Les Nabis 1888–1900 Waddington Custot

PIERRE BONNARD

p. 51

MAURICE

DENIS

p. 79

CHARLES

FILIGER

p. 105

PAUL RANSON

p. 129

JÓZSEF

RIPPL-RÓNAI

p.145

KER-XAVIER

ROUSSEL

p. 155

PAUL

SÉRUSIER

p.165

FÉLIX

VALLOTTON

p. 181

ÉDOUARD VUILLARD

ENJOYING THE NABIS TODAY

GILLES GENTY

A BROTHERHOOD OF ARTISTS BOUND BY FRIENDSHIP

The story of the Nabis began with the close friendship between a group of teenage artists, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis, at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris in the period 1885–87. To understand the birth of their artistic calling, one has to picture their passionate discussions about the writers (Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarmé) and the philosophers (Schopenhauer and Bergson) introduced by their teachers; to imagine their first artistic emotions at the Louvre and at the revelation of Paul Gauguin’s painting; to share their astonishment at the Japanese prints exhibited at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890; and to understand the flux of new artists, both French and foreign, who shared their ideals and gradually joined their group – Paul Ranson, Georges Lacombe, Félix Vallotton, József Rippl-Rónai and others. And thus the group of ‘Nabis’ (the Hebrew word for ‘Prophets’) was born.

THE RIGHT TO DARE ANYTHING

The group called themselves ‘Nabis’, recalling the English Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, to reflect the quasi-spiritual dimension of their shared admiration for Gauguin. It was not by chance that they titled the painting made in summer 1888 by Paul Sérusier under Gauguin’s direction – which became the medium for transmission of this aesthetic – ‘The Talisman’ (Paris, Musée d’Orsay). However, the true breakthrough for the Pont-Aven School’s painting came at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, when works by Gauguin and his circle were displayed on the walls of the Café Volpini. It was there that the Nabis saw a style of painting that went beyond Impressionism. With his unrestrained brushstrokes and flat tints, Émile Bernard produced almost abstract paintings, such as L’Orchestre (c. 1887) [p. 14], creating an aesthetic from the PontAven School that inspired Paul Sérusier to use the same flat tints in his Bretonne

allaitant (1892) [p.158], a masterpiece of these radical years, and Denis in Devant la fenêtre bleue (1894–96) [p. 74]. In Nus dans un paysage (c. 1887) [p. 10], Bernard combined the simplification of volumes that had been so important to Paul Cézanne with the visual solutions invented by Gauguin. The elongation of the figures’ bodies, especially of the reclining bather, is evocative of the earlier imaginings of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867). The Nabis were also interested in the Neo-Impressionism of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. Long underestimated by art historians, this influence is essential to understanding the development of the group’s aesthetic: it is apparent in Bonnard’s study for Le Corsage à carreaux (1892) [p. 34], and Denis’ Marthe au tablier rouge (c. 1892) [p. 58]. The Nabis were also passionate about Japonisme, as is evinced by Bonnard’s Au café (c. 1890) [p. 20] and Vuillard’s Biana Duhamel dans le rôle de Miss Helyett (1891) [p. 202]. The kakemono format used by both seems to have been directly inspired by the prints published by Siegfried Bing in his review Japon Artistique (1888–91), some of which, furnished in several folds, could be removed from the review and hung on the wall.

EXALTING THE UNREMARKABLE

In their combat against the hidebound nature of the official academies, the Nabis aimed to do away with boundaries: those that separated the ‘major’ from the ‘minor’ arts, those between subjects considered worthy of the Salons with others reduced to purely private consumption, and the boundary between easel painting and the decorative arts. Furthermore, like the Art Nouveau designers, whose contemporaries and sometimes friends they were, the Nabis’ goal was to create ‘Total Art’ decors. In addition to their easel paintings, they conceived a great many objects of daily life, for example, Denis’ design for a lampshade, Au Pont du Nord un bal était donné (1894) [p. 65], in which he transformed a folk song into elegant Japanizing

arabesques; and Bonnard’s design for a fan, La Famille Terrasse (c. 1892) [p. 43], in which the figures and setting were taken from his lithograph Scène de famille of 1892. It is clear today the degree to which the Nabis heralded the twentieth-century revival of the decorative arts (textiles, the arts of fire – glass and ceramic, and so on): Henri Matisse was their direct heir.

WOMEN PLACED CENTRE STAGE

Art and the formation of its history are never dissociated from the societies in which they develop. For this reason, recent exhibitions on the Nabis have explored the relationship between this group of exclusively male painters and women. In the tireless observation of their domestic environments, the Nabis used their mothers, partners, wives and sisters as their primary models. This was the subject of the very recent exhibition ‘Private Lives, Home and Family in the Art of the Nabis, Paris, 1889–1900’ (Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH , 2021). Vuillard’s mother was a fundamental reference point in his emotional landscape, as was recently made clear in the exhibition ‘Maman: Vuillard and Madame Vuillard’ (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, UK, 2018–19). The title, inspired by Vuillard’s own terms of affection, should not mask the richness (and complexity) contained in these moments of everyday life captured by the painter. Consider also the sometimes almost theatrical portrayals he gives of his sister, Marie, the future wife of his friend the painter Ker-Xavier Roussel, for example in the strange and original Marie au jardin (1893) [p. 210] – shown to one side of an expanse of profuse vegetation, she appears to have the same texture as the greenery. Vuillard’s point here is that we are all literally inhabited by the places and objects by which we are surrounded. A follower of young philosophers like Bergson, Vuillard expressed concepts since developed by contemporary psychology. Visitors to the recent exhibition ‘Femmes chez les Nabis, de fil en aiguille’ (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pont-Aven, FR , 2024) discovered that some of these women had been artists and had contributed to the discourse and philosophy of the Nabis. One was

Marthe Meurier, seen in Marthe au tablier rouge (equisse) (c. 1892) [p. 58], who collaborated on the paintings of her beloved Denis by adding poetic painted flowers to the compositions.

FROM THE ARTISTS’ FAMILIES TO LEADING INTERNATIONAL MUSEUMS

For a long time, the dealings of the Nabis group were limited to a tight circle of initiates. At first, they were supported by Symbolist writers (Mallarmé, Kahn and Mirbeau) and their works collected by their immediate entourage; for example, by the actor Coquelin Cadet (1848–1909), who was involved in the avant-garde theatre that so fascinated the Nabis. Vuillard painted the actor’s portrait in a radical manner on many occasions, as in Coquelin Cadet dans “Le Malade imaginaire” (c. 1890) [p. 184]. Another was the brilliant art critic Gabriel-Albert Aurier, who was one of the first to understand Vincent van Gogh’s painting and who wrote a pioneering article in 1892: ‘Les Symbolistes’ in La Revue Encyclopédique. Aurier owned Bernard’s L’Orchestre and Nus dans un paysage, as well as Bonnard’s Au café and Villa Bach (La Chasse à courre) (1890–91) [p. 28]. Subsequently, the Nabis experienced a period of disenchantment from ‘modernist’ critics who only had eyes for Cubism, which probably culminated in 1947 with the article published in Les Cahiers d’aujourd’hui in which Christian Zervos asked whether Bonnard was a ‘great painter’. Matisse took it upon himself to give a categorical reply! During the 1960s, enterprising American collectors showed a passion for the Pont-Aven School and the Nabis: Arthur Altschul, whose collection represented a landmark in art history, acquired Charles Filiger’s Sainte Famille (1891) [p. 88] and Paysage de Bretagne (1892–93) [p. 94], and Félix Vallotton’s La Sortie (1894) [p. 176], while Robert Walker, based in Paris, owned Filiger’s Lamentations sur le Christ mort (c. 1895) [p. 100]. Sam Josefowitz’s fascination with the Nabis was fundamental to the movement’s recognition. Owning some of the greatest masterpieces by Vuillard and his friends, he was the instigator of a number of important travelling exhibitions. Official

recognition of the Nabis followed with major international retrospectives. In 1984, the Bonnard retrospective (Paris, Washington and Dallas) was the first to highlight the links between Bonnard’s late period and the great all-over works by Mark Rothko and Sam Francis. The show dedicated to Vallotton in 1991–93 (New Haven, Houston, Indianapolis, Amsterdam, Lausanne) shone a light on the artist’s mature works and, in the process, his links with the German and Dutch movement Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as with Edward Hopper.

AN AESTHETIC ELUCIDATED BY CONTEMPORARY ART

As may be recalled, Surrealist André Breton – a great admirer of Arthur Rimbaud and Symbolism in general – was one of the first to rediscover Filiger. This dialogue between Post-Impressionism and contemporary art is more vibrant than ever today: in his preface to the 2013 exhibition ‘Félix Vallotton, le feu sous la glace’ (Paris, Amsterdam), Guy Cogeval brilliantly compared Vallotton’s staged settings with those of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, affinities that had already been sketched out in the exhibition ‘Alfred Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal. In spring 2013, the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne offered a prolific comparison between the American artist Alex Katz and Vallotton. In 2015–16, contemporary artist and film director Joann Sfar was invited by the Musée d’Orsay to present 60 paintings and 60 drawings inspired by Bonnard. To accompany his drawings in the catalogue, Sfar authored a text in which, with extreme pertinence, he questioned the relationship between Bonnard – and, by extension, every artist – and his models, the body, desires and figuration. He also examined the profound and almost philosophical seriousness of Bonnard’s painting, in that it confronts viewers with the mundanities of everyday life, obliging them to put their own existence into perspective. Right down to its semi-circular format, Bonnard’s fan design La Famille Terrasse is a presentation of the ages of life, a characteristic theme

in nineteenth-century popular imagery. In just a few pages, Sfar offers a surprising view of Bonnard, as perhaps only a contemporary artist would be able to. In fact, while the Nabis’ place in art history has become as self-evident as those of the famous ‘-isms’ (Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism), the group’s aesthetic, their vision of the world and their analysis of human relationships are constantly being examined in contemporary art. It is a history that is very much alive and forward-looking.

ÉMILE BERNARD

ÉMILE BERNARD

1868–1941

Six years after arriving in Paris in 1878, Émile Bernard joined the free studio run by Fernand Cormon (1845–1924), where he made friends with artists Henri de ToulouseLautrec and Louis Anquetin. After just two years, in 1886, he was asked to leave, as his use of the pointillist technique went against Cormon’s teaching. In 1887, Bernard went to Brittany with Anquetin, and met Émile Schuffenecker in Concarneau the following year. He then went to Pont-Aven where he became enthralled by the ideas of Paul Gauguin, and introduced Gauguin to zincography.

In 1886, Bernard joined the Mercure de France as an art critic and in 1892 wrote a complimentary article on Paul Cézanne. In 1907, he published their correspondence. In 1888, Bernard’s work was exhibited for the first time, alongside that of Toulouse-Lautrec, in a show held at the Grand Restaurant-Bouillon; he exhibited again that same year at the Salon des Indépendants. Rejected from the Salon d’Automne in 1889, he was one of the artists who exhibited at the Café Volpini on the fringe of the Exposition Universelle. He was later included in the exhibition at the Café des Arts with the group of artists he had met in Pont-Aven. Bernard definitively broke off his relations with Gauguin in 1891, and a year later he decided to mount a first retrospective of the work of his great friend Vincent van Gogh, who had died two years earlier. Supported by his patron Antoine de la Rochefoucauld, Bernard spent the years 1893 and 1904 travelling in Italy, Greece, Turkey, Palestine and Egypt.

On returning to France in 1905, he founded the journal Rénovation Esthétique, which he edited until 1910. Like Anquetin, Bernard encouraged his colleagues to return to both the classicism of the Old Masters (Raphael, Velázquez, Poussin) and the medieval technique of woodcuts. Bernard died in 1941, having published the rest of his correspondence with Cézanne (1925) and an essay entitled ‘La connaissance de l’art’ (1935).

NUS DANS UN PAYSAGE

c. 1887 oil on canvas

14 5/8 × 18 in / 37 × 45.5 cm

PROVENANCE

Gabriel-Albert Aurier (directly from the artist); thence by descent to Suzanne Aurier-Williame (his wife)

Estate of Suzanne Aurier-Williame, Nohant-par-Bruère

Cornette de Saint Cyr, Paris: 10 December 2016 (lot no. 20)

Private Collection

LITERATURE

Émile Bernard, Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint, Jean-Jacques Luthi, Side Editions, Paris, 1982, no. 69 (repro.)

Émile Bernard, Sa vie, son Œuvre. Catalogue raisonné, Jean-Jacques Luthi and Israël Armand, Editions des cat.s raisonnés, Paris, 2014, no. 89, p. 151 (repro.)

This painting is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by Béatrice Recchi Altarriba.

L’ORCHESTRE

1887 oil on canvas 16 1/8 × 12 3/4 in / 41 × 32.3 cm

PROVENANCE

Gabriel-Albert Aurier (directly from the artist); thence by descent to Suzanne Aurier-Williame (his wife)

Estate of Suzanne Aurier-Williame, Nohant-par-Bruère

Cornette de Saint Cyr, Paris: 10 December 2016 (lot no. 21)

Private Collection

EXHIBITED

‘Émile Bernard 1868–1941. A pioneer of Modern Art’, Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim, 12 May – 5 August 1990; touring to Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 24 August – 4 November 1990, cat. no. 38, pp. 170–71 (repro. in colour)

LITERATURE

Émile Bernard, Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint, Jean-Jacques Luthi, Side Editions, Paris, 1982, no. 62 (repro.)

Émile Bernard, Sa vie, son Œuvre. Catalogue raisonné, Jean-Jacques Luthi and Israël Armand, Editions des cat.s raisonnés, Paris, 2014, no. 89, p. 149 (repro.)

This painting is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by Béatrice Recchi Altarriba.

PIERRE BONNARD

PIERRE BONNARD

1867–1947

Born into a middle-class family, and a brilliant pupil at secondary school, Pierre Bonnard studied law in 1886–87 while also attending the Académie Julian. It was there he met Maurice Denis, Gabriel Ibels, Paul Ranson and Paul Sérusier. After a brief spell at the École des Arts Décoratifs, followed by the Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he met Édouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel, Bonnard turned against his family’s wishes and took up painting full time. In 1889 he formed the Nabi group with these six fellow-artists and designed his first poster for FranceChampagne. In 1891, he exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants and at the gallery Le Barc de Boutteville; in 1896 he had his first solo exhibition at the Durand-Ruel gallery.

Very active in the theatre world, Bonnard produced illustrations for André Antoine’s Théâtre-Libre, then for Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre de l’Œuvre. Bonnard then became close with Alfred Jarry and collaborated on the sets for Jarry’s play Ubu Roi in 1896, followed by the Almanach du père Ubu illustré in 1901. He worked as a preferred illustrator for La Revue blanche until 1903 from the time of its creation by Thadée Natanson and his two brothers in 1889; he also produced prints commissioned by Ambroise Vollard for the album of Peintres Graveurs (1896), for Jules Renard’s Les Histoires naturelles in 1904, and André Gide’s Prométhée mal enchaîné (1920).

In 1912, Bonnard moved to Vernonnet, near Giverny, and frequently visited his elder colleague Claude Monet, returning to a more Impressionist style just as Cubism was prevailing. A year later, he went to Hamburg with Vuillard at the invitation of the historian Alfred Lichtwark, before experiencing a period of artistic crisis during the First World War. In 1924, a major retrospective of his work was held at the Galerie Druet. Two years later, Bonnard bought a villa in Le Cannet, where he lived until his death in 1947.

AU CAFÉ

c. 1890

watercolour, Indian ink and pencil on paper 12 1/2 × 4 1/2 in / 31.6 × 11.5 cm

PROVENANCE

Gabriel-Albert Aurier (directly from the artist)

Succession Gabriel-Albert Aurier

Cornette de Saint Cyr, Paris: 10 December 2016 (lot no. 13)

Private Collection

This artwork is accompanied by a photocertificate of authenticity issued in Paris by Bernheim-Jeune on 12 January 2018 and signed by Guy-Patrice Dauberville and Floriane Dauberville. It is registered in the Bernheim-Jeune archive under number 218-01 12 B [titled ‘Femme au cabaret’].

PARIS 1900, THE ‘CITY OF LIGHT’

Once part of the highly discerning collection of art critic Gabriel-Albert Aurier (see his biography on p. 221), this drawing reveals a little-known and surprising aspect of Bonnard’s production: his depiction of Parisian cafés during La Belle Époque.

Celebrated in literature and painting in the late 19th century, French cafés were fundamental places of leisure and conviviality, lavishly described by writers – for example, the Café Riche on the capital’s grand boulevards, not far from the Paris Opéra, which Émile Zola used as a setting for several scenes in his novel La Curée (1871), as did Guy de Maupassant for certain chapters in Bel Ami (1885). Cafés were also meeting places for writers and painters: Charles Baudelaire was a regular at the Momus, Paul Verlaine at the François Ier, and Zola at the Café Guerbois, which was also frequented by Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro. Soon, guides were published listing the different cafés according to their specific characteristics: Auguste Lepage published Les Cafés politiques et littéraires de Paris in 1874, followed by Les Dîners artistiques et littéraires de Paris in 1884. Cafés were a favourite motif among the Impressionists: see L’Absinthe (1876) by Degas (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) and La Prune (1878) by Manet (Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art). Artists even exhibited in cafés, for instance Van Gogh at Le Tambourin, run by Agostina Segatori. It should be mentioned that the first public commercial screening of a film was held by the Lumière brothers at the Grand Café on 28 December 1895. In 1890–91, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis and Aurélien

Lugné-Poe shared a studio at 28 Rue Pigalle [1], at the foot of the Butte Montmartre, a short stroll from the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, the meeting place of the Impressionists. The café was also central to a number of avant-garde cabarets: Jehan Sarrazin’s Le Divan Japonais, Rodolphe Salis’s Le Chat Noir, Aristide Bruant’s Le Mirliton, and, of course, Zidler and Oller’s Moulin Rouge, for which Bonnard designed a poster. Although Bonnard produced several paintings of café-concerts, such as Le Jardin de Paris (1896) (Hays Collection, promised to the Musée d’Orsay), very few works, with the exception of Au Bar (1892) [2], depict cafés. This specificity and originality are indisputably the most important aspects of this watercolour.

INFLUENCED BY JAPONISME

What is most striking about Au café (c. 1890) [p. 20], however, is its very tall and narrow format, which raises questions about its purpose. It could have been a preparatory work for a folding screen, of which we see only one panel here, a study for an easel painting, or even a decorative strip to be used in a magazine. Regardless, its kakemono format attests

to the influence of Japanese prints, enthusiastically discovered by the Nabis in the art review Le Japon artistique (1888–91) [3], published by Siegfried Bing.

Originally from Hamburg, Bing had come to Paris to set up a branch of his family’s company, which specialised in importing objects from the Far East. To open his new gallery, La Maison de L’Art Nouveau, he even commissioned Bonnard and his Nabi friends to design cartoons for a series of stainedglass windows to be made by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Bonnard’s infatuation with Japanese

chirimen-e (prints on a kind of crepe paper) was confirmed by his visit to the large exhibition of Japanese prints, fabrics, and objects at the École des Beaux-Arts in spring 1890. Bonnard became, as his friends affectionately called him, the ‘Nabi japonard’.1 From that time on, he had a fondness for the kakemono format, which prompted him to use daring graphic designs enhanced by the two-dimensionality of Japanese prints. For example, consider Femme à la robe à pois (1891) [4], one panel of the screen Quatre Femmes au jardin (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), which Bonnard dismantled in 1892 to transform its sections into easel paintings. The female figure in Au café receives similar treatment, shown in profile and given an identical hat that extends almost disproportionately forward in curves that echo the cast-iron legs of the café table.

THE HIDDEN REALITY

Bonnard did not treat this figure purely graphically, however attractive the idea may have been. There are several details that suggest a more complex interpretation of the scene: the feathered boa around her neck (an accessory also seen in some of ToulouseLautrec’s sketches of demi-mondaines), the woman’s right hand strangely contorted behind her back as it seems to reach for a glass, and the position of the man facing her, shown seated in this version but standing in another [5]. Gradually, the mild and rather superficial café scenes painted by Jean Béraud made way for a coarser reality, revealing the harsher aspects of life in Paris in the 1900s. This is almost the world of Jean-Louis Forain, but without that artist’s malevolent gaze. Bonnard did not depict this young woman without wishing to illustrate something more than what we see. In fact, cafés were looked upon with mistrust and suspicion by the authorities throughout the 19th century, with Balzac referring to them as the ‘people’s parliaments’ and Gambetta viewing them as ‘salons of democracy’. By the end of the century, alcoholism and immorality were the greatest issues of concern. In L’Assommoir (1877), Émile Zola viewed bars as dens of iniquity, while Alfred Carel, in Les Brasseries à femmes (1884), and, even more explicitly,

Ernest Guérin, in La brasserie, une plaie sociale (1891), labelled them places of debauchery and possible sexual soliciting. Considered in this context, the respective roles of the man in the bowler hat (indicative of his modest background) and the woman facing him directly, for a ‘woman of the world,’ suggest a dynamic worth exploring. It raises the question of who is attempting to seduce whom. Their relationship may develop into either a sentimental or a commercial affair. A humanist like his friend Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard makes no judgement: he observes, illustrates the scene, and leaves the interpretation open to the viewer.

REFERENCES

1. With the meaning of ‘Japanese] Nabi’ but based on a pun on the sound of his surname.

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Postcard, Paris, Le Café de la Nouvelle Athènes et la rue Pigalle

[2]. Pierre Bonnard, Au Bar (c. 1892), oil on card, 23 × 19 cm (private collection)

[3]. Utamaro, Serving Girl in an Inn, published in Siegfried Bing, La Japon artistique, no. 21 (January 1890), pl. Baa

[4]. Bonnard, Femme à la robe à pois (1891) (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), from his Quatre femmes au jardin (1891), distemper on canvas, 160.3 × 48 cm (Paris, Musée d’Orsay)

[5]. Bonnard, Au café (1890), pen and ink, brush and watercolour on paper, 28.7 × 6.7 cm (private collection), reproduced in the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Bonnard, Magier der Farbe’, Wuppertal, Von der Heydt-Museum, 14 September 2010 – 30 January 2011, p. 148

VILLA BACH (LA CHASSE Á COURRE)

1890–91

watercolour, Indian ink and pencil on paper

6 3/8 × 5 in / 16 × 12.7 cm

initialled lower right ‘PB’

PROVENANCE

Gabriel-Albert Aurier (directly from the artist)

Succession Gabriel-Albert Aurier

Cornette de Saint Cyr, Paris: 10 December 2016 (lot no. 10)

Private Collection

This artwork is accompanied by a photocertificate of authenticity issued in Paris by Bernheim-Jeune on 16 January 2018 and signed by Guy-Patrice Dauberville and Floriane Dauberville. It is registered in the Bernheim-Jeune archive under no. 218-01 16B.

A HOLIDAY IN ARACHON: VILLA BACH

AN AMOROUS ENCOUNTER

While doing his military service in Grenoble from November 1887, a young musician named Claude Terrasse (1867–1923) [1] met Charles Bonnard, with whom he quickly became friends. Charles was the brother of Pierre Bonnard, who was then a pupil at the Lycée Fontanes (later called Condorcet), alongside fellow students Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis. During 1888, Terrasse, a future composer, was invited on several occasions to Le Clos [2], the Bonnards’ family home in Le Grand-Lemps, near Grenoble, where he met Charles and Pierre’s younger sister, Andrée Bonnard.

The pair met again in Paris in early 1889, and in September or October of the same year Terrasse left for Arcachon, where he had been offered the post of harmonics teacher at the Dominican-run Collège Saint-Elme. He held this position from 1889 to 1896.1 A lengthy correspondence followed between the suitor and Bonnard’s mother, Madame Frédéric Mertzdorff, during which the young musician increasingly declared his love for Andrée. After the couple’s wedding, celebrated on 24 September 1890 by the mayor of Le Grand-Lemps, they moved into the Villa Bach in Arcachon. Bonnard and Terrasse soon became close friends, and the artist portrayed the composer in several intimate paintings from 1891 onwards.

A HOLIDAY IN ARACHON

Located on Boulevard d’Haussez in the ‘summer city’ of Arcachon, the villa was close to the station, and thus offered all the amenities a young couple might need. Prompted by an overwhelming desire to draw, as a letter to his sister makes clear, Bonnard soon visited them: “I am also bringing a great deal of resignation to the streams of music that are bound to escape from the Villa Bach. But the Muse of Painting will be avenged, as I am bringing my box of colours with me, and streams of green, blue and yellow will flow in return”. This enthusiasm was also confirmed by Charles, who told Terrasse: “My brother has asked me to warn you not to rack your brains looking for distractions to last until Christmas. He’s going to bring his doodle box and while he’s capturing Arcachon beach on canvas, I’ll be collecting whales for lunch.” Contrary to what Charles thought, it was not the beaches that would immediately inspire Pierre, but the concerts that Terrasse held in his home.

RHYTHMICALLY ARRANGED LINES

Undoubtedly with the idea of illustrating concert programmes, Bonnard created a series of drawings for private use, with no known plans for publication.2 The motifs he chose for these unique works had no direct connection to music but reflected his imagination and abundant inventiveness: he depicted Claude and Andrée sitting tenderly together under foliage, a young woman playing a mandolin,3 a young woman sitting in an orchard,4 Andrée walking a dog,5 and even some skaters. What all these drawings have in common is their size (about 16 × 13 cm) and the fact that they all go by the title Villa Bach.

Villa Bach (La Chasse à courre) (1890–91) [p. 28] is an exception in this series, because although hunting as a subject is far removed from the concerts given at the Villa Bach, the horn offers a direct, though tongue-in-cheek reference to music. Here, Bonnard takes up a motif that he had used in an earlier drawing [3], but this time he transforms it radically. Instead of the stiffness of his youthful watercolour, he now prefers a Japanizing distortion of the outlines. Far from being anecdotal, these small graphic pieces allowed Bonnard to experiment for the benefit of future works; for example, the motif of leaping dogs, whose bodies, partly treated in reserve, i.e. leaving the paper visible, are created using a line drawn almost without lifting the pen. He reused this dynamic arrangement of forms in 1891/1892 in a watercolour with the title Femme avec un chien [4]. The series of drawings for the Villa Bach ended in 1892. Following the birth of their first child, Jean Terrasse, in May of that year, the couple moved to the Villa Bijou on Boulevard de la

Plage in Arcachon. Nonetheless, Bonnard did not stop collaborating with his brother-in-law. In 1893 together they published Petites Scènes familières, a series of scores for songs composed by Terrasse, with illustrations that had been started at the Villa Bach in 1891, and Le Petit Solfège illustré, intended to make learning music less dull for children.

It is important to note the significance of the relationship between Bonnard and GabrielAlbert Aurier, the first collector to own Villa Bach (La Chasse à courre) (1890–91). A poet

and art critic, Aurier came to own several works by Bonnard, including Au café (c. 1890) [p. 20]. Aurier (see p. 221) was an ardent defender of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and the Nabis, and, in particular, Bonnard. This is evident from the place of honour he gave the artist in his influential article on the Symbolists, published in the Revue Encyclopédique in April 1892, in which he reproduced one of Bonnard’s watercolours, whose whereabouts today are unknown [5].

[3]

[4]

VILLA BACH (LA

REFERENCES

1. See Philippe Cathé, Claude Terrasse (Paris: L’Hexaèdre, 2004), p. 23 ff.

2. 22 drawings today in Austin (TX ), in the collection of the Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas, and described Carlton Lake, Baudelaire to Beckett: A Century of French Art and Literature. A Cat. of Books, Manuscripts, and Related Material Drawn from the Collections of the Humanities Research Center (Austin, TX : Harry Ransom Humanities, 1976).

3. See Gilles Genty and Pierrette Vernon, Bonnard, inédits (Paris: Éditions Cercle d’Art, 2006), chapter ‘Bonnard et la musique’, p. 60 ff.

4. Reproduced in the catalogue of the exhibition Pierre Bonnard, Lisbon, Fundação Arpàd Szenes – Viera da Silva, 11 July – 30 September 2001, p. 21.

5. Reproduced in the catalogue of the exhibition Pierre Bonnard, The Graphic Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2 December 1989 – 4 February 1990, p. 44.

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Unknown photographer, Claude Terrasse regardant une photographie (private collection)

[2]. Postcard, Le Grand-Lemps (Isère) – Le Clos

[3]. Pierre Bonnard, Départ pour la chasse (c. 1884), graphite, pen and ink, watercolour on paper, 16.5 × 11.7 cm (private collection)

[4]. Bonnard, Femme avec un chien (c. 1892), graphite, pen and ink, watercolour on paper, 25.7 × 18.4 cm (Springfield, Ma, Museum of Fine Arts)

[5]. Albert Aurier, “Les Symbolistes”, La Revue Encyclopédique (April 1892)

ÉTUDE POUR ‘LE CORSAGE À

CARREAUX’

1892

oil on card affixed to panel 9 1/4 × 6 3/4 in / 23.5 × 17 cm

PROVENANCE

Collection Édouard Vuillard

Antoine Salomon, Paris

Madame Claude Dalsace, Paris

Galerie Berès, Paris

Private Collection, Switzerland

Private Collection

EXHIBITED

‘Au temps des Nabis’, Huguette Berès, Paris, 1990, cat. no. 14 (not repro.)

‘Pierre Bonnard’, Musée Maillol, Paris, 31 May – 9 October 2000, cat. no. 7, p. 24 (repro. in colour)

LITERATURE

Bonnard. Catalogue Raisonne de l’oeuvre peint volume 4 et 1er supplement, Jean and Henry Dauberville, Bernheim–Jeune, Paris, 1974, no. 01728, p. 137 (repro. in b&w)

Pierre Bonnard, André Fermigier, Abrams, New York, p. 52 (repro.)

La peinture des Nabis, Claude Jeancolas, Editions Franck Van Wilder, Paris, 2002, p. 60 (repro. in colour p. 61)

AN ICON OF JAPONISME

It is profoundly moving to follow the various stages in the creation of a work of art, from the artists’ initial idea to the final version. Exploring the many possibilities shaped by the artist’s imagination, their hesitations, and eventual decisions provides access to what still remains a mystery: what we call creation. This painting invites us to do just that.

ANDRÉE BONNARD AND HER DOGS

Bonnard’s relationship with his sister Andrée (1872–1923) [1], the figure in Étude pour ‘Le Corsage à carreaux’ c. 1892 [p. 34] was very similar to that between Édouard Vuillard and his sister Marie. Both sisters married artists: Marie became the wife of the painter Ker-Xavier Roussel, and Andrée married the composer and musician Claude Terrasse. Bonnard, who developed a genuine artistic dialogue with Terrasse, created many illustrations for him, particularly those for the concerts the musician gave at the Villa Bach in Arcachon [p. 30]. Both

women were also regularly portrayed by their respective brothers, making it possible to trace the evolution of their styles.

Bonnard usually depicted Andrée accompanied by her dogs, Bella and Ravageau,1 and even painted a portrait of the latter. Although he disrupted the conventional pictorial approach to full-length figures in Andrée Bonnard et ses chiens (1890) [2] by introducing movement, Bonnard remained uncertain about how to organise

the different elements in the space. There is a sense of hesitation between his volumetric representation of the two moving dogs and the contraction of perspectival depth, combined with the flat-tint treatment he applied to the upper section of the painting. It was during 1891 and 1892 that Bonnard truly found his style, as Étude pour ‘Le Corsage à carreaux’ demonstrates.

SUDDENLY, A CAT APPEARS...

One of his earliest ideas can be seen in a sketchbook from 1890–91: on page 49 [3], Bonnard sketched his sister sitting at a table as a cat decides to join her. The distinctly Art Nouveau curves of the animal’s tail, and the way he created the motifs on the clothing, both attest to the extent of the continued influence on him of Japanese prints. It is worth noting that, in this initial sketch, Andrée is not wearing a red-and-white checked blouse but a blue-and-white checked dress with a red polka-dot jabot, which reappears in Femme au chien (1891) [4]. In the same sketchbook, this time on page 50, Bonnard also made a study for the latter painting. From the outset, he had planned to paint two portraits of Andrée: one with a cat, the other with a dog, one set indoors, the other outdoors.

AN ICON OF JAPONISME

The motif of the red-and-white checked blouse later appeared in the large watercolour Femme avec au chien (1891–92) [p. 31], in which Andrée is seen playing with a lively dog. Although Bonnard once again employed the idea of an elegant serpentine form to

depict the dog’s tail, this time he was much more adventurous in his use of formal solutions inspired by Japonisme. The publication of the review Le Japon artistique (1888–91) by Siegfried Bing, and the opening in the spring of 1890 of a large exhibition on Japanese art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, clearly contributed to this shift.

The influence of Japanese art was also the subject of a leading article written by Bernard Dorival (1914–2003), then curator at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, in which he focused on the painting Le Corsage à carreaux when it entered the French national collections.2 Following Ursula Perruchi-Petri’s innovative research 3 and the seminal exhibition Japonisme (Paris, Grand Palais, 1988), Bonnard’s fascination with Japanese prints has been well documented. Like Claude Monet, Bonnard purchased original prints, collecting them more for their aesthetic value than for their rarity. The one by Utagawa Kuniyoshi [5] is a good example: it mattered little to the painter that it was just one part of a triptych because it suggested inventive decorative motifs. Perruchi-Petri recounts an anecdote shared by Professor Hans R. Hahnloser: when he asked Bonnard what he owed most to the Japanese, the artist replied, ‘The small checked patterns!’4

[3]

[4]

THE COMPOSITION CRYSTALLISES

At the start of 1892, the definitive composition took shape: based on a drawing enhanced with watercolour [6], Bonnard returned to his idea of depicting Andrée, this time dressed in a uniform red-and-white checked blouse, eating at a table with her cat in front of her. The cat, now sitting up, seems eager to take part in the meal, as suggested by its wide-open eyes and a paw, sketched in pencil, boldly stretched towards a plate. Bonnard has given Andrée the pose she will adopt in the final painting, including her slightly off-kilter shoulders and the elegant curl of hair on her forehead. The large brown bottle on the right would later be replaced by a white carafe, which gives greater prominence to the young woman. The entire scene is bathed in a warm orange light, cast by a suspension lamp suggested by a few pencil lines at the top of the image. The most surprising aspect of this watercolour is the male figure sketched in on the far left, whose identity remains unknown: is he the composer Terrasse, or Bonnard himself? The painter still had to experiment with the effects that the colours would produce

when painted in oils. And it is precisely this fundamental step that is the subject of this particular painting.

THE NEO-IMPRESSIONIST TEMPTATION

Whereas in his earlier preparatory studies Bonnard had used flat tints and sinuous lines, at this point he began to construct his painting using a profusion of small touches of colour, like the Neo-Impressionists. Long undervalued by art historians, the influence of the technique developed by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac now appears to have been more significant than previously thought. It should not be forgotten that, under the aegis of the poet Gustave Kahn and the art critic Félix Fénéon, both of whom were great supporters of Neo-Impressionism, in 1891 the Nabis were included in an exhibition of Impressionist and Symbolist works in Saint-Germain-enLaye. From 1892 onwards, they also exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, created by Seurat and his friends in 1884 to defend their new approach to painting. Although Maurice Denis and Vuillard were the Nabis who most

[6]

admired Neo-Impressionism, Étude pour ‘Le Corsage à carreaux’ shows that Bonnard was not unaware of its formal potential: all the elements in the final composition vibrate with luminous colour, enhanced further by the small juxtaposed touches applied in the ferment of creation. He even used the support he had left almost bare, covered simply with a grey-white preparation, to represent certain motifs, such as Andrée’s face. What we see here is no longer the figurative use of colour but the formal logic developed by the Fauves. Furthermore, Bonnard executed his painting without the aid of any underlying drawing, like those painted by André Derain and Henri Matisse in the years 1904–05.

Bonnard then abandoned the peripheral motifs in the previous watercolour: the figure of the man disappeared, and the framing became tighter, which he bordered with a black line as though it could better restrain the expansion of the colours. Bonnard was acting here like a photographer who crops the shots on his contact sheet. More developed than the other motifs, the cat has almost become the focal point of the composition. The lines of Baudelaire’ s poem Le Chat come to mind:

Seraphic cat, singular cat, / In whom, as in an angel, all is / As subtle as harmonious! [...] A familiar figure in the place; / He presides, judges, inspires / Everything within his province; / Perhaps he is a fay, a god? 5

The last two versions of Le Corsage à carreaux [7 & 8, overleaf] follow the composition of the painting exhibited; in them, Bonnard narrowed the framing further, almost adopting the vertical format of the kakemono. Although he reverted to a more Japanizing style, playing with curves and counter-curves like a counterpoint musician, he retained the marvellous chromatic eloquence of the painting on display, which the Surrealist painter André Masson (1896–1987), who was very attentive to the work of the Nabis, later described as lyrical effusion. 6

REFERENCES

1. On this point, see the catalogue for the exhibition Entre chiens & chats, Bonnard et l’animalité, Le Cannet, Musée Bonnard, 2 July – 6 November 2016.

2. Although the painting belonged to Andrée and Claude Terrasse, it was their son who sold it to the museum. See Bernard Dorival, ‘ Le Corsage à carreaux et les japonismes de Bonnard’, La Revue du Louvre et des Musées de France, no. 1 (1969), pp. 22–24.

3. Ursula Perruchi-Petri, Die Nabis und Japan (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1976).

4. Quoted in the cat. of the Bonnard exhibition, Zurich, Kunsthaus, 14 December 1984 – 10 March 1985, p. 82.

5. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, Spleen et idéal, poem no. LI (1857). Eng. trans. by William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954).

6. Quoted in Georges Charbonnier, Le Monologue du peintre, I (Paris: Julliard, 1959), pp. 190–91.

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Unknown photographer, Andrée Bonnard (c. 1900) (private collection)

[2]. Pierre Bonnard, Andrée Bonnard et ses chiens (1890), oil on canvas, 180 × 80 cm (private collection)

[3]. Bonnard, Andrée et son chat, Carnet de dessins / folio no. 49 (1890–91), graphite, pen and ink on paper, 13.2 × 20 cm (private collection)

[4]. Bonnard, Femme au chien (1891), oil on canvas, 40.6 × 32.4 cm (Williamstown, Ma, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute)

[5]. Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Tokiwa Gozen, the Mistress of Minamoto no Yoshitone, in a Kabuki Scene, coloured woodcut, 35.5 × 24.5 cm (private collection, former Pierre Bonnard Collection)

[6]. Bonnard, Study for ‘Le Corsage à carreaux’ (1892), pencil, pen and ink, watercolour on paper (private collection)

[7]. Bonnard, Le Corsage à carreaux (1892), oil on canvas, 61 × 33 cm (Collection of Spencer and Marlene Hays, promised to the Musée d’Orsay)

[8]. Bonnard, Le Corsage à carreaux (1892), oil on canvas, 61 × 33 cm (Paris, Musée d’Orsay)

LA FAMILLE TERRASSE

1892

watercolour on paper 11 1/2 × 21 5/8 in / 29 × 54.8 cm

signed centre left ‘P. BONNARD’; initialled and dated centre right ‘PB 1892’

PROVENANCE

Hôtel Rameau, Versailles: 2 December 1973 (lot no. 198)

Galerie André Romanet, Paris

Private Collection

Neret-Minet [Tessier & Sarrou], Paris: 21 November 2008 (lot no. 37)

Private Collection

EXHIBITED

‘Bonnard: Tekeningen en Akwarellen (Drawings and Watercolours)’, Singer Museum, Laren, The Netherlands, 1 May – 26 June 1977, cat. p. 11 (repro. in b&w) [titled ‘Le Sourire’]

LITERATURE

Pierre Bonnard: The Graphic Art, John P. O’Neill, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1989, p. 213 (mentioned)

A WING FLUTTERED BY THE HAND

An everyday object and indispensable fashion accessory during La Belle Époque, the fan was also a personal belonging, a medium for lyrical beauty, and even a vehicle for declarations of love. In short, a fan was never insignificant.

In France, during the second half of the nineteenth century, fans received great attention. Baudelaire celebrated them in Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1869), and Maupassant asked, ‘Why shouldn’t poets take fans as a subject, just as painters are asked to colour them?’1 Within a few years, the fan had become a genuine social phenomenon. In 1882, the bibliophile and dandy Octave Uzanne2 traced its history since antiquity, while Gustave Fraipont3 offered advice on how to make your own. For painters, fans also became a way to decorate the background of paintings: consider Édouard Manet’s La Dame aux éventails, Nina de Callias (1874) (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) and Monet’s La Japonaise (1876) (Boston, Museum of Fine

Arts) [1]. Embracing Japonisme, painters Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Signac soon began producing fanshaped compositions.

Among the Nabis, fan-shaped drawings also reflected their genuine desire to promote the decorative arts. As Pierre Bonnard said: ‘Our generation has always pursued a relationship between art and life. At that time, I personally imagined a popular art with everyday applications: engravings, furniture, fans, screens.’4 Although Maurice Denis5 was the most prolific, Félix Vallotton and Bonnard also embraced these original mediums. Bonnard made a painted fan, Promeneurs et cavaliers, avenue du bois (1894) (whereabouts unknown), as well as several designs, including Femmes et fleurs (c. 1891) (Netherlands, Triton Foundation) and Les Lapins (1890–95) [2], the border of which poetically incorporates the name of his sister Andrée.

WHEN THE CHILD APPEARS

The most important aspect of Bonnard’s fan design lies in its iconography, which refers to the birth, on 6 May 1892, of Jean Terrasse, the first child of his sister Andrée and the musician Claude Terrasse [see Villa Bach (La Chasse à courre) (1890–91) p. 28]. Thrilled for his sister, Bonnard painted her numerous times in 1892 and 1893, as seen in Madame Claude Terrasse et son fils Jean (1893) [3]. For Bonnard, who was experiencing the emotional turmoil of a thwarted love affair with his cousin Berthe Schaedlin, the great love of his youth, this motif likely provided a welcome distraction from his distress.

Both emotionally and artistically, family played a central role in Bonnard’s early

[1]

[2]

works.6 He frequently addressed the motif of mother and child – often with sacred overtones – across various media, including two lithographs from 1892 and 1893, one in horizontal format [4], the other vertical [5]. Regarding the first, Claude Roger-Marx, son of the art critic and collector Roger Marx, understood Bonnard’s graphic intent:

The baby’s head is like a sugar egg placed on the white bib. The same pink is used for the protective hand of the mother and the profile of the white-bearded grandfather on the left. Here and there, flat tints of Japanese black suggest almond-shaped eyes, a lock of hair, a jacket, and pince-nez. The same tones, uniting the three figures, confirm that they are made from the same clay.7

In the fan design, a second version of which is known8, where the only difference lies in a mottling of red spots on Andrée’s blouse, Bonnard employs tight framing, a very close viewpoint, and flat tints. The extreme proximity of the viewer to the figures distorts their outlines and forces us to view the scene through the eyes of a small child, who has little understanding of space.

SENTIMENTAL GEOMETRY

Aside from stylistic similarities, comparing these works reveals that Bonnard alters the male figure in each: in the horizontal lithograph, he portrays Eugène, the baby’s maternal grandfather, while in the vertical lithograph, he depicts himself. In La Famille

[3]

Terrasse (c. 1892) [p. 43], Bonnard’s grandfather, Claude-Marie Terrasse, can be easily identified.

The latter’s rather clumsy gestures toward the child are conveyed by the artist, whose depiction of the hand is almost caricatural. Bonnard references Claude-Marie again in one of the plates he drew for Petites Scènes familières [6], a series of songs written by Franc-Nohain and set to music by Claude Terrasse. The plate dedicated to the grandfather bears the title Chanson du grand-père. Bonnard began the illustrations in 1891, while staying at the Villa Bach; he completed them in 1892; they were published in 1893

In what seems like an ode to family joy, Eugène and Pierre, along with Claude-Marie, are shown as Three Wise Men, each coming to pay their respects to Andrée and Jean. Victor Hugo’s beautiful words in Les Feuilles d’automne (1831) come to mind: ‘Lorsque l’enfant paraît, le cercle de famille / Applaudit à grand cris; son doux regard qui brille / Fait briller tous les yeux’9

REFERENCES

1. Guy de Maupassant, ‘Poètes’, Gil Blas, 7 November 1882.

2. Octave Uzanne, L’Éventail (Paris: Quantin, 1882).

3. Gustave Fraipont, L’Art de composer et de peindre L’Éventail, L’Écran, Le Paravent (Paris: Laurens, 1895).

4. Quoted by Antoine Terrasse, Bonnard, “la couleur agit” (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), p. 26.

5. The Musée Départemental Maurice Denis in SaintGermain-en-Laye has 18 fans or studies for fans in its collection. To these can be added designs in private hands.

6. See Véronique Serrano, ‘Maternités et scènes de famille chez Bonnard, Denis, Sérusier’, in the catalogue of the exhibition Enfances rêvées, Bonnard, les Nabis et l’enfance, Le Cannet, Musée Bonnard, 2 July – 6 November 2022, pp. 138–51.

7. Claude Roger-Marx, Bonnard lithographe (Monte-Carlo: André Sauret-Éditions du Livre, 1952), p. 18.

8. Pierre Bonnard, La Famille Terrasse (1892), crayon and watercolour, 26.7 × 51.1 cm (private collection), reproduced in the catalogue of the exhibition Pierre Bonnard: The Graphic Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2 December 1989 – 4 February 1990, no. 15, fig. 89.

9. ‘When the child appears, the family circle / Applauds with loud cries; his gentle shining gaze / Brings a gleam to every eye’. Victor Hugo, Les Feuilles d’automne (Paris: Ollendorf, 1909), pp. 63–64.

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Claude Monet, La Japonaise (1875–76), oil on canvas, 231.5 × 142 cm (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts)

[2]. Pierre Bonnard, Les Lapins (1890–95), crayon and brown ink on paper, 33.6 × 57.5 cm (Paris, Musée d’Orsay)

[3]. Bonnard, Madame Claude Terrasse et son fils Jean (1893), oil on canvas, 37 × 30 cm (New York, Alice Mason Collection)

[4]. Bonnard, Scène de famille [horizontal] (1892), 5-colour lithograph, 21 × 26 cm (private collection)

[5]. Bonnard, Scène de famille [vertical] (1892), 4-colour lithograph, 18 × 31 cm (private collection)

[6]. Claude Terrasse (music), Pierre Bonnard (lithograph), Petites Scènes familières / La Chanson du grand-père (1893), black lithograph on paper (Paris: Éditions Fromont, 1893)

MAURICE DENIS

MAURICE DENIS

1870–1943

In 1888, Maurice Denis began studies at the Académie Julian with Ker-Xavier Roussel and Édouard Vuillard, both of whom he had met while at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. Striking up friendships with Pierre Bonnard and Paul Ranson, the five formed the Nabi group the following year, for which Denis would be both the spokesman and the theoretician. On 23 and 30 August 1890 – the year he first took part in the Salon des Indépendants –Denis explained his credo in the review Art et Critique: ‘Remember that a painting – before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or an anecdote of some sort – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours, put together in a certain order’.

A champion of synthetism and mellow colours, the artist, nicknamed by his friends ‘the Nabi of the beautiful icons’, painted decorative panels for such influential people as the composer Ernest Chausson and the parliamentary deputy Denys Cochin, as his list of contacts had grown since he began frequenting the salon of the painter Henry Lerolle (1848–1925), whom he had met in 1891. There he met Renoir and Degas, as well as the authors Paul Claudel, Stéphane Mallarmé, André Gide and Paul Valéry, and the musicians Vincent d’Indy and Claude Debussy. Lerolle also introduced him to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. In 1912, he converted a former hospital in Saint-Germainen-Laye into a studio he called Le Prieuré (The Priory), which he decorated on the theme of Saint Martha, in celebration of his wife Marthe, who died in 1919. That same year, Denis founded the Ateliers d’art sacré with the painter Georges Desvallières, where he continued the teaching vocation he had begun at the Académie Ranson in 1908.

Beginning in 1940, Denis sympathised with the Vichy regime and was consequently appointed chairman of the Comité d’organisation professionnelle des arts graphiques et plastiques. He passed away in 1943 after being involved in an accident with a lorry.

VÊPRES À L’H ÔPITAL (ESQUISSE)

c. 1889–90 oil on card

11 5/8 × 7 1/8 in / 29.5 × 18 cm

stamped lower right with the artist’s round workshop monogram ‘MAUD’; stamped on reverse with the artist’s round workshop monogram ‘MAUD’ and certified by the artist’s daughter Madeleine Follain Denis.

PROVENANCE

Collection Madeleine Follain Denis (the artist’s daughter); thence by descent to Jean-Baptiste Denis (the artist’s grandson) and subsequent family collections

This work is accompanied by a photocertificate of authenticity, dated 30 August 2024 and signed by Claire Denis, the artist’s granddaughter.

PORTRAIT DE MARTHE AU TABLIER ROUGE (ESQUISSE)

c. 1892 oil on card

7 3/8 × 5 3/4 in / 18.5 × 14.5 cm

signed lower left with the artist initials ‘MAUD’; figurative sketch present on the underside of backboard

PROVENANCE

Collection Bernadette Denis (the artist’s daughter); thence by descent to JeanBaptiste Denis (the artist’s grandson) and subsequent family collections

EXHIBITED

‘Maurice Denis’, Galerie Berès, Paris, 4 June – 22 July 1992, no. 19 (repro. in b&w)

This work is accompanied by a photocertificate of authenticity, dated 30 August 2024 and signed by Claire Denis, the artist’s granddaughter.

MYSTERY IN PLAIN SIGHT

At first glance, Portrait de Marthe au tablier rouge (esquisse) (c. 1892) [p. 58] has all the characteristics of a genre scene: a young woman dressed in a checked blouse and an orange-red apron is seated before a window, through which a large tree and a few houses can be made out. As she looks at us, she lets a napkin slip gently from her hands onto her lap. We are familiar with the elements in this composition: the setting is Saint-Germain-enLaye and the hills of Fourqueux are visible in the distance. This is the town where Maurice Denis and Marthe Meurier met in 1891 and got engaged a year later. Between their engagement and their wedding on 12 June 1893, the young couple experienced hopes and doubts as the opposition of their parents to the marriage grew. During that year, Denis painted a dazzling series of portraits of his fiancée, of which this is one. Denis settled on Marthe’s slightly upright pose in an early preparatory watercolour [1]. Her head faces slightly to the left and she already has a curl of hair hanging down her forehead. The background, however, is very different: two large flat fields of colour – one light, one dark – indicate that the scene is set in an interior. Denis’ final painting [2] shows Marthe seated on a sofa as she gazes

dreamily into the distance. Does this mean that Denis successively painted his fiancée in different settings and at different times of the day? Did these different scenes really exist or were they the painter’s invention?

MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN DREAMS

After Denis met Marthe in autumn 1890, he wrote constantly about his happiness in a journal he had kept since the age of 14: ‘Angels are women who hold me by the hand’. This poetic periphrasis expresses the symbolic process by which Denis would record the progressive realisation of this nascent love affair. It was through a sort of prose poem Denis called ‘Les Amours de Marthe’, which he wrote between 30 June and 29 December 1891, that the artist put his feelings into words: ‘One feels more beautiful when one loves. Attitudes are easy and chaste. Life becomes precious, discreet: sunsets have the mellowness of old paintings. But it is actually the heart that is beating too fast’.1

In Jeunes filles qu’on dirait des anges (1892) [3], as in certain paintings by the English

[2]

Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), we feel we are seeing a triple portrait of Marthe. Dressed in the same checked blouse, like in some of Bonnard’s contemporary portraits of his sister Andrée, Marthe seems to be an apparition. The intensity of Denis’ passion for Marthe made her, in his eyes, almost unreal. He wrote in his Journal: ‘She is more beautiful. SHE IS MORE BEAUTIFUL than all images, than all representations, than all subjective efforts! She is outside of me, it is not me who created her. The embrace of our hands last night is more valid than all metaphysics to attest the reality of things’.2

REALITY TRANSFORMED

Considered from this viewpoint, the content of this painting can be seen in a new light; Denis did not simply represent Marthe as sometimes performing trivial gestures and sometimes as a Symbolist icon, his work is an expression that the marvellous is an integral part of our everyday reality. This is precisely the meaning of these lines written in his Journal:

The evening in September when I received her into my heart for the first time, the evening when she came into my life [...] She was going to do some ironing: she was fanning the stove where the irons were being heated. I can still see how she was standing. And at the same time, she was singing.

I’d never heard her deep voice. She was singing that song Entends-tu pas la nuit d’étoiles that I thought I alone loved, but that she loved too! That was how I discovered the happiness I’ve found in her ever since: her discreet love and her taste for beautiful things in the midst of humble domestic tasks.3

Denis paints a scene of everyday life in which reality is transfigured by a literary imagination in which the two lovers are steeped. In Marthe symboliste [4] or Portrait de jeune fille dans un décor de soir (both 1892) she wears her long hair in precisely the same fashion as in Portrait de Marthe au tablier rouge (esquisse), gently undulating as it descends from her left shoulder to her waist. It is not inconceivable that this is a reference to Mélisande’s golden hair into which Pelléas sinks his face. Remember that the production of Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, for which Denis and the Nabis created the sets in 1893, at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre, was published

[3]

in 1892. In Marthe symboliste, as is the case here, a large tree spreads its foliage in the background.

ON A PALE SILVER SOFA

In the beautiful love affair between Denis and Marthe, music and literature were omnipresent. Denis wrote: ‘We read things from the Song of Songs, and a poem by Edgar Poe and even by Baudelaire and Mallarmé [...] She reread Princesse Maleine until two o’clock in the morning. She is pale, on edge, caressing’,4 and then added, ‘I said to her (on the pale silver sofa where we were alone together): your neck is like the Tower of David, ringed with shields’.5 The pale silver sofa, seen in Marthe au divan or Marthe au tablier rouge (1892) [2], was the setting for the pair’s first emotions as they read poetry together at night. Denis used the motif one last time in Sur un canapé d’argent pâle [5], Plate X in his series Amour, published by Ambroise Vollard in 1899.

The portraits of Marthe painted by Denis during 1892 are like the pieces of a loving jigsaw. It is difficult to have an idea of the precise

chronology of these works as Denis’ creative dynamic was never linear. In this series he simultaneously developed multiple symbolic possibilities offered by a single motif, and, enthralled, we observe as an infinite love crystallises before our eyes and, even rarer, takes material form in a series of paintings. As Denis said, ‘Dream will become reality’.6

REFERENCES

1. Maurice Denis, ‘Les Amours de Marthe’, 30 September [1891], Journal, Tome I (1884–1904) (Paris: La Colombe, 1957), p. 85.

2. Denis, p. 86.

3. Denis, ‘Wednesday 16 November [1892]’, Journal, Tome I (1884–1904), p. 97.

4. Denis, ‘Les Amours de Marthe’, October [1891], ibid., pp. 86–87.

5. Denis, ‘Les Amours de Marthe’, Friday 23 October [1891], ibid., p. 87.

6. Denis, ‘28 November’ [1892], ibid., p. 98.

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Maurice Denis, Study for ‘Marthe au divan’ or ‘Marthe au tablier orange’(1892), watercolour on paper, 31.2 × 26 cm (former Henri-Marie Petiet Collection)

[2]. Denis, Marthe au divan or Marthe au tablier orange (1892), oil on cardboard, 38 × 28 cm (private collection)

[3]. Denis, Jeunes filles qu’on dirait des anges (c. 1892) (private collection)

[4]. Denis, Marthe symboliste or Portrait de jeune fille dans un décor de soir (1892), oil on canvas, 130 × 71 cm (Niigata, Niigata Prefectural National Museum)

[5]. Denis, Sur le canapé d’argent pâle (1892–1899), plate X from the Amour series, colour lithograph on paper, 53 × 41 cm (private collection). Published by Ambroise Vollard in 1899

AU PONT DU NORD

UN BAL ÉTAIT DONN É

1894

watercolour, ink, graphite and pen on paper 13 3/4 × 29 3/4 in / 35 × 75.5 cm

signed and dated lower right ‘MAUD 94’;

PROVENANCE

Private Collection

Tajan, Paris: 19 March 1983 (lot no. 34)

Collection Sam Josefowitz

Christie’s, Paris: 2 December 2008 (lot no. 7)

Galerie Hopkins, Paris

Private Collection

EXHIBITED

‘The Nabis and the Parisian Avant-Garde’, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ, 4 December 1988 –14 February 1989; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 11 March – 21 May 1989, cat. no. 53, pl.12 (repro. in colour), pp. 39–40, p. 78

‘Nabis 1988–1900’, Kunsthaus, Zurich, 28 May – 15 August 1993; Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 21 Sept. 1993 –3 January 1994, cat. no. 193, p. 372 (repro. in colour)

LITERATURE

Les Nabis, Claire Frèches-Thory and Antoine Terrasse, Flammarion, Paris, 1990, title page (repro. in colour), p. 161

Maurice Denis, Jean-Paul Bouillon, Skira, Genève, 1993, p. 65 (repro. in colour)

This painting is accompanied by a photocertificate of authenticity, dated 4 July 2023 and signed by Claire Denis, the artist’s granddaughter.

MUSIC BEFORE ALL ELSE

Indisputably one of the most accomplished watercolours of the 1890s, Au Pont du Nord un bal était donné (1894) [p. 65] demonstrates Maurice Denis’ love of the decorative arts and the way in which he gave great symbolic value to everyday objects.

ART IN AN EVERYDAY WORLD

Like William Morris and the English PreRaphaelites, the Nabis had the goal of renewing the decorative arts with the aim of turning our everyday surroundings into a total work of art. Every object, from a door handle to a dessert table, a carpet to wallpaper, had to be artistic. It was with this in mind that in 1891 Pierre Bonnard entered the competition at the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs to design a dining room. In a more theoretical perspective, in 1892 Denis argued for an alliance between art and crafts, even between artists and the business world: ‘Where is the businessman willing to enlist the invaluable help of these decorators, to take a little of the time they devote to making many paintings?’1

Without waiting for actual commissions, Denis began to produce a series of designs: between 1891 and 1898, decorations for fans, some of which make direct reference to his relationship with Marthe Meurier; and wallpaper designs,2 including Les Colombes, Les Trains and Les Bateaux Jaunes, all conceived in 1893. Only Les Bateaux Roses (1893) was printed by L’Estampe Originale, directed by André Marty.

Between 1893 and 1899, Denis created in partnership some fifteen lampshade designs; Fête de noces sous les lanternes (1893), today in the Sant Collection, promised to the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC [1]; Erlkönig (The Alder King) (17 November 1893) based on Goethe’s poem set to music by Franz Schubert, this piece, Au Pont du Nord un bal était donné; Marthe et Noële aux brebis (1896), Marthe et Noële aux marronniers (1896); Chevaux de bois (1900); and Le Trottoir roulant (c. 1900). Some have come down to us as sketches, while others, like Au Pont du Nord un bal était donné, are

very well finished. Originally designed to be used with paraffin lamps, lampshades began to interest artists in the 1890s and 1900s as electricity was introduced more widely, as attested by the works of Antonin Daum and the artists of the Nancy School.

JAPONISME

Making skilful use of flat tints and perspective, and the contrast between straight and sinuous lines, Denis took inspiration from Japanese graphic works to create a rhythmic image. The influence of Japonism, which was very fashionable in Paris following its widespread presentation at the Expositions Universelles (1867, 1878, 1889), is seen here in several instances; first, in the Japanese paper lanterns lighting the bridge, a motif Denis had already used in Fête de noces sous les lanternes and in Erlkönig (1893); second, in the Japanese lanterns that Whistler installed in his Peacock Room (1877) and that Henri Rivière used as a repetitive motif in La Tentation de Saint-Antoine [2, overleaf], presented at Le Chat Noir a production at Le Chat Noir in 1887; third, lanterns that graced the cabaret Le Divan Japonais, run from 1883 to 1892 by the poet Jehan Sarrazin on the Butte Montmartre; fourth, in the decorative motifs on the dancers’ dresses, which seem to have been taken directly from the plates published by Siegfried Bing in his review Japon Artistique (1888–91); and lastly, in the elegant [1]

winding lines Denis uses to depict swirling water.

Japan did not provide the only influence here, however: the two cartouches framing the boat, which bear the title of the song that gives the image its name, are explicit references to the Middle Ages, of which Denis was a great enthusiast. They suggest two lines by Paul Verlaine from the collection Sagesse (1880), for which Denis composed illustrations between 1889 and 1893. The meticulous precision with which he drew his motifs is reminiscent of the art of medieval enamelling.

MUSIC BEFORE ALL ELSE

Music had already been the central theme of Erlkönig, based by Denis on Schubert’s lied sung by his beloved Marthe. Denis had numerous ties with music; he was a close friend of Ernest Chausson, who bought many of his works, also of Claude Debussy, whose score of Pelléas et Mélisande he illustrated in 1894, and of Vincent d’Indy. The musical reference in Au Pont du Nord un bal était donné is not to classical music but an anonymous folk song. As often occurs with such songs, several versions exist due to regional variations and adaptations. In the original version, the story is related to the bridge in Nantes where a mother refuses to let her daughter, called Hélène, go dancing. In defiance of this injunction, Hélène’s brother, here seen wearing a top hat, takes the girl out in a boat that overturns when part of the bridge collapses:

Upon the bridge of Nantes, a dance is held / Fair Hélène longs to join the joy dispelled / ‘O dearest mother, wilt thou let me go?’ / ‘Nay, nay, my daughter, thou shalt not do so’ / She climbs her chamber, tears begin to flow / Her brother comes, in a boat gilded bright / ‘What troubles thee, dear sister, on this night?’ / ‘Alas, dear brother, I shan’t join the dance!’ / ‘Oh, fear not, sister, I shall thee advance’ / ‘Take thy white dress and thy belt all of gold’ / Thrice she did turn... the bridge no longer holds / Fair Hélène into the Loire swiftly falls / ‘Alas! dear brother, dost thou hear my calls?’ / ‘Nay, nay, dear sister, I shall save thee yet!’ / Into the waters, both their fates are set / The bells do toll, with sorrow deeply met / What makes the bells to toll so loud and clear? / Tis for Hélène and thy son held most dear / Behold the fate of children, stubborn still 3

BECOMING HIMSELF

Faithful to the text, Denis includes all the details in the song: while the mother reiterates her command with a gesture on the far right of the composition, to her left men and women in festive dress are dashed into the water. Created in the early days of his marriage, just after their 1893 honeymoon in Brittany, the subject matter is far from insignificant and should be understood not in its literal sense but in its symbolism. Remember that in the early days of his relationship with Marthe, Denis was subject to doubt: would his love for his beloved be compatible with his artistic and spiritual commitment? In this context, the fact of the couple being thrown into the river must be understood as the materialisation of the possible perils that threatened Maurice and Marthe. Traditional places of socialisation, in the 19th century dances and balls were looked on with suspicion by the religious authorities. However, the story related by this song should be understood as a metaphor for a passage, a bridge between an earlier life and a future existence. And, in fact, 1894 was the year that Denis resolved the existential questions that had beset him

and gave himself permission to be himself, so that he might offer his beloved a life of fulfilment. From this perspective, the golden boat, depicted fancifully as if it had come out a dream, becomes the symbol of this journey towards a new life full of hope.

REFERENCES

1. Pierre Louis [Maurice Denis], ‘Pour les jeunes peintres’, Art et critique, no. 90 (20 February 1892), pp. 94–95.

2. See the catalogue of the exhibition Bonnard to Vuillard, The Intimate Poetry of Everyday Life, The Nabi Collection of Vicki and Roger Sant (Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, 26 October 2019 – 26 January 2020), pp. 136–37.

3. See Bernard Cousin, L’Enfant et la Chanson, une histoire de la chanson d’enfant (Paris: Éditions Messidor, 1988).

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Maurice Denis, Fête de noces sous les lanternes (1893) (detail), ink, watercolour and gouache on paper, 17.2 × 71.7 cm (Roger and Vicky Sant Collection)

[2]. Henri Rivière, Scene for La Tentation de SaintAntoine, presented at Le Chat Noir, December 1887

DEVANT LA FEN ÊTRE BLEUE

c. 1894–96 oil on card 11 × 8 1/4 in / 28 × 21 cm

stamped lower right with the artist’s round workshop monogram ‘MAUD’

PROVENANCE

Collection Noële Maurice-Denis Boulet (the artist’s daughter); thence by descent to Jean-François Denis (the artist’s grandson)

Galerie Huguette Berès, Paris (directly from the above in 1992)

Private Collection, London (acquired from the above)

EXHIBITED

‘Paris in the Nineties’, Wildenstein Gallery, London, 12 May – 23 June 1954, no. 23

‘Paris 1900’, Musée Jenisch, Vevey, Switerland, 17 July – 26 September 1954, no. 41

‘Maurice Denis’, Musée de l’Hôtel de ville, Pont-Aven, France, 17 June – 15 September 1979, no. 21

‘Maurice Denis’, Galerie Huguette Berès, Paris, 4 June – 22 July 1992, no. 36 (repro. in cat.)

This painting is accompanied by a photocertificate of authenticity, dated 26 May 2023 and signed by Claire Denis, the artist’s granddaughter.

SENTIMENTAL GEOGRAPHY

Some paintings are so poetic that the tools of art history are insufficient to convey their sublime beauty; Devant la fenêtre bleue (c. 1894–96) [p. 74] is one of them.

We are in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Maurice Denis and Marthe Meurier, who had met in 1891 and married two years later, are living in Villa Montrouge, a small apartment situated below the upper town, whose windows look out onto the hills of Fourqueux and Mareil-Marly. As this had been the setting of his childhood and his first love affairs, Denis knows every lane of the place and always paints them realistically. Thus, the white wall across the centre of Devant la fenêtre bleue (c. 1894–96) is the Priory built at the request of Madame de Montespan, for which Denis had great fondness on account of its history. As a result of the commission for a decorative cycle made to Denis by the great Russian collector Ivan Morosov, for his Moscow mansion, Denis purchased the Priory and made it his home; it is now home to a museum dedicated to the artist’s work. The landscape in the background of the composition the one seen in Le Pré aux chevaux (1893) [1]

It was in Villa Montrouge that Denis and Marthe’s first child, Jean-Paul, was born in October 1894. Marthe was often visited there by her sister Eva, a musician like herself, who in Devant la fenêtre bleue Denis shows standing in pensive mood, not unlike the one

adopted by the young woman in blue seen from behind in Portrait d’Yvonne Lerolle en trois aspects (1897) [2]. The essential elements of Denis’ affective universe are thus brought together here, and would reappear year after year in later works, like motifs in a tapestry woven over time.

ALBERTI’S WINDOW

A recurring motif in the history of art, the window became the cornerstone of the revolution of artistic representation in Renaissance Italy when the philosopher, painter and mathematician Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) described a painting as being a window on the world. Breaking with the vertical arrangement of planes characteristic of the Middle Ages, the artists of the Quattrocento began to construct their works using perspective. A diligent visitor to the Louvre from the time of his youth and a passionate admirer of Italian painting, Denis had a perfect understanding of this revolution in aesthetics. What is fascinating about Devant la fenêtre bleue is how it reintroduces

compositional stacked planes, integrating them with the formal experimentation of the Pont-Aven School: the foreground is constructed with several flat tints of blue, like a succession of flat surfaces. Eva, whose face is barely sketched in, is portrayed without volume, like a figure taken from a Japanese print and slid sideways between two flat planes. Denis would return to this idea of young women with blank faces in Figures à la fenêtre verte, Perros (c. 1897) [3]. In both cases, the space between the two casements offers the viewer visual perspective, functioning as a painting within a painting. When we consider the mastery with which Denis has transfigured reality in this work, it is easy to understand the fascination that the young Henri Matisse had for the works of the Nabis [4].

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE QUEST

The meaning of this painting, however, cannot be divined through simple formal analysis; this young woman, in a landscape depicted in various shades of blue (a nighttime scene?), whose gesture appears to point toward somewhere other than her present circumstance, no longer fully belongs to everyday reality. To grasp the scene’s atmosphere, it is useful to consider the doubts and hopes expressed by Stéphane Mallarmé in his

poem ‘Les Fenêtres’ (Windows), published in Vers et Prose in 1893: ‘Let the glass be art, let it be mysticism / To be reborn, wearing my dream as a crown, / In a past heaven where Beauty flourished!’1 And to understand this mysterious dreamlike apparition, we also need to refer to verses by Verlaine:

The sky above the roof / Is so blue, so calm! / A tree above the roof / Sways its fronds […] Dear God, dear God, life is there, / simple and still. / That peaceful murmur there / comes from the town. / What have you done, you who are here / weeping endlessly? / Oh, what have you done, you who are here, / with the days of your youth? 2

The repetition, if not the frequent recurrence, of the motif of a young woman at a window in Denis’ later work, for example in Temps gris sur l’île, also known as Le Soir (c. 1894) [5], is not at all inadvertent. The confrontation between inside and outside, between the protective space of intimacy and that of adventure, undeniably speaks of the relationship with reality and the quest for

[3]

[4]

construction of the self. It is of no real importance that the setting in Le Soir is no longer Ile-de-France but Brittany: the poetic and symbolic framework remains the same, in scenes featuring identified but idealised characters. Baudelaire summed it up brilliantly in his poem of the same title, Les Fenêtres: ‘What does it matter what reality is outside me, provided it has helped me to live, to feel that I am and what I am?’3

REFERENCES

1. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Les fenêtres’, La Revue indépendante (1887), pp. 18–20.

2. Paul Verlaine, ‘Le ciel est par-dessus le toit’, Sagesse, partie III , poème VI . Eng. trans. Muriel Kittel, Anchor Anthology of French Poetry from Nerval to Valéry (New York: Doubleday, 2009), p. 97.

3. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Les Fenêtres’, Petits poèmes en prose, 1869. Own translation.

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Maurice Denis, Portrait d’Yvonne Lerolle en trois aspects (1897) (detail), oil on canvas, 170 × 110 cm (Paris, Musée d’Orsay)

[2]. Denis, Le Pré aux chevaux (1893), oil on cardboard, 25.3 × 25 cm (private collection)

[3]. Denis, Figures à la fenêtre verte, Perros (c. 1897), oil on canvas, 59 × 47 cm (Pont-Aven, Musée de Pont-Aven)

[4]. Henri Matisse, Fenêtre à Tanger (Tangier, spring 1912), oil on canvas, 115 × 80 cm (Moscow, Pushkin Museum, formerly in the collection of Ivan Morosov)

[5]. Denis, Temps gris sur l’île or Le Soir (c. 1894), oil on canvas, 47.5 × 55.5 cm (Douai, Musée de la Chartreuse)

CHARLES FILIGER

CHARLES FILIGER

1863–1928

Charles Filiger was introduced to drawing as a child by his father, who worked as a draughtsman at the Thann fabric company. After attending a Jesuit school, in 1880 Filiger decided to study the decorative arts and, in 1887, moved to Paris to follow the courses at the Atelier Colarossi on Rue de la Grande-Chaumière.

He visited Pont-Aven frequently between 1889 and 1892, and became friends with Paul Gauguin and Paul Sérusier while all three were staying in Le Pouldu, at the Buvette de la Plage belonging to Marie Henry (called Marie Poupée). Filiger spent the rest of his life in Brittany, sometimes visiting Paris to see his patron Antoine de la Rochefoucauld, who financed him from 1890 to 1900, the year that their relations ceased.

Although Filiger also received money from his family, from 1895 he suffered serious financial hardship. Loneliness, worsening health (he was neurasthenic) and alcoholism obliged him to continually change boarding houses. Between 1905 and 1910, he was also confined twice in hospices. Filiger survived on sales of his paintings and pottery decorations. He broke from his brother Paul in 1910, shortly before the latter’s death. In 1914, he was taken into the hotel in Trégunc run by the Le Guellec family, who looked after Filiger until his death in 1928.

TÊTE DE CHRIST AUX

CHEVEUX DE FLAMMES

c. 1892

gouache on card 8 7/8 × 7 3/8 in / 22.4 × 18.6 cm

PROVENANCE

Comte Antoine de la Rochefoucauld, Paris (directly from the artist); thence by descent to Eugène de La Rochefoucauld (his son)

Mira Jacob

Arthur G. Altschul, New York (acquired December 1961)

Private Collection, Paris (acquired from the above in 2002)

Private Collection

EXHIBITED

‘Gauguin og hans venner’, Winkel & Magnussen, Copenhagen, 1956, no. 56

‘The Nabis and Their Circle’, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN , 14 November –30 December 1962, cat. p. 142

‘Neo-Impressionists and Nabis in the Collection of Arthur G. Altschul’, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, 20 January – 14 March 1965, cat. no. 27, pp. 74–76 (repro. in b&w)

‘Il Sacro et il profano nell’arte dei simbolisti’, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Turin, 1 June – August 1969, cat. no. 128, p. 120 (repro. in b&w)

‘The Sacred and Profane in Symbolist Art’, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1–26 November 1969, cat. no. 107, p. 102 (repro.)

‘Filiger: Dessins, gouaches, aquarelles,’ Musée départemental Maurice Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 14 November 1981 –15 February 1982; touring to Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper, 5 March – 30 April 1982, cat. no. 23, p. 46 (p. 47 repro. in b&w)

‘Charles Filiger’, Musée d’Art Moderne, Strasbourg, 16 June – 2 September 1990, cat. no. 21

‘Filiger: curated by André Cariou’, Galerie Malingue, Paris, 27 March – 22 June 2019, p. 40 (repro. in colour)

LITERATURE

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin, vol. LI , no. 4, December 1962, p. 142

Melvin Waldvogel, Art International VII /I, 1963, p. 55

Paul Gauguin et l’école de Pont-Aven, Wladyslawa Jaworska, La Bibliotheque des Arts and Éditions Ides et Calendes, Neuchâtel–Paris, 1971, p. 165 (repro.), p. 260

Filiger l’inconnu, Mira Jacob, Le BateauLavoir, Paris, 1989, no. 74

Filiger. Correspondence et sources anciennes, André Cariou, Locus Solus, Châteulin, 2019, no. 53

SAINTE FAMILLE

1891

gouache on card 12 1/4 × 10 in / 32.7 × 27 cm

signed upper right ‘FILIGER’

PROVENANCE

Antoine de la Rochefoucauld, Paris (directly from the artist in 1891); thence by descent to Eugène de La Rochefoucauld (his son)

Mira Jacob

Arthur G. Altschul, New York (December 1961)

Private Collection, Paris (acquired from the above in 2002)

Private Collection

EXHIBITED

‘Salon de la Rose + Croix’, Galerie DurandRuel, 1892, Paris, cat. no. 59

‘Neo-Impressionists and Nabis in the Collection of Arthur G. Altschul’, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, 20 January – 14 March 1965, cat. no. 26, pp. 74–75 (repro. in colour) [titled ‘Virgin and Child’]

‘Gaugin and The Pont-Aven Group’, Tate, London, 7 January – 13 February 1966, cat. no. 130, p. 35, pl. 32 (repro. in b&w)

‘Pont-Aven: Gauguin und sein Kreis in der Bretagne’, Kunsthaus, Zurich, 6 March –11 April 1966, cat. no. 175

‘Il Sacro et il profano nell’arte dei simbolisti’, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Turin, 1 June – August 1969, cat. no. 127, p. 119 (repro. in b&w), appendix XLIII [titled ‘La Madonna e il Bambino’]

‘The Sacred and Profane in Symbolist Art’, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1–26 November 1969, cat. no. 106

‘Symbolists’, Spencer A. Samuels, New York, NY, November 1970, cat. no. 63

‘Search for Innocence: Primitive and Primitivistic of the 19th Century’, University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park, MD, 29 October –10 December 1975, cat. no. 46

‘The Pre-Raphaelite Era: 1814–1914’, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE , 12 April – 6 June 1976, cat. nos. 8–13, pp. 186–187 (repro. in b&w)

‘Post-Impressionism: Cross Currents in European Painting 1880–1906’, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 17 November 1979 – 16 March 1980, cat. no. 78, p. 71 (repro. in b&w)

‘Filiger: Dessins, gouaches, aquarelles,’ Musée départemental Maurice Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 14 November 1981 –15 February 1982; touring to Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper, 5 March – 30 April 1982, cat. no. 28, p. 51 (repro. in b&w)

‘Filiger: curated by André Cariou’, Galerie Malingue, Paris, 27 March – 22 June 2019, cat. p. 30 (repro. in colour p. 31)

LITERATURE

‘R + C: Galerie Durand-Ruel, mars–avril’, Félix Fénéon, in Le Chat noir, Paris, 19 March 1892 [reproduced in Oeuvres plus complètes, vol. I, Félix Fénéon, Librairie Droz, Genève–Paris, 1970, p. 211] SAINTE FAMILLE

‘Salon de la Rose + Croix’, Félix Vallotton, in Gazette de Lausanne, 22 March 1892

‘Les Premiers Salons: Indépendants –Rose + Croix – Exposition de Mme Jeanne Jacquemin’, Rémy de Gourmont, in Mercure de France, Paris, vol. V, no. 29, May 1892, pp. 63–64

‘Charles Filiger’, Antoine de La Rochefoucauld, in Le Coeur, Paris, vol. IV/V, July–August 1893, pp. 3–6

Paul Gauguin et l’école de Pont-Aven, Wladyslawa Jaworska, La Bibliotheque des Arts, Éditions Ides et Calendes, Neuchâtel–Paris, 1971, p. 260

Le Sentiment religieux chez trois peintres de Pont-Aven: Charles Filiger, Jan Verkade, Mogens Ballin, Marie-Amélie Anquetil, Sorbonne University, Paris, 1975

Charles Filiger: Synthesist, Symbolist and Recluse, Virginia Lee Kobler, University of Washington, Seattle, 1981, no. 2

Filiger l’inconnu, Mira Jacob, Le Bateau Lavoir, Paris, 1989, no. 17

Post-Impressionism, Bernard Denvir, Thames & Hudson, London, 1992, no. 90

Les Peintres de Pont-Aven, André Cariou, Éditions Oues–France, Rennes, 1994, p. 82

Émile Bernard: 1868–1941, Fred Leeman, Flammarion, Paris, 2014, p. 191

Gauguin et l’école de Pont-Aven, André Cariou, Hazan, Paris, 2015, p. 138

Gauguin et ses camarades de l’École de Pont-Aven au Pouldu, André Cariou, Coop Breizh, Spézet, 2016, p. 75

Filiger. Correspondance et sources anciennes, André Cariou, Locus Solus, Châteaulin, 2019, no. 31

PAYSAGE DE BRETAGNE

1892–93 gouache on card 9 3/8 × 11 5/8 in / 23.7 × 29.6 cm

inscribed lower left ‘certifié de Filiger/ Emilie Bernard’

PROVENANCE

André Level, Paris (acquired from the artist for his organisation ‘Peau de l’Ours’)

‘Peau de l’Ours’, Hôtel Drouot, Paris: 2 March 1914 (lot no. 92)

Eugénie de La Rochefoucauld (acquired from the above); thence by descent

Mira Jacob

The Reid Gallery, London

Arthur G. Altschul, New York (c. 1964)

Private Collection, Paris (acquired from the above 2002)

Private Collection

EXHIBITED

‘Charles Filiger: First Exhibition in London of the Pont-Aven Painter’, The Reid Gallery, London, 3 October – 2 November 1963, cat. no. 14, p. 6 (repro.)

‘Neo-Impressionists and Nabis in the Collection of Arthur G. Altschul’, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, 20 January – 14 March 1965, cat. no. 29, pp. 74–79 (repro. in b&w)

‘Gauguin and The Pont-Aven Group’, Tate, London, 7 January – 13 February 1966, cat. no. 148, p. 36, plate 29 (repro. in b&w)

‘Pont-Aven: Gauguin und sein Kreis in der Bretagne’, Kunsthaus, Zurich, 6 March –11 April 1966, cat. no. 188, p. 73

‘From Delacroix to Cèzanne, French Watercolor Landscape of 19th Century’, University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park, MD, 26 October – 4 December 1977; touring to The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY, 9 January – 19 February 1978; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI, 1 April – 14 May 1978, cat. no. 54

‘Filiger: Dessins, gouaches, aquarelles’, Musée départemental Maurice Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 14 November 1981 –15 February 1982; touring to Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper, 5 March – 30 April 1982, cat. no. 26, p. 50 (repro. in b&w)

‘Gauguin und die Schule von Pont-Aven’, Kunsthalle, Munich, 28 August –15 November 1998, cat. no. 68

‘Filiger: curated by André Cariou’, Galerie Malingue, Paris, 27 March – 22 June 2019, repro. on book cover, p. 53 (repro. in colour)

LITERATURE

‘Die Schule von Pont-Aven’, Ursula Perucchi-Petri, in DU , Conzett + Huber, Zurich, 1963, p. 626

‘Charles Filiger Malarz Szkoly Pont-Aven’, Wladyslawa Jaworska, in Biuletyn Historii Sztuki, Warsaw, 1965, p. 16

Paul Gauguin et l’école de Pont-Aven, Wladyslawa Jaworska, La Bibliotheque des Arts, Éditions Ides et Calendes, Neuchâtel–Paris, 1971, p. 166

Charles Filiger: Synthesist, Symbolist and Recluse, Virginia Lee Kobler, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 1981, no. 31, p. 37, p. 143 (repro.)

Filiger l’inconnu, Mira Jacob, Le BateauLavoir, Paris, 1989, no. 78

L’Aventure de l’art au xix siècle, JeanLouis Ferrier and Sophie Monneret, Éditions du Chêne, Paris, 1991, p. 774

La peinture des nabis, Claude Jeancolas, Éditions Franck Van Wilder, Paris, 2002, p. 146 (repro. in colour)

Gauguin et ses camarades de l’École de Pont-Aven au Pouldu, André Cariou, Coop Breizh, Spézet, 2016, p. 18

Filiger. Correspondance et sources anciennes, André Cariou, Locus Solus, Châteaulin, 2019, no. 49

FAMILLE DE PÊCHEURS

1894 gouache on card 11 1/4 × 8 in / 28.5 × 20.5 cm

signed on artwork border lower left ‘FILIGER’

PROVENANCE

Private Collection, Bretagne

Yannick Doyen, Vannes

Galerie Doyen, Vannes

Galerie Laurentin, Paris (2005)

Private Collection, Paris

Private Collection

LAMENTATION SUR LE CHRIST MORT

c. 1895

gouache on paper

13 × 14 in / 33.1 × 35.5 cm

signed lower left ‘FILIGER’

PROVENANCE

Piccadilly Gallery, London

Robert Walker, Paris

Arthur G. Altschul, New York (1977)

Galerie Hopkins-Custot, Paris, 2002

Private Collection

EXHIBITIONS

‘Symbolists’, The Piccadilly Gallery, London, 1970, no. 27 (repro.)

‘French Symbolist Painters: Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, Redon and their followers’, Hayward Gallery, London, 7 June –23 July 1972; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 9 August – 17 September 1972, cat. no. 73, p. 51 (repro. in b&w)

‘El Simbolismo en la Pintura Francesca’, Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo, Madrid, October–November 1972; Museo de Arte Moderno, Barcelona, December 1972 – January 1973, cat. no. 62, p. 64

‘Filiger: Dessins, gouaches, aquarelles,’ Musée départemental Maurice Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 14 November 1981 –15 February 1982; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper, 5 March – 30 April 1982, cat. no. 64

‘Charles Filiger’, Musée d’Art Moderne, Strasbourg, 16 June – 2 September 1990, cat. no. 44, p. 216

‘Le Cercle de Gauguin en Bretagne’, Musée de Pont-Aven, Pont-Aven, 25 June –26 September 1994

‘Filiger: curated by André Cariou’, Galerie Malingue, Paris, 27 March – 22 June 2019, cat. p. 62 (repro. in colour)

LITERATURE

Symbolists and Decadents, John Milner, Studio Vista/Dutton, London, 1971, p. 63 (repro.)

Les Symbolistes, Philippe Julian, La Bibliotheque des Arts and Éditions Ides et Calendes, Neuchâtel–Paris, 1973, no. 46, p. 54

Charles Filiger: Synthesist, Symbolist and Recluse, Virginia Lee Kobler, University of Washington, Seattle, Wa, 1981, no. 61

The Post Impressionists, Belinda Thomson, Phaidon Press, Oxford, 1983, no. 170

Filiger l’inconnu, Mira Jacob, Le Bateau Lavoir, Paris, 1989, no. 111

Filiger. Correspondance et sources anciennes, Andrê Cariou, Locus Solus, Châteaulin, 2019, no. 84

PAUL RANSON

PAUL RANSON

1861–1909

The son of the mayor of Limoges, Paul Ranson studied at the École des Arts Décoratifs in the city before moving to Paris to study at the capital’s École des Arts Décoratifs. However, he left this new school in 1888 to attend the Académie Julian, where he remained until 1891. There he got to know Paul Sérusier, Henri Gabriel Ibels, Pierre Bonnard and Maurice Denis, with whom he formed the Nabis. Meetings of the group were held in his apartment, known as ‘Le Temple’, at 25 Boulevard du Montparnasse.

In 1891, Ranson exhibited at the first annual Beaux-Arts exhibition in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, while exhibiting his works alongside his companions at Le Barc de Boutteville gallery. Given the nickname ‘Nabi plus Japonard que Japonard’, he was above all a painter-decorator who created panels, tapestries, wallpapers and stained-glass windows for collectors and manufacturers. He also formed a puppet theatre that performed in the salons of art patrons such as Coulon, Fontainas and Madame Straus, and he became a friend of the playwright Alfred Jarry.

Between 1895 and 1903, Ranson devoted himself to tapestry-making, exhibiting cartoons and works of embroidery at the salons of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Suffering from financial difficulties and in poor health, in 1908 he opened the Académie Ranson with his wife to create extra income but died of typhoid the following year.

PAUL RANSON

L’HIPPOGRIFFE

1891 oil on canvas

36 1/4 × 28 3/4 in / 92 × 73 cm

signed lower right ‘P. Ranson’; signed twice on reverse ‘P. Ranson’, dated ‘91’ and titled ‘Nabi’ in Arabic

PROVENANCE

Collection Auguste Cazalis

Private Collection, France

Piasa, Paris: 15 June 2005 (lot no. 9)

Gallery Hopkins Custot, Paris (acquired from the above)

Private Collection, Germany (acquired from the above 2008)

EXHIBITED

‘Paul Ranson’, Galerie Druet, Paris, 1906, catalogue no. 12

‘Paul Elie Ranson: du symbolisme à l’art nouveau’, Musée Maurice Denis, SaintGermain-en-Laye, 25 October 1997 –25 January 1998, catalogue no. 18

‘Paul Ranson: fantasmes & sortilèges’, Musée Maurice Denis, Saint-Germain en Laye, 24 October 2009 – 24 January 2010

LITERATURE

‘Paul Ranson’, Charles Morice, in Mercure de France, 15 February 1906, p. 608

Paul Ranson, 1861–1909. Catalogue raisonné: japonisme, symbolisme, art nouveau, Brigitte Ranson Bitker and Gilles Genty, Somogy éditions d’art, Paris, 1999, no. 62, p. 36 (repro. in colour), p. 111

A RESURGENCE OF WILD ROMANTICISM

In many respects, the outstanding painting L’Hippogriffe (1891) [p. 108] fully answers the question ‘What does it mean to be a Nabi?’ We know that the word nabi (plural nebiim) comes from Hebrew and means ‘prophet’. As a name, it was ‘offered’ to Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and their friends by Auguste Cazalis, the first owner of L’Hippogriffe. Like its owner, this painting was central to the history of the Nabis.

Being a Nabi also meant adopting Paul Gauguin’s formal legacy, which he had summarised in the aphorism that has since become famous: ‘We invented the right to dare everything’. With its flat tints, stacking of the different planes, abolition of classical perspective, and sinuous lines that so evidently heralded Art Nouveau, L’Hippogriffe appears in many ways to be the ideal conformation of the Nabis’ aesthetic.

A FIRST COLLECTOR CENTRAL TO THE HISTORY OF THE NABIS

Born in Paris in 1859, the son of a doctor, Cazalis entered the École du Louvre in 1882, and in 1886 he began to attend the classes of Professor Eugène Ledrain, a specialist in Semitic languages and the author of a ten-volume translation of the Bible to which Cazalis also contributed. Ledrain was also the curator of Oriental Antiquities at the Musée du Louvre, an area of interest which is not unconnected with the iconography of L’Hippogriffe

It was in Professor Ledrain’s classes that Cazalis met the painter Paul Sérusier, the unifying force of the future group of Nabi painters. Fascinated by the history of religions, esotericism and theosophy, Cazalis not only invented the name ‘Nabis’ for the movement, he also gave Bonnard, Vuillard, Maurice Denis and their friends their esoteric and humorous nicknames, which have since become famous. Bonnard became known as the ‘Nabi japonard’, Denis as the ‘Nabi aux belles icônes’, and Ranson as the ‘Nabi plus japonard que japonard’. It is interesting to note that L’Hippogriffe is signed on the reverse ‘Nabis’, in Arabic.

Painted in 1891, L’Hippogriffe continued in the line of Ranson’s early experimental and programmatic paintings, including Christ et Bouddha (1890) and Paysage nabique (1890). Close to Gauguin, Ranson and his friends laid strong claim to his heritage of pioneering form and to a form of symbolism derived from the generation of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. The strangeness of the iconography of L’Hippogriffe – mysterious and modern, antiquising but also heralding the 20th century – was united with the ancestral myths of the West.

In a seascape by Puvis de Chavannes that seems almost dreamlike, a young woman with the body of a snake is the prisoner of a stiff and upright winged creature with a body that is half human, half animal. This is the hippogriff, after which the painting is named. The painting’s first owner, the poet Cazalis, was a specialist in Eastern religions and theosophy, and L’Hippogriffe can be seen as a painting at the conjunction of the École de Pont-Aven, Japonisme and Symbolism, although it appears yet to reveal all its secrets.

DREAMS, MYSTERY AND LEGENDS

Like František Kupka, Ranson was fascinated by myths of origins, and, an assiduous reader of Rimbaud (he illustrated Le Bateau ivre), he took pleasure in blending ‘classical’ legends with personal oneiric experiences in a number of his compositions. Among the Nabis, Ranson was the only one about whom historians have wondered whether, like Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, he executed some of his works under the influence of hallucinatory drugs. It was for this reason that the Surrealists, from the 1930s onwards, showed interest in his production.

Viewers are straight away intrigued by the significance of the contents of this painting, above all by the motif of the snake-woman, which descends from tales and legends that have circulated in the West since the early Middle Ages. We know that Denis, the Nabis’ theoretician, was a great enthusiast of Breton legends and that Ranson and Paul Sérusier,

lovers of myths and the occult, had several books on the subject. Édouard Schuré’s Les Grands initiés (1888), which attempted to promote universal religious syncretism and influenced the generation of the 1890s, had been read by Ranson, whose family still owns the copy.

One of the most famous serpent-bodied women is Melusine, the daughter of the fairy Pressine and Elinas, the king of Scotland. Melusine locked her father up in the magical mountain of Northumberland because he had broken a family promise. Pressine, her mother, found this reaction too severe and put a spell on her three daughters. Melusine was punished by having the lower half of her body transformed into a snake’s body every Saturday. The story is recorded as early as the 14th century by the chronicler Jean d’Arras:

Every Saturday, you will be a snake from your navel down, but if you find a man willing to take you as his wife and who promises never to see you on Saturdays, you will follow the normal course of life. However, if your husband discovers your secret, you will be condemned to remain in your monstrous form until the Last Judgement.1

It should be noted that a few years later Joséphin Péladan, the organiser of the esoteric-aesthetic Salon de la Rose + Croix, took the legend as the basis for a novel that he called Mélusine. 2 Another snake-like figure was the vouivre, whose name comes from the Latin vipera (viper) and whose myth spread primarily in Franche-Comté.

The central theme of Ranson’s painting, that of a woman as the victim of a monstrous creature, is also inspired by the great founding myths of Latin culture and can be found in many instances, such as Perseus and Andromeda, Roger and Angelica, and the Christian version of the theme given by Saint George and the Dragon. It was in chapter 10 of Orlando Furioso that Ludovico Ariosto created the literary motif of a knight mounted on a hippogriff (half-horse, half-bird of prey) coming to the rescue of a heroine, delivering her from the clutches of a dragon.

The hippogriff, whose wings each have an eye at their tip, is also associated with the demonology of the Middle Ages, beloved of the 19th century. In the reproduction of a painting by Spranger, published in Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal of 1863,3 as in Ranson’s painting, the devil appears in majesty with his hooves bearing both claws and wings, surrounded by beings subject to his malevolent dominion. However, the search for perfect correspondence between the sources of legends and Ranson’s painting quickly gets lost in a maze of hypotheses, particularly so because Ranson juxtaposes literary origins with pictorial sources.

A RESURGENCE OF WILD ROMANTICISM

Although the Nabis invented highly innovative formal solutions, continuing Gauguin’s heritage, they also drew on the classical iconography established by art history. It should be remembered that they had a very good classical education. With their love of the Middle Ages, the French Romantic artists were the first in the 19th century to draw on the world of legends and myths, which they transformed into powerful images, such as Ingres’ Roger et Angélique (1819), one of the most famous paintings of its time4 and one of the most striking pictorial images of a hippogriff. Its wing is already opened flat and its feathers stuck together with no apparent volume, as in Ranson’s painting. Théophile Gautier, who in 1855 commented that ‘rarely has the intimate meaning of the Middle Ages been better understood’,5 also employed the motif of the hippogriff in his collection Emaux et Camées (1884): ‘Just like me / as I mount upon the Hippogryph / In blue domain / Soulless, and reveling on and on / Off to wherever God might deign!’6

Following Ingres, it was Gustave Doré’s monumental illustration of Orlando Furioso that offered the most dreamlike representations. We know that Ranson owned several books with illustrations by Doré, whose love of fantasy was close to his own. It was probably through the engraver Rémois Maquart that Ranson discovered this Romantic imagery,

while he was still a child. Here, however, Ranson availed himself of visual syncretism, for although the hippogriff motif indeed stems from Ariosto and Ingres, nowhere is there a description of a man-animal wearing a mitre on his head, as seen in L’Hippogriffe. The closest visual reference to this mitred man is no doubt the lithograph La Ronde du Sabbat [1].

This work, executed in 1832 by Louis Boulanger (1806–1867) to illustrate Victor Hugo’s collection of poems Ballades, was then set to music by Niedermeyer. In it we also see a number of female nudes lying at the feet of the goat-horned prelate, women whose twisting bodies are not unlike the one painted by Ranson. These images, given visual substance by the generation of Romantic artists, made a lasting impression on the fin-de-siècle imagery of Symbolist artists like Arnold Böcklin.

While the figures in L’Hippogriffe relate to a wealth of ancient visual references, the setting suggests contemporary works. Even more than through its esoteric allusions, the painting’s originality derives from its modern composition; the very high horizon and the

dune that falls abruptly into the sea are very evocative of Puvis de Chavannes’ Jeunes filles au bord de la mer (1879) [2]. Although both versions of Puvis’ painting were in private hands when L’Hippogriffe was painted,7 in 1889 one of them had been displayed at the Exposition Centennale de l’art français 1789–1889, where Ranson no doubt saw it. However it came about, Symbolist critics and writers commented on it at length. The poet Gustave Kahn, who had organised the Nabis’ earliest exhibitions, offered an interpretation of Puvis’ painting that has some bearing on our understanding of Ranson’s work: ‘do we not see in these three women, all alike yet in different attitudes, the same woman given three physical aspects? The same woman at three moments, in three acts of her life: young, at the moment of waiting, at the moment of calling, at the moment of the return of her throbbing impulse towards herself – when she comes to mourn the eternal antinomy of the sexes’. Seen from this viewpoint, are we to look on Ranson’s L’Hippogriffe as the evocation of a myth, a long-ago legend, or should we understand it as an allegory of the probing of male-female relations, perhaps with respect to the artist’s personal history?

[1]

[2]

JOURNEY TO THE MYSTERIOUS CENTRE OF THOUGHT

Beyond its literary and legendary references, Ranson’s painting contains a series of details that evade traditional iconographic analysis, with many of the motifs belonging to the world of the fantastic and the dreamlike, such as the strange plants that populate the landscape. The large green leaves to the right of L’Hippogriffe can be seen in another of Ranson’s paintings, La Chambre bleue (1891) [3], where they seem to threaten the naked woman or to symbolise an imminent excess of sensuality. The symbolic use of foliage is also reminiscent of Gustave Moreau, whose love of marine plants, with their sinuous lines evocative of mystery, was well known. Several

other artists in the Art Nouveau movement also collected and drew inspiration from this natural imagery. For example, August Endell, based in Munich, was fascinated by the collections published by Ernst Haeckel [4], and took inspiration from them to create decorations infused with strangeness. And in Paris, between 1885 and 1890, the Théâtre des Menus Plaisirs projected images onto a large screen that showed the public the life of microscopic organisms with ‘monstrous’ shapes. Several European artists, such as Odilon Redon and Alfred Kubin, related the influence on Symbolism of this unprecedented visual information, and, like his friend Georges Lacombe, Ranson shared a fondness for introducing the undefined into the real world. These plants, painted to suggest

seaweed, suggest a marine, underwater scene, as Jean Delville would later do in Les Trésors de Sathan (1896) (Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts).

Another instance of the strange and bizarre in L’Hippogriffe is given by the motif of the animal’s wing with an eye at its tip; while a distant reference can be found in Francisco Goya’s Caprices series, the most relevant contemporary connection is to be seen in the work of Redon. In his charcoal drawing Œil-ballon (1878) [5], the strangeness arises as much out of the incongruity of the motif as it does out of the break in scale. This image would be used by Redon in his two collections of lithographs, Les Origines (1883) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1888), the latter inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s prose poem of the same name. Les Origines contains all the motifs to be found in L’Hippogriffe, from the eye that dominates the scene (plates 2 and 3) to the snake (plate 6), as well as a centaur (plate 7) that may have inspired Ranson. Lastly, the 5th plate in La Tentation de SaintAntoine (1888), titled Être fabuleux, 8 shows a man’s disembodied head emerging from an undetermined source, perhaps liquid. This

[3]

[4]

L’HIPPOGRIFFE

image is the illustration of Flaubert’s passage: ‘then appears a singular being with the head of a man on the body of a fish’. In the painting

Le Cyclope (1898–1900) [6], the similarity with Ranson’s world is even more evident. A gigantic man, whose head is nothing but a huge single eye, dominates a landscape into which is embedded a naked woman who is attempting, to no avail, to be hidden by its foliage. In many respects, L’Hippogriffe is one of French Symbolism’s most essential works, whose profound sensibility it shares.

FIN-DE-SIÈCLE SENSUALITY

The many analyses of Ranson’s painting do not, however, exhaust its meaning, and the question of its personal significance remains unanswered even today. Aspects of an answer are probably to be found in the personality of the artist. Produced in 1891, L’Hippogriffe, has affinities with several other contemporary paintings by Ranson, in particular Suzanne et les vieillards (January 1891), La Chambre bleue (April 1891) and L’Aiguillon de la chair (April 1891), a gift to Sérusier. In all these works, several of which were exhibited together in 1892 like episodes in a continuous story, Ranson addressed the theme of female sensuality. While Suzanne et les vieillards addresses modesty and unrevealed intimacy, La Chambre bleue suggests sensuality, while L’Aiguillon de la chair objectifies carnal pleasure. With L’Hippogriffe, Ranson dealt with submission and its erotic corollary; by using changes of scale and accentuating the stiff uprightness of the hippogriff to contrast with the contortion of the woman’s body, one hand of which is nailed to the ground, Ranson established relationships not unlike those that Redon would depict in Le Cyclope [6]. Such ‘Surrealist’ images would not be seen again until Max Ernst and André Masson.

Was Ranson objectifying his own erotic imagination or was he exploiting a purely legendary imagery? The absence of any related correspondence leaves room for interpretation. The mystery is heightened by the fact that Auguste Cazalis, who was hopelessly in love with Ranson’s sister-in-law, destroyed all his correspondence just before his marriage in 1902.

Regardless, the originality of L’Hippogriffe indisputably lies in the fact that it anticipated the visual devices that would be adopted by the Surrealist painters, and it is no coincidence that it would be André Breton and his friends who first rediscovered Symbolist painting. As often occurred with Ranson’s Nabi paintings, L’Hippogriffe also offers a number of perspectives on the world of comic strips during the second half of the 20th century. Like that of contemporary cartoonists, Ranson’s fondness for imagery, untrammelled by traditional representational conventions, and combined with an objectified eroticism, unquestionably makes L’Hippogriffe one of Ranson’s most modern paintings.

REFERENCES

1. He wrote the story in 1392 for Jean de Berry, who had recently purchased Lusignan Castle and wanted to give his family prestigious mythical origins in the image of Greek or Latin heroes, all of whom were descended from either a god or goddess.

2. Joséphin Péladan, Mélusine (Paris: Ollendorff, 1895).

3. Jacques-Albin-Simon Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire infernal, 6th edition expanded with 800 new articles and illustrated with 550 engravings (Paris: Plon, 1863).

4. Purchased by Louis XVIII on the advice of the Comte de Blacas, the French ambassador to Rome, this was the first painting bought from Ingres by the French State and was hung above a door in the throne room at Versailles. It was transferred to the Luxembourg in 1824, and to the Louvre in 1874.

5. Quoted in the cat. of the exhibition Ingres, held at the Petit Palais in Paris (27 October 1967 – 29 January 1968), p. 154.

6. Théophile Gautier, ‘La montre’ in Emaux et Camées (Paris: Édition Charpentier, 1884).

7. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Jeunes filles au bord de la mer (1879), oil on canvas, 205 × 154 cm (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), entrusted to Durand-Ruel in November 1887 then acquired by Émile Boivin; also Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Jeunes filles au bord de la mer (1879), oil on canvas, 61 × 47 cm (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), Robert de Bonnières Collection, Paris, from 1894, then the Isaac de Camondo Collection.

8. Odilon Redon, Être fabuleux (1888), lithograph, 27.5 × 17 cm (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Cabinet des estampes).

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Louis Boulanger, La Ronde du Sabbat (1832), lithograph

[2]. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Jeunes filles au bord de la mer (1879), oil on canvas, 61 × 47 cm (Paris, Musée d’Orsay)

[3]. Paul Ranson, La Chambre bleue (1891) (detail)

[4]. Ernst Haeckel, Kunstform der Natur (Artistic Forms of Nature), Munich, 1880.

[5]. Odilon Redon, Œil-ballon (1878), charcoal, 42.2 × 33.2 cm (New York, Museum of Modern Art)

[6]. Redon, Le Cyclope (1898–1900), oil on wood, 64 × 51 cm (Otterlo, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller)

PAUL RANSON

LE GRAND TIGRE

1893

black Conté on paper

51 1/4 × 36 5/8 in / 130 × 93 cm

signed lower right ‘P. Ranson’

PROVENANCE

Paul Ranson – posthumous sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris: 7 June 1909 (lot no. 30 or 37)

Ellissen or Jacques Rouché (director of the Paris Opera) (acquired from the above)

Godillot Collection, Paris

Drouot, Paris: 27 November 1987 (lot no. 79)

Galerie Hopkins Thomas, Paris

Private Collection

EXHIBITED

‘Salon des Artistes Indépendants, 9th exhibition’, Grand Palais, Paris, 28 March – 30 April 1893, cat. no. 1085 [titled ‘study for Le Tigre original print’]

‘Association for Art, 2nd exhibition’, Museum of Painting, Antwerp,  16 February – 16 March 1894, cat. no. 1

‘La Libre Esthétique’, Palais des BeauxArts, Brussels, 24 February – 1 April 1898, cat. no. 296

‘Die Nabis und Ihre Freunde’, Stadtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim, 23 October 1963 –6 January 1964, cat. no. 181 (repro. in b&w)

‘Paul-Elie Ranson’, Musée départemental Maurice Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 15 November 1997 – 16 February 1998, cat. no. 37 (repro. in colour)

LITERATURE

L’Art Moderne, 20 May 1893, p. 154

‘La Décoration intérieure et les travaux féminins: La Tapisserie’, Maurice Pillard Verneuil, in Art et Décoration, vol. II , Librairie de l’Art et de la Décoration, Paris, 1897, p. 80

Les Nabis et leur époque 1888–1900, Agnès Humbert, Éditions Pierre Callier, Geneva, 1954, no. 28 (repro. in b&w)

Les Nabis et leurs temps, Charles Chassé, La Bibliothèque des Arts, Lausanne, 1960, no. 13 (repro. in b&w) [the glass screen; lists the piece as belonging to Michel Ranson, Paris]

Die Nabis und Ihre Epoche 1888–1900, Agnès Humbert, Fundus-Bucher, Dresden, 1967, no. 28 (repro. in b&w)

The Nabis and the Parisian Avant-Garde, Patricia Eckert-Boyer, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1988, no. 88 (not exhibited)

Les Nabis, Claire Frèches-Thory and Antoine Terrasse, Flammarion, Paris, 1990, p. 178 (repro. in b&w)

Paul Ranson 1861–1909. Catalogue raisonné. Japonisme, Symbolisme, Art Nouveau, Brigitte Ranson Bitker and Gilles Genty, Somogy, Éditions d’Art, Paris, 1999, no. 116, p. 140 (repro. in colour), repro. in colour on dust jacket

A TIGER WITH A PROLIFIC LINEAGE

That Le Grand Tigre (1893) [p. 120] was long the most celebrated of Ranson’s works is no doubt due to its extraordinary modernity. Resolutely Art Nouveau in style, it also heralded several powerful images during the 20th century, such as the jungle scenes painted by Henri Rousseau and the settings dreamed up by Al Dempster for Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967).

PAUL RANSON, THE NABI ‘PLUS JAPONARD QUE JAPONARD’

As the nickname affectionately given to him by his painter friends indicates, Ranson, together with Bonnard, was the Nabi most strongly influenced by Japanese art. Books written on the relationship between Ranson and Japonisme have rightly compared Le Grand Tigre to Utamaro’s Tiger in the Bamboo1 and to the various tigers depicted by Hokusai2 and Sharaku. Such comparisons are not surprising; after all, the Nabis visited the exhibition of Japanese art organised in 1890 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris with great enthusiasm. Ranson may also have been inspired by Ganku’s Tiger, published in an

astonishing kakemono, or hanging scroll, format in Le Japon Artistique in February 1889 [1]. Ranson’s copies of Siegfried Bing’s Le Japon Artistique (1888–91), held in the Ranson family archive, reveal how often he used to leaf through them, and he even removed some of the plates so he could hang them on his studio walls.

A MULTI–SOURCE MASTERPIECE

In addition to Japanese sources, images from the period that inspired Ranson’s Le Grand Tigre included the series of heraldic lions sewn by Denis and Ranson in 1891 onto the stage curtain at the Théâtre d’Art for the performance of Rémy de Gourmont’s Théodat. Although the original stage set is no longer extant, an idea of the curtain is conveyed by the cover of the original dramatic text published in 1893 [2].

One unexpected source may have been Henri Rousseau’s Surpris! or Tigre dans une tempête tropicale (1891) [3]. Exhibited that same year at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, where the Nabis would exhibit the following year, the painting caused a sensation, as related by the young Swiss painter Félix Vallotton: ‘Mr. Rousseau is becoming more astonishing every year, but he is establishing himself and is winning a lot of attention. The public gathers around his works and laughter rings out [...]. His tiger surprising its prey is truly something to see; it is the alpha and omega of painting.’3 Admired by Alfred Jarry and Rémy de Gourmont, Rousseau was, in fact, closer to the milieu of the Nabis and La Revue blanche than is usually thought.

Contemporary with Ranson’s Le Grand Tigre the mystical and erotic tale La jalousie du tigre, written by Albert Jeune and Gustave Moreau and published in the magazine La Plume, may have contributed to the painter’s creative process: ‘Then she saw [...] a large tiger, tawny and striped with bands of black velvet, splendidly supple and lying on its side, with teeth like enamel revealed by an ambiguous rictus, the flanks of the beast vibrating from a carnal growl. He looked at her.’4

ADMIRED BY CRITICS OF THE AVANT-GARDE

Whether it was the large tapestry cartoon or the drawing for the lithograph with the same subject [4], both of which were exhibited in 1893, the first in Antwerp at the exhibition of the Association pour l’Art, and the second in Paris at the Indépendants, Le Grand Tigre drew an immediate response from critics. In the review L’Art Moderne, edited by Octave Maus, Edmond Picard, and Émile Verhaeren, the critic wrote:

Among the works that demand particular attention are those by Mr. P. Ranson, whose decorative panels, Le Tigre, Motif de sorcellerie, Lustral, and Harmonies de verts et de jaunes are composed with marked personal

feeling and painted with a delicate awareness of colour. It is new and very appealing. Mr. Ranson applies human and animal figures to the decorative setting in a curious manner. His Tigre, with its fierce appearance, is the most welcome piece in his very interesting exhibition. This feline is one of the plates in the first album of L’Estampe Originale, the new publication from André Marty that we announced earlier, to which all the new artists have contributed. This first album, which is currently on show in Antwerp, includes works by Messrs ToulouseLautrec, Vallotton, Ibels, Denis, Anquetin, Bonnard, and Vuillard, among others. It is the first of a truly artistic series characterised by enjoyable variety and real originality.5

A critic in Le Cœur observed: ‘I dream of a luxurious residence where fantastic, fearsome animals like the tiger would decorate the dining room.’6 We will conclude the reviews with this comment by Thadée Natanson, the director of La Revue blanche: ‘To show one’s admiration for Mr. Ranson’s panels, it would suffice to say that he is a master decorator. Look at the cat, the swan, the line he uses in the bodies and women, the tiger.’7

One of the reasons Le Grand Tigre received such admiration was its radical style, with interlacing curves that echo the ‘dynamogenic lines’ theorised in the 19th century by Humbert de Superville8 and used by Art Nouveau designers. The animal’s tail, winding in a purely graphic display, recalls the ‘whip-tail’ decoration that the architect Victor Horta employed on the walls of his Hôtel Tassel (1893) in Brussels [5].9

JACQUES ROUCHÉ, THE FIRST OWNER OF ‘LE GRAND TIGRE’

Jacques Rouché (1862–1957), was a graduate of the elite scientific École Polytechnique and a hard-nosed businessman, who successfully developed the perfumes of the LT Piver company, which belonged to his wife. Rouché was also an astute music critic and the dynamic director of the Théâtre des Arts. As director of the Paris Opéra from 1914, he brought the institution international renown through those he charged with its musical direction (such as Wilhelm Furtwängler), through the musicians he invited to perform (Francis Poulenc, Albert Roussel), and through the artists he commissioned to design its sets –Paul Colin for L’Orchestre en liberté (1931) and Fernand Léger for David Triomphant (1937).

Having placed Maurice Dufrêne in charge of the interior design of his mansion in the 17th arrondissement, Rouché commissioned Denis in 1907 to create a large decoration on the theme of ‘Terre latine, inspiratrice d’art et de poésie’ (The Latin world, catalyst of art and poetry), along with a two-part, stained-glass window depicting young women with mirrors. These works, which were removed by Rouché when he moved out of his mansion, are now held in the Musée Départemental Maurice Denis in SaintGermain-en-Laye.

A TIGER WITH A PROLIFIC LINEAGE

Although Le Grand Tigre was never recreated in the form of a tapestry, it prompted a very real line of descent, which can be seen

above all in the work of Ranson himself. In 1898, the artist produced a new cartoon on the theme of the tiger [6, overleaf], which served as a model for a carpet woven after the artist’s death [7, overleaf]. Agnès Humbert recounted the work’s extraordinary story in 1954:

The triumph of the curved line came about with the Tigre in 1898 [...] This second cartoon entered the Manufacture des Gobelins in the year of Ranson’s death (1909), from which a tapestry was woven in the workshop of the Savonnerie manufactory between 15 January 1910 and 15 January 1911. In 1936, it was deposited in the apartment of General Besson in the Hôtel des Invalides. During the period 1940–44, the apartment was occupied by the Germans. When they left Paris, they took the Tigre with them. Despite the efforts of the Commission de récupération artistique, the Tigre was never found again. It remains uncertain whether it is still embellishing the house of the Nazi who stole it or if it was perhaps destroyed in Germany during a bombing raid.

At the time Humbert was writing her book, the cartoon had disappeared and was only found again much later. Today, it belongs –like the carpet – to the Mobilier National in Paris. Le Grand Tigre has had a more unexpected posterity. The exceptionally expressive quality of its graphic style makes it feel as though the animal is literally about to step out of its frame and bound through the screen towards the viewer. It was not simply by chance that Ranson’s work was featured in the large Walt Disney exhibition held in the Grand Palais in Paris and then the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2007. As we are more aware today, cartoonists and animators studied the paintings from the 1890s to the 1920s very closely. A brilliant synthesis of Japonisme and Art Nouveau, the tiger is depicted in a way that a child might see it, with an apparent naivety that dissolves the boundary between reality and fantasy, and that above all retains its power to amaze.

REFERENCES

1. Kitagawa Utamaro, Tiger in the Bamboo (Zurich, Museum Rietberg).

2. Joséphin Péladan, Mélusine (Paris: Ollendorff, 1895).

3. Félix Vallotton, ‘L’exposition des artistes indépendants’, Journal suisse (25 March 1891), p. 3 (own translation).

4. Albert Jeune and Gustave Moreau, ‘La Jalousie du tigre’, La Plume (15 January 1893), p. 65 (own translation).

5. Anonymous, ‘L’Association pour l’Art’, L’Art Moderne (20 May 1893), p. 154.

6. Théophile Gautier, ‘La montre’ in Emaux et Camées (Paris: Édition Charpentier, 1884).

7. Thadée Natanson, ‘Expositions / IX e exposition de la Société des Artistes Indépendants’, La Revue blanche (18 April 1893), p. 275.

8. In Essai sur les signes inconditionnels en art (1840), Humbert de Superville defined the collection and direction of the lines in space as an unconditional sign, i.e., an element that is immediately perceptible to the observer.

9. André Mellerio, Le Mouvement Idéaliste en Peinture (Paris: H. Floury, coll. Petite Bibliothèque d’Art Moderne, 1896), p. 53.

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Ganku (1750–1838), ‘Kakemono “Tigre”’, Le Japon Artistique, no. 10 (February 1889), plate aaH, Gillot phototype, 61.5 × 23 cm (private collection)

[2]. Cover of Rémy de Gourmont, Théodat (Paris: Edition du Mercure de France, 1893)

[3]. Henri Rousseau, called Le Douanier Rousseau (1844–1910), Surpris! or Tigre dans une tempête tropicale (1891), oil on canvas, 128.9 × 161.9 cm (London, National Gallery of Art)

[4]. Paul Ranson, Dessin pour ‘Le Tigre dans les jungles’ (1893), Indian ink on paper, 37 × 28 cm (private collection)

[5]. Victor Horta (1861–1947), Hôtel Tassel, Brussels (1893)

[6]. Ranson, Le Tigre acculé (1898), tempera on canvas, 54 × 112 cm (Paris, Mobilier National, inv. GOB 1418)

[7]. Ranson, Le Tigre acculé (1910–11), wool carpet, 74 × 133 cm (Paris, Mobilier National, inv. GOB 1418-000)

PAUL RANSON

JÓZSEF

RIPPL-RÓNAI

JÓZSEF RIPPL-RÓNAI

1861–1927

József Rippl-Rónai, from Kaposvár in southwestern Hungary, initially obtained a degree in pharmacology and started his career working at an apothecary in his home city. Unfulfilled, he moved to Munich in 1884 to follow his burgeoning passion for art. There, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts and trained under German landscape and genre painter, Karl Raupp. Relocating to Paris in 1887 on the completion of his studies, RipplRónai joined the studio of the Hungarian artist Mihály Munkácsy, who was known for his large-scale biblical paintings. Rippl-Rónai quickly rejected Munkácsy’s traditional approach and sought out the avant-garde. After a fortuitous encounter with Paul Gaugin, he became friends with Aristide Maillol, Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard and, influenced by the work of James Whistler, Eugène Carrière and later Maurice Denis, he joined the Nabis.

Rippl-Rónai’s use of soft, muted colours and bold black outlines evinces his affiliation with the Nabi aesthetic. Limiting his colour palette and simplifying his means of expression, Rippl-Rónai’s ‘black paintings’ brought him high praise. He was offered exhibitions in Paris, including at the Salon des Indépendants and with the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Concurrently, Rippl-Rónai designed for the Gobelins tapestry factory, where he melded traditional craftsmanship with his contemporary style.

In 1902, he returned to Kaposvár and began to employ brighter colours in a looser, more expressionist style. In 1906, he was commissioned to design furniture and stained-glass windows for Count Tivadar Andrássy’s palace, further expanding his impact on the decorative arts. In 1909, Rippl-Rónai was exhibited at the 8th Venice Biennale. Following these achievements, he continued to paint intimate portraits, landscapes and still lifes that reflected his association with both Hungarian and French modernism. A major retrospective, which presented Rippl-Ronai as one of Hungary’s preeminent modernists, was held in Budapest in 1921. Rippl-Rónai continued to work prolifically until his death in 1927.

FEMME AU CHAPEAU

c. 1892–95 watercolour and pastel on paper 16 1/2 × 12 3/4 in / 41.8 × 32.3 cm

signed lower right ‘Ronai’

PROVENANCE

Private Collection

Arthur G. Altschul, New York

Private Collection, Paris (acquired from the above 2002)

Private Collection

FEATHERS: FIN-DE-SI È CLE ELEGANCE

PARIS, THE TESTING GROUND FOR A NEW AESTHETIC

Like Vincent van Gogh, who arrived in Paris in 1886, József Rippl-Rónai’s understanding of painting was transformed by the artistic discoveries he made especially during his stay in Pont-Aven in 1889. Upon returning to Paris, he decided to break with the academicism of his master, Mihály Munkácsy, and to work in his own studio. To achieve this, he moved into the Château de Neuilly [1] at 65 Rue de Villiers in Neuilly-sur-Seine.

This somewhat grandiloquent name was a vestige of a real château built in 1751, which later became part of the Orléans family’s possessions, but was largely destroyed during the 1848 revolution that overthrew Louis-Philippe I. Confiscated by Napoleon III in 1852, the property was divided into 700 lots, and RipplRónai moved into one of the new buildings constructed on the site during the Second Empire. He lived there from 1892 to 1902 with his partner Lazarine Boudrion, sharing his studio with a young painter of Scottish descent, James Pitcairn-Knowles [2]. Born in Rotterdam in 1864, Pitcairn-Knowles had lived in Munich and then Weimar before moving to Paris in 1887, where he became a pupil of the academic painter Jean-Paul Laurens.

Though not yet familiar with the Nabis, both painters, who were close to Aristide Maillol, experimented together, inspired by their exposure to avant-garde painting. For both artists, developing a new aesthetic meant limiting their palette and simplifying their means of expression, as Rippl-Rónai explained:

It was here in Neuilly that I painted my series of ‘black’ paintings. Not that I saw the world in black, but I wanted to paint using that colour as a point of departure. I was convinced that this approach had its own rationale, just as much as a method based on violet, blue or any other colour. At that time, I was fascinated by black and grey, and I absolutely wanted to know what could be achieved with them.1

His fondness for black and grey, which dominate in Femme au chapeau (c. 1892–95) [p. 132] was likely influenced by Pitcairn-Knowles’ admiration for the works of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. The latter’s Arrangement in Grey and Black (1871) [3] had just been acquired from the artist by the French State for the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. In his memoirs, Thadée Natanson confirmed the two painters’ admiration for the American Symbolist artist: ‘Rónai shared the large rooms and tall trees in the garden of his Neuilly house with a young British painter who was an even greater devotee of Whistler than he was.’2 Rippl-Rónai’s home –like that of Paul Ranson on Boulevard du Montparnasse, or the studio shared by Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, and Maurice

Denis at 28 Rue Pigalle – became a meeting place and centre for artistic exchange. Always generous with vivid details, Natanson recalled the meals Rippl-Rónai prepared, heavily spiced with paprika and accompanied by Tokay wine, which delighted Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and his friends.

FIN-DE-SIÈCLE ELEGANCE

The identity of the elegant lady in the hat remains a mystery, even today. Was it his companion Lazarine Boudrion [4], or one of the young women Rippl-Rónai portrayed at the time, such as in Femme lisant sous la lampe (1891) [5]? The photographs held today in the museum in Kaposvár, the artist’s birthplace,

do not allow for a definitive identification, although Boudrion’s profile is strikingly similar to that of the woman in the painting.

Nonetheless, what makes this portrait so captivating is how Rippl-Rónai frames the woman’s face amidst a flurry of fabrics and feathers, marvellously conveyed through the powdery texture of the pastel. While the profile set against a solid background is typical of the fin-de-siècle style, the way in which the model’s pose interacts with her accessories (the hat and boa) echoes the grand tradition of English portraiture in the 18th century, particularly works by Thomas Gainsborough, whom Rippl-Rónai greatly admired. In the last decade of the 19th century, to create particularly striking material effects, RipplRónai did not hesitate to mix mediums, combining oil and pastel, or watercolour and pastel, as seen in this portrait.

The accessories worn by this elegant woman were carefully selected: they not only enhance the model’s splendour but also represent a fashion and craftsmanship with its own codes, social conventions, and distinct professions. For example, the plumassiers-panachiers, detailed in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751–72), shared their privileges with the plumassiers-fleuristes, who

[5]

worked with both feathers and artificial flowers within the same guild. These materials were commonly used in hat-making, and by the 19th century, demand for this luxury craft had grown so large that it evolved into a thriving industry. Etiquette manuals advised that feathers be worn only by married women – leaving single women to settle for hats adorned with flowers or fruit.

At the time, ostrich feathers were imported from South Africa, heron feathers from Venezuela, and white turkey feathers from the western United States. In France, attempts were made to compete by creating beautiful colour and texture effects with feathers from local species. The fashion for feathers remained strong well into the second decade of the 20th century. As the illustrated weekly Le Miroir commented in 1914:

The art of the plumassiers has reached such a level of perfection that it seems to have reached its peak. Not only are aigrettes, paradis, and crosses now perfectly dyed in any shade, and

arranged and mounted with such skill and taste that they are a hundred times more beautiful than in the past, but even with the most ordinary and common types of plumage, marvels of grace and elegance can be achieved.

The golden age of feathers in hats and boas occurred between the 1880s and the 1920s, spanning from La Belle Époque to the Roaring Twenties. This trend is evidenced not only by the abundance of postcards [6] but also by paintings from artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Gustav Klimt and Pablo Picasso. The fashion came to an end with the rise of the motor car, as elaborate plumes proved incompatible with car interiors and the effects of wind at speed.

REFERENCES

1. Judit Szabadi, József Rippl-Rónai (Budapest: Corvina, 1978), p. 12.

2. Thadée Natanson, Peints à leur tour (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1948), p. 296.

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Eugène Atget (1857–1927), Immeuble du 65, rue de Villiers, Neuilly-sur-Seine (1914), silver print on paper, 16.5 × 21.6 cm (New York, Museum of Modern Collection)

[2]. Unknown photographer, József Rippl-Rónai et James Pitcairn-Knowles à Neuilly-sur-Seine (1896) (Kaposvár, Rippl-Rónai Múzeum)

[3]. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Arrangement in Grey and Black (1871), oil on canvas, 144.3 × 163 cm (Paris, Musée d’Orsay)

[4]. Unknown photographer, Lazarine Baudrion dans l’appartement de Neuilly-sur-Seine (1892–95) (Kaposvár, Rippl-Rónai Múzeum)

[5]. József Rippl-Rónai, Femme lisant sous la lampe (1891), oil and pastel on canvas, 46.2 × 38.2 cm (private collection)

[6]. Postcard, Élégante au chapeau à plume (c. 1900)

MÈRE ET ENFANT

c. 1891–92 pastel on card 16 × 12 1/2 / 40.6 × 31.8 cm

signed lower left ‘Ronai’; faintly signed and dated on reverse ‘Rippl-Ronai 91’

PROVENANCE

Étienne Donath, Paris (directly from the artist); thence by descent to Dr. Renée Donath, Les Rasses, Switzerland (his daughter) [Brummer Gallery, New York]

Arthur G. Altschul, New York

Private Collection, Paris (acquired from the above 2002)

Private Collection

EXHIBITED

‘Neo-Impressionists and Nabis in the collection of Arthur G. Altschul’, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, 20 January – 14 March 1965, cat. no. 37, p. 87 (repro. in b&w p. 88)

THE HUNGARIAN NABI

BUDAPEST-PARIS-BUDAPEST

For artists from the Hungarian region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th century, Paris was the European capital of the arts, far surpassing Vienna, Munich, or Berlin. It was the city where they could truly unleash their creativity. For instance, Franz Liszt’s years in Paris – from 1823 to 1844 – were the most productive of his career. Similarly, Mihály Munkácsy, who moved to Paris in 1871, not only thrived as an artist but also became a teacher at the École des BeauxArts. Although an academic history painter, Munkácsy maintained a painting studio that young Hungarian artists aspired to join, as his extensive contacts in the elite social circles of Paris were a major asset for winning commissions. It was for this reason that, after spending time in Munich between January 1884 and February 1887, József Rippl-Rónai moved to Paris to become Munkácsy’s pupil. In 1889, the young artist broadened his artistic horizons with a trip to Pont-Aven, where he met James Pitcairn-Knowles, a painter of Scottish descent but born in Rotterdam, who introduced him to Aristide Maillol. This marked the beginning of Rippl-Rónai’s gradual shift away from Munkácsy’s academicism, leading him to adopt a lighter palette and simplify his means of expression. Although Mère et enfant (c. 1891–92) [p. 138] and the painting Mere avec son enfant (1890) [1] reflects the academic tradition with its plain background reminiscent of Italian Primitives, the blending of colours, casting of shadows and Dutchinfluenced composition are apparent. At the same time, the artist’s preference for flat tints, typical of the Nabis, is evident.

RIPPL-RÓNAI BECOMES THE ‘HUNGARIAN NABI’

Thadée Natanson, director of La Revue blanche, provides insight into how RipplRónai met the Nabis: ‘It happened a long time ago, towards the end of the last century, when people still used to meet at the opening of the Salon, held that year on the Champs de Mars. On meeting up, several of us shared in the happy surprise and pleasure we had each felt on discovering the portrait of a small and

pale old peasant woman with a lively gaze, a portrait of the artist’s grandmother, signed with a foreign name that none of us had heard of. Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Roussel and, I think, Maurice Denis, all agreed that we should recognise the talent of this unknown artist. Completely unknown, because we did not yet know Maillol, of whom this RipplRónai was already a friend.’1

Enrolled at the Académie Julian like Pierre Bonnard and his friends, and meeting Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, whom he greatly admired, Rippl-Rónai soon embraced the Nabi aesthetic. This is evident in Mère et enfant, where he frames the scene tightly and outlines his motif with a few strokes, giving it substance with flat tints and powdery pastel to create a refined texture. Like Toulouse-Lautrec and Vuillard, RipplRónai reworked certain areas (the hair and bodice of the mother) by scratching away the paint to reveal the support beneath. Although cast shadows have disappeared, tonal gradations remain, as seen in the mother’s cheeks, realised with a fusion of pink and white strokes. By this time, Rippl-Rónai had become a full member of the Nabi brotherhood,

earning the ‘Hungarian Nabi’ nickname from his fellow members. He was invited by Siegfried Bing to participate in exhibitions at Bing’s gallery, L’Art Nouveau.

THE WORK’S COLLECTORS

The first owner of Mère et enfant was Étienne Donath, a Hungarian Jew born in Budapest in 1897. Upon arriving in Paris, he opened an antiques dealership in the 9th arrondissement in 1934, close to the Hôtel Drouot. His wife, Renée Tapfer, originally from Romania, was a doctor. With the outbreak of war and the German occupation of northern France, Donath was forced to cease his business in the capital. Between 1939 and 1941, he raised enough funds to leave the city with his family. In May 1942, they moved to the Free Zone and settled in Nice, later relocating to Monaco in 1943. During his absence, his business was closed, his apartment looted (with 1,000 books dispersed), and some possessions sold at Drouot’s. After the war, his daughter Renée managed to recover some of these items.

The painting then entered the collection of Arthur G. Altschul (1920–2002), a notable American collector of Neo-Impressionist and Nabi works. Born in Manhattan, he studied at Deerfield Academy (Massachusetts) and Yale College, served in the Marines from 1943 to 1945, and worked as a reporter for The New York Times. After becoming a partner at Lazard Frères in 1945, he joined Lehman Brothers as an analyst before becoming an investor-partner at Goldman, Sachs & Co from 1959 to 1999. A passionate collector for over forty years, Altschul was also a staunch supporter of the museum world, contributing to exhibitions and acquisitions. He served on the boards of directors and/or as a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC

REFERENCES

1. Thadée Natanson, Peints à leur tour (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1948), p. 294 (own translation).

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. József Rippl-Rónai, Mère avec son enfant (1890), oil on wood, 41.2 × 32 cm (Budapest, Magyar Nemzeti Galeria)

KER-XAVIER ROUSSEL

1867–1944

While a pupil at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris in 1882, KerXavier Roussel met Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis and the future stage director Aurélien Lugné-Poe, all of whom he would remain close to throughout his life. In 1885 he studied under the painter Diogène Maillart (1840–1926), followed in 1888 by William Bouguereau (1825–1905) and Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury (1797–1890) at the BeauxArts, while also attending the Académie Julian. He then formed the Nabi group with Vuillard, Denis, Paul Ranson, Georges Lacombe and Pierre Bonnard, which exhibited with the gallery Le Barc de Boutteville from 1891 to 1894.

In 1893, they also exhibited at La Revue blanche, the same year that Roussel decorated stage sets for LugnéPoe’s Théâtre de l’Œuvre with Bonnard, Paul Sérusier and Vuillard. From 1894 to 1903, his work was presented in the Libre Esthétique exhibitions in Brussels and at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, and the art dealer Ambroise Vollard engaged him to produce colour lithographs. The Galerie Bernheim-Jeune dedicated a solo exhibition to him in 1906, the pivotal year in which he visited the studios of Paul Cézanne (Aix-en-Provence), Paul Signac (Saint-Tropez) and Henri-Edmond Cross (Cavalaire) with Denis.

Roussel specialised in large ornamental works, for which he received several commissions, among them the curtain for the stage production of Le Cortège de Bacchus at the Théâtre de la Comédie des ChampsÉlysées in 1912, decorations for the Kunstmuseum in Winterthur in 1918, and panels in 1922 for the villa in Antibes belonging to Marcel Monteux. He also decorated the Théâtre de Chaillot in 1937 and created an elevenmetre panel with the title Pax Nutrix for the Palace of the League of Nations in Geneva in 1938. Roussel lost the use of one eye in 1941 but worked on the album of lithographs Les Églogues published in 1944. He died in his house La Jacanette in the town of L’Étang-la-Ville, where he had lived since 1899.

FEMMES AU JARDIN

c. 1893–95 pastel on paper 10 7/8 × 16 5/8 in / 27.5 × 42 cm

signed lower right ‘K. Xavier’

PROVENANCE

Private Collection

Sotheby’s, London: 4 December 1996 (lot no. 343)

Private Collection, Paris (from the above)

Private Collection

DEUX ÂGES DE LA VIE

(COMPOSITION DEUX FEMMES)

c. 1892 oil on canvas

11 1/2 × 20 1/2 in / 29 × 52 cm

signed lower left ‘K. X. Roussel’

PROVENANCE

Galerie Maratier, Paris

Léon Nauwinck, Paris (violinist, painter and friend of Édouard Vuillard) (from the above 1944); by descent after 1971

Galerie Hopkins Thomas, Paris

Private Collection (from the above 1994)

EXHIBITIONS

‘Ker-Xavier Roussel’, Galerie Maratier, Paris, 1944, no. 173

‘K.X. Roussel: 1867–1944’, Musée départemental Maurice Denis, SaintGermain-en-Laye, 4 March – 23 May 1994, no. 10, p. 6 (repro. in colour), repro. in colour on cat. cover

‘Francia szimbolistak: Gauguin, PontAven, Nabis’, Nemzeti Galéria, Budapest, 10 November 1998 – 4 January 1999, no. 87, p. 85 (repro. in colour)

‘Ker-Xavier Roussel, le Nabi bucolique’, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pont-Aven, 28 May – 2 October 2011, cat. no. 32, pp. 86–87 (repro. in colour)

‘Japonismes / Impressionnismes’, Musée des impressionnismes, Giverny, 30 March – 15 July 2018, cat. no. 136, p. 180 (repro. in colour)

‘K. X. Roussel. Jardin privé, jardin rêvé’, Musée des impressionnismes, Giverny, 27 July – 11 November 2019, p. 55 (repro. in colour)

LITERATURE

La peinture des Nabis, Claude Jeancolas, Editions Franck Van Wilder, Paris, 2002, p. 72 (repro. in colour)

This artwork is accompanied by a photocertificate of authenticity issued in Paris on 27 October 1993 and signed by Antoine Salomon.

PAUL SÉRUSIER

PAUL SÉRUSIER

1864–1927

The son of the director of the Houbigant perfume company, Paul Sérusier was a brilliant pupil at the Lycée Condorcet between 1876 and 1883, distinguishing himself with his fondness for philosophy. Joining the Académie Julian in 1885, he was appointed a massier (monitor) there from 1888 to 1890, and met Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Ranson, Ker-Xavier Roussel and Édouard Vuillard. He received a commendation at the 1887 Salon and went to Pont-Aven the following summer, where Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard introduced him to their approach to the use of colour, which they called synthetism. Fascinated, the young man returned to Paris with a small painting – L’Aven au Bois d’Amour – he made on the lid of a cigar box, to which the Nabis later gave the name ‘The Talisman’. It provided the group, which was being formed at the time, with the theoretical basis for their aesthetic.

Sérusier returned to Brittany to see Gauguin in 1889 and 1890 and, following his mentor’s departure for Tahiti, became the leader of the Pont-Aven movement while continuing as a member of the Nabis. From 1891 to 1895 he exhibited with the dealer Le Barc de Boutteville and created masks and sets for the Théâtre de l’Art and the Théâtre de l’Œuvre, in particular for Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu roi in 1896. With Vuillard he provided illustrations for La Revue blanche from 1893, and was one of the Nabis exhibited by Ambroise Vollard in 1895 and 1898. He exhibited at Bernheim-Jeune in 1900 and Galerie Druet in 1903. Between 1895 and 1913, he contributed to the Salon des Indépendants, gradually adopting the aesthetic of the painter Desiderius Lenz, whom he had met at the Archabbey of Beuron in Germany. Beginning in 1908, Sérusier taught as a volunteer at the Académie Ranson and began to write his ABC de la peinture, a book that was published in 1921 and would be reissued several times. His work was included in the Exposition Internationale de l’Art Chrétien Moderne in 1911 and 1920 and he was given solo exhibitions at the Galerie Druet in 1909 and 1919. He died of a heart attack in 1927.

PAUL SÉRUSIER

BRETONNE ALLAITANT

1892 oil on canvas

28 3/4 × 21 5/8 in / 73 × 55 cm

signed lower right ‘P. Sér.’

PROVENANCE

Dr. Maurice Hepp

Private Collection, Lille

Private Collection, Geneva (acquired in 1994)

Christie’s Paris: 31 March 2016 (lot no. 124)

Galerie Hopkins Thomas, Paris (acquired from the above)

Private Collection

EXHIBITIONS

‘L’Ecole de Pont-Aven et les Nabis’, Galerie Parvilée, Paris, 11 May – 11 June 1943, cat. no. 33 (not repro.)

‘Gauguin and his friends’, Ordrupgaard, Denmark, 26 January – 1 May 2022, cat. no. 43, p. 91 (repro. in colour)

‘Enfances rêvées, Bonnard, Les Nabis et l’Enface’, Musée Bonnard, Le Cannet, 2 July – 6 November 2022, cat. no. 49, p. 147 (repro. in colour)

LITERATURE

Paul Sérusier, Marcel Guicheteau, Edition Side, 1976, no. 62, p. 209 (repro. in b&w)

Sérusier et la Bretagne, Caroline BoyleTurner, Editions Le Chasse-Marée/ArMen, Douarnenez, 1995, p. 136 (repro. in colour p. 137) [dated 1892]

La Marveilleuse Bretagne des Peintres, Bertrand Frélaut, Georges Naef, Geneva, 2004, p. 150 (repro in colour p. 151)

This artwork is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity issued in Pont-Aven by the Comité Paul Sérusier on 4 March 2016.

A PANORAMA OF REAL LIFE

The Nabis movement might never have come into being without Paul Sérusier: the massier at the Académie Julian – the student who organised the work sessions in the absence of the master; it was Sérusier who gathered around himself the first small group of painters: Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. Above all, it was Sérusier who, in Pont-Aven in the summer of 1888, painted a small landscape ‘at Gauguin’s dictation’, Paysage au Bois d’Amour, which soon came to be referred to as ‘The Talisman’ (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) and embodied the aesthetic on which the Nabis group was founded. From this time onwards, in his letters and in theoretical writings [1], Sérusier constantly imparted the teachings of his master Gauguin. In a letter written to Jan Verkade in 1892, he called Gauguin ‘the most senior member of the Nabis’.1

In the text he wrote about Sérusier’s life and work, Denis described his friend not only as the executor of Gauguin’s formal solutions, but also as the master’s successor. In the correspondence between Gauguin’s disciples once they had gone their separate ways, the Nabis kept each other informed of the progress they had

made. When, on 4 April 1891, Sérusier accompanied his friend Gauguin to the Gare de Lyon as the latter departed on his first trip to Tahiti, he was aware of the role that would now be his: to carry forward and pass on the aesthetic revolution originated by Gauguin and Émile Bernard. In June that year, Sérusier left Paris to live in Huelgoat in Brittany, as if echoing his mentor’s reflections: ‘I let myself live in the silent contemplation of nature, entirely dedicated to my art. [...] You have adopted Parisian attitudes. And the countryside is mine. I love Brittany: there I find the wild, the primitive. When my clogs clump on the granite floor, I hear the muffled, dull, rugged tone I look for in painting.’2

HUELGOAT: A HAVEN OF PEACE

In search of a place untouched by modern society, Sérusier in 1890 sought somewhere less crowded than Pont-Aven. Since the mid-1850s, France’s coastal towns had been attracting painters from various backgrounds (Americans, Canadians, Danes, Norwegians, Dutch, etc.), and gradually became key stops in the burgeoning art tourism scene. As a result, Sérusier decided to settle in Huelgoat, in the Monts d’Arrée, some forty kilometres from the nearest coastline. Flowing through the village is the Rivière d’Argent, which rushes between jumbled rocks, tumbles down astonishing waterfalls, and serves as a place where young women came to wash their clothes [2]. The conveniences of urban life were absent in Huelgoat: most people travelled on horseback [3] and the surrounding area

PAUL SÉRUSIER

boasted sites with evocative names such as La Grotte du Diable (The Devil’s Cave), La Pierre Tremblante (The Trembling Stone), and Le Chaos du Moulin (The Mill Chaos). It was a land of rituals and ancestral legends: for example, the nearby forest was said to be inhabited by fairies, goblins, and spirits, and home to figures such as Gargantua and King Arthur. Sérusier settled into the Hôtel Le Bihan, as confirmed by a letter written by his brother Henry, who joined him there. However, due to the difficulty of working in the summer heat, he later rented a room from Marie Guillou, which overlooked the lake. In Huelgoat, Sérusier set himself new artistic goals: ‘If the design is simple and beautiful, if the colour is harmonious and expressive, isn’t that the greatest ambition an artist can have, isn’t that Art in a nutshell? [...] The Japanese attract me; I have copied their works. [...] As for colour, I have abandoned the search for delicate tones placed next to each other. They attract the eye to one corner of the painting but weaken the overall effect. Three or four well-chosen shades are enough and are expressive; additional colours only diminish the impact’.3

A PANORAMA OF REAL LIFE

During his time in Huelgoat, Sérusier painted a dazzling series of canvases, many of which are now held by major international museums. These include Jeune Bretonne à la Cruche (1892) (Quimper, Musée des BeauxArts), L’Averse (1893) (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) [4], La Lutte Bretonne (c. 1893) (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), La Marchande d’étoffes (c. 1893) (Geneva, Musée du Petit Palais), and

Bretonnes dans la Forêt de Huelgoat (1893) (Indianapolis Museum of Art) [5]. This last work also belonged to the prestigious Sam Josefowitz collection. In this series, Sérusier did not merely depict moments of local daily life but also sought to give them a symbolic dimension: the women in La Marchande d’étoffes represent the three ages of life, while here, Bretonne allaitant (1892) [p. 158], with its strongly hieratic quality, achieves the universality of the Old Masters’ depictions of the Mother and Child theme. Notably, several of the paintings in this series are almost identical in height, suggesting that Sérusier intended them to be hung as a continuous decorative frieze. This comes as no surprise as 1893 was the year Sérusier created a large

decorative piece (no longer extant) for the dining room in Georges Lacombe’s family home in Versailles.

HUELGOAT: THE RADICAL YEARS

What is striking about Bretonne allaitant is the radical nature of Sérusier’s aesthetic approach, beyond its symbolism. The artist employed only warm shades of colour, corresponding exactly with those on the colour wheel [7] included in his treatise on painting, ABC de la Peinture. By outlining his motifs with a strong black line, applying colours in flat tints, and playing with the rhythm of sinuous outlines, Sérusier realised Gauguin’s dream of an art that was both decorative and symbolist. Like his master, he skillfully merged the lessons of the Italian Primitives with Japanese prints, evident here in the frontal presentation of the figures. It’s worth recalling the enthusiasm with which the Nabis read Siegfried Bing’s review Le Japon Artistique (1888–91) and their fascination with the works displayed at the great exhibition of Far Eastern objects at the École des Beaux-Arts in the spring of 1890. According

to several accounts, Sérusier hung not only his paintings but also Japanese prints on the walls of his bedroom-studio in Huelgoat. After a few experimental years in Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu, Sérusier achieved a kind of aesthetic plenitude, summarised by Denis as follows: ‘His originality was established in colour by his choice of limited tonal ranges interspersed with whites and blacks like joyful dissonances; in form, by a rapid, summary design inspired by the Japanese. [...] The years at Huelgoat – 1891, 1892, 1893 – were fruitful and decisive: he freed himself.’4 In 1895, Gauguin left for the South Pacific for a second time, making it difficult to view his latest paintings. Sérusier’s works thus became the primary vehicle for passing on Gauguin’s teachings to the next generation of artists. Sérusier’s importance has undoubtedly been underestimated. For instance, why has it not been recognised that the perfect balance between form and meaning seen in Sérusier’s paintings anticipates Picasso’s approach in his Mother and Child paintings of 1901–03? Picasso, captivated by the Parisian avant-garde of 1890–1900, shared a bold dealer with the Nabis: Ambroise Vollard.

A PRESTIGIOUS HISTORY

The first collector of Sérusier’s painting was Maurice Hepp (1869–1951), a close friend of the Nabis, particularly Georges Lacombe, with whom he had attended the Lycée Hoche in Versailles. Born into a family from Strasbourg that relocated to Île-de-France after the war in 1870, Hepp became a doctor and later a surgeon. He was also a man of wide interests (in 1928, he published a book on Indochina) and an inventor (he created dyspepsin, a medicine to treat digestive problems). The subject of this painting – a maternity scene – may not be unrelated to Lacombe’s family history, as it was Hepp who delivered Lacombe’s two daughters and later recited a poem at his friend’s grave in 1916. Bretonne allaitant went on to gain historical prominence. Exhibited in 1943 at the Galerie Parvillée in Paris, it was accompanied by a preface by Denis, which traced the origins and development of the Nabis and highlighted the influence they had on the Fauves. Its

historical significance likely attracted the great collector Sam Josefowitz (1922–2015), whose collection became a highlight of major international museums. He owned Paul Signac’s Portrait de Félix Fénéon (1890), now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Gauguin’s Les Enfants Luttant (1888), now in the Louvre Abu Dhabi and above all, the world’s most outstanding collection of works by Gauguin and the École de Pont-Aven.

REFERENCES

1. Letter from Sérusier to Jan Verkade (21 January 1892), Paul Sérusier, ABC de la peinture, suivi d’une correspondance inédite (Paris: Librairie Floury, 1950), p. 57.

2. Letter from Paul Gauguin to Claude-Émile Schuffenecker (February–March 1888), quoted in Victor Merlhès, Correspondance de Paul Gauguin (Paris: Fondation Singer-Polignac, 1984), p. 172.

3. Letter from Sérusier to Jan Verkade (summer 1892), in Sérusier, ABC de la peinture (op. cit.), pp. 61–62.

4. Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, sa vie, son œuvre, in Sérusier, ABC de la peinture (Paris: Librairie Floury, 1942), p. 69.

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Paul Sérusier, cover of ABC de la peinture (Paris: Librairie Floury, 1942)

[2 & 3]. Postcards, Huelgoat: Jeune femme à cheval (Young Woman on Horseback) and Les laveuses (Washerwomen)

[4]. Sérusier, L’Averse (1893), oil on canvas, 73.5 × 60 cm (Paris, Musée d’Orsay)

[5]. Sérusier, Bretonnes dans la forêt de Huelgoat (1893), oil on canvas, 71 × 91 cm (Indianapolis Museum of Art)

[6]. Sérusier, La Marchande d’étoffes (c. 1893), oil on canvas, 73 × 92 cm (Geneva, Musée du Petit Palais)

[7]. Sérusier, ABC de la peinture (Paris: Librairie Floury, 1942), colour wheel

FÉLIX VALLOTTON

FÉLIX VALLOTTON

1865–1925

From Lausanne, Switzerland, Félix Vallotton arrived in Paris in 1882 where he attended the Académie Julian, studying under Gustave Boulanger (1824–1888) and Jules Lefebvre (1834–1912). About 1885 he experienced a difficult period during which he earned his keep by restoring paintings. After learning the art of woodcuts in 1891, he showed his prints at the Salon de la Rose + Croix the following year. Vallotton then linked up with the Nabis, exhibiting with them at Le Barc de Boutteville and the Salon des Indépendants in 1893, before officially joining them in 1897 as ‘the foreign Nabi’.

Three years later he was given French citizenship. Vallotton became famous for his illustrations for Le Mercure de France, Le Cri de Paris and in particular for his series of detachable prints of ‘Crimes et châtiments’ that were published in L’Assiette au beurre in March 1902. With his fellow-Swiss Alexandre Steinlen, and Louis Anquetin and Lucien Pissarro, Vallotton, a dedicated anarchist, illustrated the escape of the militant anarchist Zo d’Axa in De Mazas à Jérusalem (1895), before painting fifteen portraits of former communards for La Revue blanche in 1897. He helped organise the raffles used to finance Jean Grave’s anarchist journal Les Temps nouveaux (notably an 1899 issue) and in 1902 contributed to the Album de lithographie des Temps nouveaux. Although Vallotton wrote his novel La Vie meurtrière in 1907–08, in which he explained the principles of his painting, it was not published until 1927. He had his first solo exhibition in 1909 in Zurich, followed in 1910 by an exhibition at the Galerie Druet in Paris. In 1913, he married the sister of the Bernheim-Jeune gallery owners. After refusing to accept the Légion d’honneur in 1912, Vallotton took part in the collective series La Grande Guerre vue par les artistes issued from 1914 to 1916, while personally financing the publication of his six famous engravings C’est la guerre! Vallotton died following an operation for cancer in 1925.

BAIGNEUSES AU CLAIR DE LUNE

c. 1893 oil on canvas

10 5/8 × 8 1/2 in / 27 × 21.6 cm

signed and dated right ‘F. Vallotton. 97’

PROVENANCE

Succession Félix Vallotton, Paris

J. Rodrigues-Henriques, Paris

Private Collection, France

Private Collection, France

EXHIBITED

‘Nabis. Exhibition of works by MM. P. Bonnard, M. Denis, Ibels, G. Lacombe, Ranson, Rasetti, Roussel, P. Sérusier, Vallotton, Vuillard’, Galerie Vollard, Paris, 6–30 April 1897, no. 61 [titled ‘Baigneuses’]

‘Exhibition of unseen works by Félix Vallotton (1865–1925)’, Galerie Jacques Rodrigues-Henriques, Paris, 9–30 March 1928, cat. no. 7 [titled ‘Deux Baigneuses au clair de lune’]

‘Van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard et son époque’, Galerie d’art Braun, Paris, 8–28 April 1932, no. 35

‘Exposition of painters de La Revue blanche’, Bolette Natanson (Les Cadres), Paris, 12–30 June 1936, no. 84

LITERATURE

Félix Vallotton, Livre de raison (The Artist’s Handlist), no. 154 [listed as ‘Cinq petites toiles. Baigneuses’]

Vallotton, Charles Fegdal, Les Éditions Rieder, Paris, 1931, p. 12 (repro.)

La peinture française au XIXe siècle III , George Besson, Paris, 1934, p. 54 (repro.)

Das Bild der Landschaft im Schaffen von Félix Vallotton, Rudolf Koella,Wesen Bedeutung Entwicklung, Zurich, 1969, no. LK–42, p. 88 (repro.)

Félix Vallotton im Kunsthaus Zürich, Rudolf Koella, Zurich, 1969, no. 11, p. 60 (repro. in b&w)

The Nabis. Their History and their Art 1888–1896, George L. Mauner, Garland, London, 1978, p. XII, fig. 121 (repro. in b&w)

Félix Vallotton. The Nabi Years, Ashley Saint James, Courtuald Institute of Art, London, 1982, no. 30, p. 228, p. 305

‘Badende aus Félix Vallotton Werk’ in F. Vallotton und die Badenden, Susanne Brenner, 1987, p. 13

Félix Vallotton, La vie, la technique, l’oeuvre peint, Marina Ducrey, Edita S.A., Lausanne, 1989, p. 40

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925). L’oeuvre peint, Cat. Raisonné vol. II , Marina Ducrey, Katia Poletti, Five Continents Editions and Félix Vallotton Foundation, Milan/Lausanne/ Zurich, 2005, no. 149, p. 81 (repro.)

BATHING IN MOONLIGHT

In June 1889, before joining his family in Lausanne, Vallotton spent three weeks in the village of Les Charbonnières, situated between Lac de Joux and Lac Brenet in the Jura mountains, in the Swiss region of Vaud. He brought back around ten paintings from this venture, including two lakeside views that, four years later, would provide the setting for Baigneuses au clair de lune (c. 1893) [p. 168].

As was his custom, Vallotton rooted his painting in reality, as evidenced by the houses in the background, which can be seen in postcards from the period. However, Vallotton used realism only to draw us into the universe of his imagination. If the viewer finds this canvas immediately appealing, it is primarily due to its radically steep perspective. By setting the horizon line very high, and thereby accentuating a slightly downward view, Vallotton constructed his composition by juxtaposing large flat areas of colour, characteristic of the years 1890–95, during which the Nabis were experimenting with lessons learned from Gauguin. Using a highly original visual artifice, Vallotton inverted the traditional order of earth, water, and sky. By devoting much of the image to the foreground, he creates a large mirror effect in the lower section of the painting, where we see clouds – though only their reflections.

As in Clair de lune (c. 1895), held by the Musée d’Orsay, the clouds appear dynamic; they are no longer merely vapour but cotton balls forming a nest out of which a young woman emerges, like a modern Venus. These swelling clouds in the lower part of the painting also obscure our perception of the water’s surface, making it impossible to discern where the young woman’s body ends and her reflection begins, thus endowing her with a monumental quality. The point where her dress meets the water is indicated by no more than a barely perceptible white line.

The motif of bathing was central to Vallotton’s work from the start of his career. From the 1860s onwards, bathing in the lakes and rivers of France became one aspect of the growing leisure activities of an entire social class. The Impressionist painters Claude Monet (1840–1926) and Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) had even made this pursuit of personal

freedom a recurrent motif in the canvases they painted around Paris between 1870 and 1875. Vallotton’s image is, however, very different from the atmosphere of Monet’s La Grenouillère (1869), particularly due to his decision to paint moonlight, which has always held special significance in art history: consider, for example, the ‘inhabited’ nightscapes of Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797) and Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), as well as those of Symbolist painters Jean Delville (1867–1953) and Edvard Munch (1863–1944), notably the latter’s striking Moonlight (1895) (Oslo, National Gallery).

Vallotton produced his series of Bathers, which he began in 1892 with small painted sketches, in both paintings and woodcuts. This is attested by an astounding set of ten small woodcuts produced in 1893, as well as Les Trois Baigneuses, which he engraved for the February 1894 issue of La Revue blanche However, Baigneuses au clair de lune is in the same vein as the paintings of Munch, having an essentially Symbolist aesthetic that calls more upon the imagination than it relies on the description of reality. In La Baigneuse rose (c. 1893), recently acquired by the Musée d’Orsay, Vallotton used saturated colours to emphasise the unrealistic dimension of the nude young bather wearing make-up.

Baigneuses au clair de lune exploits colour less than it relies on composition and iconography. These elements are closely related to Vallotton’s great Symbolist masterpiece of the 1890s, exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1893, his famous Bain au soir d’été (1892–93) (Zurich Kunsthaus) [1, overleaf]. The bather in Baigneuses au clair de lune is, in fact, the reverse of the one seen on the far right in the Zurich painting. Decorative in the best sense of the word, our baigneuses are also a poetic evocation, an ode to femininity, a communion with nature; a shower of stars scattered across the surface of the lake surrounds the two young women like a celestial vault. In addition, the mysterious illuminated windows in the distance reiterate the warm light of the lunar disc. But what is their significance? Is it the house the bathers have just left, or one they will return to after their swim? Is their bathing the prelude to an

adventure? Like a skilful novelist or photographer, Vallotton prefers to suggest rather than explain – it’s for viewers to imagine their own story.

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Félix Vallotton, Bain au soir d’été (1892–93) (Zurich Kunsthaus)

FÉLIX VALLOTTON

LA SORTIE

1894

Indian ink and pencil on paper 14 1/4 × 10 3/8 in / 36 × 26.4 cm

initialled lower left ‘LV’; titled lower right ‘LA SORTIE’

PROVENANCE

Private Collection

Arthur G. Altschul, New York

Private Collection, Paris (acquired from the above 2002)

Private Collection

EXHIBITED

‘Neo-Impressionists and Nabis in the Collection of Arthur G. Altschul’, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, 20 January – 14 March 1965, cat. no. 44, p. 101 (repro. in b&w p. 102)

‘Félix Vallotton: A Retrospective’, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, 24 October 1991 – 5 January 1992; touring to Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX , 31 January – 29 March 1992; Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN , 25 April – 21 June 1992; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 27 September – 1 November 1992; Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, 21 November 1992 – 31 January 1993, cat. no. 30, p. 32 (repro. in b&w), p. 303

THE PAPER AGE

Published in Le Courrier Français on 13 May 1894 [1] La Sortie (1894) [p. 176] attests to Félix Vallotton’s work as a press artist, but also, and above all, to his concern for the social issues of his time.

With the end of the Second Empire and the proclamation of the Third Republic in 1870, the press gradually became freer. The law passed on 29 July 1881, which legally defined the freedoms and responsibilities of the press, prompted a huge increase in the number of newspapers and magazines of all kinds, though often short-lived: Paris had roughly 1,200 titles during the early years of the 20th century. Wishing to constantly attract more readers, editors competed using ever more ingenious ideas, accompanying their texts with striking images. For young artists between 1880 and 1910, providing illustrations for the press became a way to gain both recognition and income. This was the case with Vallotton, the young artist from Lausanne who had moved to Paris in 1882, and later with a ‘Dutchman’ who signed his illustrations ‘Kees’ (van Dongen), and a Spaniard who used his father’s name, ‘Ruiz’ (Picasso).

Vallotton made a name for himself with his drawings and woodcuts, mainly for the press, before being celebrated for his painting. Evidence that this activity was important to him is seen in his showing of woodcuts at Georges Seurat and Paul Signac’s Salon des Indépendants in 1893. These led to his drawings being regularly published in Georges Darien’s L’Escarmouche, Thadée Natanson’s La Revue blanche, and Joseph Werner’s Le Canard Sauvage. Vallotton’s choice of subjects and periodicals often demonstrated his commitment to leading current political and social debates. For example, in Le Cri de Paris in 1898, he published an image titled L’âge du papier, showing men seated at tables reading newspapers; in the foreground, we see L’Aurore with the headline of Émile Zola’s manifesto J’accuse, written in support of Captain Dreyfus.

VALLOTTON AND LE COURRIER FRANÇAIS ILLUSTRÉ

Located at 14 rue Séguier in Paris, close to the Seine, Le Courrier Français was founded in 1884 by Jules Roques (1850–1909), who had previously worked as an advertising agent for pharmaceutical products. The first issue, published on 16 November 1884, cost 20 centimes and comprised eight pages illustrated with black-and-white reproductions. It included columns on literature, the fine arts, theatre, medicine, and even finance. Its success was immediate, to the extent that two months later, each issue was selling 100,000 copies. Roques had commissioned writers from high society, such as Jean Lorrain, from the world of Paris’s cabarets, and Georges Montorgueil, and from the ‘Incohérents’ group, such as Raoul Ponchon. The illustrators he recruited, sometimes from the world of poster design, like Jules Chéret, were primarily artists with an acerbic sense of humour, including Jean-Louis Forain, Adolphe Willette and René Georges Hermann-Paul, who showed no hesitation in illustrating the most disturbing aspects of contemporary society.

In 1894, Vallotton became a regular contributor, criticising both the moral indifference of contemporary society, as depicted in Misère de ce monde (28 January), and major financial scandals, as in La Revanche du Panama (1 April). With La Sortie, he turned his attention to a recurring motif during his early years: the crowd.

CROWD PSYCHOLOGY

As photographs of the period show, Paris during La Belle Époque was characterised by throngs of adults and children packing the city. Paris became the setting for a social spectacle: the more affluent seen at the theatre and the opera, the more modest in the street, with its bustle and shops. Vallotton was fascinated by crowds, as several of his paintings of the time demonstrate: La Foule (1894), Bal de l’Opéra (1894), Au Bistro (c. 1895), Au Music-Hall (1895). He also provided the illustrations for a book on the

subject – Badauderies parisiennes / Les Rassemblements / Physiologies de la rue –published by Floury in 1896 with a preface by Octave Uzanne.

As a sly observer of society, Vallotton was not only enamoured of the graphic possibilities the crowd offered him, as seen in Les Chanteurs (Le Courrier Français, 25 February 1894). He was also fascinated by how crowd behaviour brings out and reveals our characters as individuals, as Gustave Le Bon explained in his book Psychologie des foules, published in Paris by Alcan in 1895. In La Sortie, which perhaps illustrates the crowd leaving the Théâtre de l’Odéon after a performance, the men push and shove, stand on each other’s toes, jostle the women, and forget the social conventions and simple courtesies they had demonstrated only a few minutes earlier. Vallotton reveals this in small but significant details: a cocked top hat, an arm blocking the way, a grimacing face. For him, no misdemeanour should be overlooked.

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Le Courrier Français of 13 May 1894

ÉDOUARD VUILLARD

ÉDOUARD VUILLARD

1868–1940

Wishing to follow his father’s example, Édouard Vuillard studied at the Lycée Condorcet as preparation for the competition to enter the Saint-Cyr military school. However, he changed his mind and decided to join his best friend Ker-Xavier Roussel in the studio of the painter Diogène Maillart (1840–1926) at Les Gobelins. He then failed the exam to enter the École des Beaux-Arts for the first time. In 1886, Vuillard attended the courses at the Académie Julian with Roussel and Maurice Denis, before being admitted to the Beaux-Arts – on the fourth attempt –in June 1887 to study in the class of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904). With his two friends and Pierre Bonnard, Paul Ranson and József Rippl-Rónai, their fellow students at the Académie Julian, the Nabi group was formed around 1888; Vuillard was given the nickname ‘the Zouave’.

He exhibited at the Salon the following year – the only occasion – and in 1891 was given his first solo show at La Revue blanche, the review founded by the Natanson brothers in 1889, to which he contributed regularly as an illustrator. In 1891 and 1892, Vuillard exhibited at Le Barc de Boutteville and received the commission to decorate the home of Paul Desmarais. This was followed by decorations he created for Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre de l’Œuvre (1893) and the dining room of Alexandre Natanson in 1894. In the period 1896–99, he created his album of lithographs Paysages et Intérieurs for the gallerist Ambroise Vollard. He also exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants from 1901, the Salon d’Automne as from 1903 and at Bernheim-Jeune’s until 1914. During the First World War, Vuillard became a line guard at Versailles and then an army artist, but he also exhibited in Hamburg with Bonnard in 1913.

Elected to the Institut des Beaux-Arts in 1937, Vuillard’s work was celebrated in a retrospective show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs the following year. In June 1940, when Vuillard was seriously ill and German troops were approaching, the artist’s patrons Jos and Lucy Hessel, to whom he had been introduced by Félix Vallotton in 1900, took Vuillard to La Baule on the Atlantic coast. He died there the same year, aged seventy-two.

COQUELIN CADET DANS

“LE MALADE IMAGINAIRE”

c. 1890

watercolour on paper affixed to panel 9 1/2 × 18 7/8 in / 24 × 48 cm

signed lower left ‘E Vuillard’; inscribed on reverse backing board ‘L’aquarelle représenté ci-contre provient de ma collection particuliere. J. Roussel’ [The watercolour shown opposite comes from my private collection. J. Roussel]

PROVENANCE

Jacques Roussel (son of Ker-Xavier Roussel)

Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, Paris

Sam Salz, New York

Sam Salz Inc., New York

Nathan L. Halpern, New York (1960); thence by descent

Christie’s, New York: 3 November 2004 (lot no. 20)

Private Collection, Paris

Private Collection

THE THEATRE: A NEW AESTHETIC

THE THEATRE: THE CRADLE OF A NEW AESTHETIC

Occurring alongside the avant-garde movements in painting, the renewal of the theatre introduced by theorists, playwrights and directors at the end of the 19th century brought radical change. Their aim was to move away from the stereotypical performances of certain actors, eliminate the effect scenes that the public expected, and avoid overly realistic stage scenery. In short, their goal was to distil the essence of drama through symbolism and near abstraction. The convergence of these two artistic revolutions was of great interest to the Nabis, who had already been introduced to the theatrical world by Aurélien Lugné-Poe, their fellow pupil at the Lycée Condorcet. They all shared a studio at 28 Rue Pigalle in Paris, which Lugné-Poe later referred to:

Sérusier, Percheron, Gauguin, Coquelin Cadet, Ibels, Ranson, Père Barc de Boutteville, Mauclair [...] sat in this studio [...] It was there that the Nabis began, those chaste prophets of painting who stood out like a new branch on the proud tree: Signac, Seurat, and Pissarro [...] My friends painted while I bored them stiff with theatre, with my scenes from the Conservatoire that I was rehearsing, with a lesson that I was giving.1

Vuillard quickly understood how much his painting would be enriched by this new world. We know from his Journal that he visited Paris’s avant-garde theatres, such as the Divan Japonais and Le Chat Noir, and that he soon played an active role in set design and staging. The drawings he made at the end of performances demonstrate his fascination with actresses like Yvette Guilbert, Jane Avril, and Biana Duhamel [p. 202] and actors like Coquelin Cadet [1], whom he met at the Comédie-Française.

AN UNFORGETTABLE ACTOR

Ernest Coquelin (1848–1909), nicknamed ‘Cadet’ (‘the Younger’) to distinguish him from his brother Constant, who was also an actor, was a highly talented comedian. He won first prize for acting at the Paris Conservatoire in 1867, made his professional debut at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, achieved early successes in vaudeville at the Théâtre des Variétés, and became a member of the Comédie-Française in 1879. Although primarily known as a comic actor, he did not hesitate to tackle more experimental roles, such as those at the Petit Théâtre des Marionnettes, founded by Henri Signoret, whose shows were held at the Galerie Vivienne in Paris. Some of the stage sets were painted by Aristide Maillol. Coquelin’s greatest triumphs were his performances in Molière’s plays at the Comédie-Française: Les Fourberies de Scapin, Le Mariage de Figaro, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac [2] and, as illustrated here by Vuillard, Le Malade imaginaire. A specialist in monologues,2 a subject on which he wrote a book in 1881, Coquelin did not, however, make a name for himself for the modernity of his acting. As Jules Clarétie commented, in the preface to the catalogue of the sale of Coquelin’s art collection in 1909:

He had [...] a prodigious sense and gift for laughter. It was enough for him to show himself for people to laugh! He would stand in front of an audience, look at them with an ironic expression, peer into the corners of the house with his mischievous questioning eye, his

head forward, his arms open, already initiating a sort of dialogue between himself and the audience with this amusing pantomime. Yes, for him, a monologue became a kind of dialogue; his gestures were questioning, his smile demanded an answer. Coquelin was marvellous in these ‘soliloquies,’ of which he was a triumphant interpreter.3

A RADICAL MODERN STYLE

Between 1890 and 1892, Vuillard created an extraordinary series of watercolours of Coquelin Cadet, one of which is Coquelin Cadet dans “Le Malade imaginaire” (c. 1890) [p. 184]. Unquestionably one of Molière’s most famous plays, it is satire on medicine, the plot also, and above all, revolves around personal pride. Fascinated by the actor, Vuillard condenses the actor’s pose into an astonishing arc, and his face into an outline that seems to express the very essence of the text being

spoken. In this work, Vuillard gives free rein to his brimming imagination, flirting with caricature while remaining rooted in radical modernity. In another version [3], less colourful than this one and tightly framed on the left, Vuillard plays with flat tints and outlines that seem to be drawn with an unbroken stroke of the pen. In Coquelin Cadet dans “Le Malade imaginaire”, Vuillard has used rapid brushstrokes that sometimes exceed the outlines. His bubbling creativity is also evident in the runs of black ink he applied too quickly, prompted by an emotion he wanted to capture as swiftly as possible. The same kind of overrun can be seen in some of Alexander Calder’s watercolours. Thanks to an article on the ‘cabinets’ of ‘various Parisian celebrities’, published in L’Éclair in 1892, we know how much Coquelin Cadet admired Vuillard’s watercolours, which he hung on the walls of his dressing room. When questioned, Coquelin: ‘very frankly declared his strong liking for a young painter till now known only by those who keep an eye on the most progressive artistic movement: M. Édouard Vuillard [...] We observe, in certain intimate studies, a very powerful and very original use of colour, and in caricatures of Coquelin Cadet in arabesques, an altogether decorative and new flight of fancy.’5

The memorabilia and works collected by Coquelin Cadet, who died in 1909, were sold in Paris at the Hôtel Drouot on 26 May of the same year. The catalogue was prefaced by the critic and collector Jules Clarétie.

[2]

[3]

A LEGENDARY PEDIGREE

Coquelin Cadet dans “Le Malade imaginaire”, which probably remained in Vuillard’s collection, was later acquired by Jacques Roussel (as noted in a handwritten inscription on the back of the mount), an actor and the son of the painter Ker-Xavier Roussel, Vuillard’s brother-in-law. The work then passed into the collection of Sam Salz (1894–1981), whose story is very moving. Born into a Jewish family near Kraków in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Satz studied at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts before moving to Paris in the early 1920s, where he met two of the city’s most influential art dealers, Gaston Bernheim-Jeune and Ambroise Vollard. He then opened his own gallery in Cologne, where he exhibited the works of Marc Chagall and Georges Braque. He followed this with other galleries between 1926 and 1930 in Brussels, London, and finally Paris. The photograph by August Sander [4] dates from this period. As World War II loomed, Salz took refuge in New York, where he became an ardent defender of French painting from Impressionism to Fauvism. His clients included some of the most famous people of the time: Albert Barnes, Paul Mellon, Robert Lehman, David Rockefeller, Greta Garbo, Orson Welles, and Billy Wilder. Salz was not only one of the most successful art dealers of the first half of the twentieth century, but he was also a close friend of artists, including Vuillard, whom he met in 1938 through Jos Hessel, and who painted his portrait in 1939 [5]. Shortly afterwards, Salz became Vuillard’s exclusive dealer in the United States. Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Diego Rivera were also among his artist friends, as is evidenced by a photograph dated 1940 of the dealer alongside Rivera and the actor Edward G. Robinson.

REFERENCES

1. Aurélien Lugné Poe, La Parade, Le Sot du tremplin, Souvenirs et impressions de théâtre, Paris, Librairie Gallimard, 1930, pp. 190–191.

2. Coquelin Cadet, Le Monologue Moderne, illustrations by Luigi Loir (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1881).

3. René Coursaget and Maximilien Gauhier, Cent ans de théâtre par la photographie, Comédiens et comédiennes d’hier (Paris: Editions L’Image, 1947), p. 60.

4. Les Collectionneurs / M. Coquelin Cadet amateur de peinture, L’Éclair, no. 1333 (21 July 1892).

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Antoine Bourdelle, Coquelin Cadet en mascarille (1891), terracotta (Montauban, Musée Ingres-Bourdelle)

[2]. Postcard, Coquelin Cadet dans “Monsieur de Pourceaugnac” (c. 1900)

[3]. Édouard Vuillard, Coquelin Cadet dans “Le Malade imaginaire” (c. 1890), crayon, pen and ink, watercolour on paper, 21 × 34.5 cm (collection Melanie Kahane)

[4]. August Sander (1876–1964), Le Marchand d’art Sam Salz (1927), silver gelatin print, 29 × 20.6 cm (Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, inventaire no. aM 1979-184)

[5]. Vuillard, Portrait de Sam Salz (1939), pastel on paper, 51 × 34 cm (private collection)

AU JARDIN PUBLIC

1891

oil on card [recto]; Indian ink, pastel and gouache on card [verso] 12 5/8 × 8 3/4 in / 32 × 22 cm

signed and dated lower left ‘ev 91’; on reverse, stamped lower left ‘E. V.’

PROVENANCE

Private Collection

Private Collection

EXHIBITIONS

‘Édouard Vuillard 1868–1940’, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC , 19 January – 20 April 2003; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, 15 May –24 August 2003; Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 23 September 2003 –4 January 2004; Royal Academy of Arts, London, 31 January – 18 April, 2004, cat. no. 329

‘Édouard Vuillard, The Poetry of the Everyday’, The Holburne Museum, Bath, 24 May – 15 September 2019, cat. pl. 3 (repro.)

LITERATURE

Édouard Vuillard. Catalogue Raisonné des peintres et pastels, volume I, Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, Skira and Wildenstein Institute, Paris, 2003, no. V–1, p. 362 (repro. in colour)

LE FLIRT

c. 1890–91 pastel on paper

9 3/4 × 7 7/8 in / 24.8 × 20 cm

initialled lower right ‘EV’

PROVENANCE

Private Collection, Paris (by descent from the artist)

Private Collection, Paris (from the above)

EXHIBITED

‘Édouard Vuillard 1868–1940’, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC , 19 January – 20 April 2003; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, 15 May –24 August 2003; Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 23 September 2003 – 4 January 2004; Royal Academy of Arts, London, 31 January – 18 April 2004, cat. no. 18, p.72 (repro. in colour p.73)

LITERATURE

Édouard Vuillard. Cat. Raisonné des peintres et pastels, volume I, Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, Skira and Wildenstein Institute, Paris, 2003, no. II –120, p. 140 (repro. in colour)

LA RAVAUDEUSE

c. 1891–92 oil on board

11 1/4 × 9 1/4 in / 28.6 × 23.5 cm (framed)

initialled upper left ‘ev’

PROVENANCE

Louis-Alfred (Athis) Natanson, Paris; thence by descent to Denise Tabah (née Natanson), Rueil-Malmaison

Florence Seminario, Paris

Henri Tabah, Rueil-Malmaison

Sotheby’s, London: 12 April 1972 (lot no. 25)

E. V. Thaw, New York

Art Council Establishment, Vaduz

Samuel Josefowitz (acquired in 1984)

Christie’s, New York: 8 May 2002 (lot no. 218)

William J. Levy (acquired from the above)

Sotheby’s New York: 14 November 2023 (lot no. 318)

Private Collection (from the above)

EXHIBITED

‘Peintres de La Revue blanche’, Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 8 April – 30 May 1936, cat. no. 52 (titled ‘La Raccommodeuse’)

‘Paris 1900’, Vevey Musée, Jenisch, Switzerland, 10 April – 13 June 1954, cat. no. 213

‘La Revue blanche’, Galerie Maeght, Paris, 15 March – 15 April 1966, cat. no. 58, p. 27

‘Édouard Vuillard–K.-X. Roussel’, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 27 Oct. – 5 Jan. 1968, cat. no. 11

‘The Intimate Interiors of Édouard Vuillard’, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX , 5 February – 16 April 1989; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC , 6 May – 16 July 1989; Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, 6 October 1989 – 7 January 1990, cat. no. 10 (titled ‘Woman Mending’)

‘Édouard Vuillard: la porte entrebâillée’, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, 20 October 2000 – 14 January 2001, cat. no. 10, p. 17

LITERATURE

‘Le barc de Bouteville’, Cécile Guy, in L’Oeil, Paris, 1965, p. 37 (repro.)

The Nabis: Their History and Their Art, 1888–1896, Gordon L. Mauner, Columbia University, New York, NY, 1978, no. 88, p. 235, (repro. p. 302) ]

Symbolisme et décor: Vuillard, 1888–1905, Agnès Georges, Université Sorbonne, Paris, 1982, p. 42

Vuillard: l’espace de l’intimité, Élisabeth Daniel, Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie, Paris, 1984, no. 141, p. 389 (repro.)

The Portraits of Édouard Vuillard, Patricia Ciaffa, Columbia University, New York, NY, 1985, no. 77, pp. 192–94, (repro.)

Édouard Vuillard’s Interiors of the 1890s, Edward W. Easton, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 1989, p. 26

Gauguin et les nabis, Andrew Ellridge, Pierre Terrail, Paris, 1993, p. 90 (repro.)

Édouard Vuillard. Catalogue. Raisonné des peintres et pastels, volume I, Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, Skira and Wildenstein Institute, Paris, 2003, no. IV–11, p. 232 (repro. in colour)

BIANA DUHAMEL AU RÔLE DE

“MISS HELYETT”

c. 1891 pastel on paper

16 1/8 × 7 3/8 in / 41 × 18.5 cm

signed lower centre ‘E Vuillard’

PROVENANCE

Private Collection

Hopkins Gallery, Paris

Private Collection, Singapore

Private Collection

LITERATURE

Édouard Vuillard. Catalogue Raisonné des peintres et pastels, volume I, Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, Skira and Wildenstein Institute, Paris, 2003, no. II–2, p. 165 (repro. in b&w)

This painting is accompanied by a photocertificate of authenticity dated 7 June 2004 and signed by Antoine Salomon.

MISS HELYETT

A large pastel with a radical aesthetic, Biana Duhamel au rôle de “Miss Helyett” (c. 1891) [p. 202] is unarguably one of the most beautiful works produced by Vuillard during the 1890s, and the fruit of a surprising history that merits the telling for a full appreciation.

ARTISTS’ ENTRANCE

The operetta Miss Helyett was staged at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens in the heart of Paris, located between Passage Choiseul and Rue de Monsigny in the 2nd arrondissement [1]. Wanting a more comfortable venue than the one he had occupied on the ChampsÉlysées, Jacques Offenbach moved there in 1855 and enlarged the auditorium for the occasion. With productions of Orpheus in the Underworld and La Belle Hélène, he made the theatre one of the most popular in Paris.

When Biana Duhamel (1870–1910) performed at the Bouffes Parisiens at the age of twenty, she was already an established actress. Born in Rouen to actor parents, she had played children’s roles from the age of four, most notably in Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris and Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir. She made her Paris debut in Le Petit Poucet, adapted from the tale by Charles Perrault, at the Théâtre de la Gaîté in 1885. After spending two years at the Conservatoire (1886–88), she performed at the Odéon, then at the Bouffes Parisiens in 1890, where she played Phrynette in L’Enfant Prodigue, a pantomime by Carré fils and Wormser. This role was later taken up, again at the Bouffes Parisiens, by Félicia Mallet, whose performance, although fairly conventional, so impressed Vuillard that he depicted it in a series of drawings. This experience probably marked the point of departure for what he would shortly imagine for Miss Helyett.

A three-act operetta by Maxime Boucheron and Edmond Audran that opened at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens on 12 November 1890, Miss Helyett enjoyed immediate success. It was performed 800 times to no fewer than 500,000 theatre-goers, including on provincial tours.

In 1892, Georges Launey devoted a lengthy article to the play in the Revue encyclopédique, in which he recounted the plot, set in a holiday resort in the Pyrenees. Miss Helyett, a young American raised in a strict manner by her father – a pastor – is courted by a young man, whose advances she regularly defers. She is determined to remain faithful to her father’s principles, which are written in a small notebook kept in a purse that hangs from her belt. This type of purse can be seen in a contemporary photograph taken by Van Bosch [2].

In a series of plot complications, the two authors mischievously contrast the young woman’s puritanical attitude with the light-hearted outlook of other young women frequenting the resort. The plot takes a turn when Miss Helyett meets Paul, a French painter who sketches her, as shown in another photograph by Van Bosch. After various twists and turns, Miss Helyett becomes aware of Paul’s love for her, and her discovery of his sketch finally leads her to accept his proposal of marriage. Audran’s duets were a huge hit with audiences, who almost every night sang along to Ah, Le Superbe Point de Vue.

The show’s success quickly attracted companies wanting to promote their products: Lefèvre-Utile included Biana Duhamel’s image in a series of adverts for their biscuits [3], and Maison de la Crème Simon used her to advertise their ointment. These corollary developments should not obscure the fact that, as Georges Launey himself pointed out, the show’s ‘success rather exceeds the true scope of the work.’

VUILLARD’S ICONIC IMAGE

The modernity of Vuillard’s portrayal is in stark contrast to the light-hearted atmosphere of the operetta, which is very much in the tradition of Offenbach. The way Vuillard transposes Biana Duhamel’s melodramatic acting and conventional gestures into a ‘dynamic calligraphy’ – to use the term Guy Cogeval employs in the Critical Catalogue1 of the artist’s work – is nothing short of miraculous, unless we consider the influence of his exposure to avant-garde theatres on

[3]

the blossoming of his radical aesthetic. The figure Vuillard cast like a silhouette against a plain background is evocative of the shadow puppets admired by the audience at Le Chat Noir, the cabaret run by Rodolphe Salis on the Butte Montmartre. The figure’s exaggerated movements also suggest characters with contorted bodies drawn on glass plates and projected by magic lanterns and praxinoscopes, the proto-cinema of the years 1880–95. Vuillard’s sinuous lines and frozen expression immediately call to mind figures in Japanese prints, which the Nabis collected, such as Kitao Masayoshi’s Dancers. 2 The image is also reminiscent of the way in which Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Art Nouveau designers would later portray Loïe Fuller.

These sources and formal affinities neither explain nor exhaust the somewhat mysterious richness of this pastel, beginning with the expressiveness of the face and the radical, severe quality of the lines and colours, which so anticipated the practices of the Fauves and even the German Expressionists. Did Vuillard, who in 1890 was a young bachelor, identify with the character of Paul, the painter who sketched Miss Helyett? His interest in this operetta raises questions, especially as his friend Romain Coolus had criticised it in the pages of La Revue blanche. At the time, it was only defended by academic critics like Francisque Sarcey. The almost organic logic of the forms and tones seems too much like the formal representation of an ‘inner necessity’, to use a term coined by Kandinsky, to be the result of mere chance. For Vuillard, theatre would in many ways become a place of Revelation in the strongest sense of the word, although the reason why remains concealed.

REFERENCES

1. Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, Vuillard. Le Regard innombrable. Cat. critique des peintures et pastels, volume I, Paris, Skira / Seuil / Wildenstein Institute, 2003, no. III –1 & no. III–2, pp. 164–165.

2. Ursula Perucchi-Petri, Die Nabis und Japan, Munich, Prestel-Verlag, 1976, pp. 119–120.

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Poster for Miss Helyett at the Théâtre des Bouffes

[2]. Photograph of Biana Duhamel as Miss Helyett by Van Bosch

[3]. Advertising ‘Lefèvre-Utile Biscuits LU’

MARIE AU JARDIN

1893 oil on canvas

10 5/8 × 13 3/4 in / 27 × 35 cm

artist’s stamp lower left ‘Vuillard’

PROVENANCE

Hector Brame, Paris, 1947

Matthiesen Gallery, London and New York

David B. Findlay, New Cannan CT ; thence by descent

Christie’s, New York: 5 May 2004 (lot no. 254)

Private Collection, USa

Private Collection, Paris

Private Collection

EXHIBITIONS

‘Peintures de Vuillard’, Espace Bonnard: Jardins du Tivoli, Le Cannet, 3 June –17 September 2006, cat. no. 10, p. 29 (repro. in colour)

LITERATURE

Édouard Vuillard. Catalogue Raisonné des peintres et pastels, volume I, Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, Skira and Wildenstein Institute, Paris, 2003, no. IC –103, p. 284 (repro. in b&w)

MARIE

Édouard Vuillard’s work from 1892 to 1895 features numerous genre scenes with titles as colourful as they are enigmatic: Le Caraco orange (1890–91), Femme en peignoir bleu (c. 1892), Demoiselle en rouge (1893), Dame en noir assise (1893), Dame en rouge (1895–98), and others. Among the women he painted, we occasionally see his mother, sometimes workers from the dressmaking workshop she ran on Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, and, at other times, young women whose identities remain unknown. However, his most frequent subject during these years was his sister, Marie.

Affectionately called “Mimi” by Vuillard, she and his mother were undoubtedly the central figures in the young artist’s emotional world. Vuillard portrayed his sister consistently from 1888 to 1895. After this period, as he became more involved with the La Revue blanche circle, Misia, the wife of Thadée Natanson, took over as his favourite model. These earlier domestic scenes, far from trivial, played a crucial role in the development of Vuillard’s artistic style. By repeatedly focusing on the same subjects, he experimented with various approaches to representation: academic in 1888, synthesised and hieratic in 1890 [1], and adopting Japanesque influences with outlined flat tints from 1890–91.

THE NABI ZOUAVE’S PRANKS

Like a photographer composing a photographic essay, Vuillard unstintingly followed Marie, portraying her engaged in many occupations of her daily life, even the most trivial. In La Manche bleue (1893) [2], we see her employed in the family workroom. Surprised, she turns towards the artist, gazing too at the viewer. As in the works of Diego Velázquez, whom Vuillard admired so much, here the painting looks at us. Often, it is difficult to understand what Marie is actually doing; in Marie en robe bleue, assise de profil (1894) [p. 217], is she sewing, reading a magazine, finishing her lunch? No detail is given that allows us to reach a conclusion. It is as though Vuillard enjoyed teasingly blurring the picture. What is Marie doing in the other painting of her shown here, Marie au jardin (1893) [p. 210]? Is she taking a walk? Is she going to meet someone? And where is the scene taking place? Is this the garden of her Aunt Saurel in Creteil? Is it a real setting or a partly invented reconstitution? And what are we to make of the oddly static pose he gives her? What does it signify?

These uncertainties should not lead us to think that Vuillard painted his works all in one go, that what we see is a snapshot in paint.

Analysis of his sketchbooks, especially the one for 1893 (in the Vuillard archives), reveals that he prepared his compositions with the greatest care, making many small preparatory sketches in pencil. When Vuillard bought himself a camera in 1897, he continued to take endless snaps of Marie [3, 4], who had now become the wife of the painter Ker-Xavier Roussel; his photographs now played the role that his sketches had, that of memory aids to help prepare his paintings.

We know that Vuillard shared certain personality traits with Marie, starting with shyness and a lack of physical presence that often led them both to avoid the limelight. However, this shyness does not fully explain the immobile image with which he represents his sister in Marie au jardin. Her fixed pose should perhaps be understood as the legacy of his collaboration with avant-garde theatres, in particular the Théâtre de l’Œuvre, founded in 1893 by Aurélien Lugné-Poe, his old schoolmate at the Lycée Condorcet. Vuillard contributed to creating the sets for Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, as well as for plays by Henrik Ibsen, in other words, in dramas in which the characters are unable to free themselves from the conventions that fetter them. Is Vuillard presenting Marie, whose early years of marriage were often painful,

through the filter of Ibsen’s theatre? Vuillard was too sophisticated to make an unambiguous comment. He always left it up to the viewers, and historians too, to imagine the story being played out before them.

MOTIF, SCENERY, TEXTURE: VUILLARD’S UNCONVENTIONALITY

Looking at the restrained nature of Vuillard’s genre scenes, it is hard to imagine that his friends referred to him as the ‘Nabi Zouave’.1 However, there was an unconventional and modern Vuillard who followed previously unexplored paths that art history had long ago put to one side to define him as a painter of intimate middle-class scenes.

While, like his friends, Vuillard took an interest in Japanese art, the conclusions he drew from it often differed from theirs. It is true that, like them, he was an avid reader of Siegfried Bing’s Le Japon artistique, and sometimes even acquired Japanese prints directly, such as Eizan’s Three Courtesans beneath the Cherry Blossom [5, overleaf], but where Bonnard and Ranson took inspiration from Utamaro and Hokusai to invent a graphic vocabulary featuring arabesques characteristic of Art Nouveau, Vuillard, more than any other, explored the possibilities offered by this new syntax. In Marie en robe bleue, assise de profil, the viewer’s eye is invited to focus not on whatever action she is

[3]

[4]

engaged in, but on the motif of her blue dress, patterned with squares by rapidly executed white lines, which occupies the foreground. The pattern of the dress becomes the element that structures the composition. The contracted perspective in association with the support left visible at the bottom of the painting – en reserve as Toulouse-Lautrec used to do – accentuates the texture of the work rather than its narrative. The viewer’s relationship with the painting is tactile, without losing any of its power of appeal.

But Vuillard went even further in Marie au jardin. By contrasting surfaces painted in solid colours (Marie’s dress, the walls and roofs of the houses, the sky) with areas created by skilfully applied and stippled colours, Vuillard invites us to lose ourselves visually in the bushes. He no longer considers his painting as being a window looking onto the world but as a continuum of decorative textures that the eye traverses laterally. Another idea that in this painting is still in its inception is the visual relationship between immobile figures and an irrepressibly burgeoning expanse of vegetation. Not simply a formal relationship, this contrast stems from a poetic and almost philosophical conception of the world:

we are fixed in a reality that in turn interacts with us. This theme would structure many of Vuillard’s future decorative works, for example, Les Jardins publics (1894) [6]. Later on, echoes of it can be found in the foliage of Sam Szafran (1934–2019) and the embroidery of Éva Jospin (b. 1975).

STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ, THE REVERED POET

Whereas Bonnard empathised with the sensual and even erotic world of Paul Verlaine, as demonstrated by his illustrations for Parallèlement, Vuillard’s aesthetic leaned towards Mallarmé. In fact, a recent detailed analysis of his Journal shows that he made numerous references to the poet’s writings (Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Institut). What Vuillard drew from Mallarmé is marvellously expressed in Marie au jardin [p. 210]; our gaze is first drawn to the proliferation of bushes depicted in a range of greens embellished here and there with red and yellow touches. But the diagonal path does not lead to a visual outlet, and our eye is once again lost in the shower of colours with which Vuillard has sprinkled the space. What Vuillard was in fact doing is that he was touching on the moment when painting ceases to be comprehensible, decipherable, in order to tell us a different and parallel story where words, as in Mallarmé’s writings, no longer have the power of description. Vuillard appropriates Mallarmé’s principle that pointing something out is tantamount to concealing its profound truth: suggestion – that is the means by which one arrives at the quintessence of the world. In his descriptions of the paintings for the first catalogue raisonné of Vuillard’s works, André Chastel (1912–90) described Marie au jardin with great sensitivity: ‘Evening. Dark green and blue flowerbeds with patches of yellow, white and pink flowers. A lady in a blue dress appears on the right, holding her arms loosely in front of her. Blue sky with white clouds. One of the artist’s earliest ‘polyphonic’ garden studies’. An international specialist in Italian Renaissance painting, this historian of exceptional curiosity, culture and sensitivity had understood, before anyone else, how much Vuillard’s painting is a delicate and infinite melody of tones.

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]. Édouard Vuillard, Portrait schématique de Marie Vuillard (1890), oil on canvas, 92 × 73.5 cm (private collection)

[2]. Vuillard, La Manche bleue (1893), oil on card, 26.6 × 22.3 cm (New York, Collection Malcolm Wiener)

[3 & 4]. Vuillard, Marie Roussel dans un fauteuil de la salle à manger, rue Truffaut (c. 1900), original photograph, 9 × 9 cm (private collection) & Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Marie et Annette Roussel à Levallois (1898), original photograph, 8.8 × 7.7 cm (private collection)

[5]. Kikugawa Eisen, Trois Élégantes sous des cerisiers en fleur, 38.4 × 25 cm (private collection)

[6]. Vuillard, Les Jardins publics, Fillettes jouant (1894), oil on canvas, 214.5 × 88 cm (Paris, Musée d’Orsay)

MARIE EN ROBE BLEUE, ASSISE DE PROFIL

1894 oil on card

9 7/8 × 5 1/8 in / 25 × 13 cm

signed lower right ‘E Vuillard’

PROVENANCE

Olivier Sainsère, Paris

Private Collection

Private Collection

Private Collection, France

EXHIBITIONS

‘Édouard Vuillard’, Musée des Arts Décorartifs, Paris, May–July 1938, no. 57

LITERATURE

Édouard Vuillard. Catalogue Raisonné des peintres et pastels, volume I, Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval, Skira and Wildenstein Institute, Paris, 2003, no. IV–151 (repro. in b&w p. 314)

GABRIEL-ALBERT AURIER

1865–1892

Dying at the age of just twenty-seven, GabrielAlbert Aurier was another of those meteors of history, like Théodore Géricault, Georges Seurat and Arthur Rimbaud. The ephemeral existence of this brilliant, lucid writer was known for his daring art criticism. Born in Châteauroux, he went to Paris in 1883 to study law, which he completed only to satisfy his father. After being admitted to the Paris Court of Appeal as a lawyer, he turned away from the Bar to take up journalism, publishing his first articles in Le Grillon and, in 1886, in Anatole Baju’s Le Décadent. His meeting with Stéphane Mallarmé, and in 1887 with the painter Émile Bernard in Saint-Briac, on the way to Pont-Aven, confirmed his support for young artists.

As editor-in-chief of the short-lived illustrated review Le Moderniste, from April to September 1889, he demonstrated boldness and originality, publishing articles, as well as his own poems, on the avant-gardes of the moment: in the issue of 27 April, an article by Charles Morice on Richard Wager, and in those of 4 and 13 July, notes by Paul Gauguin on the Exposition Universelle, in Paris. The 17 August issue featured a reproduction of Claude-Émile Schuffenecker’s drawing for the Volpini exhibition, which enabled Parisians to learn about the painting of the Pont-Aven School. His work for other magazines was no less intense, and the articles he published there were of major importance for many artists: ‘Les Isolés: Vincent van Gogh’, Mercure de France, January 1890; ‘Le symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin’, Mercure de France, March 1891; ‘Les Symbolistes’, Revue encyclopédique, 1 April 1892. He was also Mercure de France’s official art critic from 1890 to 1892.

An indefatigable defender of Vincent van Gogh’s work, he was invited by the painter’s brother Théo to write a posthumous monograph. Sadly, this project never came to fruition, Aurier died prematurely in 1892. His Œuvres posthumes, prefaced by his friend Rémy de Gourmont, was published by

Mercure de France in 1893. As for Aurier, art was always a measure of commitment; the critic was also a daring collector, several of whose works can be seen in this exhibition: Bernard’s L’Orchestre (c. 1887) and Nus dans un paysage (c. 1887), and Bonnard’s Au café (1890) and Villa Bach (Chasse à courre) (c. 1891).

OLIVIER SAINS ÈRE

1852–1923

Born on 9 September 1852 in Bar-le-Duc, Olivier Sainsère was descended from ancient Danish nobility that went into exile in the 16th century and settled near Caen, in Normandy. In the early 18th century, a branch of the family became established in Vaucouleurs (Meuse) where its members flourished as horse dealers. In Bar-le-Duc, close to Vaucouleurs, one of their descendants, Louis Sainsère (1811–60), became the local mayor. His son Olivier studied in the town, where he became friends with Raymond Poincaré, also from Bar-leDuc, who would later become Président du Conseil (Prime Minister). Olivier Sainsère soon entered the senior ranks of the French administration, making him an important figure in the political life of the Third Republic. Appointed Sous-Préfet (responsible for ensuring state decisions are implemented) seven times, he became Préfet for Loir-et-Cher in 1889, and then achieved high honour in being appointed a Conseiller d’État (a senior member of the Council of State) and lastly Secrétaire général de la Présidence de la République from 1915 to 1920.

After marrying Anne Marie Henry in 1881, who came from a Lorraine family of industrialists specialising in dyeing, Sainsère enjoyed a financial affluence that allowed him to indulge in his other great passion –supporting artists and collecting their works. Immediately enthused by the paintings of Pablo Picasso, whom he discovered in the gallery belonging to Berthe Weill, one of the first to exhibit the Spaniard, he decided to help the young artist. Consequently, through Sainsère’s assistance, Picasso found it easier to have his residence permits legalised in France and received protection during the police investigations into the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911. A lover of fine books, Sainsère was also a founder member of the ‘Cent Bibliophiles’ with Louis Barthou, another important political figure.

On Sainsère’s death in 1923, the Bulletin de la Vie Artistique, whose principal editors and often main article writers were Félix Fénéon and Adolphe Tabarant, paid tribute to him as follows:

Olivier Sainsère was the quintessential art lover. For this ingenious mind, art was not a laborious occupation alien to his everyday life: art provided him with a natural response to his intellectual needs [...] he was a member of the council of national museums and the committee of historical monuments, to which he brought his informed wisdom and strong convictions. His love of art was not purely theoretical. He surrounded himself with masterpieces chosen with infallible taste. In his home, Monets hung alongside Seurats, the Henri-Edmond Crosses with the Pierre Bonnards, the Gauguins with the Pissarros, the Signacs with the Maurice Denis, the K.-X. Roussels with the Derains, the Degas with the Vuillards.1

REFERENCES

1. ‘Les disparus’, Bulletin de la Vie Artistique, Year 4, no. 18 (15 September 1923), p. 386.

[1]

[2]

[3]

AUGUSTE CAZALIS

1859–1930

Unjustly forgotten today, Auguste Ferdinand Cazalis [1] played an essential role in the formation of the Nabi group of painters. The fact that Pierre Bonnard and his friends took the word nabi as a generic name for their pictorial movement was due to Cazalis Studying under the Orientalist archaeologist Eugène Ledrain (1844–1910), Cazalis was introduced to the Semitic languages by this specialist in Aramaic and Assyrian epigraphy, and it was these languages that he later introduced to his friends. Their interest in ancient cultures was not simply a bit of student light-heartedness, but part of their ambition to form an artistic brotherhood and to break away from naturalism in painting. Wishing to announce a new era, Paul Sérusier and his friends became, through Cazalis, the Nabis, the ‘prophets’ of a pictorial revolution pioneered by Paul Gauguin. We should not forget Maurice Denis’ notebook in which recorded his progress in Hebrew, held today by his family. Nor that Paul Ranson signed several of his paintings in Arabic characters.

It was in 1890 in the restaurant L’Os à Moelle –named because the place had its key attached to a large bone – located in the Passage Brady, near to the Porte Saint-Martin (Paris, 10th arrondissement), that the Nabis got into the habit of meeting up with Cazalis. The story goes that, in order to stimulate their fervent discussions on painting and philosophy, each participant showed one of his works. Soon, Cazalis had fun making up a nickname for each of his friends: Pierre Bonnard became the ‘Nabi japonard’, Paul Ranson the ‘Nabi plus japonard que japonard’, Paul Sérusier the ‘Nabi à la barbe rutilante’, Vuillard the ‘Nabi zouave’, Maurice Denis the ‘Nabi aux belles icônes’, Georges Lacombe the ‘Nabi sculpteur’, Félix Vallotton the ‘Nabi Suisse’, József Rippl-Rónai the ‘Nabi hongrois’, and Jan Verkade the ‘Nabi obéliscal’ (owing to his height). In return, his painter friends dubbed him the ‘Nabi Ben Kallyre’, meaning ‘with hesitant speech’ on account of his stammer.

Cazalis was also a collector and at times an artist. Among the works he was given by his friends, besides L’Hippogriffe, was a wonderful Sérusier, Quatre jeunes bretonnes dans la forêt (1892). Although there is a superb photograph showing Cazalis painting [2], very few of his works are known today, and the precious watercolour Le Chemin (1892) [3] is the only one in a public collection.

It was Jan Verkade who gave the most endearing portrait of Cazalis:

These six young men – Sérusier, Denis, Vuillard, Bonnard, Roussel and Ranson – formed the core of this little circle, which included a few other members [...].” Cazalis had already tried several careers but had abandoned them one after the other. There was one point, however, on which he was steadfast: friendship. He had made it his mission to be of service to others. Anyone in need of anything would go and see Cazalis, who would deal with it straight away. A devoted son, he lived with his mother on a small annuity his father had left him.1

REFERENCES

1. Dom Willibrord Verkade [Jan Verkade], Le Tourment de Dieu, Étapes d'un moine peintre (Paris: Louis Rouart and Jacques Watelin, 1923), p. 82.

GILLES GENTY

An art historian, formerly a lecturer at the École du Louvre and a former director of the Musée du Petit Palais in Geneva, Gilles Genty has co-curated many international exhibitions on Post-Impressionism, including: ‘Maurice Denis’ (Lyon, 1994–95), The ‘Time of the Nabis’ (Florence and Montreal, 1998), ‘Impressionism from Corot to Renoir’ (Brescia, 1998), ‘Da Pont-Aven ai Nabis. Le stagioni del simbolismo francese’ (Brescia, 1999), ‘De Caillebotte à Picasso’ (Paris, Rotterdam and Quebec, 2002–03), ‘Paul Ranson’ (Valence, 2004), ‘De Gauguin aux Nabis, le droit de tout oser’ (Lodève, 2010), ‘Les Univers de Georges Lacombe (1868–1916)’ (Versailles, 2012), ‘ToulouseLautrec Illustrates the Belle Époque’ (Montreal, 2016), ‘Paris in the Days of Post-Impressionism: Signac and the Indépendants’ (Montreal, 2020), ‘Vallotton en noir et en couleur’ (Le Cannet, 2022), ‘Toulouse-Lautrec tête d’affiche’ (Le Cannet, 2024). He is also the author of the main introductory texts for the following exhibitions: ‘Lyonel Feininger, la ville et la mer’ (Vevey, 2021), and ‘La Belle Époque de l’Art Nouveau’ (Pully, 2022). And he is also a co-author of the Catalogue raisonné of Paul Ranson (1861–1909) (Somogy, 2000) and Pierre Bonnard, inédits (Cercle d’Art, 2006).

1888–1900

Waddington Custot Frieze Masters, 2024

Text: Gilles Genty

Translation: Timothy Stroud Images: Prudence Cuming

Official copyright 2024

Waddington Custot 11 Cork Street London W1S 3LT Tel +44 (0)20 7851 2200

mail@waddingtoncustot.com