. The scene seems idyllic ... Boris Mikhailovich Snejkovsky was born July 23, 1910 in Odessa. His father was a ship captain in the Russian volunteer fleet. At the time of the Revolution, Boris, aged seven, and his mother traveled all across the country - Odessa to Vladivostok - in order to join the father and his ship. The family left Russia in May 1919 arriving at Ellis Island (United States) a month later. Obviously this little family was never allowed into the United States since it was in Istanbul at the beginning of 1920.
Two years later, unscathed after the devastating Spanish flu epidemic, we find the family in Gołdap in East Prussia (now Poland). The Snejkovskys did not stay there long either (less than a year) - before moving to Berlin. There too ... quick visit to the German capital, just a few months, before settling in Paris. More sustainably this time.
Boris became a naturalised French citizen in 1937. He also got married that year and began his military service. He was demobilised in 1940 after the defeat of France and divorced in 1942. Later he remarried - to Christiane Karcher - with whom he had at least one child and declared himself to the authorities as an "accountant" and "physical education teacher".
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he huge 11-meter-high canvas Paradise Lost was presented by Alexandre Cabanel at the Universal Exhibition of 1867. It had been commissioned by King Maximilian II of Bavaria for his Maximilianeum in Munich. The work was inspired by Milton's eponymous book and Cabanel himself lent his features (in all simplicity!) to the figure of God (bottom image). Originally from Montpellier where many his large paintings are conserved, Cabanel is considered to be one of the great academic painters of the Second Empire. At the end of his life, much admired and decked with honours, he had nothing more to prove, but the critics were not always very tender with him and this painting in particular, including the two studies, one drawn the other painted, shown here, suffered the wrath of his time! Thus Pierre Larousse's Le Grand Universal Dictionary of the 19th Century, published from 1866 to 1877, devoted a long and very critical entry to this work every detail of which we admire today including Adam trying to flee the sin committed by feigning sleep or hiding his shameful gaze in the shadows of his tilted face:
“(…) This painting is one of the author's major works but, next to incontestable qualities of modelling and colours one finds serious defects. It is in referring to Michelangelo that M. Cabanel painted Paradise Lost. Unfortunately, drawing colossal figures is not enough, with large muscles and vast draperies, to recall the grandiose pages of the Sistine Chapel. M. Cabanel's Eve has pale, flabby flesh; Adam is bloated and looks sullen; the formal bored pose is that of a workshop model; Lucifer is disguised as a melodramatic traitor; the Eternal Father, with his naked torso, his legs twisted in heavy purple drapery, his egg-yellow halo and his vulgar gesture, seems overly monumental; the three angels who support him do not seem sufficiently impressed with the seriousness of their role. Add to this an extremely overworked landscape, all encumbered with poppies, daisies, volubilis and other flowers which would like to be naive but look like illuminations on wallpaper. "
Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1899)
Adam Study and drawing forParadise Lost Fabre Museum, Montpellier
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The Austro-Hungarian painter Anton Ažbe was both a whimsical and mysterious character who was the object of constant legends and rumour. It started from childhood when, with his twin brother, he was placed at the age of 7 in an adopted family after his father died of tuberculosis and his depressed mother committed suicide. At the moment of adolescence, he is found alone - without his twin who mysteriously disappeared - working as a miserable grocery clerk. The painter Janez Wolf, then relatively famous, unearthed Ažbe in the back of a seedy grocery store when he was only 16 years old and decided to employ him as an assistant in the execution of the frescoes of the church of the Annunciation of Ljubljana. At 20 years old, we still find Ažbe alongside Wolf, deeply imbued with his role as protector and pygmalion, and who sends him to study at the Academy of Beaux Arts de Vienne followed by that of Munich. Before dying in terrifying misery, Wolf still wanted to do something for his protege and decided to confide in him the "secret" of his art.
Anton Ažbe (1862 -1905) Nude of a Reclining Man, 1886 Private collection
According to a legend, once the famous "Secret" was transmitted, Anton Ažbe was obliged to transmit it in turn to another painter which necessitated his teaching him for free for 8 years! Rather than subscribe to this chain of knowledge "avant la lettre", Ažbe preferred to establish a school of painting in Munich which quickly became very popular with up to 80 students at any one time. Rather than forming one painter, according to the wishes of his deceased protector, he thus formed at least four of the greatest Slovenian impressionnist painters as well as some famous Russian painters including Igor Grabar, Alexandre Mourachko and ... Vassily Kandinsky! Maintaining a romantic mystery around Ažbe, the writer Leonhard Frank wrote of him: "No one had ever seen his paintings.
No one knew if he had ever even really painted. No one knew his past. One night in December, drunk on cognac, he fell asleep in the snow. He was found dead in the morning. No one knew where he was from. "
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ SLEEP Ferdinand Hodler (1853 -1918) The Night (1890), detail Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Strange self-portrait this of the painter Ferdinand Hodler surrounded by his loved ones and brutally awakened in his sleep by the shadow of death. Regarding this composition, he wrote: "I made for the
first time the reasoned use of parallelism at night - this is my most important painting to date - its appearance is dramatic,it is not night, but a set of impressions of the night, the ghost of death ... and, here, as the most intense nocturnal phenomenon, the colouring is symbolic. »
In fact we see in the center of the composition, Holder himself awakened by the figure of death while around him several members of his family, entwined, sleep peacefully, placed in a setting where the rhythmic arrangement of figures and lines dominates. The work evokes the very essence of night and death, the similarity between the posture of the sleeping and that of the dead, whereas the one that death seizes is in fact shown awake! Yet it was not the symbolism that held
the attention of the first spectators of the work, but rather the realism of the nudes and the poses of these couples which were deemed "scandalous". So much so that the painting was refused at the Beaux-Arts exhibition in Geneva in 1891. This refusal which caused a stir in the art world of the late 19th century, enabled Hodler to make a name for himself beyond the borders of his country and become a world famous painter.
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This painting is strongly reminiscent of the painting "The visit to the convalescent" that Duran presented in the Wicar competition at Lille. The composition is centered on the artist himself, seen half-length and surprised in his sleep. This "Visit to the convalescent" won the Wicar Prize for Carolus-Duran, thanks to which he received a scholarship to go to Italy. But, despite this success, Duran was not satisfied with the work and preferred to cut it into pieces, keeping only two fragments: a white dog, and this convalescent , dressed in a red shirt. A variant painted in 1861, "The Sleeping Man", offered by the artist to the Lille museum in 1862, represented the same scene but figuring a white shirt (top left image). The Convalescent of the Orsay Museum is part of the school of Realism, a current upheld by Fantin-Latour, Zacharie Astruc or Alphonse Legros. As a great admirer of Courbet, Carolus-Duran was inspired by his "Portrait of the Artist" otherwise titled "The Wounded Man" (bottom right image) that he had seen in the Realism Pavilion of the Universal Exhibition of 1855. The division of the Convalescent which creates an original framing, à la Degas, accentuates its modernity. Very vigorously crafted, executed in a particularly bright red, contrasting with the white of the pillow, "Le Convalescent" is undoubtedly one of Carolus-Duran's greatest successes. Common points between "Le Convalescent" du Musée d'Orsay and "The Sleeping Man" from Lille: the model who is Durand himself and the absolutely identical still life on the bedside table in both paintings.
Carolus Duran (1837-1917) The sleeping man, 1861 Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) The Wounded Man, 1844-54 Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Carolus Duran (1837-1917) Le Convalescent, 1860 Musée d’Orsay, Paris
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John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) Sleeping male model, 1895 Oil on canvas, 55.88 x 71.12 cm Private collection
Portraits made John Singer Sargent famous, and in particular his most controversial work, Madame X (Virginie Gautreau) currently kept at the MET, produced in 1884. He himself wrote in 1915 that it was the best thing he had done. And he did a lot, considering that during his career he painted 900 canvases and more than 2000 watercolours, as well as countless sketches and drawings. If we are to believe the painter Jacques-Emile Blanche who was one of his first clients, Sargent was a sex addict whose scandalous escapades were notorious both in Paris and in Venice. Nowadays he would surely have been brought before a court for harassment, but the 19th century which one often qualifies as a puritan and bourgeois had a different view of these questions. Some academics believe Sargent was gay. His socialite affair with Edmond de Polignac and Robert de Montesquiou and their Parisian circles would argue in favour of this, as well as his many male nudes (like this one) and his countless drawings of strangers encountered in the slums of Venice or Istanbul which reveal a complex artistic approach to aspects of male sensuality. However, after having been forgotten for several decades, his disgrace ended at the end of the twentieth century which was more permissive. So for example in 1986, Andy Warhol the king of Pop Art, declared that "Sargent had known how to
make everyone attractive. Bigger. Thinner. All however retain character, and even different characters. For each of them." In these years, too, the critic Robert Hughes greeted Sargent as the incomparable witness of masculine power and feminine beauty of his time. Which he definitely was.
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English painter William Etty is best known for both his nude paintings and his great historicomythological compositions ... with however a slight advantage for his nudes as it is true that his approach to nudity liberated Western culture's aesthetic rules and the morals that reigned in the painting of his time. With William Etty, the nude is no longer idealised but comes alive, despite the criticisms of the era which did not fail to shout scandal and indecency. The critics were not the only ones to be embarrassed by his representation of nudity, the extreme realism of which also deeply troubled the public at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. In reality William Etty sought to give the nude a certain modernity by extracting it from the firm rules that prevailed. Thus he was careful not to not choose models that were "beautiful", but rather favoured the strength of representation, the incarnation, the shocking angle.
William Etty (1787-1849) Reclining Male Nude, raised right Knee (oil on milboard - 60 x 49,5 cm) The Courtaud Gallery, London
By thus showing models in all their rawness, models that had nothing pure or graceful or even less, mystical, William Etty was accused of having "descecrated the artistic nude" such as it was drawn until then. The nude asleep opposite provides one excellent example: languid without elegance, legs spread apart, in a position that even the a vision of the deepest sleep would not have justified in his day. This man who does not hide anything, including the "fleece" between his legs ,stirred up scandal. One hardly dared to look at this painting when it was presented. It is even said that in walking past, husbands posed an authoritative hand in front of the eyes of their wives so that they wouldn't risk noticing the awful spectacle of this " neglected male
crotch offered with incomprehensible complacency to the amateur of fine Arts ".
American by birth, encouraged by a banker uncle whose generous support allowed him to take courses at the Royal Academy, he became Thomas Lawrence's student following which his work was accepted in the Royal Academy's exhibitions. He even ended up becoming an extra-ordinary member in 1834 thanks to his composition Pandora couronnee par les saisons, bought by his former teacher in person: Thomas Lawrence. A great traveler, Etty was inspired largely by what he had been able to see in major European museums (Florence, Rome, Paris…). He refreshed these achievements with a radicality which is both effective and sympathetic. Although he was a master of the modern nude - or perhaps because of this - his name did not in any way pass on to posterity. Today we know his name more especially thanks to his grandfather, a miller who invented a famous gingerbread which was still marketed in the 20th century!
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ SLEEP The theme of Noa's drunkenness is a theme which was often treated by the painters of the Renaissance. It describes a biblical episode also known under the title " The Curse of Canaan" and related in Parashat Noa'h, Genesis 9 / 18-29. When the Flood ended, Noah came out of his ark with his sons and planted a vine. He wasted no time getting drunk on the wine from this plantation. His son Cham seeing the nudity of his drunken father, went back to tell his two brothers, Shem and Japheth. When he was awakened, Noah condemned his son Cham and his grandson Canaan to becoming "the slave of the slaves of his brothers" before blessing Shem and Japheth. Various interpretations were given throughout history to the Curse of Canaan, the most tragic of them proposed a religious justification for racism and in particular an excuse for the depreciation of the peoples of black Africa and their enslavement, excusing all forms of racial segregation over time, even up until the modern period when slavery was followed by apartheid in the United States and South Africa. The ancient Jewish exegetes Rav and Shmuel (3rd century) put forward two hypotheses on the nature of the fault which deserved such a severe punishment. One explains that Noah was abused by his son Cham while sleeping, relying on Greek translations where the expression "to see" makes a direct reference to homosexual relationships. The other thinks that Cham castrated his father so as not to see him naked. In this painting by Cagnacci, we note that Noah is not represented as the venerable old man expected, but as a languid young man !
Guido Cagnacci (1601-1663) Noah drunken, 1650
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François Boucher (1703-1770) Academic study of a reclining nude man, c.1750 Black chalk, with touches of red chalk, heightened white chalk, on cream laid paper Art Institute of Chicago
The French painter François Boucher was a particularly prolific representative of the Rococo style which covered all genres: religious painting, mythological subjects, rustic scenes, landscapes, animals, decorations of monuments and private houses, tapestry cartoons. He is perhaps the most famous painter and decorative artist of the 18th century. He himself estimated, a year before his death, to have produced more 10,000 drawings, but still found time to work 10 hours per day on idyllic and voluptuous representations of classical themes, mythological and erotic, decorative allegories and pastoral scenes. He was painter to the court of Louis XV and favorite painter of the Marquise de Pompadour, of whom he made several famous portraits. Boucher never sought to reproduce reality. He was a precious and sensual painter, using brilliant colours, serpentine lines and a profusion of quaint accessories. His predilection for female nudes earned him, during his lifetime, the nickname of "Painter of the Graces" which was easily mocked as "painter of 'es Grasses » (or "the chubbies") by allusion to the advantageous shapes of his models! He also tried his hand at drawing some male nudes which were used as sketches of sacred figures (Saint-Jean-Baptiste lower left) but especially as embellishments which he occasionally placed in his feminine paintings. In general, we can really say that male bodies are absent from Boucher's painting. What is even more striking in the few male nudes that have come down to us, is that he seemed to forget the viril attributes themselves when drawing men! As if Boucher cared little for the details of the appendages of his models which he represented naked, merely to better dress them afterwards or place them in situations accompanying female bodies which were ultimately the ones which really interested him. The male nude in Boucher is "put to sleep", relegated to the background of the 18th century gallant scenes, confined to a role of figuration.
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Uruguayan artist, born in Montevideo, Carlos Federico Sáez painted mainly portraits. His style is characterised by very wide brush strokes that however always succeed in rendering his models very precisely and realistically. During his stay in Italy, he painted several portraits in oil on "the reserve" of the canvas (the canvas is left visible), a fairly innovative technique at the end of the 19th century, when it was used only on paper by the watercolorists. It was however widely used in the 20th century in abstract art. During his short career he made more than 70 oil paintings and 100 drawings. He is considered one of the main modern Uruguayan artists and the first to produce an unconventional art form in his country. Little or not at all known in Europe, the works of Saez are kept at the MNAV (Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales)
in Montevideo, at the Museo Juan Manuel Blanes also in Montevideo, in the Pinacoteca Eusebio Giménez in Mercedes (his hometown) and at the MALBA in Buenos Aires. The portraits painted by Saez were never commissions ; he always chose his models himself and rarely professionals. In most cases, they were family members or close friends (like on this canvas). He never painted groups, but only isolated individuals. He always drew with a brush, the first strokes defining the outline instead of a line drawing. His famous rqpid brushstrokes gave his models the feeling of being captured in an instant. The pose sessions never lasted more than a quarter of an hour. Juan Carlos Muñoz, who is painted on this canvas, was one such close friend of Saez's as well as his mentor.
Picturedon a very neutral background, without any object or decoration other than his chair, he seems to emerge from nowhere. This void accentuates the general feeling of loneliness that emanates from the canvas. This is undeniably a lonely man who is in front of us, a man abandoned, who seems to want to ignore or flee reality in a drowsiness which is however not completely sleep. His eyes half closed, without any other expression than that of an infinite sadness, softly scrutinising the painter, as if perfectly indifferent to the end result of the painting session and the portrait that was going to result from it. This attitude of false relaxation while sitting for a portrait says a lot about the model and the ability of the painter to seize with grand finesse the psychology of his model. Carlos Federico Sáez (1878-1901) Retrato del Sr. Juan Carlos Muñoz 1899, Oleo sul tela 50 x 61cm Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo
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Renato Guttuso (1911- 1987) Sleeping man, 1938 Private collection
Renato Guttuso, opposed to the academic cannons of his time, focused on the freedom of figures in space and pure chromatic research, moving ever more away from the official culture of the Italian fascist regime and its chosen themes during the Spanish civil war and on the eve of the Second World War. It was during his long stay of three years in Milan, 1938-1940, that the “social art” of Guttuso manifested his political commitment more and more clearly. So we will never know if this sleeping man is like the "Dormeur du Val" by Rimbaud, that is to say for eternity, shot down on the way by some sneaky militia or if his sleep lasted only the time of a pause on the edge of the path. Throughout the period of the worldwide conflict, Guttuso worked tirelessly, multiplying his still lives punctuated with humble everyday objects, the sights of the Gulf of Palermo and a series of drawings entitled "Massacri", clandestinely distributed, which denounced the abuses of the Nazi army, especially the massacre of the Ardeatine Pits in March 1944.
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Ubaldo Gandolfi (1728-1781) Study of a naked man Sanguine Bibliohèque nationale du Brésil
This study of a naked man awakened from a sleep he was enjoying on a couch which seems comfortable enough, is amazing in more ways than one. The border that separates this male nude from a female nude is thin indeed. The only elements which really make it possible to tell the difference is the shape of the pelvis and thorax as well as
the
advantageous musculature of the thigh and calf. This characterisation of the genre outside the habituel elements, the sex and the breast, denotes an acute knowledge of anatomy, a knowledge particularly developed by painters of the 18th century. The author of this drawing, Ubaldo Gandolfi, was an Italian painter of the late Baroque, belonging to the School of Bologna. With his brother Gaetano, Ubaldo Gandolfi was part of a family of prolific artists: his sons Giovanni Battista and Ubaldo Lorenzo, and his nephews Mauro, Democrito and his niece Clementina were the last representatives of Bolognese painting, born two centuries after the Caracci. Ubaldo painted the canvases with mythological subjects of the Palazzo Marescalchi in Bologna, two of which are preserved today in the United States, at the Museum of North Carolina. He left many drawings and sanguines preserved in Italy or at the MET in New York and in many museums around the world.
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Aside from his considerably free morals and his full bisexual life, including Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keynes, David Garnett, Roger Fry or the poet Paul Roche, the painter Duncan Grant is mostly known for his style which is similar to that of the post French impressionism. The poet and famous translator of ancient greek tragedies, Paul Roche (19162007), is here painted by Duncan on a canvas dating from the years 1946-50, period of the beginning of a romantic relationship which was to last their entire lives. At the end of his life, Paul Roche took care of Duncan by allowing him to maintain his lifestyle at Charleston, where Angelica his daughter had also settled. In return, Grant made Roche the co-heir of his works with his daughter Angelica. Grant penniless, died at Paul Roche's home in 1978.
Duncan Grant (1885-1978) Paul Roche sleeping Private collection
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Sir Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) Charles Henri Ford (1913-2002) ansPavel Tchelitchev (1898–1957) in 1941
The photographs Sir Cecil Beaton took of the avant-garde writer and filmmaker Charles-Henri Ford and painter Pavel Tchelitchev who had an extended romantic relationship from the early 1930s, represent a turning point in his career, especially when compared to the fairly conventional portraits of royalty and jet set celebrities of his time he had done until then. These photos were quite transgressive for the era like this one which represents the heads of the two lovers placed on top of one another or the photo of Charles-Henri Ford lying on a bed of tabloid newspapers, symbols of the violence and cultural excess of America. Charles Henri Ford, brother of actress Ruth Ford, and Pavel Tchelitchev, were figures emblematic of the American homosexual scene as well as being unavoidable participants of mid-20th century artistic New York, one as a writer, the other as an illustrator. Upon his arrival in New York in 1933 from Paris where he had already made a recognized career as theater decorator, Pavel Tchelitchev joined his companion, the writer Charles Henri Ford, with whom he would live until the end of his life. As soon as he arrived in New York, Tchelichev set to work for directors and choreographers, such as Georges Balanchine or Everett Austin, director of the Wadswoth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. From 1940 and throughout World War II he published illustrations in the surrealist magazine View edited by his companion Charles-Henri Ford. Under the direction of Charles-Henri Ford, View became an avant-garde magazine that attracted contributions from artists and writers such as Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, André Masson, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Paul Klee, Albert Camus, Lawrence Durrell, Georgia O'Keeffe, Man Ray, Jorge Luis Borges, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Jean Genet, René Magritte, Jean Dubuffet or Isamu Noguchi… In the 1940s, View Editions, the magazine's editorial branch, published the first monograph on Marcel Duchamp and a collection of poems by André Breton in an bilingual edition, "Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares » (1946). Suffice it to say that Ford and Pavel Tchelichev, at the center of 20th century artistic creation, never hesitated taking the most audacious risks of their era. When Tchelichev died in Rome in 1957, of a heart attack , the New York Times described Ford as his "long-time companion and secretary ».
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ SLEEP While he became world famous for his descriptions of the American West, painting equally well both cowboys and Indians and their horses, Frederic Remington hardly ever visited these locations, at most two or three times and for short stays only. Yet his descriptions of the life of the pioneers of the Wild West are invaluable documents, as well as being works of art appreciated by the greatest museums on the planet. Unfortunately Remington, ever dissatisfied with his production, burned and destroyed most of his work. Many no doubt fabulous documents have thus disappeared forever. His work on the American West influenced many artists such as director John Ford who was inspired by his paintings for the cinematography of his film "The Heroic Charge". Remington himself became the central figure in volume 40 of "The Adventures of Lucky Luke", a famous cartoon album in which "the cowboy who shoots faster than his shadow » ensures his protection in his crossing the American West! Born in Canton, New York, he spent his childhood hunting and riding horses while making his first drawings. Later, incidentally, he made his first trip to the West and became a business man in Kansas City where he published a few illustrations in The Collier's Weekly and Harper's Magazine. Obese, victim of very poor nutritional hygiene and a deplorable lifestyle, Frederic Remington died of a poorly treated appendicitis which degenerated into peritonitis.
1892 - The MET Museum, New York
Frederic Remington (1861-1909) A New Year on the Cimarron, (A Courier's Halt to Feed) Oil on canvas, (69.2 × 102.2 cm), 1903 Boston Museum of Fine Arts
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ SLEEP
Emile Friant (1863-1932) Two artists : Mathias Schiff and Camille Martin, 1880 Oil on canvas, 32,5 x 40,5 cm Private Collection
In this painting, the Lorraine painter Emile Friant painted two of his closest friends resting in the Nancy countryside. They were the painter Camille Martin (right), who studied with him at the École des Beaux-Arts de Nancy and Mathias Schiff (left) painter and sculptor who died prematurely. Besides the two young artists lying in the grass, we note the complete paraphernalia of the painter of this time: the wide-brimmed hat to protect the eyes from deceptive sunlight, the parasol, and the box of gouaches held by two leather handles topped with sheets of paper and cardboard for painting. The arrival of a pretty young lady passing by with a picnic basket under her arm, seems to have awakened these two young gallant, and a bit lazy, artists from a long nap. In fact they did between them create many works. Mathias Schiff remains best known for a imposing monument, still visible today in Nancy in the heart of the old town, Place Saint Epvre; it represents René II, emblematic personage of an independent and sovereign Lorraine, victorious over Charles Le Téméraire at the Battle of Nancy in 1477. Camille Martin is one of the rare painters from Nancy who had an influence on the painting of the Ecole de Nancy along with the famous Victor Prouvé and Emile Friant with whom he remained friends during all his life and the lesser known Henri Royze and Paul-Emile Colin.
MPS MEN PORTRAITS SERIES n°5 ©Francis Rousseau July -2020 English translation : Ann Menuhin htpp : //menportraits.blogspot.com
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