Secrets of the absinthe drinker: the life and art of Marcellin Desboutin

November 26, 2013, 4:27 am

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You might not recognize the name of Marcellin Desboutin, but you would know him if you saw him in the street. His is the bearded, dishevelled face staring despairingly out at you from a table in the artists' café La Nouvelle Athènes in the painting L'Absinthe (Dans un Café) by Edgar Degas. The women sitting next to him is the actress Ellen André; like the rest of the Impressionists, Degas preferred to use members of his immediate social circle rather than paid models. Once you have committed Desboutin's face to memory, you will chance upon it again and again in works by Degas and other artists, including Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Falguière; often he is smoking a pipe. His tramp-like appearance made him the ideal sitter if you wanted to paint a down-and-out old drunk.

Marcellin Desboutin, Desboutin dit à la bavette

(aslo known as Desboutin tenant sa pipe de la main gauche, or as L'auteur fumant, à mi-corps)

Drypoint, 1897

Ref: Clément Janin 67

Actually, Marcellin Gilbert Desboutin came from a well-off, cultured background. He was born in Cérilly in 1823. His mother was an aristocrat, and Marcellin was a wealthy young man whose dabblings in literature and art were enthusiastic hobbies rather than career choices. He bought himself a grand villa outside Florence, where he lived from 1854, dealing in old master paintings, gambling, and generally squandering his fortune. During this time, Desboutin maintained contacts with the Paris art world, and was particularly close to Degas. In Florence he met and encouraged the Italian Impressionist Giuseppe de Nittis, with whom he remained on close terms; there exists a drypoint portrait of Degas about which experts remain divided as to whether it is by Desboutin or de Nittis.

Marcellin Desboutin, Femme au toutou, ou au chien

Drypoint, c. 1878

Ref: Clément-Janin 101

Marcellin Desboutin returned to Paris in 1873, at the age of 50, having ruined himself with unwise investments. Here he returned seriously to art, both painting and printmaking. Desboutin specialized in portrait drypoints, often of fellow artists such as his friends Degas, Renoir, Manet, Morisot, Raffaëlli, Goeneutte and Guérard, but also of authors such as Dumas fils, Zola, and Verlaine. Desboutin's technique was to quickly sketch a portrait on copper with a drypoint needle, to catch his subject in as relaxed and lifelike a pose as possible.

Marcellin Desboutin, Norbert Goeneutte

Drypoint, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 111

Marcellin Desboutin, Renoir, les jambes croisées

Drypoint, 1877

Ref: Clément-Janin 208

Marcellin Desboutin, Willette, en Pierrot

Drypoint, 1896

Ref: Clément-Janin 241

One of Desboutin's portraits of artists, that of Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, uses a very interesting mixed technique, invented by Félicien Rops and used infrequently by artists such as Louis Legrand and Desboutin. Based on a painting by Desboutin now in the Musée d'Amiens, this print involved making a héliogravure plate after a painting (as in this case) or an etching that needed to be reduced in size (as in the case of Legrand's La parole divine, my only other example of this process); the artist then worked on top of the heliogravure with a drypoint needle, thus producing a strange hybrid between a reproduction and an original print. The composition in the background is part of Puvis's Bois sacré.

Marcellin Desboutin, Puvis de Chavannes, portrait et composition

Drypoint on héliogravure

Ref: Clément Janin 204

Another artist portrait, that of the etcher Jules Jacquemart, strikes me as possibly originating in a photograph, though Jacquemart was still alive when it was made, so I may be wrong - certainly neither the publisher, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, nor the cataloguer, Clément-Janin, suggest this to be the case.

Marcellin Desboutin, Jules Jacquemart

Drypoint, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 141

It's interesting to compare the vivacity of Desboutin's portraits from life, such as those of Goeneutte and Renoir, with the eight drypoint portraits of singers and dancers for the anonymous work L'Opéra, Eaux-fortes et Quatrains in 1876 (the author was Henry Cohen). Seven of these are drawn after photographs rather than from life, and although they have great charm, they are much stiffer and more conventional than the free depictions of his friends; the exception is the portrait of Léontine Beaugrand. On all eight the printer, Vve Cadart, has misspelled the artist's name as Desboutins.

Marcellin Desboutin, Charles-Amable Bataille

(bass-baritone 1822-1872)

Drypoint after a photograph by Pierre Petit, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 186

Marcellin Desboutin, Mlle Baux
(soprano, dates unknown)

Drypoint after a photograph by Pierre Petit, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 187

Marcellin Desboutin, Léontine Beaugrand, danseuse

(ballerina, 1842-1925)

Drypoint from life, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 188

Marcellin Desboutin, Rosine Bloch

(mezzo-soprano, 1844-1891)

Drypoint after a photograph by Pierre Petit, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 189

Marcellin Desboutin, Auguste-Acanthe Boudouresque

(bass, 1835-1905)

Drypoint after a photograph by Pierre Petit, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 190

Marcellin Desboutin, Eugène-Charles Caron

(baritone 1834-1903)

Drypoint after a photograph by Pierre Petit, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 191

Marcellin Desboutin, Pedro Gailhard

(bass, and future director of the Opéra, 1848-1918)

Drypoint after a photograph by Pierre Petit, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 192

Marcellin Desboutin, Rita Sangalli, danseuse

(ballerina, 1850-1909)

Drypoint after a photograph by Luckhardt, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 193

Despite his late start, Desboutin achieved some fame and success as an artist in the Bohemian circle of Manet and Degas; he exhibited six works at the Second Impressionist Exhibition. The catalogue of his works in Clément-Janin's La Curieuse Vie de Marcellin Desboutin lists 246 original prints and 30 "gravures de réproduction" after artists such as Israëls, Fragonard, and Rembrandt; there's also an impressive list of paintings, showing Desboutin to have been hard at work at his art from 1873 to his death.

Marcellin Desboutin, Les travailleurs de la mer (also known as Les amarreurs)

Drypoint after a painting by Jozef Israëls, 1889

Ref: Clément-Janin 1 (gravures de réproduction)

From 1880 Desboutin lived mostly in Nice, where he died in 1901.

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Hermann Struck: a German-Jewish etcher

November 29, 2013, 9:07 am

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I've just discovered that the house of Hermann Struck in Haifa has this October been turned into the Hermann Struck Museum, with an opening exhibition of his etchings. I'm thrilled to think this brilliant and influential etcher is at last getting his due. So I thought I would share the Hermann Struck etchings I have. Struck was born in Berlin in 1876. His birth name was Chaim Aaron ben David, and his Jewish heritage is central to his work - most of the original works below have Hebrew inscriptions or Stars of David incised in the plate in drypoint. An early Zionist, Hermann Struck settled in Palestine, in what is now Haifa, Israel, in December 1922. All of my works date from before this time (although I give the date of his portrait of Chagall as 1923, that is the date of publication, and presumably the actual work was made in or around 1922). Evidently Struck had an active life as artist, mentor, and teacher in Israel, but I don't have any direct evidence of this to show.

Hermann Struck, Porträt eines alten Mannes

Etching, 1901

Hermann Struck, Canal Grande

Etching, 1903

Hermann Struck, Bildnis R.B.

Etching, 1905

Does anyone know who R.B. was?

Hermann Struck, Alte Jude aus Jaffa

Etching, 1905

The sitter is Struck's father

(I believe probably the same subject as Porträt eines alten Mannes)

Hermann Struck, Marc Chagall

Etching, published 1923

(probably 1922)

Hermann Struck studied at the Berlin Academy, and learned etching under Hans Meyer. Like many other accomplished etchers, he etched plates after the work of others as well as his own originals.

Hermann Struck after Olof Jernberg, Zur Erntezeit

Etching, 1901

Hermann Struck after Max Liebermann, Bildnis des Baron Berger

Etching, 1906

Hermann Struck died in Haifa in 1944. In his lifetime Hermann Struck was highly respected as an etcher, and taught the craft to other artists, including Marc Chagall, Max Liebermann, and Lovis Corinth. His important book on the art of etching Die kunst des radierens went through several editions, each illustrated with original prints.

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Tears of rage, tears of grief: Käthe Kollwitz and her circle

December 5, 2013, 8:24 am

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Käthe Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn-Becker are the two most famous female artists in early twentieth-century Germany, but they were by no means alone: there are plenty of interesting women working alongside them. Gabriele Münter, Jacoba van Heemskerck, and Marianne von Werefkin are just three of the more well-known names. As I've recently acquired two etchings by Kollwitz, I thought I'd post these alongside some work by other female artists of the period with less of a public profile.

Käthe Kollwitz was born Käthe Schmidt in Königsberg in 1867. She made her initial studies at an art school for women in Berlin, where her teacher was Karl Stauffer-Bern; she then went to the Women's Art School in Munich. From 1891 she lived and worked in Berlin, where her husband Karl was a doctor. Kollwitz is widely recognised as one of the most important etchers of her day. Her art expresses a profound sympathy with the lives of the poor, as in her early masterworks for the series The Revolt of the Weavers.

Käthe Kollwitz, Der Sturm (The Riot)

Etching for The Revolt of the Weavers, 1897

Ref: Klipstein 33

Two further themes in the work of Käthe Kollwitz are her loathing of war and the suffering it brings (she herself lost both of her sons to the great conflicts of the twentieth century), and her profound self-questioning, in a sequence of some 50 self-portraits. I can't think of any artist other than Rembrandt who has examined themselves with such unflinching honesty as Käthe Kollwitz. The sense of anguish in the self-portrait below is almost tangible.

Käthe Kollwitz, Selbstbildnis, mit der Hand an der Stirn (Self-portrait, hand at the forehead)

Etching, 1910

Ref: Klistein 106 iib

Clara Siewert, who was born in 1862, was a close friend of Käthe Kollwitz, with whom she studied under Karl Stauffer-Bern. When Clara Siewert moved to Berlin in 1900 she lived in the same house as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein; she also good friends with Max Slevogt and Lovis Corinth. Clara Siewert was born in Budda, East Prussia, and died in Berlin.

Clara Siewert, Junges Mädchen (Young Girl)

Lithograph, 1908

Although (as with Kollwitz) much of her work was destroyed in WWII when her studio was hit by a bomb, the art of Clara Siewert is being rediscovered today, amid new interest in the work of women artists. There was a retrospective exhibition with catalogue in 2008: "Clara Siewert - zwischen Traum und Wirklichkeit" in the Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, Regensburg. Like Käthe Kollwitz, Clara Siewert died in 1945, having lived through two cataclysmic world wars and endured the miseries of the Third Reich.

Sella Hasse, Kohlenlöschen im Schnee (Unloading Coal in the Snow)

Etching, 1913

The artist Sella Hasse was born in Bitterfeld in 1878, and died in Berlin in 1863. She studied under Walter Leistikow, Franz Skarbina, and Lovis Corinth. Sella Hasse was a socially-committed artist, who became a close friend of Käthe Kollwitz. Her work was declared "degenerate" by the Nazis. There is a collection of her paintings and watercolours in the Wismar Museum.

Erna Frank, Rue Berger in Paris

Lithograph, 1913

The etcher, lithographer and pastellist Erna Frank was born in Cologne in 1881. She studied under Paul Baum, and lived and worked in Berlin. In 1914 Erna Frank won the bronze medal at the international graphics exhibition the Bugra Leipzig. Erna Frank's etchings were published by Hermann Abell, Paul Cassirer, and J. B. Neumann, and in the Leipzig art revue Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst. The cityscape was her favored subject. Erna Frank died in 1931

Marie Gey-Heinze, Frühling (Spring)

Etching with aquatint, 1906

Despite the title of this blog post, I can't be sure that my next two subjects knew Käthe Kollwitz personally, but they would certainly have been aware of her art, as they were working at the same time, and contributing to the same art revues - so in the circle of influence, at least. The painter and printmaker Marie Caroline Gey-Heinze was born in Cologne in 1881. Born Marie Caroline Gey, she studied under Otto Fischer at the Dresden Academy. She married the Leipzig physician Paul Heinze and quickly made a reputation for herself under the name Marie Gey-Heinze with pastels and also with etchings such as Spring and Guinea-pigs (Meerschweinsen) published by Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst.

Marie Gey-Heinze, Meerschweinchen (Guinea-pigs)

Etching, 1908

Sadly, Marie Gey-Heinze's promising career was to come to an end when she shot herself at the age of 26, in her home in Oetzsch. There is a memorial Marie Gey Fountain in Dresden, designed by George Wrba.

Marie Stein, Porträtstudie (Portrait Study)

Etching, 1899

The etcher Marie Stein (Marie Stein-Ranke) was born in Oldenburg in 1873, into a Jewish family. Unable because she was a woman to study at the Düsseldorf Academy, she chose to study in the ateliers of Walter Petersen, Friedrich Fehr, and Paul Nauen. From 1896-1898 she lived and worked in Paris, before returning to Düsseldorf and becoming a successful society portraitist. Her closest artistic friend was the landscapist Georg Müller. In 1904 Marie Stein was awarded third prize in the annual competition of the revue Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst, judged by Klinger, Liebermann, Köpping, Tschudi, Lehrs, and Graul.

Marie Stein, Bildnis (Portrait)

Etching, 1905

In 1906 Marie Stein married the eminent Egyptologist Hermann Ranke. Their life together was happy but blighted by the untimely deaths of their three children, and persecution by the Nazis because of Marie Stein's Jewish background. The bulk of her artist activity appears to date from before her marriage. Marie Stein-Ranke died in Nussloch near Heidelberg in 1964.

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Edouard Chimot and the Lost Girls of Montmartre

January 17, 2014, 3:40 am

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It’s a while since I posted about the master of the Art Deco nude, Édouard Chimot. Of course if Chimot were simply a depictor of the nude, there wouldn’t be much to say about him—boudoir pictures are boudoir pictures, and that’s it. But Chimot is a much more complex artist than that—one in whom the twin themes of Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death, are inextricably intertwined.

Édouard Chimot, Le café-concert maudit

Colour etching with aquatint for La montée aux enfers, 1920

Of course Love sells better than Death, so sensuous nudes inevitably predominate in Édouard Chimot’s work. But his obsession with prostitutes, drug addicts, and good girls gone bad, means that the spectre of death and destitution hovers behind and around Chimot’s nudes, turning them from decorative erotica into perverse memento mori. They are women “soumises à leurs passions mortelles et délicieuses”, as the critic André Warnod put it.

Édouard Chimot, La Mort

Etching with aquatint for L'enfer, 1921

In my previous post, The fast rise and long slow fall of Édouard Chimot, I mentioned that Chimot had apparently been commissioned in 1903 as architect of the Villa Lysis in Capri, for the dissolute Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen. It seems from the current Wikipedia entry on the Villa Lysis that this is not quite the case, based on a study of Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen’s correspondence with Chimot; Chimot’s role was more likely that of interior decorator. In a comment on my earlier post, Martin Stone notes that “he was also the art director of Fersen's review Akedemos (1909-1910).” The inscription above the door of the Villa Lysis, AMORI ET DOLORI SACRUM, certainly shows that Édouard Chimont and Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen were kindred spirits, for the same words could also be inscribed above Chimot’s work: A Shrine to Love and Sorrow.

Édouard Chimot, L'enfer

Etching with aquatint for L'enfer, 1921

When speaking of the art of Édouard Chimot in the context of this post, I am speaking only of the work created before the Wall Street Crash. Anything published after 1931 (allowing for projects already in the pipeline to emerge) is the work of a lesser, lighter artist. The intensity and complexity of Chimot’s work in the 1920s is completely missing.

Édouard Chimot, Ce sont les autres qui meurent

Etching with aquatint for L'enfer, 1921

All the images in this post are etchings with aquatint published between 1919 and 1922, the years when Chimot exploded onto the Paris art scene. These established him as a central figure in the world of printmaking and fine press publishing. He was the artistic director of the publications of both La Roseraie (the atelier and publishing house of Roger Lacourière) and of Les Éditions d’Art Devambez. In the latter role, especially, Chimot was crucial to the artistic development of many important artists of the twenties.

Édouard Chimot, Les Après-Midi de Montmartre

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

Édouard Chimot, Le rouge et le noir

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

The etchings that made Chimot’s name, published in 1919 as Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, are precious evidence of Chimot’s pre-war work. They were made in 1913, but publication was delayed by the Great War. You can see that the hairstyles and clothes (when worn) are quite different from the 1920s etchings. The difference in style is not huge, but in these early etchings one can still see the influence of Symbolists such as Félicien Rops, Louis Legrand, Armand Rassenfosse, and Henri Thomas. Édouard Chimot was to take the aesthetic of these artists into the twenties, and blend it seamlessly with the glittering curves of Art Deco.

Édouard Chimot, Moulin Rouge

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

Édouard Chimot, La fille et sa mère

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

The Après-Midi de Montmartre etchings were printed on a hand press by Eugène Delâtre, in an edition of 170 copies. I love the connection they make right back from the post-war world into the dying days of the Belle Époque.

Édouard Chimot, Opium

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

Édouard Chimot, Épave

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

After the war, Édouard Chimot established himself in an atelier in the rue Amphère in Montmartre. The atmosphere there is well described by Chimot’s close friend, the poet Maurice Magre, in Magre’s introduction to Chimot’s edition of Jean de Tinan’s La Petite Jeanne pâle. Magre writes, “L’atelier de Chimot est un coin de Paris où Montmartre d’aujourd’hui se condence à certaines heures, se cristallise, donne tout son comique, toute sa couleur et parfois toute sa peine. C’est toujours la pensée d’un individu qui crée et qui groupe. C’est la pensée de Chimot, son amour pour cette forme de l’existence parisienne qui a créé le miroir vivant, aux facettes varies, qui donne en tournant ces images qui ne sont jamais banales et qui toutes sont representatives.”

Édouard Chimot, Soirs d'opium

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Édouard Chimot, Est-ce celle que j'aime

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Édouard Chimot, Dans la fumée bleue

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Chimot’s “living mirror” of Bohemian life in Paris is never more truly reflective than in his etchings for Maurice Magre’s 1921 collection of poems, Les soirs d’opium. These colour etchings with aquatint were, like the similar etchings for Magre’s La montée aux enfers a year earlier, printed by Eugène Delâtre with Chimot’s assistance. Édouard Chimot was not by nature a colourist, and the wonderfully subtle tonalities of the etchings for both these projects are probably attributable to Delâtre, a master printer of colour etchings à la poupée. Certainly Chimot never achieved any colour effects like this again.

Édouard Chimot, Volupté

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Édouard Chimot, Rosaire de souvenirs

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Édouard Chimot, À une amie

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Les soirs d’opium was published in an edition of 513 copies by L’Édition (Georges Briffaut); the etchings are printed on wove paper with the watermarks MBM and J. Perrigo.

Édouard Chimot, La petite Jeanne pâle

Colour etching with aquatint for La Petite Jeanne pâle, 1922

Édouard Chimot, Noctambulisme

Etching with aquatint for La Petite Jeanne pâle, 1922

Édouard Chimot, Quatre heures du matin

Etching with aquatint for La Petite Jeanne pâle, 1922

La Petite Jeanne pâle, already mentioned above, was published in 1922 by Éditions Léo Delteil in an edition of 393 copies. The etchings were not printed by Delâtre, but at La Roseraie by Philippe Molinié and Eugène Monnard under the direction of the artist.

Édouard Chimot, Sa mince visage parmi l'ébouriffment des cheveux de soie frisée

Etching with aquatint for La Petite Jeanne pâle, 1922

Édouard Chimot, Les rideaux d'arbres dépouillés rétrécissent doucement l'horizon

Etching with aquatint for La Petite Jeanne pâle, 1922

Édouard Chimot only spent a very few years at peak velocity. His art is at its best in these few years after the Great War. After about 1922, Chimot’s work becomes slowly more facile and crowd-pleasing. He remains a really interesting artist right through the 1920s, with flashes of real brilliance, especially in etchings close to his heart, such as those for Maurice Magre’s Les belles de nuit in 1927. But if you are looking for the purest of the impure, look no further than the art of Édouard Chimot, 1919-1922.

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Original etchings by American Artists

February 19, 2014, 9:33 am

≫ Next: Underexposed: Female Artists and the Medium of Print

≪ Previous: Edouard Chimot and the Lost Girls of Montmartre

I’ve posted before about Sylvester Rosa Koehler and his role as godfather of the American Etching Revival – the revival that consolidated (in the late 1870s and 1880s) around the New York Etching Club. Now I have a copy of one of his rarest and most sought-after publications, Original Etchings by American Artists, published in 1883 by Cassell and Company. There is no indication that I can see of any limitation, but the print-run must have been quite small, both because the book is so rare now and because it is very large and would have inevitably have been extremely expensive when issued. I say book, but my copy has completely disintegrated, mostly through time, and also because 4 of the 20 original etchings have been previously removed. Luckily, the remaining etchings are all in very good condition, and I also have all of Koehler’s informative if sometimes rather waffly text. The four missing plates are The Inner Harbor, Gloucester by Stephen Parrish; The Ponte Vecchio by Joseph Pennell; A Cloudy Day in Venice by Samuel Colman; and A Tower of Cortes by Thomas Moran. Fortunately the rest of the Moran clan have been left for me, so I have a highly atmospheric Long Island landscape by Thomas’s wife Mary Nimmo Moran (with a wincingly twee title, taken from a Scottish ballad), and a true masterpiece by his brother Peter, Harvest at San Juan, New Mexico.

Mary Nimmo Moran, "'Tween the Gloamin' and the Mirk, When the Kye Come Hame"

Etching, 1883

Henry Farrer, Winter Evening

Etching, 1883

John Austin Sands Monks, Twilight

Etching, 1883

Of the three twilight scenes above, that of Mary Nimmo Moran is my favourite. Despite the Scottish title, the scene is on Long Island, where Thomas and Mary Nimmo Moran habitually spent their summers.

Kruseman van Elten, The Deserted Mill

Etching, 1883

R. Swain Gifford, The Mouth of the Apponigansett

Etching, 1883

James D. Smillie, At Marblehead Neck

(also known as A Bit at Marblehead Neck)

Etching, 1883

James Craig Nicoll, The Smugglers' Landing Place

Etching, 1883

George H. Smillie, An Old New England Orchard

Etching, 1883

J. Foxcroft Cole, The Three Cows

Etching, 1883

Original Etchings by American Artists shows a snapshot of American printmaking at a crucial time; all of the etchings were made especially for this work, and many are dated 1883 in the plate. The artistic and technical skill on display is very impressive, even if Koehler’s insistence that each etching is a masterpiece needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. Impressionism hasn’t yet made any impact, and the key influence on the American landscapes, which predominate, is the plein-air Barbizon School. There are a couple of whimsical subjects: Church’s take on an Aesop fable and Gaugengigl’s faux-Meissonier fiddler. There are also four European scenes, one in Florence and one in Venice that have been removed, plus scenes in London and the Hague by Platt and de Haas. Of these, Platt's Whistler-esque scene of barges on the Thames at Woolwich seems to me particularly noteworthy.

Frederick Stuart Church, The Lion in Love

Etching, 1883

Ignaz Marcel Gaugengigl, And Drive Dull Care Away

Etching, 1883

Charles Adams Platt, Canal Boats on the Thames

Etching, 1883

Mauritz Frederick Hendrik de Haas, Fishing Boats on the Beach at Scheveningen

Etching, 1883

There are also three plates of particular interest for American social life and culture rather than landscape. Frederick Dielman’s The Mora Players, shows Italian immigrant children playing the ancient finger-counting game of mora or morra, in which the winner is the one who correctly guesses the total number of fingers simultaneously displayed by the two players. Koehler writes, “Italian bootblacks playing ‘mora,’ and yet a thoroughly American scene, enacted on a New York sidewalk!”

Frederick Dielman, The Mora Players

Etching, 1883

Thomas Waterson Wood, His Own Doctor

Etching, 1883

Thomas Waterson Wood’s His Own Doctor shows “an exhorter in a Methodist church and a ‘professor’ of white-washing” self-medicating against a fever. Wood’s African-American scenes show him to have had a keen sympathy with his subjects. However, to me his portrait of an infirm elderly African-American overplays the comic element. The hint of caricature detracts from the sharp observation of details such as the quilt robe.

Peter Moran Harvest at San Juan, New Mexico

(also known as Threshing Grain at San Juan Pueblo, New Mexico Territory)

Etching, 1883

Peter Moran’s Harvest at San Juan is to me an incredibly beautiful, important, and moving work. Peter Moran was one of the first artists to come to terms with the American Southwest, and in this etching he responds with grace and respect to the ancient cultures of the Pueblos. There is nothing here of the comedy to be found in Thomas Waterman Wood’s His Own Doctor. Nor is there any false romanticism. Sentimentality and guilt have no place in this etching, which focuses completely on the spiritual weight of the here and now. The centripetal force of this composition intrigues and delights me. Sylvester Rosa Kohler explains the scene thus: “The Indians use horses instead of oxen to thresh their wheat, and they are just driving them into the threshing circle indicated by the upright poles. The ground occupied by the horses is the cleaning floor, the raised ground which forms part of a circle in the foreground, is the earth banked up in levelling the floor, and the refuse of several years threshing.” Peter Moran seems to have instinctually understood that he was observing something with more meaning than a simple harvest, for he invests the scene with a thrilling sense of significance. The traditional method of threshing depicted seems to have been discontinued from 1920, replaced by the use of a threshing machine.

The setting for Harvest at San Juan is the New Mexican Pueblo now officially known by its Tewa name of Ohkay Owingeh (“place of the strong people”). This was the birthplace of the great 17th-century Pueblo spiritual and political leader Po’pay (or Popé), who briefly united the Pueblos against Spanish rule. I have, quite separately from my print collecting and dealing, a strong interest in Native American culture, and Peter Moran’s etching speaks eloquently to me—as eloquently as the Tewa “Song of the Sky Loom”, as translated by Herbert Joseph Spinden in his Songs of the Tewa:

Oh our Mother the Earth, oh our Father the Sky,
Your children are we, and with tired backs
We bring you the gifts that you love.
Then weave for us a garment of brightness;
May the warp be the white light of morning,
May the weft be the red light of evening,
May the fringes be the falling rain,
May the border be the standing rainbow.
Thus weave for us a garment of brightness
That we may walk fittingly where birds sing,
That we may walk fittingly where grass is green,
Oh our Mother the Earth, oh our Father the Sky!

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Underexposed: Female Artists and the Medium of Print

April 24, 2014, 3:51 am

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Underexposed: Female Artists and the Medium of Print is an exhibition on a subject close to my heart, the importance of female printmakers, and the relative neglect their art still receives. Regular readers of this blog will remember my posts on artists such as Angèle Delasalle, Ghislaine de Menten de Horne, Käthe Kollwitz, Laura Malclès-Masereel, Lill Tschudi, Norbertine Bresslern-Roth, Terry Haass, Tirzah Garwood (Ravilious), and others. Underexposed will run from 16 May to 19 June at Studio 3 Gallery, University of Kent School of Arts, Canterbury, with an associated programme of free lectures. It has been curated by Frances Chiverton and Lynne Dickens, and you can find out more about it here. I would reproduce the beautiful poster for the show, but I can't work out how to do so. Among the many artists included are Alison Wilding, Anne Desmet, Barbara Hepworth, Berthe Morisot (about whom I have a post-in-the-making), Bridget Riley, Cornelia Parker, Elisabeth Frink, Leonora Carrington, Louise Bourgeois, Paula Rego, Rose Hilton, Sandra Blow, Sarah Lucas, Sonia Delaunay, and Tracey Emin.

Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012), La Marée 5

Etching with aquatint, 1970

Dorothea Tanning, Untitled (En chair et en or)

Lithograph, 1975

Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), Untitled (Fresh Air School)

Lithograph, 1972

Gwen Raverat (1885-1957), The River Darent

Wood engraving, 1931

Gwen Raverat, The River Ver

Wood engraving, 1931

I have just waved goodbye to the five prints I am lending to this exciting show. They show a very varied range of female art, from Dorothea Tanning's transgressively sexualised La Marée and Untitled (En chair et en or) to Gwen Raverat's idyllic views of the English rivers of the Darent (in Kent) and the Ver (in Hertfordshire), via Joan Mitchell's cool and collected spatial abstraction for Fresh Air School. I am very pleased that these prints will take their place on the walls of Studio 3 alongside such varied and interesting company. For anyone who can get there, there will be a lecture on Gwen Raverat and her wood engravings on Saturday 31 May from 14.00 to 16.00, given by her grandson William Pryor. Other lectures include Gill Saunders, Senior Curator of Prints at the V&A, on women printmakers, Paul Coldwell on the studio of Paula Rego, and Anita Klein on beauty in art.

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Tavik Frantisek Simon: Letters Home

May 7, 2014, 2:45 am

≫ Next: Roger Vieillard: The Architecture of Time

≪ Previous: Underexposed: Female Artists and the Medium of Print

For those who remember my earlier post about the Czech artist Tavik František Šimon, I thought I would flag up a new book of interest, the first English translation of his Letters from a Voyage Around the World. This lively book was first published in Czech in 1928 but has been essentially unobtainable since. The translation is by David Pearson, with an introduction by the artist's grandson Michal Simon. I have an etching to share of a scene from Tavik Frantisek Simon's adventurous world trip, depicting beggars in Shanghai; it was published by the art revue Byblis in 1928.

Tavik Frantisek Simon, Au quartier Chinois (Chinese beggars, Shanghai)

Etching, 1928

Ref: Novak 480

For more information see the excellent Tavik Simon website here. This model of a single-artist website contains among much else a good selection of the drawings made by Simon on his travels in 1926 and 1927.

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Roger Vieillard: The Architecture of Time

May 13, 2014, 3:30 am

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I’ve posted before about some of the great names of twentieth-century French engraving—Jean-Émile Laboureur, Henri-Georges Adam, Ferdinand Springer. And there are more to come, such as Pierre Guastalla, the founder of La Jeune Gravure Contemporaine. Today I want to look at the man who, in my view, took the art of engraving to its dizziest heights, Roger Vieillard, born in Le Mans in 1907.

Roger Vieillard, Économie dirigée

Engraving, 1934

Guérin & Rault 11 (state v/v)

Vieillard devoted himself to the engraved line almost from the moment he entered Stanley Hayter’s famed Atelier 17 in 1934. He soon established himself as a master of copper engraving, specializing particularly in surreal mythological/architectural scenes, realized with great fluidity and imbued with a sense of mystery. He believed that engraving was capable of effects impossible to achieve in drawing or painting. The Surrealist atmosphere that prevailed at Atelier 17 in the 1930s is thoroughly ebedded in Vieillard’s work, though he seems to have avoided the factions and cliques of the Surrealist movement.

Roger Vieillard, Cité du Lac

Engraving, 1935

Guérin & Rault 97 (state vi/vi)

Interestingly. Vieillard’s wife, the American painter Anita de Caro, specialized in brightly-coloured abstracts, so the pair divided art up between them like Jack Sprat and his wife, he taking the line, and she the colour. A joint exhibition of the pair at the Propriété Caillebotte, Yerres, in 2008 was titled La Trait et la Couleur.

Roger Vieillard, Villes (Babylone)

Engraving, 1935

Guérin & Rault 86 (state iii/iii)

At Atelier 17 Vieillard studied alongside John Buckland-Wright, remaining on friendly terms with him. In England, the art of Roger Vieillard was also championed by the great expert on the livre d’artiste, W. J. Strachan, author of The Artist and the Book in France. Walter Strachan was influential in arranging two important exhibitions: a retrospective at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 1993 (with an excellent catalogue by P.M.S. Hacker, Gravure and Grace: The Engravings of Roger Vieillard) and the 1994 V&A exhibition Modern French Book Illustration: Vieillard, Flocon, Krol.

Roger Vieillard, Âge de fer

Engraving, 1948

Guérin & Rault 184 (state xvii/xvii)

There is a wonderful two-volume catalogue of Vieillard’s engravings by Anne Guérin and Virginie Rault: Roger Vieillard, Catalogue Raisonné, Oeuvre Gravé 1934-1989. This lists and illustrates 662 engravings, including those made for artist’s books, and also describes and usually illustrates all known “states” of each engraving. These can be quite numerous—some of Vieillard’s engravings go through over twenty states before reaching the “état definitive”.

Roger Vieillard, Fantaisie architecturale

Engraving, 1978

Guérin & Rault 605 (state v/vi)

The portfolio Architectures was published by Vieillard in 1980, “à la demande d’un groupe d’amateurs d’estampes”, in an edition of just eleven copies, of which nine were numbered 1-9 and two artist’s copies were marked A and B. It gathers together 14 engravings on architectural subjects, dating from 1934 to 1978. The engravings in the nine numbered copies are numbered out of the originally-envisaged editions of 30, 40, or 60, the artist never having printed the entirety of the stated editions. They were printed on very large sheets (in-folio raisin, 66 x 50 cm) of handmade Moulin de Larroque wove paper, in the atelier of the specialist taille-doucier Georges Leblanc. The small amount of type was hand-set and printed by Marthe Fequet and Pierre Baudier. My copy of Architectures is an out-of-series exemplaire de collaborateur, warmly inscribed by Roger Vieillard to Monsieur Baudier et Mademoiselle Fequet; the individual engravings are signed, titled, monogrammed, and marked “ép. col.”, collaborator’s proof. Presumably there was another exemplaire de collaborateur presented to Georges Leblanc, bringing the true number of copies of Architectures to thirteen.

Justification page of Architectures, inscribed by the artist

Roger Vieillard’s fascination with architectural forms persists right through his career. Some of his architectural fantasies are as complex as anything by Piranesi; equally he enjoyed simplifying these down to their essential structures, in what he called a “reprise linéaire”. I have three examples of this. Tour de Babel I was executed in 1935, while the reprise linéaire, Tour de Babel II, was created forty years later in 1975 (with the date 1935-1975 incised in the plate, in recognition of this engraving’s long gestation).

Roger Viellard, Tour de Babel I

Engraving, 1935

Guérin & Rault 28 (state vii/vii)

Roger Vieillard, Tour de Babel II

Engraving, 1975

Guérin & Rault 593 (state ii/vi)

My second example is also a Biblical subject, and again one that had haunted the artist for many years. It has its origins in a 1937 engraving of the blinded Samson destroying the temple of the Philistines, Chute du temple. In 1975 Vieillard engraved a new version of this, Ruine du temple (the major difference being the excision of a running female figure in the bottom right of the original composition, and a revised image of the god Dagon above the altar). His reprise linéaire of Ruine du temple is entitled Moment architectural.

Roger Vieillard, Ruine du temple

Engraving, 1975

Guérin & Rault 590 (state viii/viii)

Roger Vieillard, Moment architectural

Engraving, 1975

Guérin & Rault 591 (state iii/iii)

Lastly, Atelier and Espace d’atelier, both from 1973, envisages the artist’s working environment both as a hub of complex activity and as a tranquil negative space.

Roger Vieillard, Atelier

Engraving, 1973

Guérin & Rault 556 (state vii/ix)

Roger Vieillard, Espace d'atelier

Engraving, 1973

Guérin & Rault 557 (state iii/iii)

Two very interesting engravings from Vieillard’s later years are the almost abstract view of Manhattan, and the fully-abstracted Pyramide extrême. Manhattan is embodied by the Platonic idea of the skyscraper; I don’t think any individual buildings can be identified, and yet the place can be. Pyramide extrême similarly takes the idea of a pyramid to a state of geometric perfection. This engraving is printed from five plates—the central image and four long narrow rectangles along the sides.

Roger Vieillard, Manhattan

Engraving, 1966

Guérin & Rault 483 (state vi/vi)

Roger Vieillard, Pyramide extrême

Engraving, 1970

Guérin & Rault 513 (state iii/iii)

In a short foreword to Architectures, Vieillard sets out the reasons behind his fascination with buildings. He writes, Dès ses aurores, l’homme a conçu l’ARCHITECTURE comme le prolongement de sa vie brève et fragile, à la mesure de ses besoins et de ses songes, et l’a insérée dans une nature à lui offerte mais qui ne convenait pas à tous ses besoins. Elle fut d’abord son habitat, puis le décor des civilisations successives, le témoin de son passage et de ses modes de penser. “Since the dawn of time, man has conceived of architecture as a way of extending his brief and fragile life, by the measure of his needs and dreams, and has inserted it into a nature that was offered to him but did not meet all his needs. It was first of all a habitation, then the décor of successive civilizations, the witness of his time and of his way of thinking.”

Roger Vieillard, Cathédrale de Paris

Engraving, 1945

Guérin & Rault 130 (state vii/viii)

Beside Architectures, I have another rare set of engravings by Roger Vieillard, his Suite pour Déméter. This is one of twenty suites printed in bistre on Japon paper of a set of six engravings inspired by the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Hymne à Déméter was printed in an edition of 250 (20 on Hollande and 230 on Lana), with 20 suites in bistre on Japon and 70 suites in black on Hollande. Mine is suite 6/20. The engravings were printed by Philippe Molinier on the hand press of Roger Lacourière. There are strong echoes of Surrealism in these really beautiful and graceful interpretations of the myth of the abduction of Persephone by Hades, the desperate search of her mother Demeter, the cyclical release of Persephone for the spring and summer, and the founding of the Mysteries of Eleusis.

Roger Vieillard, L'Enlèvement de Persephone

Engraving, 1946

Guérin & Rault 139 (state iv/iv)

Roger Vieillard, La Poursuite de Déméter

Engraving, 1946

Guérin & Rault 140 (state vi/vi)

Roger Vieillard, La Royaume des Morts

Engraving, 1946

Guérin & Rault 141 (state iii/iii)

Roger Vieillard, L'Incantation de Déméter

Engraving, 1946

Guérin & Rault 142 (only state)

Roger Vieillard, Éleusis

Engraving, 1946

Guérin & Rault 143 (state ii/ii)

Roger Vieillard, Vie & Mort de la Déesse - Les Saisons

Engraving, 1946

Guérin & Rault 144 (only state)

Roger Vieillard died in 1989. Like T. S. Eliot and Kenneth Grahame, he combined his artistic life with a successful career in banking, working at the Banque nationale pour le commerce et l'industrie (for which he was for many years the chief financial analyst, and latterly deputy director) in order to secure his financial independence and give himself complete artistic freedom. The exceptional purity of his artistic vision is perhaps partly due to this liberation from financial pressures.

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The Pre-Impressionists: Adolphe Appian

June 11, 2014, 1:37 am

≫ Next: The Pre-Impressionists: Eugene Boudin

≪ Previous: Roger Vieillard: The Architecture of Time

I intend this post to be first in a short series about the important fore-runners or precursors of Impressionism. Although the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 is regarded as an earthquake moment in the history of art, there had been plenty of warning tremors in the years leading up to it. The roots of Impressionism lie most obviously in the plein-art painters and printmakers of the Barbizon School, and I shall in due course be looking at Barbizon artists such as Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, Charles-Émile Jacque, Jean-François Millet, and Théodore Rousseau. The Barbizon artists were inspired by the example of the English painter John Constable, just as the Impressionists were inspired by J. M. W. Turner. There were also plenty of artists working outside Barbizon with similar aims of capturing fleeting sensations of light and shade and representing the landscape as our minds actually apprehend it. Most of these had some contact with the Barbizon group, and my first subject, Adolphe Appian, is a case in point.

Adolphe Appian, L'étang de Frignon à Creys

Etching, 1962

Curtis & Prouté 1 (II/III)

Adolphe Appian was born in Lyon in 1818; his birth name was Jacques Barthélémy or Barthélémi Appian, and he first exhibited under the pseudonym Adolphe at the Salon de Paris in 1835. He studied drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon under Jean-Michel Grobon and Augustin Alexandre Thierrat. Appian was both a musician and a painter, and did not fully commit himself to the visual arts until 1852. This was the year Appian met Corot and Daubigny, both of whom profoundly influenced his style and approach; after this, while remaining based in Lyon, he made numerous trips to the forest of Fontainebleau to paint alongside the Barbizon artists. Michel Melot, in his exhibition catalogue for the centenary show of L'estampe impressioniste at the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1974, writes of Appian's wish to resolve the problems of changing light, and to render visual sensations (air, water, leaves) in etching. If you look closely at the kinds of marks Appian uses to describe skies, reflections, or seas, you will see that these are not conventional notations, but freely expressive responses, designed to evoke rather than delineate.

Adolphe Appian, Le champ de blé

Etching, 1863

Curtis & Prouté 2 (III/IV)

Although Appian remained a provincial artist, working almost always in the region of Lyon, he did make his mark on the art world, exhibiting at the Salon de Paris from 1835 and the Salon de Lyon from 1847 (and regularly at both Salons from 1855), contributing etchings to L'Artiste and the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, and most importantly publishing etchings with the firm of Cadart. Appian was a prominent member of the Société des Aquafortistes from its foundation by Cadart in 1862 until its dissolution in 1867, and remained loyal to Cadart and his widow Célonie-Sophie until the collapse of the business on 12 January 1882.

Adolphe Appian, À gorge de Loup

Etching, 1863

Curtis & Prouté 5

The 1878 Cadart catalogue advertises a Collection de 25 Eaux-Fortes (Paysages et Marines) by Adolphe Appian for the sum of 50 francs. This title, Landscapes and Seascapes, does convey in simple terms Appian's ostensible subject-matter. But the truth is that for Appian, as for the Impressionists, the true subject of art is the play of light. This is very evident in his etchings, and even more so in his monotypes. He made around 33 of these, some true monotypes (painted directly onto the plate and printed only once), others painted on top of an already-etched plate. Most of these monotypes, from the Atherton Curtis collection, are housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; Melot's catalogue reproduces the etching Un Rocher dans les communaux de Rix alongside the same plate printed "en manière de monotype". The fact that the monotype was printed on the first state of the etching proves that Appian was already experimenting with monotype by 1865, three years before Paul Huet explored this technique and ten years before Degas. Appian was probably encouraged in his trials of different ways and intensities of inking an etching plate by Auguste Delâtre, who printed Appian's etchings from 1863 to 1869.

Adolphe Appian, Flotille de barques marchandes (Monaco)

Etching, 1872

Curtis & Prouté 34 (II/II)

Adolphe Appian made his first etching in 1853. Between then and 1896 he produced some 90 etchings, 4 lithographs, and around 33 monotypes. This is quite a serious printmaking output for someone whose main work was as a painter, and this is reflected in the fact that nowadays Appian is much more fêted for his etchings than for his paintings. The paintings tackle the same subjects as his etchings, with a strong preference for "contre-jour" motifs; these extravagant contrasts of light and dark show the influence of another artist loosely affiliated to Barbizon, Appian's friend Félix Ziem. After he discovered the light of the Mediterranean, Appian's palette lightened and his style became looser and more impressionistic.

Adolphe Appian, Environs de Martigues (Bouches de Rhone)

Etching, 1874

Curtis & Prouté 39

Adolphe Appian, Barque de pecheurs
(Barques de cabotage, Côtes d'Italie)
Etching, 1874
Curtis & Prouté 40 (II/III)

There is a good further selection of etchings by Adolphe Appian at Old Master Prints. The standard reference work is Atherton Curtis and Paul Prouté, Adolphe Appian, son oeuvre gravé et lithographié (1968).

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The Pre-Impressionists: Eugene Boudin

June 16, 2014, 1:32 am

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Eugène Boudin actually took part in the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, but he has never been regarded as one of the Impressionists. He did play a key role in the development of the movement, though, as mentor to his friend Claude Monet. It was Boudin who encouraged Monet to paint, and it was while painting alongside Boudin at Honfleur that the 18-year-old Monet received the revelation of his artistic vision. After Boudin had set up his easel and begun to paint, Monet wrote, "I looked on with some apprehension, then more attentively and suddenly it was as if a veil was torn away; I had understood, had grasped what painting could be; by the sole example of this painter absorbed in his art and independence of effort, my own destiny was made clear." Boudin was born in Honfleur in 1824, so was sixteen years Monet's senior. The two men remained close until Boudin's death in Deauville in 1898; it even seems likely that the word "Impression", which so infuriated the critics when Monet used it, was borrowed from Boudin, whose notebooks and letters are full of the need to work "when the impression is fresh". Boudin's kindly and modest nature is well-caught in Paul Helleu's drypoint portrait of him sketching on the harbour at Deauville in 1894.

Paul Helleu, Eugène Boudin

Drypoint, 1894

The seaside towns of Normandy - Honfleur, Deauville, Trouville - were Boudin's home territory, and the primary subject of his art. Even though he spent every winter in his Paris studio, he never painted a single city scene. Boudin is particularly remembered for his relaxed and evocative beach scenes, which from the 1860s on documented the new fashion for beach holidays, with female holidaymakers in crinolined dresses and men in suits and bowler hats. But he was interested in everything to do with the sea, and his canvases are full of yachts and fishing vessels, sailors, fish markets, and washerwomen. Boudin was an astonishingly productive artist, creating over 4,000 oil paintings and 7,000 drawings, watercolours, and pastels. But he only made three prints: two unimportant lithographs, and a single etching. The etching is a dramatic seascape with many different vessels - sailing ships, fishing wherries, rowing boats - evidently very quickly sketched onto the surface of the copper plate, which has been quite lightly bitten. Boudin would have made this etching in the atelier of Alfred Cadart, having accepted membership of Cadart's Société des aquafortistes in 1864. But it was never published by Cadart, and Boudin seems to have laid it aside and forgotten all about it. It wasn't published until after his death, when it was first editioned by L'Estampe et l'Affiche in December 1899. There were 50 copies on Chine, with no text, and larger edition on laid paper with the words Boudin inv. et sculp., and usually the blind stamp of L'Estampe et l'Affiche. A third edition of 300 copies (20 on Japon and 280 on wove paper with no lettering) was published the following year by H. Floury in Gaston Cahen Eugène Boudin, sa vie & son oeuvre.

Eugène Boudin, Marine

Etching, c.1864

Delteil 3, Melot 3

On the evidence of this one lively "essai d'eau-forte", it seems a shame that Eugène Boudin did not pursue his interest in etching further, and given the etching fever of the time it is also quite surprising. But I am very pleased to have a copy of his only etching, from the Floury edition. The same publication contains a further eight etchings after Boudin, by Loÿs Delteil. Delteil (1869-1927) is better known today as a cataloguer of the etched work of others in his multi-volume work Le Peintre-Graveur illustré, but he was also a talented etcher in his own right.

Loÿs Delteil, Temps d'orage

Etching after Eugène Boudin, 1900

Loÿs Delteil, Chez la Mère Toutain

Etching after Eugène Boudin, 1900

Eugène Boudin's primary artistic principle was his commitment to working direct from the motif, en plein-air. This doesn't mean he never worked up his ideas in the studio - that was how he spent the winter months in Paris. But he was convinced that "everything painted directly and on the spot has a strength, a vigour, a vivacity of touch that can never be attained in the studio." He passed this conviction on to Monet. Boudin in turn had been converted to plein-air work by the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819-1891), who was on friendly terms with artists of the Hague School, the Barbizon School, and the Impressionists, without, like Boudin, being subsumed into any of these groups. Boudin, too, was on very good terms with Barbizon artists such as Corot, Troyon, and Daubigny.

Loÿs Delteil, La plage de Trouville

Etching after Eugène Boudin, 1900

Loÿs Delteil, Campoux, environs de Brest

Etching after Eugène Boudin, 1900

The best place to see Boudin's art is on the Normandy coast where it was created. There are wonderful collections of his work at the Musée d'art moderne André Malraux in Le Havre and the Musée Eugène Boudin in Honfleur, mostly works donated by the artist's family, at his request, after his death.

Loÿs Delteil, Un marché au Faou

Etching after Eugène Boudin, 1900

Loÿs Delteil, Barques à marée basse

Etching after Eugène Boudin, 1900

Loÿs Delteil, Pardon dans l'église de Hauvec

Etching after Eugène Boudin, 1900

The critic Gustave Geffroy wrote in 1883 that Boudin was "together with Corot and Jongkind, one of the immediate precursors of Impressionism. He shows us that impenetrable black does not exist and that air is transparent."

Auguste Marie Lauzet, Le port de Trouville

Etching after Eugène Boudin, 1892

I'm indebted for information and translations to Vivien Hamilton's excellent book Boudin at Trouville.

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The Pre-Impressionists: Jules Bastien-Lepage

June 25, 2014, 7:49 am

≫ Next: Rilke and Slevogt: The Panther

≪ Previous: The Pre-Impressionists: Eugene Boudin

Jules Bastien-Lepage was born in Damvillers, Meuse in 1848. After studying under Cabanel at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, Bastien-Lepage became a ground-breaking plein-air painter of realistic rural scenes, influenced by Courbet and the Barbizon School. Essentially a painter, Jules Bastien-Lepage only made 5 etchings himself, under the tutelage of Léopold Flameng, one of which is Retour des champs. In works such as this, Bastien-Lepage updated Millet's spiritual admiration of the peasant class into an unflinching reportage.

Jules Bastien-Lepage, Retour des champs

Etching, 1878

Most etchings of the art of Bastien-Lepage are, like this portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, interpretative etchings by others after Bastien-Lepage paintings. In addition to his landscapes, Bastien-Lepage was a sought-after and very accomplished portraitist, though I feel his heart was in his rural scenes.

Ricardo de Los Rios, Sarah Bernhardt

Etching after Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1879

Jules Bastien-Lepage influenced Manet and the Impressionists, and was especially important to the British plein-air painters who have become known as the British Impressionists, such as George Clausen, Henry Herbert La Thangue, Stanhope Forbes, and James Guthrie.

Henry Herbert La Thangue, A Study (Boy holding a calf)

Lithograph, 1903

Jules Bastien-Lepage made an enormous contribution to art in his short lifetime. He died in 1884, at the age of just 36, a fact which may explain his relative obscurity today.

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Rilke and Slevogt: The Panther

July 25, 2014, 8:57 am

≫ Next: A major artist in a minor field: the wood engravings of Gwen Raverat

≪ Previous: The Pre-Impressionists: Jules Bastien-Lepage

As soon as I saw this etching by Max Slevogt of a black panther, I thought of Rainer Maria Rilke's 1902 or 1903 poem Der Panther, written as a response to Rilke's friend Rodin's urging to work directly from life. So as I had a bit of time on holiday this week, I tried to make my own version of Rilke's poem. I wouldn't call it a translation, as apart from retaining the four quatrains, I have ignored the form of the original - the metre and the rhyme. The best proper translation I know is that of my late friend Stephen Cohn in Neue Gedichte: New Poems (Carcanet, 1992). I didn't have this with me while I sat and struggled with the hilarious responses of Google Translate, but I did have the sensitive translation of Susan Ranson from Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems (OUP, 2011). Back home I have taken the precaution of checking Google's grasp of German with the literal prose translation of Patrick Bridgwater in Twentieth-Century German Verse (Penguin, 1963). Any boo-boos remain, of course, my own.

Max Slevogt (1868-1932), Schwarzer Panther

Etching (with three extra panthers as drypoint remarques), 1914

THE PANTHER

Jardin des Plantes, Paris

His barred eyes have grown so tired

of pacing, they have emptied out.

As if there were a thousand bars

and beyond those thousand bars, a hollowness.

The supple flexure of his paws,

revolving in an ever-tightening gyre,

creates a passionate dance around

the still centre of his fierce, numbed will.

Just sometimes, the shutter of his lens

lifts, without a sound.

An image enters, pulses through the coiled spring of his sinews,

and winks out in his heart’s great silence.

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A major artist in a minor field: the wood engravings of Gwen Raverat

December 11, 2014, 2:39 am

≫ Next: An obscure English woodcut artist: Felix Henry Eames

≪ Previous: Rilke and Slevogt: The Panther

I suppose I've been aware of Gwen Raverat's wood engravings for most of my life, though without ever knowing how to pronounce her name: the final "t" is silent, so the correct pronunciation is more like Raverar. Her husband, the artist Jacques Raverat, was French, and Gwen and Jacques lived in Vence from 1920 until Jacques' early death from multiple sclerosis in 1925. It was in Provence that Gwen created what for me are her most perfect works, from a lifetime total of nearly 600 engraved woodblocks.

Frances Spalding, Gwen Ravert: Friends, Family & Affections

Cover design incorporating an oil self-portrait, c.1910-11

Gwen Raverat was born in Cambridge in 1885. Her eccentric family were part of the intellectual elite of Cambridge. Charles Darwin was her grandfather, and late in life she wrote a brilliant childhood memoir, Period Piece, which brings the family dramas of the Darwins to life. She would be an interesting person simply for her Darwin heritage, her close involvement in the Cambridge Neo-Pagans led by Rupert Brooke, and her tangential but intimate entwinement with the Bloomsbury Group, if she herself had never produced any original art. But she did, and it is art of such quality that Joanna Selborne in the monograph and catalogue raisonné Gwen Raverat: wood engraver describes her as "a major artist in a minor field".

Nightmare, or Cauchemar, or Flight

Woodcut, 1909

Gwen Raverat's work developed very quickly from her first woodcuts made while she was a student at the Slade in 1909, cut with a knife into softwood, along the grain. Even these are full of vitality, and one of the best is Nightmare, with its striking sense of existential angst and its strongly Expressionist aesthetic.

Sir Thomas Browne, state 1

Wood engraving, 1910

Within a year Gwen had moved from the woodcut to the wood engraving, made on the end grain of a boxwood block - the technique pioneered by her childhood hero, Thomas Bewick. She remained true to Bewick's small-scale perfection throughout her career, and she also shared his sly sense of humour. The frontispiece she designed for Geoffrey Keynes's Bibliography of Sir Thomas Browne in 1910 is a brilliant piece of fun, with Death guiding the hand and mind of the author of Urn Burial. This impression is the first state of the engraving, before the artist filled in the blank background behind the figure of death with wood panelling, and altered the anachronistic sash window. I prefer the stark authority of this first state to the slightly cluttered feel of the second, finished state.

The Dead Christ

Woodcut, 1913

The Nativity

Wood engraving, 1916

As a Darwin, Gwen was raised a freethinker, but between 1912 and 1914 she went through an intensely religious phase. She and Jacques were friends and fellow-students of Stanley Spencer, and also friends with Eric Gill. Jacques dreamed of creating a temple to be decorated by the four of them, a project that never happened, though it came to a kind of fruition in Spencer's chapel at Burghclere. The Raverats and Gill also planned to publish an illustrated Gospels, a plan which fell apart over Gill's insistence on using the Catholic Bible. However the engraving The Dead Christ, engraved by Gwen after a drawing by Jacques, gives a flavour of what such a book would have been like. The resemblance to Eric Gill's work of the period is quite striking. Gwen's tender Nativity of three years later is less graphic and more intimate; the luminous sense of the play of light in the stable gives an indication of the impressionistic course that Gwen Raverat's art would take in the following years.

The Sleeping Beauty (La Belle au bois dormant)

Wood engraving, 1916

The Sleeping Beauty, from the same year, is one of Gwen Raverat's most attractive images; although the print was editioned in black-and-white, Gwen hand-coloured at least one copy, which can be seen on the website of the Raverat Archive here. All of the pieces illustrated in this post come from the Raverat Archive, by permission of the artist's grandson William Pryor, the author of the fascinating Virginia Woolf & the Raverats.

Olive Pickers

Wood engraving, 1922

Street by Moonlight, Vence, I

Wood engraving, 1922

Jeu de Boules, Vence, II

As I mentioned earlier, it is Gwen's Provençal engravings that speak most strongly to me, and all the rest of the images here come from that vivid period in Vence, where Gwen nursed the dying Jacques while also nourishing her own art. The wood engravings Gwen made in Vence are among her loveliest; unfortunately the Provence climate played havoc with the woodblocks, so these exquisite works can never again be printed direct from the block.

La Place en Hiver

Wood engraving, 1923

La Place en Été

Wood engraving, 1923

Old Women, state 1

Wood engraving, 1924

Gwen Raverat's long and influential career as a wood engraver was cut short by WWII. In her British Wood-Engraved Book Illustration 1904-1940, Joanna Selborne writes of Gwen Raverat, "Apart from Lucien Pissarro, she was virtually the only practitioner in the early days of the revival to apply the lessons of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and to retain an interest in light effects throughout her work."

The Balcony, state 2

Wood engraving, 1926

In addition to the books above, I strongly recommend the biography by Frances Spalding, Gwen Raverat, a really compelling read.

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An obscure English woodcut artist: Felix Henry Eames

December 30, 2014, 2:57 am

≫ Next: War and the pity of war: Kathe Kollwitz

≪ Previous: A major artist in a minor field: the wood engravings of Gwen Raverat

I offer the robust woodcut A Breton Déjeuner by F. H. Eames to my readers with all my best wishes for a happy and healthy 2015. May your tables overflow with food, wine, and the laughter of friends.

Felix Henry Eames, A Breton Déjeuner

Woodcut, 1930

I really like this highly-accomplished work, which was contributed to The London Mercury in 1930. Around this time Eames was also contributing woodcuts or wood engravings to another London literary and artistic revue, The Town Crier. So I was surprised when researching him to find almost nothing about F. H. Eames, either in standard reference books or on the internet. I did manage to expand the initials to two given names, Felix Henry. I also discovered that he was born in Matlock, Derbyshire, in 1892, and that he died in 1971. And that is about the sum total of my knowledge.

From the Breton subject-matter of A Breton Déjeuner and the Post-Impressionist aesthetic of the piece I would suspect that Felix Henry Eames was one of those artists still drawn to Pont-Aven in the 1920s and 30s, in the footsteps of Gauguin and the School of Pont-Aven of the 1880s and 90s. For instance in the 1930s the painter William Scott, his wife the sculptor and painter Mary Lucas, and their friend Geoffrey Nelson ran the Pont-Aven School of Painting there, to attract just such artistic pilgrims.

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War and the pity of war: Kathe Kollwitz

January 16, 2015, 7:41 am

≫ Next: Winter: an etching by Louis Graf Sparre

≪ Previous: An obscure English woodcut artist: Felix Henry Eames

I've posted before about the German Expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz, so I'll not rehearse all my previous thoughts again: you can read them here. But having acquired a new etching by Kollwitz I felt I wanted to share it with you, partly as my own inadequate response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. Initially this picture seems to have nothing to do with war or terror: it is simply a mother caressing her baby in the cradle, the kind of image Mary Cassatt made famous.

Käthe Kollwitz, Frau an der Wiege

Etching, 1897

Klipstein 38 IIIc, Knesebeck 40

But look again at that mother. She is not entranced by the happy, healthy presence of her baby; she is traumatised by the anticipation of grief and loss, already holding her head in her hands. When she made this image in 1897, after the birth of her second child, Peter, how could Käthe Kollwitz have known that such sadness lay ahead? But it did. Peter was killed in action in WWI in October 1914, aged just 19. Everyone knows how much it hurts a mother to lose a child. If everyone in the world who is tempted to acts of war or terrorism could just remember, in the moment before they pull the trigger or shed the bomb, that every one of those they kill is a son or a daughter, surely they would think again?

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Winter: an etching by Louis Graf Sparre

January 23, 2015, 1:34 am

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The aristocratic Swedish artist Count Pehr Louis Sparre, commonly referred to in German as Louis Graf Sparre (Graf meaning Count), was born in Gravellona Lomellina, Italy, in 1863. He was married to the Finnish artist Eva Mannerheim, and lived in Finland for nearly twenty years from 1889. Louis Sparre is regarded as one of the founders of Karelianism, alongside his close friend and colleague Akseli Gallen-Kallela. This shiveringly cold etching was created by Louis Sparre in 1904, and published in 1906 by the Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in Die Graphischen Kunste.

Louis Graf Sparre, Winter

Etching, 1904

Besides a long career as a painter and printmaker, Louis Sparre was a leading ceramicist, and directed the first Finnish feature film. If that wasn't enough, he also competed as an individual and team fencer at the 1912 summer Olympics. Louis Graf Sparre died in Stockholm in 1964, at the age of 101.

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Social Media: Twitter and Facebook

January 26, 2015, 3:01 am

≫ Next: Two Lithuanian Modernists: Vincas Kisarauskas and Saule Kisarauskiene

≪ Previous: Winter: an etching by Louis Graf Sparre

This is just to alert my readers to the fact that I have taken the plunge into the world of social media, and set up Twitter and Facebook accounts for Idbury Prints. The Twitter feed will just feature a single image with minimal information: artist, title, medium, date. The Facebook page will feature the same image but with a brief, informal text about it. I'll also try to work out how to link the Facebook page to this blog, so that the longer, more considered pieces I post here should also go there.

Ludwig Heinrich von Jungnickel, Pantherkopf

Colour woodcut, 1916

This is the first image I chose for this new project, a really stunning colour woodblock print by one of the masters of the medium. It was published in 1916 in the Vienna art revue Die Graphischen Kunste. Jungnickel made two different versions of this print - this one with the white background, and a second one with an orange background. You can compare the two in the informative post on L. H. Jungnickel at Modern Printmakers.

I'm still intending to keep this blog up, and have quite a few posts in the works, but the simpler nature of Twitter and Facebook should enable me to communicate with more regularity. So if you like, please follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or even both.

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Two Lithuanian Modernists: Vincas Kisarauskas and Saule Kisarauskiene

January 30, 2015, 1:54 am

≫ Next: The Unarticulated Cry of Light: The Art of Sonia Delaunay

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When Vincas Kisarauskas and Saulė Aleškevičiūtė met while studying at the Lithuanian Art Institute in Vilnius in the late 1950s they forged a powerful personal and artistic partnership that was to introduce a Picasso-inspired Modernist aesthetic into the conservative Lithuanian art scene, which typically encouraged socialist realism or the exploration of safe ethnographic themes. The 1960s was a decade of turmoil and revolution not just in the West, but also in the Soviet bloc. In his article "Vincas Kisarauskas' Arrow Is Still In Flight", Marcelijus Martinaitis recalls how in those heady days, "Fragments of modern Western art were hunted for, art albums 'from over there' were scanned, books and articles were read."

Saulė Kisarauskienė

One approved route into Western art circles was participation in international congresses of collectors and creators of exlibris bookplates, and both Vincas and Saulė became keen exlibris artists. All of my examples of their work represent this aspect of their art, which was celebrated in three booklets by the Danish exlibris scholar Klaus Rödel: Nogle Exlibris af Vincas Kisarauskas og lidt om Tradition eller Modernisme i Exlibriskunsten (1970), Vincas Kisarauskas: En moderne litauisk grafiker og hans exlibris (1973), and Exlibris-Portrait 12: Saule Kisarauskiene (1973). All of the exlibris I have by Saulė are etchings with aquatint; those by Vincas include etchings with aquatint, linocuts, and one relief engraving on zinc. The artistic practice of both extends way beyond this discrete area of work - Vincas in particular was a dedicated painter, and also became known as a designer for stage and screen.

I find much to admire in work of both these artists. The work of Vincas is perhaps more austere and intellectual than that of Saulė, which has a livelier sense of emotion. But they are both clearly working in the same area of interest, and playing with the interaction of shape and form in similar ways. Saulė is more concerned with the human figure than Vincas, though when he does include figures they have a wonderful wit, as in his 1970 bookplate for Inge Rödel, created on the occasion of the 13th international Exlibris congress in Budapest. I'll show Saulė's work first; her bookplates are mostly for literary and artistic figures in Lithuania, including the artist Ausra Petrauskaite, the poet Edward Puzdrowski, Saulė's sister Aldona Aleškevičiūtė, the scientific writer Jurgis Tornau, and the artist Antanas Gudaitis.

Saulė Kisarauskienė, Ex libris Ausra Petrauskaite

Etching with aquatint, 1970

Saulė Kisarauskienė, Ex libris Edward Puzdrowski

Etching with aquatint, 1969

Saulė Kisarauskienė, Ex libris Aldona Aleskeviciute

Etching with aquatint, 1969

Saulė Kisarauskienė, Ex libris Jurgis Tornau

Etching with aquatint, 1970

Saulė Kisarauskienė, Ex libris Antanas Gudaitis

Etchng with aquatint, 1970

Saulė Kisarauskienė, Ex libris Inge Rödel

Etching with aquatint, 1970

Vincas Kisarauskas was born in 1934 in the village of Augmėnai, in the Radviliškis district. Saulė Stanislava Aleškevičiūtė was born in 1937 in Kaune. After their marriage, Saulė became Saulė Kisarauskienė, or Saulė Aleškevičiūtė-Kisarauskienė. While both pursued their art with great seriousness, it was perhaps inevitable that the duties of motherhood and the gender bias of the day would mean that it was Vincas who achieved the greater fame and acclaim, but they appear to me to have been a true lifelong artistic union, each enriching their own artistic practice by reference to the other.

Vincas Kisarauskas

The art of Vincas Kisarauskas employs a personal vocabulary of forms, which he combines and reinterprets with wit and skill. This is particularly evident I think in his linocuts, which teeter on the verge of abstraction without ever fully embracing it. What I particularly admire about these is the way Kisarauskas achieves a sense of monumentality within such small-scale works. His block-like figures have real strength and presence.

Vincas Kisarauskas, Ex libris Inge Rödel

Etching with aquatint, 1970

Vincas Kisarauskas, XIII Congres International de l'exlibris 1970

Etching with aquatint, 1970

Vincas Kisarauskas Ex libris Klaus Rödel

Etching with aquatint, 1974

Vincas Kisarauskas, Ex libris Klaus Rödel

Etching with aquatint, 1974

Vincas Kisarauskas, 15. Dail. Julijos Vysniauskienes knygy

Zinc engraving, 1967

Vincas Kisarauskas, Ex libris Mary & Alfonso (Sapnas?)

Linocut, 1971

Vincas Kisarauskas, Ex libris A. Stasiul…

Linocut, 1971

Vincas Kisarauskas, Ex libris Herber Blokland

Linocut, 1971

Vincas Kisarauskas, Ex libris Lars, Inge & Klaus Rödel

Lincocut, 1971

Vincas Kisarauskas, Ex libris Carlo Chiesa (XIV Congres International de l'Ex libris)

Linocut, 1972

Vincas Kisarauskas, Ex libris Inge Rödel (XIV Congres International de l'Ex libris)

Linocut, 1972

Vincas Kisarauskas, Ex libris Vagn Clemmensen

Linocut, 1972

Vincas Kisarauskas, Ex libris Vagn Clemmensen

Linocut, 1973

Vincas Kisarauskas, Ex libris Vagn Clemmensen

Linocut, 1973

In this sense they are rather like a Lithuanian version of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. As in the case of the Delaunays, the husband died prematurely (Robert Delaunay lived to be 56, Vincas Kisarauskas was just 54 when he died of a heart attack in New York in 1988). Saulė Kisarauskienė, like Sonia Delaunay, was left to be the standard bearer of her husband's reputation, and also to continue her own artistic journey. In 2007, after a long silence, she held a major exhibition of new work entitled Rebirth, and in 2008 there was the first monograph on her art. There's a 2013 interview with her here, in Lithuanian; if you copy this into Google Translate you will get the gist of it.

There is now an extensive collection of works by Saulė Aleškevičiūtė-Kisarauskienė and Vincas Kisarauskas in the Šiauliai Aušros Museum, whose website has virtual exhibitions of both linocuts by Vincas and monoprints made from carved and painted clay plates by Saulė.

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The Unarticulated Cry of Light: The Art of Sonia Delaunay

May 4, 2015, 2:14 am

≫ Next: Ellsworth Kelly 1933-2015

≪ Previous: Two Lithuanian Modernists: Vincas Kisarauskas and Saule Kisarauskiene

Sonia Delaunay was born Sara Stern in 1885 in Odessa in Ukraine, into a relatively-poor Jewish family. At the age of 5 she was adopted by a wealthy uncle, Henri Terk, and renamed Sofia Terk (though she was always known as Sonia). She doesn't appear to have had much if any contact with her birth parents after this point. She grew up in St. Petersburg in wealthy, educated circles, becoming fluent in English, German, and French. In 1904 she went to Germany to study at the Karlsruhe Academy, moving two years later to Paris to study at the Académie de la Palette. Sonia's early paintings, mainly highly-coloured portraits of people in her circle, were influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin, but also by the German Expressionists of Die Brücke, and by the Fauves, who were just exploding onto the Paris art scene. She met and married the art dealer William Uhde, in what was essentially a marriage of convenience; Uhde was gay, and Sonia wanted to stay in Paris. Uhde put on her first show in 1908, but by this time Sonia had already met the love of her life, the painter Robert Delaunay. She and Uhde divorced (though they remained lifelong friends), and Sonia married Robert in 1910. Together they became one of the power couples of the Paris art world, working in a joint style of Cubist-influenced almost abstract colour-contrasts that they named Simultanism or Orphism.