Category: Art

NÉLIE

This is the story of a woman of extraordinary destiny. Cornelia Jacquemart, a girl of modest origins. wiWth a patrician name, had the good fortune of receiving a refined. Education from Madame de. Vatry, a noblewoman for whom her parents worked. Nélie’s artistic inclinations did the rest. In the. First part of her life, she entered the studio of the painter. 

Léon Cogniet and by 1868, she received a medal at the Salon, the annual exhibition of contemporary art. Few had her self-assuredness and her contacts and good technique. Propelled her to become the darling portraitist of many political and famous men. She managed to  successfully break the impasse between dilettantism and professionalism. Which many women painters attempted to navigate in the second part of the 19 century. Thiers, the President of the. Republic, sat for her and in the stuffy world of French male politics, a man of great wealth asked her in 1872 to do his portrait.

Édouard André was a “fils unique”, the single scion of a Protestant banking family. He was nearly forty when he met. Nélie, a man of the world with a reputation as a shrewd investor who had increased the family fortune speculating in the. Golden property development headed by. Haussman which resulted in the radical transformation of Paris. And true to the tasteful models of his time, he embarked upon. The construction of a magnificent residence and assembled a first-rate collection of art, inspired on both accounts, by 18 century aesthetics. Pursuits which other enlightened magnates, such as Isaac de Camondo turned into life passions to distance themselves from simply a rich man’s caprice.

When this blasé bachelor met Mlle. Jacquemart, she was already holding her own in a world where a single woman living off her painting was still an exception. No great sparks glowed out of that encounter, just a slow flame, a current of sympathy progressively strengthened. Nonetheless, nine years later. Édouard asked Nélie for her hand in marriage. The Anglo-Saxon press commented on the event: “The fashionable world and the. Respected bourgeoisie think that M. André sets a deplorable example in taking Mlle. Jacquemart for his wife. The idea is that he should have looked out for another fortune, or have dedicated his millions to the daughter of some noble personage bearing an old title”.

And so, under that unkind auspice and the distrust of the beau monde began the second life of Nélie. The couple set about enlarging André’s collection mostly revolving. Around 17 and 18 century masterpieces. Nélie abandoned her paintbrushes and became a collector as avid and engaged as her husband. A gilded life of traveling in search of new treasures took them abroad and often to Italy where Nélie had. Stayed as a young woman at the Roman Villa Medici.

By the time Édouard died in 1894 the collection was almost completed, but not the unabated passion of Nélie for more. She journeyed to India and Burma exploring other cultures’ artifacts, seeking a new aesthetic pleasure. The destiny of this romantic heroine had no. Match in the pen of any of her contemporaries. The couple bequeathed their collections to the Institute de France. And today, the Jacquemart-André museum is one of the jewels of the Parisian art crown.

QUERIDO ANTONIO

I often wonder if all the talented Spaniards who emigrated during the. Civil War years would have bloomed had they stayed in the country. Witness Dali, Buñuel or Balenciaga. Leaving Spain was their. Passport to universality, a prerequisite to their triumph. Their departure seemed to generate a tension in their work, as if the country they left. Forced its presence upon them in their exile, sustaining the emotional and aesthetic. Wellspring of their creations.

Not all of them have reached us in posterity with the same brilliancy. Among those figures, there is a curious one, often. Forgotten, a man in the right place, perhaps at the wrong time. Antonio Canovas del Castillo carried an illustrious name. His eponymous great uncle was a famous 19th century politician and Antonio, whose father and a younger brother were victims of the civil war, decided to move to Paris in 1938. There he became the protégé of. Misia Sert, the wife of José María Sert and of 

Ana de Pombo, the Spanish director of the. House of Paquin. With their help he began designing accessories, mostly hats and jewellery, for. Coco Chanel. Soon, Ana de Pombo asked him to become her assistant at Paquin’s, staying at the job till. Elizabeth Arden, trying to establish her haute couture line, called him to New York. “ You may find him a handful, from the point of view of. Management, but he has been conspicuously successful”…was the advice of a close friend to Miss Arden.

His sojourn in America consecrated him. In 1948, he became the recipient of the prestigious Nieman-Marcus award, a year after. Christian Dior received it for his “New Look” collection. But Miss Arden was becoming vocal about the shenanigans of Antonio: “That little brat. Castillo, is a constant thorn in my side. He can behave well for just so long and then the meanness comes out”.

He did not have to feel concerned about Elizabeth’s opinions. In 1950. Marie-Blanche de Polignac, daughter of Jeanne Lanvin, made him an offer to revitalize the haute couture line of Lanvin. These were his golden years. He succeeded in joining his name to the name of the house. That since was known as Lanvin Castillo. Upon the death of Marie-Blanche in 1958 and the advent of her successor Yves Lanvin, things somehow began to deteriorate. He hired Oscar de la Renta as his assistant, three years before his. Departure from Lanvin in 1963. De la Renta always  professed that he learnt his trade from Castillo .

But Antonio wasn’t done yet. His friend and admirer. Gloria Guiness, bankrolled him and thus he opened his own house at 95, rue du. Faubourg Saint-Honoré. He was accomplished, talented, running occasionally against trends, either late or. Early to many of them, be it broad shoulders or polka dots. And yet a third and last time, he failed. How difficult was he really? His lack of entrepreneurial spirit, his refusal to embrace the world of prêt-à-porter, accessories and boutiques sank the career of a creative professional, the bohemian gentleman who raised to the top but could not stay there.

TRIBULATIONS OF AN ARTWORK

In 1880, when Auguste Renoir was asked by. Louise Cahen d’Anvers to paint the portrait of her daughter Irène, he was becoming increasingly. Popular among Parisian Jewish patrons. His friend Charles Ephrussi, lover of Louise, and art critic at the respected. Gazette des Beaux-Arts had introduced him to these families and Renoir saw an opportunity to make some money. And get more exposure for his art.

Renoir’s Rising Reputation

At first sight the work certainly pleased the mother of Irène. She did not hesitate to commission a second one of her two. Younger daughters, Elizabeth and Alice. Irène’s portrait was widely admired when it was shown because at the Salon in 1881. “Moreover, Huysmans wrote that it was “painted with a. Flourish of color that has only ever been approached. By the old masters of the English school”. It is a masterly work, the brushstrokes and the play of light giving it a hypnotic glow.

All was not going to end well between Renoir and his charming and. Influential patroness. In a rather undocumented twist, she. Changed her mind about her appreciation of the artist and the portraits wound up in the servants’ quarters. The family took more than a year to pay for his work, a. Miserly sum of 1500 francs. “as for the 1500 francs from the. Cahens, I must say that I find it hard to swallow. The family is so stingy”, he wrote to a friend.

In 1891, Irène, was married to. Moïse de Camondo, an awkward match planned by their banking families. She was only 19 years-old, he 31 and one-eyed. The portrait followed her to her new home and when five years later. After giving Moïse two children, she separated, it was again the subject of. Another migration, this time, adding to her share of  items in the bitter divorce settlement.

Her separation had a name: Carlo Sampieri, the. Italian aristocrat in charge of the stables of the Camondo family. She had probably fallen in love for the first time. Undaunted, she married. Him and converted to Catholicism. The scandal took a toll on her reserved children, Nissim and Béatrice, who continued to live with their father.

Almost four decades later, Béatrice became the custodian of the canvas. She must have liked it more than her mother, who hovered between indifference and dislike for the way Renoir portrayed her. A second and violent chapter opened for the artwork in 1941, with the arrival of the Nazis in Paris, plundering all art found in their wake. The Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce appropriated the canvas and Béatrice was sent to Drancy, the internment camp outside Paris. It was then perhaps sold to a Swiss arms-dealer, Georg Bürhle by Hermann Goering. Béatrice’s final destiny was Auschwitz where her two children and estranged husband, Reinach, were sent earlier. None of them survived.

After the Liberation, Contessa Sampieri, the sweet Iréne of the painting and sole heiress of her daughter’s fortune, discovered her portrait in a 1946 exhibition organized by the Allied Forces, “Masterpieces of the French collections found in Germany” at L’Orangerie museum. She claimed the asset through the Commission for the Art Recoveries and two years later it entered again into her possession.

In her ambivalence about the work and in need of money for her gambling habits, she put the canvas on sale at a Paris art gallery. A buyer was quickly found and a price agreed. His name was Georg Bürhle and the canvas today hangs in the foundation bearing his name in Zurich. Irène Sampieri died in 1963 at the age of 91, after squandering all of her fortune in the casinos.

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HOW SELF-EFFACING A TASTEMAKER CAN BE

Oscar Wilde’s epigram about simple pleasures being the last refuge of the complex, made me think, the first time I heard it, about Eugenia Huici. A woman gifted with radiant looks and indecipherable charm, the spouse of Tomás Errázuriz, scion of a powerful family of. Chilean politicians and wealthy landowners. She was destined to be famous for being herself, a far cry. From the shallowness of our culture of celebrities. In 1880, her young husband’s passion for painting and the presence of her. Brother-in-law as Chilean Consul in Paris, landed the couple in the.

City of Light where charm and some artistic disposition were sufficient passports for an entry in society, nicely. Accelerated if a degree of wealth was also involved. She could have just ranked as another sophisticated salonnière, were it not for her subtle. Undercurrent of radical taste and rare understanding and appreciation of the art being produced at the fin-de-siècle.

During a vacation in Venice, she befriended and was painted by. John Singer Sargent. Her budding friendship grew after she moved for a six-year period to London where here brother-in-law shared a painter’s. Studio with the master only a few doors down from her home in Chelsea. By then, she had already warmed up in Paris to a refined circle of artists. Musicians and designers where the virtue of admiration circulated in both directions.

It was surrounded by Picasso, Boldini. Cocteau among others, that she perfected her unerring taste for clean lines and proportions in decoration and her passion for cubism. Soon, her remarks on how rooms should be furnished. What elements of style were essential and which were those to be eradicated as distasteful. Carried a freshness and novelty that made her popular. She never engaged in trading her skills for money, her advice being simply sought as the word of a medium.

Her most iconic legacy was a place in Biarritz, La. Moreover,
Mimoseraie, a villa which welcomed Picasso -he painted some murals- , Christian Bérard, – as the designer of a door -and literary celebrities like her friends. Jean Cocteau and Blaise Cendrars. Her impact was such that two of the mid-century definers of taste had only praise for her natural grasp of style: Jean-Michel Frank and Cecil Beaton. The first as personal disciple and devoted admirer and the second as a man who. Moved on the defining edges of modernity. Others found inspiration in her ideas and appropriated them. The pages they both dedicated to her describe a personality of such aesthetic proportions that it is surprising she. Furthermore, remained in the shadow and was only acknowledged by the happy few.

 Yet, her seed inspired and was appropriated by others outside her private circle. In spite of dazzling friendships. And countless admirers, she remained loyal to her privacy and values. Her uncluttered surroundings were a projection of her inner life. However, Growing as years passed more austere and simpler. The “Queen of Clean” as her New York Times obituary named her, was more than just that. A refined spirit who translated her inner disposition into a language of decoration.

UNDER THE VOLCANO

A name sometimes marks a life. The name Victor Hugo carries so much. Weight that his descendants have no alternative but to live under the crushing importance of their ancestor, either accepting. That nothing they will achieve or think will compare, or. Trying rebelliously to emulate his achievements.

Jean Hugo, a great grandson of the patriarch would seem. To have chosen an unusual path. Rather than struggling his way through life. Shackled by the heavy inheritance, or using it socially to his. Advantage, he chose to ignore it. He was remarkable in shrugging off. Promotion of his creative outlets. His talents, his exceptional list of friends and the circles in which he mixed, would have. Been sufficient to give him some. Additionally Olympian stature. Picasso kept telling him “you do nothing for your fame!”.

One of his many friends. Gustave Thibon, summarizes distinctively his soul: “He was a strange being, admirable, a mystic, a lover, a. Great artist who no doubt sinned by his excess of modesty”. He had the artist’s temperament in his blood. As did his great grandfather, he sketched and. Drew relentlessly from an early age.

His life was sliced in two equal parts, like the plates of a. Diptych, each of them defined by a woman. In the first, against the backdrop of the tumultuous Paris of the twenties, he met his first wife. Valentine Gross, at the apartment of Madame Alfred Edwards, later better known by the name of her third husband, Misia Sert. He married her, having Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau as witnesses to the wedding. During this period, his work centered on the theatre, lending his talents to many Cocteau plays and collaborating with Satie, Poulenc and even Carl Theodor Dreyer in his film, “The Passion of Joan of Arc”. Yet, Jean was moving gradually away from the temptations of Parisian life. A mystic streak was stirring in his blood.

In 1931 his growing discomfort. Also with urban pleasures and the failure of his ten-year marriage Furthermore. Precipitated his move to the country. At Lunel, near Montpellier, in the property inherited from his grandmother, he began experimenting with oils and endowing his choice of colors with a powerful luminosity. His new wife, Lauretta Hope-Nicolson, bore him seven children. Both devout Catholics, they lived in an old-fashioned style. In addition  entertaining lavishly and encouraging friends to stay for long periods.

Jean Hugo’s art, much like a large part of his existence, had to do with searching . Not only that for his own voice while staying away from the noise and influence of established currents. The exploration of his inner life emerged in his paintings and watercolors with a touch of innocence, almost primitive. Yet its subtle delicacy and crispness raises his work to a standard of prominence he never sought to cultivate.

SITTING PRETTY

His talent was a remarkable fit in the society of his time. Curious, gregarious and a real gossip. Jacques-Émile Blanche did not require those attributes to climb in the mondaine Paris of fin-de-siècle. His pedigree would have. Provided adequate impetus on the way to success. Son of the respected docteur Émile Blanche, an early mental health practitioner and owner of a clinic. Of renown among musicians, writers and intellectuals. He spent his infancy among the resident patients, nurses and a variety of tutors away. From the structured discipline of schooling.

Blanche knew, nevertheless, obstacles to his vocational pursuits. His training level in painting was limited. Having only received some lessons from Henri Gervex, a society painter. Moreover, it was hard at a time when post-impressionists were roller coasting the art world to make a. Name for oneself without embracing the new, and by then popular, current without the zeal of a convert as. Most of his contemporary colleagues did.

Still, polite society was increasingly adopting the role of portrait. Additionally
Painting as a tool of prestige and recognition, beyond the confined use artists and patrons made of it in the previous centuries. Anybody with a reputation had to have a portrait painted. Also
John Singer Sargent was one of his most popular practitioners and although he snobbishly defined a. Portrait as “a painting where there is always something not quite right about the mouth”, he knew as well as Blanche, who happened to be his. Friend, the social impact of what they were doing.

His gifts separated him from the voguish society painter. It was no coincidence that he spent long afternoons with Renoir at the age of eighteen and bought much of. Manet’s work. In his portraits he uses a subtle brushstroke and evokes a confident theatrical aura, in harmony with what he perceived of the personality of the sitter. His mastery of the brush was only part of his recognized talents: he. Wrote extensively chronicling the artwork of other colleagues for several magazines and journals and. Publishing books on art history.

A professed Anglophile, his home near Dieppe welcomed artists, painters and writers from both sides of the Channel. The list of sitters would cover the intellectual and cultural life of both. France and England in the years of the Belle Époque: Marcel Proust, Sergei Diaghilev, Jean Cocteau, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, James McNeil Whistler and. Roger Fry were just a few of those he succeeded in making his friends and his objects of study.

Proust once remarked of his friend. The danger for Blanche was that, albeit elegant and spiritual, he dissipated his life in mondaine pursuits”. This observation seems prophetic as Blanche was to remain a semi-forgotten figure in the pantheon of 20 century French painting. A gilded life is not exempt from burdens.

RNO BREKER AND THE SEAL OF DENIAL

Of all questions confronting the art generated during the Third Reich, one takes on special resonance: is there aesthetic value beyond its ideological function?

The issue gets even more entangled when the emotions of recent history still pulsate like cinders of a dying fire. Take the case of the German Arno Breker, a vocational sculptor lured like many of his generation by the rich art scene in Paris after the Great War. There, he befriended Picasso, Isamu Noguchi and Maurice de Vlaminck, all representative of what the Nazis called “degenerate art”. It is ironically a Jew, Max Liebermann, who convinced him to return to Germany where he was appointed at the age of 37, Director of the Akademie der Künste. He had already entered art competitions sponsored by the National Socialist regime back in 1933. His involvement with the regime went from seduction to full -blown embrace.

Hitler singled him out as one of his favorite artists, commissioning him to decorate monumental public works and appointing him official state sculptor. The Führer had a double interest in shaping the aesthetics of the regime: as a frustrated artist and as a keen decoder of the force of art in the collective subconscious. He singled out artists whose production was forceful and energetic. Arno Breker, Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer came to represent the trinity of the Third Reich art value, carrying meaning and feeding the imagination of the masses with all the choreography of the triumph of the race and the force of destiny.

Oddly enough, post-war Germany and the U.S. Intelligence agents were lenient with them. Of all three, Breker was never condemned and during the de-nazification period, he managed to be considered as a category four individual, in other words, just a fellow traveler. This treatment helped him re-invent his past as that of a victim of the regime and therefore free of guilt. He was able to resume his career and receive commissions from emerging German corporations and rich individuals. He always considered himself a genius and hoped that his art would transcend politicization. As Goethe wrote in 1832, “ to the extent an artist would be politically effective, he must commit himself to a party, and as soon as he does that, he is lost as an artist”. Breker might never have read those prophetic words of his compatriot and if he did, his cynicism prevented him from gaining enough self-knowledge to understand them

A RUSSIAN FOR ALL SEASONS

I am unsure of the ranking of a singular artist such as. Pavel Tchelitchew in the contemporary art world, where the idea of art as commodity is. Becoming the standard of value. Story  As artists are examined more and more like crude balance sheets, one is hard put to separate. The experience of a work of art from the brand value of its maker. In 1942, the. New York museum of Modern Art exhibited a. Full retrospective of Tchelitchew work. In 1987, most of his work disappeared from the museum’s walls.

Moving in and out of styles may be the key to understanding. Part of his fluctuating reputation. Born in Russia in 1898, he and his family were soon on the move following the. Bolshevik Revolution, first to Kiev and then on to Berlin where he did not abandon his initial abstract and constructivist techniques. Two years after his Berlin experience, he arrived in Paris. His regular migratory habits were reflected in his restless quest, his ceaseless experimentation. Luckily. Gertrude Stein, always on the look out for new talent, liked his work. The story goes that after a visit paid to his studio and not. Finding anyone there, she forced the entry, made a selection of some canvasses that she took to her rue de. Fleurus apartment and hung them on the spot where some of her Picassos were till then displayed.

There were ruptures not only of style but of mood. He seemed to harbor more than one disposition and although suave and gentle of. Appearance, he was often perceived as dark and malicious. Harold Acton, whom he met and frequented in Paris wrote, “Strindberg was said to have been possessed by a dark demon but. Tchelitchew] must have been possessed by several”. This did not keep him from building lasting ties with another exceptional woman, the English poetess Edith Sitwell, yet another complex individual but one who seemed to channel her own art in a less tormented way in spite of her unrequited love for Pavel.

His youthful dabbling with constructivism and later cubism gave way to a more figurative. Work, inspired partly by classical art and symbolism. Together with. Christian Bérard and his compatriots, Eugene and Leonid Berman, he founded the groups of the “neo-romantics. More than a new painting movement, it was a reunion of friends having worked on stage and costume design.

It was through his move to. New York in 1934 when his inspiration took a different turn. Gone was that touch of decorative art that suffused his portraits and landscapes. He plunged into a surrealist universe where the size of the canvasses matches its disquieting content: freaks, nightmarish landscapes and children morphing into vegetables. Oddly his popularity in America was due to this series of paintings. In 1942, during his retrospective at the MOMA, the Americans had just entered the war. Pavel may have touched a raw nerve of forthcoming trouble.

THE MOST AMIABLE OF SOULS

There are certain artists whose untimely death invests them with a. Halo of mystique. Others, in spite of a life cut short by war or other. Unfortunate accident, no matter what their merits, end up in a sort of limbo. Almost awaiting the liturgical signal that would free them from that state.

Why doesn’t Rex Whistler rank among the most significant painters of the 20th century British school? In our internet-driven era. Wikipedia does not even include him in its entry of. List of British painters for the first half of the past century. Was it that his exceptional talent seemed effortless in most circumstances. Or was it that he never embraced a specific narrative in his art?

From an early age he was surrounded by an aura of “golden boy”, in spite of his modest origins. Henry Tonks the fierce and critical director of the. Slade School of Art, which Whistler attended, wrote of him: .I have never met anyone like him. He amuses me because he has a certain gift of humor…directly he is launched, he will be an amazing success”. Whistler was 16 at the time.

The prophecy did only take six years to be fulfilled. At 22, he was commissioned by the Tate. Gallery to paint a mural for their restaurant: “The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats”, an.E extravagant and amusing title that heralded the mood of lightness and dazzling visuals that lasted for more than a decade. His friendship with. Stephen Tennant introduced him to a sophisticated and elitist circle of friends where his own self-effacing style made him an overnight success. He was a close friend of. Cecil Beaton and through him, he embraced that pastoral and carefree existence of parties, charades and “the worst-is-over”. Attitude that characterized much of the artistic endeavors between the wars.

Prolific and versatile, expressing his talents through painting, theatre sets, graphic design, murals and book covers, there was barely any medium that could resist him. “So great was his facility that other people might well labour for months to achieve the results he flicked off expertly in a few twists of his pen”, wrote Beaton about this gifted and loving individual.

At 39, war came to put an end to his life and to leave us puzzling about his status in the art world. His work was becoming increasingly somber of late. He was being. Engulfed by the incoming tide of gloom but perhaps not enough to offer a body of work in contrast to the untroubled.production of the early years. He may well lack that touch of anguish that would lift him. Off from that uncertain status. With or without the dark side, he deserves a much larger recognition.

THE TIES THAT BIND

A young woman acrobat in the Montmartre of the 1870s, could have easily been brought to life by Zola in one of his critical fictions. Nonetheless, Marie-Clémentine really existed. Born to a single mother, this precocious girl was forced to abandon the circus life after a fall. Her handsome looks opened doors for modeling in the artistic and carefree environment of Paris and she was soon one of the favorite sitters of Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and many others.

Marie-Clémentine became Maria and earned a reputation as a reliable model. But the reputation she was after was of a higher order: she wanted to become a painter.During her coy sessions with the artists, she watched, asked and learned. As her popularity grew, her name changed yet again and Toulouse-Lautrec began calling her Suzanne. It was as if with each name a new chapter opened in her life. By this time, she took to drawing with fierce intensity, sketching with a sure hand female bodies. By the age of eighteen she gave birth to a son. A Spanish artist, Miguel Utrillo was willing to give the child his name. He may have gifted it in a flight of inebriated enthusiasm or from the true generosity of his heart, or even perhaps form his own biological seed. Suzanne never disclosed the paternity.

Her lifestyle did not adjust much to maternity. Increasingly confident in her work output and her feminine success, she continued to bewitch men. Erik Satie was strongly infatuated with her. She ended up marrying one of his friends, the banker Paul Moussis, a bourgeois moneyman who, for a while, tamed her bohemian spirit . Fully committed to her painting, but restless in having to deal with her son’s early alcoholism and bored by the conventions of her lifestyle, she took lover after lover. By 1909 after fourteen years of unfaithful marriage she began an affair with.  André Utter, an aspiring painter, friend of her son Maurice who often posed as a model himself. He was more than 20 years her junior. The roles are strangely reversed. the female painter chooses a younger male to serve her as a sitter although she was ironically more interested in the female figure. Utter entered her life not just as a lover but as an emotional support to Maurice. This unusual threesome was to last for twenty years.

Both Utrillo and Valadon’s art was rather indifferent, even taboo, to modern art historians and curators. She was considered mediocre, undistinguished and lacking formal training. Utrillo was the epitome of bourgeois taste, a representative of what the market perceived as bohemianism. His art is now being rescued from the clutches of bourgeois taste, whilst his mother’s aesthetic influence dims into oblivion. Their lives in contrast to oscillating tastes, are icons of modernist inspiration, drivers of rupture and defiant iconoclasts.