A Corner In The Artist's Studio

"He certainly very clearly expressed something.  Some said that he did not clearly express anything.    Some were certain that he expressed something very clearly and some of such of them said that  he would have been a greater one if he had not been so clearly expressing what he was expressing.  Some said that he was not clearly expressing what he was expressing and some of such of them said that the greatness of struggling which was not clear expression made of him one being a completely great one.' - excerpt from Matisse in  Selected Writings Of Gertrude Stein Random House, New York: 1946.

Here, in one short yet elliptical paragraph, Gertrude Stein explains how, after a great early success, the painter Henri Matisse decamped  to the suburbs of Paris, away from the slings and arrows being hurled at him by his former friends, the Cubists and Pablo Picasso in particular.
It was Roy Lichtenstein who made me see this. Specifically, his painting Artist's Studio (1973), recently on display at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City.  It is a typical example of Lichtenstein's method of reinterpreting a painting (in this case The Red Studio by Henri Matisse) but it made me look at Matisse's original from a different angle.  Arguably the best known painting Matisse ever made, The Red Studio is a picture of his studio at Issey-les-Moulineaux,  For those who guessing games, The Red Studio, provides  the occasion for speculating  about the paintings within the painting, hanging on the walls and stacked on the floor. But be warned, as Matisse cautioned the puzzled visityors to his studio: "That (red) wall simply doesn't exist."
Lichtenstein, a Pop artist of the 1960s and 1970s  was a controversial figure and still is, eighteen years after his death.  Trying to describe what  Lichtenstein did when he painted is still debatable.  Did he copy, borrow, imitate, or steal from other artists?

But what he does by focusing on the lower left part of Matisse's painting is an homage the work of a very different artist -  Emile Galle (1846-1904).  A master glass designer whose name is synonymous with Art Nouveau, Galle's experimental glass-making techniques were applied to exemplary shapes like the goblet and the carafe on Matisse's table.   But what of that orange object with the green vines winding around it?  Matisse's contemporaries would have recognized it as one of  Galle's utterly unique pieces with the evocative name:  La main aux algues et aux coquillages (The Hand with algae and seashells).  

If Lichtenstein make me look at something familiar with fresh eyes, Matisse made me think of something we often overlook, namely that styles, periods, and movements in art are conveniences for sorting things out in ways the artists themselves may not have needed.   Likely there are many admirers of Matisse  who do not admire  Art Nouveau.  But Matisse was, himself, a decorative painter, and he may have been attracted to Galle's three-dimensional representations of (then) new discoveries in evolutionary botany.   It was perfectly possible to be a Fauve (wild beast) painter and a strict bourgeois at the same time.  And as for the  Cubists back in Paris, their triumphalism would be overtaken when a new generation of young American artists found their way to abstraction through the paintings of Henri Matisse.

Images:
1. Henri Matisse - detail from  L'Atelier Rouge (The Red Studio), 1911, Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
2. Emile Galle - La Main aux algues et aux coquillages (The Hand With Algae and Seashells), 1904, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

For Eighty Cents !

“Italy is made.  We have still to make the Italians.” – Massimo d’Azeglio (1798-1866)

Just in case the point needs to be underlined, that eighty cents was the daily wage in the Po Valley circa 1895.  Working conditions were so bad in the rise fields of the Piedmont that the women who performed this back-breaking labor had a name - they were known as mondine.  Like the women themselves, we only know that there is a sky above is through its reflection in the water they stand in.  We know that Morbelli used photographs as a memory aid to achieve this bravura example of deep space on an extremely shallow plane.   A lesser artist would have been constricted by the panoramic dimensions of the canvas. 

The path traveled by Italian art in the 19th century is different from the triumphal march of the French that began with the Impressionists.  Stylistically, the Italians were all over the place and art historians have not been kind to them on this account.  Yet the late 19th century was full of lively experiment, more than the Italian peninsula had seen in centuries.   Silvestro Lega Emilio Longoni, Plinio Nomellini, and Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, to name a few, were called Macchiaioli (meaning patches of light) as a way to describe their stylistic experiments.

Their idealism, found its subject in the economic upheavals that attended the political unification of Italy; their politics ranged from progressive to anarchistic.  The early 1890s were a time of  strikes in the industrial cities of the north, a protest against unemployment,  low wages for workers and poor living conditions for all.   Conditions were no better for the poor in rural areas; not for the new generation of Italian painters the heroic peasants of Jean-Francois Millet.

Why art historians prefer the  Futurists to other Italian artists, especially in light of recent history when the Futurists became all too sympathetic to the Fascist movement, remains an intriguing question.  One possible answer is that the Franco-centric version of art history for this period is a story, both admiring and satirical, of the rising bourgeoisie.  French artists were  forward-looking in their focus on the growing bourgeoisie, making pictures of agrarian life look old-fashioned.
Who remembers what the early Roman poet Horace wrote, that the purpose of art is to "instruct and delight?"    This idea has come to seem problematic.  Morbelli and his fellow Macchiaioli were berated from all sides:  for choosing ugly subjects rather than attractive ones and equally for making ugly realities beautiful in their paintings.   Even when socially-conscious art soars high above "agit-prop", as it does in the best Italian Ne-Impressionist paintings,  instruct or delight as it may,  its effects are uncertain.  We are moved by it, but to what effect?

Image: Angelo Morbelli - Per ottanta centesimi!  (For Eighty Cents!), 1895, Museo Francesco Biorgogna, Vercelli.

The White Roads Of Provence: Colette In Summer

Is geography destiny?  A weighty question for a late summer day, with no easy answer in sight.   In her writing, Colette she relishes the natural world in all its antique pantheism.  How good a writer was she?  When the devout Catholic Francois Mauriac was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952, the first call he paid was to Mme Colette at her apartment on the Palais-Royal; he wanted to assure her that the wrong person had won the prize!

It is impossible to avoid the word idyllic in describing the writer Sidonie-Gabrielle (1873-1954) Colette’s life at Treille Muscate.   Up at dawn she moved through  dewy grass to weed her tomatoes, then walking through the woods with her cats, returning to the house for a breakfast on wild figs: “ green ones, with yellow flesh, white ones with red flesh, black ones with red flesh, violet ones with pink flesh, mauve rather than violet, with a fine skin.”    

In 1924, Colette was  divorced from her second husband Henry de Jouvenel, a Parisian journalist and publisher,  after  Colette's affair with her seventeen year-old stepson, Bertrand de Jounevel, became the stuff of Parisian gossip.   They had been an unlikely couple: she was the daughter of a working class family from a small town in Burgundy, an author of louche novels of manners, and a stage performer; he was the son of French nobility.

Looking for a respite, Colette spent a fortnight spent at La Bergerie, a villa near Cap-d'Aire on the Mediterranean, a place she had previously dismissed as “ pretty and false.”  She was attracted by the proximity of her friends from the theater who gathered at  nearby Saint-Maxime but the deciding presence  was that of Maurice Goudeket, her new young lover.  In just a matter of months, Colette changed her mind,  “What a country!  I don't want any other.”

With help from the painter Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac, Colette found her own place, a small farmhouse near Saint-Tropez that had no plumbing or electricity but did have two and a half  picturesque acres of grape vines and fig trees,  and a path through the pines to the sea.  She named it La Treille Muscate (The Grape Arbor).  Soon after the move, Colette wrote two of her finest books there -  The Last of Cheri there in 1926 and Break of Day  in 1928.  After reading Break Of Day, Henri de Jouvenel's complained, “But can't you write a book that isn't about love, adultery, semi-incestuous couplings, and separation?  Aren't there other things in life?”   The lack of sympathy that had grown between them was never more obvious.  

For answer, consider this passage (from page 30):  “Autumn is the only vintage time.  Perhaps that is true in love, too.  It is the season for sensual affection, a time of truce in the monotonous succession of struggles between equals, the perfect time for resting on s summit where two slopes meet....”  

As a young girl studying French, I devoured every book by Colette that I could find, translated by Roger Senhouse, published by Farrar Straus & Giroux.    What I found there was puzzling:  a writer who claimed equal rights for the sensuous with the intellectual, yet seemed out of sympathy with my nascent feminism.  No better argument in favor of reading things before you are ready for them exists.   These paragraphs from The Evening Star, picked at random, are exemplary.

'All among my collection of paperweights, tight-stuffed with curlicues, burnt sugar twists, flowers and small insects, Marcelle arranged her round, impeccably re4d tomatoes, with never a crease or a rib on them, the last tomatoes from her Saint-Cloud garden, and with a sigh murmured " Yes it is compulsory.  Because they are good."

"On each successive day following the first fully ripened fig of the second crop, you can count on any number up to a dozen "secondary figs" being ripe and ready to fall into your hand, soft, with inflexed necks, bearing the pheasant's eye mark at their base and on the sides the parallel stripes that crackle their tender skins of mauve and grey.   For the first few days you'll not be able to eat your fill.  There's little to be said for your appetite if you can't polish off six, ten, or even a dozen figs with the chill of night still upon them; they readily split apart and are red inside as a pomegranate.  They are not as yet runny with their full measure of honey-sweet stickiness, and are so much the easier to put in the mouth.

"But the figs multiply with the rapidly increasing rate of maturity.   Before the week is out the huge fig tree, the young tree further down, and the contorted tree will all be overwhelmed with ripe fruit, pendent from like the stocking nests of the Haitian Cacique bird.    There is no end to them.  Every single one deserves to be picked and placed on a wicker tray.  Time is of the essence,for by now it is easy to see that in their turn the grapes are insistent on being cut, that the tomatoes have reached the peak of their red lacquer lavishness, and all that remain on the peach trees are the fluffy little pellets destined to become the hard ammunition for children to pelt each other..

After which the trees will bear no further crop but apples."

Excerpts from The Evening Star (L'Etoile Vesper) translated from the French by Roger Senhouse, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

The Evening Star (L’Etoile Vesper) was published in Paris on Bastille Day in 1945.  In French the word vesper, which means “evening,” also  refers to Venus.

 

So far as I can tell, Cyrille Besset (1861-1902) had one really good picture in him.    How to make a memorable image of such a luscious landscape is harder than you might think.  The winding road leads away from the sea yet still satisfies the eye.   Route blanche  de Provence (1891)  which is now in the collection of the Musee d'Orsay was painted soon after Besset took up residence in Nice.   Besset was born in Saone-et-Loire and studied with Alfred Roll in Paris before moving to Nice in 1890.   He caught cold and died from respiratory complications in December 1902 while painting the landscape he loved.

Images:

1. Cyrille Besset - Route blanche de Provence, 1891, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
2. Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac - Paysage No. 1 + 1912 + Flint Institute of Art.
3. Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac -  Colette sur la plage a Saint-Tropez, 1930, Collection Jacquart, Paris.

4. Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac - La ferme a l'Aire - Saint-Tropez, 1925, Pompidou Center.