Painters' Lives: Marguerite Louppe & Maurice Brianchon by Rosenberg & Co.

MAURICE BRIANCHON MARGUERITE LOUPPE Painters’ Lives Williams Center Gallery Lafayette College Painters’ Lives

Painters’ Lives

FOREWORD

he Williams Center Gallery at Lafayette is pleased to present Painters’ Lives: Marguerite Louppe and Maurice Brianchon, a selection of paintings, prints, drawings, and books drawn from the collection of David Hirsh, class of 1997. This exhibition features an artist husbandand-wife couple and brings the work of Brianchon to the United States after almost five decades. He was an influential and well-known painter in France from the 1920s through his death in 1979. We are honored to introduce the work of his wife, an under-recognized and wonderful painter, for the first time in the United States.

Michiko Okaya, Director of Lafayette Art Galleries Robert S. Mattison, Marshall R. Metzgar Professor, Department of Art, Lafayette College April 2017

The exhibition catalogue has been made possible in part by a generous gift from

Painters’ Lives

MARGUERITE LOUPPE Tabletop Still-Life undated, oil on canvas, 37.5 x 80 cm

Painters’ Lives

MAURICE BRIANCHON MARGUERITE LOUPPE

Painters’ Lives CURATED BY

William Corwin and David Hirsh

April 6 – May 19, 2017

Williams Center Gallery Lafayette College Painters’ Lives

MARGUERITE LOUPPE Bouteilles et Flacons undated, oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm

Painters’ Lives

INTRODUCTION

ainters’ Lives: Marguerite Louppe and Maurice Brianchon at Lafayette College’s Williams Center Gallery explores the rich interior and exterior lives of an artistic couple of the mid-twentieth centry Parisan art scene. The paintings, prints, drawings, and sketches in the exhibition offer a visual dialogue about two artists. The works are drawn from the personal collection of David Hirsh (Lafayette alumni class of 1997). Maurice Brianchon was a post-impressionistic and figurative painter in the tradition of Manet, Vuillard, and Bonnard, and is best known for his nudes, still lifes and ballet dancers. Marguerite Louppe explored more mathematical and abstract artistic trends of the day such as Purism and Cubism. In the comparison of the two artists’ work, we can imagine cross-fertilization of ideas and subjects of mutual interest most notably the landscape of their country house Truffieres in the Dordogne. The viewer can also observe the divergent paths the two artists pursued. Louppe tended to follow a monastic and insular practice, focusing on the intimate and interior life of an artist as well as her studio and the architecture and landscape of Truffieres. Brianchon, a sensualist and an expansive personality, heavily incorporated collaboration with other artists and leading creative minds of the time. He investigated the human form and celebrated interaction, painting images of Parisian life, music halls, and the horse races at St. Cloud and Longchamps as well as scenes of the theater, ballet, and pastoral landscapes. From the narrative of the artists’ only son, Pierre-Antoine Brianchon, we know that the two artists discussed their work on a daily basis, indicating a vital collaboration of intellect if not style. Truffieres is also a major point of intersection and a landmark moment in both Brianchon’s and Louppe’s careers worth noting. After purchasing the property in 1960, the two artists spent much of the year at the house in Perigord, working daily in their individual studios. Truffieres represented an arrangement most artists aspire to: a remote and quiet location perfect for focus, large light-filled studios, and close proximity to each other that would allow for dialogue and constructive critique. Most of all, Truffieres offered a landscape that was a source of inspiration for both artists for the rest of their lives.

Painters’ Lives

MAURICE BRIANCHON Le Grenouilles 1936, oil on panel, 10 x 18 cm

MARGUERITE LOUPPE Escargots undated, oil on panel, 22 x 34 cm

Painters’ Lives

MAURICE BRIANCHON Avant le Depart undated, oil on board, 15 x 32 cm

MARGUERITE LOUPPE Dimanche à Saint-Cloud undated, oil on canvas, 59.5 x 81 cm

Painters’ Lives

INTRODUCTION

Within the first half of the twentieth century in French painting, Brianchon (1899-1979) was a canonical figure. He became active in the Parisian art scene in the mid-twenties, and was chosen to represent France at the 1934 Venice Biennale, sharing that honor with Manet. His style of painting was avowedly figurative, and his canvases addressed the human form at leisure in domestic settings as well as in motion: ballet dancers and actors on stage, jockeys on horseback, and Parisians going about their daily routines. Painters’ Lives offers a selection of landscapes, still lifes, and theatrical scenes. At every step Brianchon was keenly aware of the traditions and tropes of French painting—referencing the clowns and harlequins of Watteau, the elegance of Fragonard, and the dancers of Degas, while employing the composition, brushwork, color, and gesture of Matisse, Vuillard, and Maillol. His figures are often pensive and thoughtful as can be seen in his masterwork Nu Assis (1946), featured in the exhibition, where the sitter gazes to the left, her face cast downwards, oblivious of the viewer and lost in thought. As in many of his intimate portraits, Brianchon deftly sets the viewer at ease by focusing on the subject’s frame of mind rather than self-consciously making her the center of attention. In Bal Masqué (1948), his ballerinas seem frozen yet harbor an intriguing subtlety of emotion that recalls the psychological depth of Manet and the spontaneous composition of Degas. In his still lifes, Brianchon enjoyed creating a simple dialectic between a classic subject and an abstract pattern—a motif immediately recognizable as his signature composition, and prefigures the intense color palette and sharp contrasts of the American Pop painters of the sixties. In the Painters’ Lives exhibition, Nature Morte aux Brioches (1963) and Nature Morte Aux Pommes (1970) depict bread and fruit against a simple and sparse tabletop pattern and background; in Brioches, a forbidding solid black background and a gray angular tabletop play abstract forms against soft bulbous forms of bread; and in Pommes the organic form of the green apples plays off the arc-patterns of the blue-and-white tiles and the abstract hard-edged red-and-white bands of the curtains or back wallpaper. Here the artist is drawing directly on the compositional methodology of Matisse while also incorporating the sense of volume found in the work of Cézanne. In 1951, Brianchon was honored with a retrospective at the Louvre’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and in 1953, was dispatched as a cultural ambassador by President of France Vincent Auriol to visually chronicle the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. He exhibited throughout Europe as well as in New York and Tokyo, and was well known as

Painters’ Lives

INTRODUCTION

a set and costume designer, collaborating with composer Francis Poulenc on operas and ballets and with the theatrical team of Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault on numerous theatrical productions. Several Brianchon oils, a selection of small sketches for theater and ballet, and drawings of nudes and still lifes are included in this exhibition. A sketchbook of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation provides an exciting window into the artist’s process. Marguerite Louppe (1902-1988) was an accomplished painter as well, but as with most women working in the arts at that time she received much less attention critically. Despite this social handicap, Louppe had a good career and showed in Paris, Switzerland, and Tokyo. She pursued intellectual and aesthetic paths widely divergent from her husband’s practice. Perhaps because of her relative lack of notoriety, or maybe simply a strong tenet of her personality, Louppe’s painting pointed inward and centered around her studio and the personal; she painted objects that stood in as symbols of her profession and herself. Her early paintings depicted the artist at her toilette and various scenes of domesticity and street life. By the forties, she had largely moved away from the human figure to a practice almost solely concerned with still lifes staged in the studio, and eventually landscapes around her country seat of Truffieres. Unlike her husband’s work, which found a recognizable style based largely on the institution of French painting itself, Louppe was an adventurous painter who was excited to experiment with movements that were contemporaneous with her practice. In her later canvases she employed a mathematical and draftsperson-like process of deconstructing a collection of objects or an exterior landscape into their basic geometry, emphasizing shape, angle, and unexpected formal coincidences and rhythms that emerge from this simplified reality. In Painters’ Lives, Louppe’s work is represented by a wide selection of oil paintings and drawings. In the painting Dimanche, à Saint-Cloud, featured in the exhibition, she mimics Braque and Picasso in her use of newspaper text as a jarring black-and-white abstract element injected into a crisp arrangement of papers, and a palette in muted ochres, browns, grays, and light blues. Eventually she settled on a quiet and controlled investigation of form and hidden geometries that is more reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Purist desktop landscapes. In her study Bouteilles et Flacons, the cold simple forms of the transparent and metal tubes are positioned against the intense red, blue, and brown of the table, and the shadows of the forms are abstracted and transformed into an almost textile-like pattern

Painters’ Lives

MAURICE BRIANCHON Bal Masqué 1948, oil on panel, 33 x 55 cm

Painters’ Lives

INTRODUCTION

that signifies the table. Similarly, Louppe’s landscapes eventually approach Diebenkorn in their simple geometrical treatment of the Perigordian countryside, as in her numerous paintings in the exhibition of the fields and farm buildings of Truffieres. The exhibition includes several ink drawings offering an insight into her process of deconstruction. Also on display are her illustrations for Georges Duhamel’s 1934 novel Le Jardin des Bêtes Sauvages. Complementing the rich offering of visual art is a selection of fascinating historical documents and ephemera showing the wide network of artists and thinkers who circulated through the world of Brianchon and Louppe, including Francis Poulenc, Paul Morand, Cecil Beaton, and Colette. The pair regularly hosted dinners and salons visited by some of the most influential artists in Paris. The period of the Second World War in particular saw the pair torn in contradictory political directions among their group—the Jewish sculptor Ossip Zadkine, the composer Poulenc (persecuted by the Nazis for his homosexuality), and the collaborationist writer Morand—all of whom claimed Brianchon/Louppe as close friends. Both artists were open to artistic collaboration, but in particular Brianchon, who worked on operas with the aforementioned Poulenc, theatrical productions with Barrault and Renaud, and illustrations for the works of André Gide and Colette. Louppe collaborated on several books and also a mural project with Brianchon. In addition to the paintings by Brianchon and Louppe, this exhibition contextualizes the artists in their time and within their circle. Painters’ Lives: Marguerite Louppe and Maurice Brianchon offers an enticing window into the early and mid-twentieth century art life of Paris for art lovers, art historians, and history buffs alike, and also presents to the American public for the first time the work of a deserving and under-recognized artist, Marguerite Louppe.

David Hirsh and William Corwin, curators, New York, April 2017

Painters’ Lives

MAURICE BRIANCHON 1899-1979 12

Painters’ Lives

MAURICE BRIANCHON

aurice Brianchon is an example of that rare breed of artist who exists not only as a great creative talent but also as an important historical figure, standing at the confluence of a variety of important early and mid-century French cultural movements. He achieved this through a great versatility in his artistic practice. Not only was he a painter in the very traditional sense of the word; he was also deeply committed to the dream of interdisciplinary partnerships among artists, writers, composers, and even politicians, fostering a community of thinkers from all backgrounds while maintaining a deeply humble perspective on his own position within the cultural network of his time. His greatest achievements clearly exist in the form of his luminous, luxurious, and pleasure-filled canvases, drawings, watercolors, and illustrations. Yet, it could be argued that by helping bring into existence the productions of Francis Poulenc, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Madeleine Renaud, or set to image the poetry of André Gide and Colette, or even helping to fulfill the obligations of the French Fourth Republic at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, one may find his greatest lasting contributions to French culture. What also clearly made this versatility among the competing worlds of art, theater music, teaching and design possible was this deep personal humility that endeared him to friends and colleagues and fostered relationships, artistic and otherwise, of great trust and respect. Olivier Daulte and Pierre-Antoine Brianchon wrote a catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Brianchon in 2008, and Francois Daulte wrote an accompanying catalogue for the painter’s retrospective in Lausanne at the Fondation de l’Hermitage in 1989. Both of these books are superb resources (in French) on the life and work of Brianchon. What follows is a narrative of the artist’s life based on those seminal volumes.1

Brianchon was born in 1899 in Fresnay-sur-Sarthe, near Le Mans. The family moved to Paris in 1917, and the following year he enrolled in l’École des Arts Décoratifs where he studied under Eugene Morand, the playwright and painter who would be a supporter and mentor to Brianchon through his early career as well as the father of his close friend, the controversial novelist Paul Morand. Several of Bianchon’s fellow

Painters’ Lives

MAURICE BRIANCHON

students would also become lifelong colleagues and friends: Roland Oudot, Raymond Legueult, and Francois Desnoyer. Brianchon won the Prix Blumenthal in 1924 and travelled throughout Spain on a grant from the l’École des Arts Décoratifs that year with Legueult, becoming fascinated with the paintings of Velasquez and El Greco. The following year the two young painters designed the sets for the Massenet opera Grisélidis, the libretto written by Morand, their former professor. They again worked together in 1925 on a short opera La Naissance de la Lyre, with music by Albert Roussel, for L’Opéra de Paris. Though he first exhibited paintings at the Salon des Tuileries in 1923, it was not until 1927 that Brianchon had his first major solo exhibition at the Galerie le Portique. In 1934 Brianchon achieved national recognition by representing France in the Venice Biennale. Six of his canvases shared the French Pavilion with works by Manet, which must have seemed a tremendous honor as well as a vindication of the artist’s practice in the face of the upheavals of Fauvism and Cubism that had transformed the French art scene at the start of the century, while Brianchon had steadily aligned himself more with post-impressionism. Brianchon’s work is filled with the influences and the craftsmanship of Corot, Manet, and Vuillard and in his paintings he reflects their marvelous intelligence at rendering the subtlety and gesture of the human condition. That same year he married fellow painter Marguerite Louppe, whom he had met at an event at the famously edgy and experimental Académie Julian. Their son and only child, Pierre-Antoine, was born the following year. Brianchon had begun his teaching career in 1930 at École de Couture, but in 1936 he returned to his alma mater, l’École des Arts Décoratifs. In 1949 he became a professor at École des Beaux-Arts. Over his long pedagogical career there, spanning two decades, he would teach and influence a generation of notable French artists, including Guy Bardone, André Brasilier, Bernard Cathelin, René Genis, and Paul Guiramand. In 1936, he received his first major institutional commission, painting a pair of murals for the entry hall of the theater the Palais de Chaillot at the Trocadéro. From that point until the late fifties Brianchon designed sets and costumes for performances of all kinds: the ballet Sylvia by Léo Delibes in 1939, Valses Nobles et Sentimentales by Ravel, and Les Animaux Modèles by Francis Poulenc the following year. In 1939 Brianchon also garnered attention in the United States, receiving the Carnegie Institute’s Garden Club Prize.

Painters’ Lives

MAURICE BRIANCHON

Poulenc and Brianchon became close friends and continued to work together on projects until the late fifties. After the Second World War, the painter forged the other great artistic association for which he is remembered: in 1946 Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault asked him to design sets and costumes for Marivaux’s Fausses Confidences. It was a partnership that would continue for a decade. That same year saw another arrival of sorts; the painter had been illustrating books for the printing house Ides et Calendes since the previous year, but in 1946 he illustrated the complete works of André Gide. He would continue to illustrate and create lithographic editions to accompany works of literature and poetry until 1970, culminating with a set of prints for Colette’s Le Blé en Herbe, and several editions with the famed Mourlot Press. The first president of the Fourth Republic, Vincent Auriol, was an admirer of Brianchon and his work, and besides inviting him to state functions and receptions, commissioned him to design official menus and invitations for the Office of the President. Auriol made Brianchon an Officer of the French Legion of Honor in 1953 and that same year sent him as the official artist representative of the French nation to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Brianchon had his first exhibition with the Wildenstein Gallery in London in 1951. In 1956 he travelled to Rome with Hans Arp and Jacques Villon to serve on the jury for the Prix del la VII Quadrienale National d’arte di Roma. Brianchon reached the zenith of his career as a painter, exhibiting 135 paintings, as well as watercolors, drawings, lithographs, and tapestries at the Musée des Art Décoratifs at the Louvre from March 15 through April 22, 1951. The exhibition, organized by his wife Marguerite, was well received critically and was a popular success as well. This retrospective occurred when he was 52 years old. By that point in his life he had already traversed a half-century of war, occupation, and artistic revolution with a steadiness and surefootedness of someone confident of his role in his world and sure of his craft but with an openness to alternative methods that made him an extremely flexible, sophisticated, and sought-after artist. His work may not show the same tension or struggle both intellectually and physically as the works of DuBuffet or Yves Tanguy —both contemporaries born within a year of Brianchon’s birth—but Brianchon’s work did not presume to challenge the way one looks at visual art. As Robert Rey said of him, “he was the result and not the synthesis of the French painting tradition.” 2

Painters’ Lives

MAURICE BRIANCHON La Place de Passy Sous la Niege 1943, oil on canvas, 25 x 34.5 cm

Painters’ Lives

MAURICE BRIANCHON

Despite the fact that Brianchon had been chosen to represent France on numerous occasions—in Venice in 1934 shoulder to shoulder with Manet, and at Westminster Abbey in 1953, offering an artist’s view of the most important event in England since the end of the war, he was just as content to illustrate the ochre wheat fields of the Dordogne and the kitchen table at his home Truffieres as he was rendering the coronation. While many artists become obsessed with their legacy, Brianchon was quite clearly content with his life as a working artist. He had achieved the height of success in all of the chosen avenues his painting had taken him: an exhibition at the Louvre, a professor at the Paris BeauxArts, and collaborations with France’s greatest writers and composers. In 1959 Brianchon sailed to New York for the first time to be present at the opening of the first of many of his exhibitions at the David B. Findlay Gallery. He filled a sketchbook with drawings of New York and its skyscrapers while there. As an antidote to their urban existence in Paris, the Brianchons purchased a rustic country estate in Périgord in 1960: the rambling buildings, pastoral vistas, and light-filled studios of Truffières became a frequent subject of the paintings of both Maurice and Marguerite. They still spent most of their time in Paris and Maurice continued to show extensively in Europe, New York, and later Tokyo in the late sixties and seventies as well. A retrospective of the artist’s work was presented at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Neuchatel in 1962. Not particularly to the artist’s liking was the fact that he was increasingly being considered part of an artificially constructed artistic movement called La Réalité Poetique, which featured such artists as Caillard, Cavailles, Legueult, Limouse, Oudot, Planson, and Terechkovitch. Brianchon died in Paris in 1979. As per his wishes, no major exhibitions of his work were mounted until ten years after his death. This epilogue of quiet after the artist’s extraordinarily productive life is an indication of the modesty with which he viewed his career and artistic output.

1 Pierre-Antoine Brianchon and Olivier Daulte, Maurice Brianchon: Catalogue de l’oeuvre peint (Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 2008); François Daulte, Maurice Brianchon 1899-1979 [exhibition catalogue] (Paris and Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts and the Fondation de l’Hermitage, 1989). 2 Robert Rey, Maurice Briancon, Collection les Maitres de Demain VI (Paris: Editions Sequana, 1943), p 4.

Painters’ Lives

MAURICE BRIANCHON Nature Morte aux Pommes 1970, oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm

MAURICE BRIANCHON Nature Morte aux Brioches 1963, oil on canvas, 65 x 92 cm

Painters’ Lives

MARGUERITE LOUPPE Glass Distilling Vessel with White Orchid undated, oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm

MARGUERITE LOUPPE Le Poste de TSF undated, oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm

Painters’ Lives

MARGUERITE LOUPPE 1902-1988 20

Painters’ Lives

MARGUERITE LOUPPE

arguerite Louppe’s paintings depict a personal, warm, and intellectually engaged portrait of the life of a woman artist observing and responding to the most profound transitional period in French painting, and perhaps western painting, in the twentieth century—the transformation of imagery from postimpressionist to Cubism into abstraction. The parameters of her oeuvre begin with a fascination with the everyday: street life and the inward-looking daily existence in the home. This focus on interiority slowly emanated outwards to become an intellectual and symbolic examination of the life of the artist. The arc of her career expanded to include a passionate interest in her country home as well. While she enjoyed painting the Perigordian landscape as an aesthetic subject, her pastoral paintings are also a consideration of the symbolism of a French rustic country lifestyle and its place in the institution of French painting. Her choice of subjects involved formalistic as well as symbolic references. Louppe never deviated sharply from her methodical progression, from interior domestic scenes to classical still lifes and then to studio still lifes and landscapes. Within these confines she incorporated many of the novel and revolutionary aesthetic styles of the day. Marguerite Louppe was born September 5, 1902, in the northern city of Commercy. Her father, Alix-Jules Louppe, was an engineer and most of the men in her family seem to have been trained as engineers. Her granduncle Albert Louppe was well known in the civil engineering field and coordinated the construction of the famous bridge between Brest and the Plougastel peninsula in Brittany (designed by Freyssinet) that bears his name. Regardless of whether her family was artistic, clearly she was surrounded by a healthy environment of scientific creativity and a strong work ethic, which heavily influenced her artistic practice. Louppe’s family moved to Paris soon after her birth and settled in the affluent 16th arrondissement. She attended the Lycée Molièere, the third public girl’s school in Paris, founded in 1888. A unique place due to its location and the fact that it had no fees, the school was attended by girls came from a variety of backgrounds, both economic and ethnic, many being Protestant and Jewish. Added to this was the historical timeframe:

Painters’ Lives

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Louppe attended the lycée from approximately 1915 through 1918, so she and the other girls found themselves holding fundraisers, and writing letters and making bandages for soldiers at the front on an almost daily basis. The school was also famous for strict regulation and rigorous standards, so the necessity of good consistent discipline was repeatedly inculcated into the consciousness of the young Louppe. This was in contrast to the rather indifferent Catholic education of her future husband Maurice, which probably led to Marguerite’s able commandeering and management of her husband’s studio and career, as well as her own (she was the organizer of Brianchon’s Louvre retrospective in 1951). Despite her family’s aforementioned mathematical and scientific proclivities, Louppe chose to pursue a “classical” course at the Lycée Molière, focusing on literature rather than mathematics. No particular information is available about Louppe’s life between her graduation from the Lycée Molière and her meeting and marriage to Maurice Brianchon. She attended classes at a variety of the more casual art schools in Paris until 1926: the Académie Julian, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, the Académie Scandinave, and the Académie André Lhote. These establishments were more hospitable both to women and to artists and individuals who did not fit the traditional art school model (at the time) of being a meticulous, detail- and craft-oriented renderer of classical plaster casts. In particular the Académie Julian had seen the likes of Derain, Denis, Vuillard, and Bonnard pass through its classes; painters who would heavily influence Louppe and her husband. Contemporaneous avant-garde innovators also attended the Académie Julian, such as DuBuffet, Duchamp, and Bourgeouis, who coexisted within the same art world as Louppe. Although their work did not affect her style in a discernable way, she was clearly aware of them and cognizant of their contributions. The Académie Julian fostered and nurtured a spirit of independence and radicality which was internalized in Louppe’s work, and led not so much to a stark break from contemporary visual tropes as it did to a subtle reimagining of existing stylistic conventions many of which were generated by predecessors such as Bonnard, Derain, and Vuillard, and became the focus of her contemporaries Legeult, Oudot, and Brianchon. According to their son’s narrative of his father’s life for the Maurice Brianchon: Catalogue de l’oeuvre peint (2008), Louppe and Brianchon met at an event at the Académie Julian. Louppe, three and a half years younger than Brianchon, was his contemporary and had been a part of the art scene for at least a decade. They were married June 18, 1934, and their only child was born a year later.

Painters’ Lives

MARGUERITE LOUPPE Rustic Chair undated, oil on canvas, 82 x 66.5 cm

Painters’ Lives

MARGUERITE LOUPPE Studio Still Life with Sketch undated, oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm

MARGUERITE LOUPPE Les Trois Chevalets undated, oil on canvas, 116 x 89.3 cm

Painters’ Lives

MARGUERITE LOUPPE

Brianchon acted as a colleague of Louppe as well as her husband; often using his higher profile as an artist in order to enable her to exhibit her work. But even before his rise in the French art world, they were exhibiting together, as equals. In January 1936, Henri Heraut organized a group exhibition at the Galerie Charpentier entitled Premier Salon de la Nouvelle Génération in which was exhibited the “elite of the young painters,” including both Louppe and Brianchon. The exhibition also included the work of Oudot, Legeult, and Terechkovitch. Further exhibitions at Charpentier continued; La Femme et les Peintres et Sculpteurs Contemporains which took place from December 12, 1941 through January 11, 1942, and included van Dongen, Bonnard, Maillol, Segonzac, Oudot, Rouault, Braque, and Denis. Over the years Louppe exhibited her work in Paris at Galerie Charles-Auguste Girard, Galerie Druet, Galerie Louis Carré, and Galerie René Drouet. One project known to have been a collaboration between Brianchon and Louppe was a series of three murals for the Conservatoire National de Musique et d’Art Dramatique de Paris created in 1943. Frustratingly, Marguerite Louppe rarely dated her paintings, so any chronology has to be deduced through catalogue and press publications, stylistic similarities, and a methodical evolution of the types of props she used in still lifes. Painters’ Lives includes a selection of mid-career paintings such as Les Trois Chevalets and several images utilizing a distinctive rustic wooden chair. Louppe reframed these tools of the artist and pieces of furniture as sculptural objects. The carved flourish in the top of her favorite wooden seat takes on an architectural presence, much like the triangles, brushes, and vases that populate her tables have a larger-than-life significance. These paintings constitute the intellectual and stylistic climax of Louppe’s work—a synthesis of a subtle Cubism with the simplicity of the Purist style. In 1960, the couple purchased their home in Perigord—Truffieres—and divided their time between the country and Paris. Louppe had her own space—a legitimate studio for the first time. Between the still lifes of the forties and the post-1960 landscapes of Truffieres, there is a profound increase in what is not perceived by the eye, a visual subtext that is a major facet of the later still lifes as well. In her views of the front of the house at Truffieres, the picture plane becomes crowded with regulating lines and angles. The perspectival lines take on a life of their own, becoming solid boundaries of form, casting their own shadows and seemingly refracting light. Like Brianchon, Louppe also painted her studio’s interior, investigating the correlation between the tall and lanky forms of the easels with the perspective of the studio, or again and again painting a

Painters’ Lives

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table with a few sculptural objects, and alternating these solid rounded or irregular forms with much more purely geometric devices—books and draftsperson’s triangles. There is a poetic interest in the everyday life of the workman’s or artist’s table, similar in emotion to the stark and overly simplified and abstracted bottles and pipes of Le Corbusier’s Purist canvases. The landscapes are quite similar in formal organization—the smaller forms are now substituted for wagons and farm structures placed within a built background of larger buildings and terraces and planes. The regulating geometries that allowed a line to form the edge of a table, the folded page of a book, and the hypotenuse of the draftsperson’s triangle are now a long gray shadow of the sun low on the horizon, the roofline of the house, and lengths of lumber piled in the back of a wagon. In the final period of her active artistic life, Louppe exhibited at Galerie des Granges in Geneva in 1978 and Galerie Yoshii in Paris in 1980. Her final exhibition was at Galerie Paul Vallotton in Lausanne in 1985. In these exhibitions she showed a combination of her faceted and mathematical tablescapes and landscapes, but also a series of spontaneous and lighthearted still lifes. Her late practice somehow poised in the middle between her Cubist/Purist impulses and her impressionistic tendencies. Louppe had once explained her feelings about art to Pierre Antoine Brianchon’s friend Yolande Calvet: that is was a calling, much like taking religious vows and joining a monastic order, that it demanded an inordinate amount of time and devotion. Sadly, Louppe’s last ten years were plagued with declining vision and eventual blindness, but they were a chance at artistic liberation as well, a time for a much deeper exploration and devotion.

Painters’ Lives

MARGUERITE LOUPPE Chair, Brushes, and Palette undated, oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm

Painters’ Lives

MARGUERITE LOUPPE View of the Basin, Truffieres undated, oil on canvas, 64.8 x 81 cm

MARGUERITE LOUPPE Les Buis undated, oil on canvas, 73 x 93 cm

Painters’ Lives

MAURICE BRIANCHON Les Figues undated, oil on panel, 24.5 x 29.5 cm

MARGUERITE LOUPPE 63 undated, oil on canvas, 54.5 x 65 cm

Painters’ Lives

WILLIAM CORWIN William Corwin is a sculptor, writer, and curator based in New York. In 2009 he began recording his radio show with Clocktower Radio and in the last eight years has interviewed artists ranging widely: Marilyn Minter, David Hockney, Tracey Emin, Xaviera Simmons, Lynda Benglis, and Sarah Lucas. Corwin’s dual exhibitions in 2015—Devotion at Catinca Tabacaru and Cyborg at Zurcher Gallery—were covered in Art Critical, Installation Magazine, and Modern Painters, and both exhibitions were reprised in 2016 and 2017 as I, Cyborg at Gazelli Art House in London and A Brief Gospel for Our Times at Art 3 Gallery in Brooklyn. In 2015 he was the organizing curator of the LUMEN Video Art Festival at Snug Harbor Cultural Center. Since 2010 he has been a reviewer for Frieze Magazine and has also regularly written reviews and conducted interviews for The Brooklyn Rail, Art Papers, Art Critical, and Bomb.

DAVID HIRSH David Hirsh graduated from Lafayette College in 1997 with a B.A. in International Affairs with a minor in Art History. While at Lafayette, he interned at Holly Solomon Gallery in New York. This gave Hirsh the opportunity to experience the works of great artists like Gordon Matta-Clark, Nam June Paik, and William Wegman. While his professional career steered him toward the world of finance, he has always kept his passion for art alive as an avid collector. He developed an interest in the artwork of a distant great aunt, Marguerite Louppe, and her husband Maurice Brianchon through his friendship with their son Pierre-Antoine Brianchon. Upon Pierre-Antoine’s death, Hirsh inherited a portion of the Brianchon-Louppe estate. For nearly a decade, he has been organizing the Brianchon-Louppe archives in the artists’ French country estate of Truffieres and has developed his own Louppe-Brianchon collection.

Painters’ Lives

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Brianchon, Pierre-Antoine, and Olivier Daulte. Maurice Brianchon: Catalogue de l’oeuvre peint. Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 2008. Daulte, François. Maurice Brianchon 1899-1979. Paris and Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts and the Fondation de l’Hermitage, 1989. Heyd, Richard. Brianchon. Neuchatel: Editions Ides et Calendes, 1954. Rey, Robert. Maurice Brianchon, Collection les Maitres de Demain VI. Paris: Editions Sequana, 1943. Rey, Robert, Maurice Brianchon, Musee des Art Decoratifs Palais du Louvre/Mourlot Freres, Paris, 1951. Marguerite Louppe, Galerie Paul Vallotton, Lausanne; 1985

Painters’ Lives

MAURICE BRIANCHON Avant le Depart, undated, oil on panel, 15 x 32 cm Bal Masqué, 1948, oil on panel, 33 x 55 cm Les Figues, undated, oil on panel, 24.5 x 29.5 cm Les Grenouilles, 1936, oil on panel, 10 x 18 cm La Place de Passy Sous la Niege, 1943, oil on canvas, 25 x 34.5 cm Nature Morte aux Brioches, 1963, oil on canvas, 65 x 92 cm Nature Morte aux Pommes, 1970, oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm Nu Assis, 1946, oil on canvas, 92 x 65 cm (front cover)

MARGUERITE LOUPPE Still lifes and interiors 63, undated, oil on canvas, 54.5 x 65 cm Bouteilles et Flacons, undated, oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm Chair, Brushes, and Palette, undated, oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm Dimanche à Saint-Cloud, undated, oil on canvas, 59.5 x 81 cm Escargots, undated, oil on panel, 22 x 34 cm Glass Distilling Vessel with White Orchid, undated, oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm Le Poste de TSF, undated, oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm Les Trois Chevalets, undated, oil on canvas, 116 x 89.3 cm Rustic Chair, undated, oil on canvas, 82 x 66.5 cm Studio Still Life with Sketch, undated, oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm Tabletop Still Life, undated, oil on canvas, 37.5 x 80 cm Landscapes Cityscape, undated, oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm (back cover) Les Buis, undated, oil on canvas, 73 x 93 cm View of the Basin, Truffieres, undated, oil on canvas, 64.8 x 81 cm

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors thank Ilaria Maggi and Valeria Romeo of www.synersea.it for their help in designing this exhibition catalogue and Columbus Art Studio for their help framing the artists’ work.

Painters’ Lives

Painters’ Lives MARGUERITE LOUPPE & MAURICE BRIANCHON April 6 – May 19, 2017

Williams Center Gallery 317 Hamilton Street, Easton, PA 18042 galleries.lafayette.edu (610) 330-5361 Hours: Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–5 p.m., Sat. & Sun. 12–5 p.m.