Art display – Page 3 – my daily art display

The Frederiksborg Castle paintings by Christen Købke

Frederiksborg Castle in the Evening Light by Christen Købke (1835)

The featured painter in my next two blogs is the Danish artist, Christen Købke, who lived in Denmark in the first half of the nineteenth century, a period which was to become known as den danske guldalder (the Danish Golden Age). The paintings I am looking in this blog feature the Frederiksborg Palace, sometimes referred to as the Frederiksborg Castle, the majority of which was built as the royal residence of King Christian IV the ruler of the joint kingdoms of Denmark and Norway between 1602 and 1620.

Christen Købke was born in May 1810 in Copenhagen. He had an unremarkable upbringing. He came from a well-to-do family, at the head of which was his father, Peter Berendt Købke and his mother Cecilie Margrete Købke (née Petersen). Christen was one of eleven children, five boys and six girls. His father Peter, like his father before him, was a baker and owned a bakery in the town of Hillerød, some twenty miles north of Copenhagen, which was also the location of the Frederiksborg Castle. At the age of five, the Købke family moved to Copenhagen where his father had been awarded a fifteen year contract to serve as head baker to the large military Citadel, known as the Kastellet. This was a very lucrative contract for it had a guaranteed clientele and secured the family’s future prosperity.

By all accounts, Christen was a sickly child and various illnesses would trouble him throughout his life. When he was eleven years old he contracted rheumatic fever and was bedridden for a number of months, following which came a long period of convalescence. It was during this enforced resting period that Christen started to sketch and began to formulate the idea of becoming an artist. His parents supported their son’s desire to study art and in May 1822 just after his twelfth birthday, they arranged for him to begin studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, which was housed in the Charlottenborg Palace, close to Købke’s home in the Citadel. It was a slow process and it was not until he was in his fifth year at the establishment that he began figure and life drawing. However one should remember his young age and accept that the time at the academy allowed him to mature and develop at a slow and calculated pace. His lessons covered such things as the theory of perspective, mathematics, anatomy, history, mythology and the history of art. It was an all-round education for prospective artists and its art students included the German painter, Caspar David Friedrich and Johan Christian Dahl.

Initially he studied under the tutorship of the eighty-year old Christian Lorentzen and later in 1828, after Lorentzen’s death, he was taken on by the Danish painter, Christoffer Eckersberg, for his final four years at the academy. Under the tutelage of Eckersberg, Købke’s art thrived and by the end of his studies he had become a gifted artist. With the help of Eckersberg, he had mastered the art of working from nature. In 1832 just before the end of his academic training he, along with a fellow student, the landscape painter, Frederick Hansen Sødring, rented a studio close to the Kastellet. It was to be their artistic base from which they were to launch their artistic careers. During his time at the Academy Købke received a number of awards for his work. He never achieved a gold medal but was presented with the Academy’s small silver medallion in 1831 and a large silver medallion in 1833.

In 1933 his father’s contract with the military came to an end and he, at the age of 62, decided to retire and so, along with his family, moved from the Citadel to a large and grand house in Blegdammen, which was situated just outside the ramparts of the Citadel.

My featured works by Købke depict the magnificent Fredriksborg Castle, which lies some twenty miles north of Copenhagen. It is located on three small islands in the middle of the Slotsøen, the Palace Lake, and is surrounded by large formal Baroque-style gardens. Købke’s paintings of the castle were completed between 1834 and 1836.

Shortly after Købke had finished at the Academy he visited Fredriksborg Castle where he met the art historian, Neils Høyen. Høyen at the time was living in the castle, cataloguing the royal portrait collection. Høyen was to be a great influence on the life of Købke. He was an art critic and art historian, who vigorously promoted Danish nationalistic art, whether it was through literature or works of art. He, like Købke, had studied at the Academy and later returned there and gave lectures to the students. In 1836 he became the first Professor of Art History at the University of Copenhagen. More importantly he was a founder member of the Kunstforeningen, the Copenhagen Art Union in 1827 and in 1847 he established the Nordic Art Society. The Art Union, amongst other things, would sponsor competitions. In its competition of 1834 one of the subjects for that year’s competition was landscape painting, which highlighted a Danish locale. Another that same year called for an interior or exterior view of a noteworthy or characteristic Danish building or public place. Høyen persuaded Købke to paint views of the Fredriksborg Castle and submit them for the competition. For Høyen, this would also be an opportunity for Købke to record, through his art, a piece of Danish national heritage.

One of the Small Towers on Frederiksborg Castle by Christen Købke (1834)

Købke completed the first of the castle paintings in 1834. It was a work which just depicted a close-up of one of the small towers of the castle and was entitled One of the Small Towers on Frederiksborg Castle. It was a small work just measuring 26cms x 19cms. In this painting we have a birds-eye view of the roof of the castle and see a large stork perched on one of the chimney tops, eyeing his or her mate as they fly off over the fields. Købke so liked the finished work that he produced a larger version of it, which he gave to his parents and which hung on the wall of their dining room. It is currently housed in the Danish Museum of Art and Design in Copenhagen.

Roof Ridge of Fredericksborg Castle with View of the Lake by Christen Købke (1834)

Shortly after the completion of those painting Købke finished his large work (177cms x 171cms) entitled Roof Ridge of Fredericksborg Castle with View of the Lake. There is emptiness about this work as the majority of the canvas is virtually taken up by a sky which is both uninspiring and unimaginative. In fact all that we see is the roof line, a chimney, and a tower. Further afield we have the lake and the small town of Hillerød. These paintings did not fulfill Høyen’s criteria that art should record the country’s national treasures and yet people recognized the castle from the simple isolated details in the painting so maybe they did partly follow Høyen’s dictates.

However, Købe’s third painting of the castle, and the one shown at the top of the blog, entitled Frederiksborg Castle in the Evening Light, fulfilled Høyen’s romantic nationalist ambitions. It is a magnificent work measuring 72cms x 103cms. The castle had been the subject of paintings by many artists before Købke. He, like many before him, decided to chose the view as seen from the other side of the lake. Johan Christian Dahl, the Norwegian artist, had painted the same view in 1814 and 1817.

It had been a very trying period in Købke’s life. The time deadline for producing a work for the Fine Art Society exhibition along with the technical challenges thrown up by the work took their toll on him both physically and mentally. He wrote to his sister, Conradine, during this time telling her of the problems he was having and the stress it was causing. It would appear that she was the most sympathetic of his family members and a good listener and it was with her he liked to stay when he found the stress unbearable. In his letter to her, he wrote:

“…I am taking my refuge with you tonight, as I know with you I will find a friendly place and I need to do so once in a while to unburden my mind….I have difficulties lately as my spirit has been under pressure, mainly because of the burden of my work and the bad weather and is always the case with me my body suffers from this…”

Whether he had some doubts as to whether the work would do well in the exhibition one will never know but we do know he started a second version which he was going to enter in to the exhibition instead of his initial painting but he failed to complete it in time for the exhibition deadline so he put forward his original offering. Alas, it did not win. There were some critical comments about errors of perspective in the work and maybe that is why his contemporary, Jørgen Roed, carried off the first prize. However, Købke had the consolation that the Society purchased the work.

Frederiksborg Castle. View near the Møntbro Bridge by Christen Købke (1836)

The final depiction of Frederiksborg Castle by Købke, which is my favourite was completed in 1836 and entitled Frederiksborg Castle. View near the Møntbro Bridge. This work depicts just part of the castle. Unlike the other works this is not one of architectural accuracy as Købke has use artistic license to change some of the landscape, removing a promontory from the lake and adjusted the foliage in the foreground enabling us to get a clear view of the castle foundations as seen through the arches of the bridge, which in reality was not possible. I like the colours used. The sky is a delicate and pale blue. The trees and the foliage are painted in restrained and somewhat muted greens whilst the brickwork of the castle walls has a pinkish-red tone.

So Høyen was well pleased with nationalist subject matter depicted in Købke’s Frederiksborg Castle works but what of the artist himself. What did he think of Høyen’s views on nationalistic art? From a passage in a letter to a friend we can see he was at best confused by Høyen’s views and somewhat cynical. He wrote:

“…What have politics, nationality and taxes to do with painterly effects and beautiful lines? What does national art mean? Does it mean politically Danish from border to border and all things within those boundaries? Or does it mean Nordic, including Nordic history and the Sagas?…. No, just as the same sun shines over the entire world, art has no boundaries; it serves only beauty and truth…”

In my next blog I will look at the latter years of Christen Købke’s life and his beautifully crafted portraiture.

The War Series by George Bellows

Massacre at Dinant by George Bellows (1918)

Another exhibition I recently attended whilst in London was one which showcased some of the works by the influential American realist painter, George Bellows. To me, before I saw this collection of his work, the art of George Bellows was all about his wonderful boxing match scenes and the haunting look at the Pennsylvania Station excavation in New York so I was delightfully surprised by the amazing variety of his works, which were on view. Today I want to look at a series of paintings and lithographs he completed in 1918, which highlighted German atrocities in the First World War. Some of these works were on display at the Royal Academy exhibition. The paintings, when they were first exhibited, shocked the people who saw them and the series caused some controversy, which I will talk about later.

The story behind his War Series paintings was of the German invasion of Belgium during the First World War and depicted some of the atrocities carried out by the invading German troops. The Belgian town of Dinant, which lies on the Meuse River, was overrun by the German Third Army, led by Lieutenant General Baron Max Klemens von Hausen on August 23rd 1914. Dinant fell to the German invaders but according to German reports some of the German soldiers, whilst repairing a bridge in the town, were fired upon by locals. A swift and bloody retribution followed. The German troops rounded up 612 local residents in the main town square. This group consisted of men women and children. In the double Pullitzer Prize Winner, Barbara Tuchman’s 1963 book The Guns of August, she wrote that among those executed that day was Felix Fivet, aged just three weeksold. The town was then ransacked by the occupying army.

Unlike how it is nowadays, there were no television crews following the battle to send back live feeds of the war with all its brutality. There were no newspaper pictures of the massacre of Dinant, so how did Bellows and the world hear about this horrific event? A month after the atrocities in Dinant, the Belgian Government put out three reports on German war crimes committed during the invasion of their country. The contents of these reports shocked all those who read them and in Britain both Parliament and the newspapers clamoured for an independent British commission to be set up to investigate the atrocities. The British Prime Minister at the time, Herbert Asquith, bowed to public opinion and set up an inquiry. In December 1914, James Bryce was asked to chair what was termed, the “German Outrages Inquiry Committee”, which would look into all material and take witness statements appertaining to the massacre of Belgium citizens and to the complicity of the German officers into the behaviour of their troops during the summary executions of civilians. James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce, was a British academic, historian and Liberal politician and had been, from 1907 to 1913, the British Ambassador to the United States of America and was on friendly terms with the then Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

The report of the Committee was published on May 12^th 1915 and the conclusion was that atrocities had been committed by the German army in order to strike terror into the civil population which would, in turn, dishearten the Belgian troops. The Germans believed that it would quash resistance and extinguish the very spirit of self-defence. The Commission also stated that the German report of the townsfolk firing on German troops was simply used to justify the murder of large numbers of innocent civilians. However, there was one problem with the compiling of the Commission’s report and this was the documenting of the 1200 eye witness accounts which had been correlated by a team of English lawyers. A large number of these were excluded as the committee were mindful that their findings had to be reliable, credible and truthful. For that to happen, the Committee stated that many of the depositions collected had to be omitted, although they were probably true, as they believed that it was much safer not to place reliance on them. The committee ended their report by concluding:

“…Our function is ended when we have stated what the evidence establishes, but we may be permitted to express our belief that these disclosures will not have been made in vain if they touch and rouse the conscience of mankind, and we venture to hope that as soon as the present war is over, the nations of the world in council will consider what means can be provided and sanctions devised to prevent the recurrence of such horrors as our generation is now witnessing…”

The report was translated into many languages and circulated throughout the world. Some later historians believed that the Bryce Commission report was a piece of propaganda and that the lurid accounts of German atrocities were designed to bolster the resolve of those already fighting in the war and to encourage those countries, including the powerful USA, to end their neutrality.

America had declared its neutrality in 1914 with Woodrow Wilson making his speech to the nation on August 18^th 1914. In the speech he said:

“…I venture therefore my fellow countrymen to speak a solemn word of warning to you against that deepest, most subtle, most essential breach of neutrality which may spring out of partisanship, out of passionately taking sides. The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men’s souls. We must be impartial in thought as well as action, must put a curb on our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another…”

The United States of America finally gave up its stance of neutrality in April 1917.

So what has this report to do with the George Bellow paintings? The answer is that Bellows based the depictions in his paintings on the Bryce Commission report. In 1918 Bellows created a series of works, known as his War Series, depicting German war atrocities in order to stir outrage and embolden America in World War I. The set consisted of five large paintings, which were his largest works ever completed. Besides these oil paintings he also completed 20 lithographs and 42 drawings about the Great War. At the time war paintings tended to focus on the heroic victors and glory in battles won and so Bellow’s War Series was a complete turnaround and many found them offensive.

Another artist, Francisco de Goya, a century earlier, had produced works highlighting the brutality of war. In all he completed eighty-two etchings between 1810 and 1820 but,for political reasons, they were never exhibited until 1863, some thirty-five years after Goya’s death. They depicted not only the atrocities of the French army which had invaded Spain but the inhuman treatment men inflicted on their fellow men. Prints of these works by Goya would have been on display at galleries in New York and it is very likely that George Bellows would have seen them.

One Can't Look by Francisco de Goya (1863) — One Can’t Look by Francisco de Goya (1863)

In Bellow’s work, Massacre at Dinant, we see the foreground is littered with the dead bodies of women and children. In the background we see the skies darken at the moment of death. In the centre of the painting we see the clergy with their arms stretched aloft beseeching an end to the killings. Their pleas fall on deaf ears and they are powerless to prevent the massacre. It is a brutal depiction and horrifies all who stand before it. Although Bellows has not depicted any German soldiers in the painting, if one looks to the far left of the work one can see their bloody bayonets and rifles appearing on the scene. This depiction of the “approaching” rifles could be taken directly from one of Goya’s lithographs entitled One Can’t Look (No se puede mirar), in which we see the bayoneted rifles just coming into the right hand side of the etching.

Another painting from his War Series was entitled The Barricade, in which we see a line of naked human beings, arms held aloft, acting as human shields for the uniformed German soldiers, with their guns raised, who stand and crouch behind them. As a propaganda piece it worked well evoking both pity and rage in the mind of the viewer. The message to the American public was clear – can we stand by and let this kind of thing happen or should we join the battle and end such atrocities.

Return of the Useless by George Bellows (1918)

In his painting Return of the Useless, Bellows depicted Germans soldiers unloading sick and disabled labour-camp prisoners from a rust-red boxcar. These were Belgian citizens who were being returned home as they were no longer physically fit to work for the Germans. Box-cars were familiar sights on the American railroads but this work depicted the box-car as a transport system for German prisoners. Look how Bellows has cleverly used the same colour, red, for the rusty box-car as he used for the flushed face of the German soldier who is venting his anger on the fallen and cowering man and the bloodied skin of some of the prisoners. Cast your eyes towards the interior of the box car. Here we see an elderly man supporting a young female who is on the point of collapse. Another woman sits on the floor her arms wrapped around a child. A young woman is stepping out of the boxcar and her arms are raised in horror as she watches the German guard bring down the butt of his rifle on to the fallen man, who pathetically looks up and begs for mercy.

The Germans Arrive by George Bellows (1918)

The Germans Arrive, another painting in the series, was based on an actual account from the Bryce Commission and gruesomely illustrated a German soldier restraining a young Belgian teenager whose hands had just been severed. This and the other paintings in the series suffered much criticism accusing Bellows of taking liberties when capturing on canvas, the horrific scenes of war. One notable detractor was the American artist and author, Joseph Pennell, who argued that because Bellows had never been at the battlefront and therefore had not witnessed at first hand the events he painted, he forfeited the right to paint them. Bellows responded sarcastically that he had not been aware that the great Leonardo da Vinci “had a ticket of admission to the Last Supper”.

The final painting in his War Series is entitled Murder of Edith Cavell. Edith Cavell was head of the Training School for Nurses in occupied Brussels.

Murder of Edith Cavell by George Bellows (1918)

On August 5th 1915, she was arrested for assisting Belgian, British, and French soldiers to escape from the country. Two months later, she was shot by the German authorities. News of her execution spread round the world, and in October of that year, The New York Times published 41 stories and her case became a cause célèbre. George Bellows included this incident in a series of 12 lithographs and one full scale painting for his War Series. In 1959 the Princeton University Art Museum found and acquired Bellow’s finished, full-size drawing (53.5 x 68.5 cm.) for this print. It is interesting to note that Bellows did not complete the oil painting of the scene until after he had finished the full scale drawing and lithograph print. The painting now belongs to the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, Massachusetts.

The work depicts a dark and somewhat chaotic prison cell with its grates and bars covering the windows and door. We see on the flight of stairs leading down to the room the angelic figure of Cavell, dressed in white with her hand to her breast, enacting the classic gesture of humility. Behind her and to the left, on a landing, we can see some soldiers and a priest clutching his bible. At the foot of the stairs there are more soldiers, one of whom holds a sword. On the floor in the foreground we see some wounded prisoners lying on the floor guarded by soldiers in the left foreground.

George Bellow’s War Series paintings and lithographs, which he completed in the summer of 1918 whilst he was residing at his home in Middletown, Rhode Island, were ambitious in nature in the beloved tradition of grand manner history works. His intention was to stir up both the public’s outrage and sympathy. However the credibility of the images depicted in these paintings went hand in hand with the credibility of the Bryce Commission Report and that was to be called into question after the war had ended. Many of the reports of German atrocities were then looked upon as merely Allied propaganda, simply designed to bolster the resolve of those Allied nations which were participating in the war and to encourage those nations to commit to the war effort , which up until then, had preferred to remain neutral, Later, many Americans believed that their country had been tricked and manipulated into joining the conflict and unfortunately for George Bellows he and his War Series were regarded as part of this deception. In 1925, the American art critic and historian, Virgil Barker commented on the series saying:

“…[they were] ill-judged in their appeal to the passion of hatred as anything produced in America’s most hysterical war years…”

However I will close with a more favourable comment on the War Series. The art critic G.D.Cotton saw the initial exhibition and wrote about the works in the American Art News in September 1918. He commented:

“…[the works] are brutal, full of horror, but reeking with truth, which adds to their poignancy. After one has recovered from the shock of the subject themselves one sees that the pictures are full of strange beauty, conceived in bigness of vision that is rare and inspiring. The whole exhibition is one to stiffen the spines of the enlisted men who are here and make them realize what they face ‘Over There’…”

I can sincerely recommend you go and see the George Bellows exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London which runs until June 9^th 2013. See what you make of these War Series paintings and lithographs and at the same time, take in many of Bellow’s other beautiful works.

Paul Delvaux’s Sleeping Venus

In my last blog I looked at the life of André Masson, the French-born Belgian Surrealist and one of his paintings, which in some ways mirrored the physical and mental suffering he had to endure for most of his life. Today my featured artist is the Belgian Surrealist painter, Paul Delvaux would never accept that he was a Surrealist or that his art followed the dictates of Surrealism. In fact Delvaux was totally averse to being labelled with and sort of “–ism”. Delvaux’s life could not be more different to that of Masson. Delvaux’s dreamlike, somewhat gentle paintings I believe reflected his inner peace and contentment.

He was born in September 1897 in the home of his grandparents in Antheit-les-Huy, a small town in eastern Belgium. He was the elder son of an affluent bourgeois family. He was his mother’s favourite son and some say she molly-coddled and over-protected him. His father was an Appeal Court lawyer and his younger brother André followed in his father’s footsteps and became part of the Belgian judicial system.

As a young child, in the summer he would go and stay with his four maiden aunts who lived in the nearby town of Wanze. One of these ladies, his Aunt Adele, encouraged his early love of music, literature and art and when he was ten years old, for his first communion gift, she gave him a beautifully illustrated copy of Jules Verne’s Voyage to the Centre of the Earth. This edition contained detailed engravings and illustrations by the French painter Édouard Riou, who collaborated with Jules Verne on many of his novels. In Guy Carels 2004 biography of Delvaux entitled, Paul Delvaux – His Life, he quotes Delavaux’s comments about his youth and his passion for reading adventure novels:

“…My overriding passion was the books of Jules Verne…. I was completely fascinated by the engraving of Riou showing Otto Lidenbrock the wise geologist from Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I reproduced this for the first time in 1939 in the Phases de la Lune I (Phases of the Moon I)….”

Delvaux attended the Athénée de Saint-Gilles School in Brussels, where he studied both Latin and Greek and it was at this time that he became acquainted with Homer’s great epic, the Odyssey with its adventures of Odysseus, the legendary Greek king of Ithaca. It is often said that childhood memories play a part in one’s future life but one recollection by Delvaux of his early schooling was to have an influence on many of his later works. It was one of his earliest memories of the music room of his primary school in which there were two full-sized skeletons, that of a man and a monkey. The sight of the two skeletons frightened him and he never forgot them and skeletons would often appear in his art work.

Such tales of adventure featured prominently in his early childhood sketches. He completed his regular school education at the age of eighteen and much to his father’s disappointment it was obvious that Paul was not going to enter the legal system. His parents decided that if their son wasn’t to study law then he should study architecture and so they had him enroll on the architecture course run by the Brussels Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. Paul Delvaux did not enjoy the course, which consisted of copying the plans and elevations of classical buildings but little did he realise at the time that this training would play a major part in his future works of art. Much to his parents’ disappointment, but to his own relief, Delvaux had to abandon the course as he failed to pass the exam in mathematics, which was a prerequisite for the continuation of the course. His time on the course was not completely wasted as his understanding of linear perspective like the classical architecture was to feature in many of his future paintings.

Paul Delvaux had always wanted to study art so that he could take it up professionally although that was not the future his parents had in mind. His stroke of good fortune came in the summer of 1919 when he was almost twenty-two years of age. He was on a family holiday at the Belgium seaside resort town of Knokke-le-Zoute. One day whilst painting a seascape watercolour he was noticed by a professional artist who was so enamoured by his work he spoke to Paul’s parents and persuaded them to let their son attend the Brussels Académie des Beaux-Arts and pursue his desire to become a professional artist. They reluctantly agreed and Paul Delvaux enrolled in the decorative painting class, which was run by Constant Montald, who also taught the featured artist of my last blog, Andre Masson and it was whilst on this course that Delvaux would once again immerse himself into the world of ancient Greece and Rome. Another of his artistic instructors at the Académie was Jean Delville, the Belgian Symbolist painter.

Delvaux remained at the Academy for four years and during this time he completed almost a hundred works of art, mainly of the naturalistic landscape genre, often depicting scenes of his home town on the river Meuse, with its castle, Le Fort de Huy, perched on a high cliff above the river. One of Delvaux’s early works was entitled For Auderghem, which he completed in 1923 and depicts the railway bridge in the town of Auderghem, which is located to the southeast of Brussels, and lies along the Woluwe valley at the entrance to Forêt de Soignes. In 1925 Delvaux held his first solo exhibition and two years later set up his first studio in his parent’s house. At this time in his life he had no interest in Modern art, which he considered to be merely a “hoax” and instead, preferred the works of the Flemish Expressionists such as Frits van den Berghe, Gustave de Smet and Constant Permeke, whose paintings featured themes such as the countryside and village life.

All this was to change in the 1930’s when he veered towards the art of the Surrealists. He was never a member of André Breton’s group but was greatly influenced by the dreamlike works of Giorgio de Chirico which he saw in a Paris exhibition in 1926. He was particularly interested in de Chirico’s painting style known as Pittura Metafisica, (Metaphysical art) which had been extremely popular between 1911 and 1920. Another artist, a fellow countryman, whose art was to have a great influence on Delvaux, was René Magritte. Delvaux found his work both amusing if somewhat disconcerting.

Delvaux’s work took on strangeness about it from the mid 1930’s with the introduction of nude figures in a world which the intimacy of nakedness is portrayed in very public settings. There was none of the automatism we saw in Masson’s paintings in my last blog. Delvaux’s works seem to be, although bizarre, very calculated and lack the spontaneity of Masson’s “subconscious” works.

Delvaux’s mother died in 1933 and four years later, his father died and it was in that same year, 1937, that he married Suzanne Purnal. The marriage was a disaster. However, some believe the emotional turmoil of their marriage resulted in Delvaux’s best works. Delvaux had been very much in love with Anne-Marie de Martelaere but the relationship foundered because of his parents’ disapproval of her. Whether his marriage to Suzanne was a “rebound” thing, one may never know. However, ten years later in 1947, completely by chance whilst visiting St Idesbald, he met his first-love Anne-Marie who had never married. Delvaux left his wife Suzanne and went to live with Anne-Marie and the pair married in October 1952.

In 1950, Paul Delvaux became professor of painting at the Ecole Nationale de la Cambre in Brussels and he would teach there until 1962. In 1952 he received the commission to create the wall frescos at the Ostend casino. In 1952 Delvaux created one of his most controversial works, The Crucifixion. The painting which is in the Royal Beaux-Arts Museum in Brussels shows a skeleton Christ on a cross between two skeletal crucified robbers. Standing beneath the crucified trio is the centurion also depicted as a skeleton. When this work was shown at the 1954 Venice Biennale it caused a furore. Cardinal Roncalli, who would later become Pope John XXIII, was horrified and Delvaux was accused of blasphemy. However Delvaux was unrepentant stating:

“…Through the skeleton, I represent a different kind of being in a kind of medieval mystery play which is perhaps profane, but never profanatory – the idea of sacrilege never entered my mind – it was put there by others…”

This skeleton painting is considered to be one of the most powerful and the most unforgettable in contemporary art.

Paul Delvaux received many honours during his life. In 1955, he received the Italian Reggio Emilia-award. In 1956, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium. In 1966 he received the Belgian State Prize for his work of art together and he was appointed Chairman of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In 1982 the Paul Delvaux Museum opened in Saint Idesbald. Delvaux died in Veurne, Belgium in 1994, at the age of 97.

Delvaux painted three versions of his Sleeping Venus. The first he completed in 1932. It is thought that the influence on the artist for this depiction was a visit in 1932 when he visited the Brussels Fair at which he came across the Pierre Spitzner’s Grand Musée Anatomique et Ethnologique, a travelling museum run by Pierre Spitzner, which was a sort of travelling wax museum. The centrepiece of the exhibition was a wax anatomical model of a sleeping woman, which opened to reveal her internal organs. This bizarre Spitzner Sleeping Venus had a mechanical movement which was to emulate breath. As if by magic, her chest rose and fell as she lay there, dressed in her white nightgown. Delvaux didn’t exhibit the work until after his mother died, in 1933. The painting received poor reviews and later Delvaux would destroy it.

The Sleeping Venus by Paul Delvaux Second version (1943) — The Sleeping Venus by Paul Delvaux
Second version (1943)

A second Sleeping Venus was completed by Delvaux in 1943.

My featured painting today was his final version of Sleeping Venus, which he completed in 1944. The setting is a Greco-Roman one. The darkly coloured work is a dream-like depiction. In the centre foreground, in a strange half-light, we have a female nude sleeping on a chaise longue. However it is the characters which surround her which are the most puzzling. Are we to believe they are part of the naked woman’s dream? Who are the other naked women in the scene who seem to be visibly moved in prayer? At the foot of the chaise longue we have one of Delvaux’s favourite inclusions – a skeleton (remember his fixation on skeletons since his primary school days). Could it be that the sleeping woman’s dream is about death? But if that was the subject of her subconscious why does she seem to be in a very relaxed state of sleep and not somebody who is experiencing a nightmare as she contemplates her mortality. Another favourite feature often depicted in Delvaux’s paintings is present in this work – that of classical temple-like structures, which harks back to his early classical architectural training. Another common feature in this work which we see in a lot of his other works is his inclusion of a barren lifeless and petrified landscape. To the left of the sleeping Venus is a fully-clothed lady whose pose is similar to that of a catwalk model! Her expression, like many of the women in Delvaux’s works, is impassive. She, like other females in his paintings, does not connect with us. They have a haunting quality about them but as in a number of paintings by Delvaux there is a definite disconnect between the figures depicted. All have a dream-like appearance. It is almost as if he has added figures to the works without any reasoning behind the addition.

Delvaux himself talked about his depictions of the Sleeping Venus in an interview he gave in which he described his first visit to the Spitzner Museum:

“…In the middle of the entrance to the Museum was a woman who was the cashier, then on one side there was a man’s skeleton and the skeleton of a monkey, and on the other side there was a representation of Siamese twins. And in the interior one saw a rather dramatic and terrifying series of anatomical casts in wax which represented the dramas and horrors of syphilis, the dramas, deformations. And all this in the midst of the artificial gaiety of the fair. The contrast was so striking that it made a powerful impression on me … All the ‘Sleeping Venuses’ that I have made, come from there. Even the one in London, at the Tate Gallery. It is an exact copy of the sleeping Venus in the Spitzner Museum, but with Greek temples or dressmaker’s dummies, and the like. It is different, certainly, but the underlying feeling is the same…”

There is no doubt that there is a strange quality to many of Delvaux’s works and art historians have tried to figure out what is going on within the paintings. They give their own interpretations and look for hidden symbolism but maybe we should be guided by the words of the artist himself as to his Sleeping Venus which he completed in 1944 during the Nazi flying-bomb attacks on his home town of Brussels. Delvaux wrote about the painting in a letter:

“…I remember that I placed my picture each evening when the painting session was over perpendicularly to the window thinking naively that, if a bomb should fall, it would be better protected in this position…….It is my belief that, perhaps unconsciously, I have put into the subject of this picture a certain mysterious and intangible disquiet – the classical town, with its temples lit by the moon, with, on the right, a strange building with horses’ heads which I took from the old Royal Circus at Brussels, some figures in agitation with, as contrast, this calm sleeping Venus, watched over by a black dressmaker’s dummy and a skeleton….I tried in this picture for contrast and mystery….It must be added that the psychology of that moment was very exceptional, full of drama and anguish… I wanted to express this anguish in the picture, contrasted with the calm of the Venus…”

Unlike the works of his contemporary André Masson, which I looked at in the previous blog, although Delvaux’s works with his naked women, skeletons, classical architecture are strange, even bizarre, there is something soothing about them unlike the disturbing works of Masson. Could it be the fact that Masson and Delvaux’s lives were so different and their life experiences translated into the types of works they produced?

Gradiva by André Masson

After my last two blogs looking at the exquisite artistry of the American landscape painter, Frederic Church, I am going to give you something completely different today. I was going to facetiously say that I was moving from the sublime to the ridiculous but I know that labelling Surrealism as “ridiculous” is a rather facile and childish statement. Not being an artist, I would be curious to know if the upbringing of an artist and how life has treated them has any bearing on their painting style. For example, Frederic Church came from a happy and financially sound family background and lived close to a very picturesque countryside and in some ways the works he produced mirrored not just the environment around him but the peace and tranquillity of his mind. My featured artist today probably felt little of that peace and tranquillity in his life and that may account for some of the disturbing images he produced. My artist today is André Masson and the painting of his I want to look at is entitled Gradiva which he completed in 1939. It is not just about a painting but about a German novel and a renowned Austrian neurologist who was hailed as the founding father of psychoanalysis and along the way I will delve into the world of automatism in art!

Andre Masson was born in January 1896, in Balagny-sur-Thérain, in the northern French province of Oise, about sixty miles north of Paris. Although born in France, because of his father’s business, he spent most of his childhood in neighbouring Belgium. The family relocated to Lille in 1903 and then later moved to the capital Brussels. In 1907, aged 11, he enrolled at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts et l’École des Arts Décoratifs in Brussels where he received tuition from the Belgian painter and muralist, Constant Montald, who would later teach the likes of Rene Magritte and Paul Develaux. It was on Montald’s advice that Masson decided to leave Belgium and travel to France. In 1912, Masson moved to Paris and attended the illustrious Parisian art college, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts where he attended Paul Albert Baudoin’s studio to study fresco painting. In 1914 he was awarded a scholarship from the École des Beaux-Arts and this allowed him to travel to Italy, along with his fellow art student, Maurice Albert Loutreuil. Whilst in Italy, Masson studied the art of fresco and discovered the works of Paolo Uccello.

These were exciting times for the youth of the day. Art Nouveau, Impressionism and Symbolism were dominating the art scene and the music of Wagner and the thoughts of Nietzsche were often foremost in their minds. Like many of his fellow art students of the time, André was a person who railed against convention and authority and had many run-ins with the police. He embraced vegetarianism and would often be seen walking bare-footed along the streets. He avidly read the great works of literature and philosophy and became a follower of the German poet and philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.

In 1914, France entered the First World War and there was a call to arms. Many of the young eagerly put themselves forward to support their country. Some, like Masson, looked on the fight that lay ahead in terms of a grand Wagnerian battle with little concern about their own mortality. In an interview he gave the American magazine Newsweek in 1965 André Masson said that when war was declared he volunteered because he wanted to experience “the Wagnerian aspects of battle”. Like many who marched off patriotically to the front line, they were mere “cannon fodder” and would never return home. Although Masson, an infantryman, was not killed in the war, in April 1917, he was badly injured during the Second Battle of the Aisne when several French army battalions stormed the German lines on the Chemin des Dames ridge. (It is interesting to note that one of the German soldiers at this battle was Adolph Hitler!)

The battle was short-lived and, for the French, it ended catastrophically in a matter of a few weeks. Thousands of French troops were slaughtered. Many others mutinied and the career of the French army’s Commander-in Chief, Richard Nivelle was destroyed. The attack, which Masson had taken part in proved disastrous and he was gravely wounded and lay helpless on the battlefield all night and it was not until the following day that stretcher bearers were able to reach him and take him to a field hospital. The wound to his chest and abdomen was of such severity that Masson remained in hospital for the next two years. Not only did he suffer horrendous physical injuries but the battle and his witnessing the death and maiming of many of his colleagues left him mentally scarred and he had to undergo a long period of psychiatric rehabilitation to treat the devastating effect it all had on his mind. His patriotic rush to serve his country resulted in constant physical pain, nightmares and insomnia for the rest of his life and he was advised by psychiatrists to stay away from the noise and chaos of cities.

In April 1919 Masson went to Céret, a town which lies in the Pyrénées foothills in south-west France. Céret was, around this time, a popular meeting place for artists, such as Picasso, Modigliani, Andre Derrain and Matisse. Whilst living there Masson met Odette Cabale, who became his wife. Odette became pregnant and Masson decides to return to Paris where his parents could assist her. In 1920 their daughter Lily was born. Masson sets up a studio at 45 Rue Blomet in Paris which soon became a local meeting place for aspiring artists as well as some influential people such as the author Ernest Hemmingway and the writer and art collector Gertrude Stein.

Battle of the Fishes by André Masson (1926)

In 1924 the German-born art historian, art collector and art dealer, Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, organised Masson’s first solo exhibition at his Galerie Simon. One of the viewers at the exhibition was André Breton and he bought a work by Masson entitled The Four Elements. Breton was the founder of the Surrealist Movement and later that year published Manifeste du surrealism, his Surrealist Manifesto, in which he had defined surrealism as “pure psychic automatism”. Masson, who had been invited to join Breton’s group of Surrealists, was influenced by the ideas Breton had put forward and began to experiment with “automatic drawing” or automatism. Automatism was a way of creating drawings in which artists smother conscious management of the movements of their hand, and by doing so, allow their unconscious mind to take over. Breton and his Surrealists believed automatism in art was a higher form of behaviour. For them, automatism could express the creative force of what they believed was the unconscious in art. Masson’s work could be categorised as a semi-abstract variety of Surrealism, which is experimental use with unusual, such as sand. His so-called sand pictures were works which his automatic drawing would be first put on the canvas using glue. Then before the glue had dried he would sprinkle coloured sand over it. The canvas would then be shaken and the sand would only remain on the glue. One of his most famous and most successful “sand paintings” is Battle of the Fishes, which he completed in 1926 and is now housed in the MOMA in New York. I read a piece about this work which described it as:

” a work which a primordial eroticism is revealed through an imagery of conflict and metamorphosis, poetically equating the submarine imagery with its physical substance…”

Is that how you see it ????????

In 1925, Masson participated in the first Surrealist exhibition, at the Galerie Pierre, alongside Picasso, Ernst, Klee, Man Ray. However, André Masson fell out with Breton and his Surrealists mainly due to Breton’s authoritarian leadership of the group and his dogmatic attitude. Masson also came round to the fact that automatism was becoming too much of a constraint on his art and so in 1929 he severed ties with the group. It was that same year that Masson and his wife Odette parted company after almost ten years of marriage.

Masson spent some time in the Provencal hills around the town of Grasse, where he met Matisse. In 1934 Masson returns to Paris but that February he is alarmed by the right-wing Fascist riots which take place in the city that February. He decided to flee the turmoil that has beset the French capital and headed south to Spain and the city of Barcelona. He was accompanied by Rose Maklès, sister of the wife of his best friend and the well-known author Georges Bataille. In December 1934 André and Rose married in Tossa de Mar on the Costa Brava, and in June 1935 their son Diego was born, later, in September 1936. a second son Luis was born. Masson’s decision to relocate to Spain, to avoid the chaos of riots in Paris, was an unfortunate one as in October 1934 the Spanish city was hit by a violent insurrection of its people and Masson and his family became trapped in a friend’s house which was at the heart of the city and which was being subjected to constant shelling and sniper fire. This was just the scenario his psychiatrists had told him to avoid when he was discharged from hospital at the end of the First World War. The situation deteriorated further in 1936 with the start of the Spanish Civil War and Masson and his family quickly headed back to France. His return to France also coincided with his return to the Surrealist fold as he and André Breton settled their differences and the following January, Masson exhibited works at the Surrealist Exposition of Paris which was held at Georges Wildenstein’s Galérie Beaux-Arts.

The year 1939 was marked by the start of the Second World War and in January 1940 the German army marched into Paris. Masson found himself in a precarious situation. His artwork had already been deemed as degenerate by the Nazis. The Nazis looked upon the Surrealist Movement and its artists as having close ties to the Communists and to top all that, Masson’s wife Rose was Jewish. He realised that for he and his family, in order to survive, had to flee France. From Paris they headed south to Auvergne and then on to Marseille. Here a group of Americans led by Varian Fry, a journalist, had set up a European Rescue Committee which helped Jews and Germans blacklisted by the Nazi authorities to escape to the USA. Varian Fry hid the refugees at the Villa Air-Bel, a chateau on the outskirts of Marseille and then took them via Spain to neutral Portugal, or shipped them from Marseille to Martinique and from there on to the USA, which was Masson escape route.

André Masson and his family, along with some of his artwork, landed in America in 1941 and one would think that his troubles were over but alas the US Customs thought differently as when they examined his drawings they declared five of them to be pornographic and tore them to pieces right in front of the artist’s eyes !!! For a short while he lived in New York before moving to Connecticut. In 1945, with the war over, the Masson family returned to France, where they lived for a while with his wife’s sister, Simone. In 1947 they moved to the small town of Le Tholonet, which lies close to Aix-en-Provence in southern France. He continued to paint and received many lucrative commissions including one from the French Culture Ministry to paint the ceiling at the Parisian Théatre Odéon. A series of solo and retrospective exhibitions of his work are held all over Europe and America. He visited Rome and Venice in the 1950’s and from these trips, he produced a beautiful series of coloured lithographs of Italian landscapes.

Masson’s wife Rose died in August 1986 and Masson himself died in Paris in October 1987 aged 91.

The painting of André Masson I have chosen today is entitled Gradiva which he completed in 1939. So who is Gradiva? Gradiva, is Latin for “the woman who walks” and in the Vatican Museum, there is a Roman bas-relief (a projecting image with a shallow overall depth), of Gradiva. This sculpture depicts a young robed woman who we see raising the hems of her skirts so as to be able to stride forward at pace. This sculpture was the basis for the novel written by the German author Wilhelm Jensen, entitled Gradiva. He originally published his fictional tale, it in a serialised form, in the Viennese newspaper, Neue Freie Presse in 1902.

It is the story of Norbert Hanold, a young archaeologist who became totally obsessed with a woman who did not even exist. He had visited the Vatican museum when he was struck by the beauty of a bas-relief of young Roman woman, very light on her feet, whom he baptized “Gradiva” (she who walks). He purchased a reproduction of the sculpture, which he hung on the wall of his workroom. He becomes fixated by the image and mystery of this enigmatic young woman. One night he dreams that he is in Pompeii in AD 79, just before the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. There he meets Gradiva. He desperately tries to warn her about the horrific events that are about to occur, but he finds himself powerless to rescue her. After waking, he is overcome by the longing to meet Gradiva. He immediately sets off for Pompeii, where he meets a young woman, very much alive, whom he believes is Gradiva. In the course of the meetings that follow, he tries to rationalise his fixation for the girl by interpreting signs such as the fact that Gradiva appears at noon, the ghost hour, and other such signs. Gradiva, in turn, seeks to cure him by gradually revealing her identity to him. Through this adventure, Norbert finally sees Gradiva for who she really is: his neighbour and childhood friend Zoe Bertgang (“Bertgang” is the German equivalent of “Gradiva”), who also travelled to Pompeii. For years he had not seen her and had no desire to see her, but without realising it Norbert was still in love with her and he had substituted his love for Zoe with his love for Gradiva, the young woman of the bas-relief. Happily, his fixation for Gradiva finally yields to reality, and Norbert is cured.

In 1906, Sigmund Freud had been made aware of this story by Carl Jung , who believed Freud would be interested in the dream sequences of the story. Freud, who frequently cited his Interpretation of Dreams which he published in 1900, suggested in his review of Jensen’s novel that even dreams invented by an author could be analyzed by the same method as real ones. He fastidiously analyzed the two dreams which were the basis of Jensen’s story, and linked them to happenings in Norbert’s life. By doing this Freud attempted to demonstrate that dreams were substitute wish fulfilments and established that they constituted a return of the repressed. According to the pschoanalysist, the source of Norbert Hanold’s fixation was his repression of his own sexuality, which caused him to forget, his past love, Zoe Bertgang, in order to keep him from recognizing her. This he termed as “negative hallucinations”. Freud concluded that the way Zoe treated Norbert when they met in Pompeii was in the manner of a good psychoanalyst, cautiously bringing to consciousness what Norbert forgot through repression.

As an interesting footnote to the Freud story, four months after he published his essay on Gradiva and Jensen’s story, he visited Rome and during the trip he went to see the bas-relief representing “Gradiva” at the museum of the Vatican, the very same one that had inspired Jensen to write his story. Just as Norbert Hainold, the character in Jensen’s story had done, Freud bought a copy of the bas-relief of Gradiva and hung it in his office in Vienna, at the foot of his divan. There it remained until he left Vienna, and took it with him to London in 1938, where it can be found on the wall of his London study which forms part of the Freud Museum.

In today’s featured painting, Masson iconography for Gradiva (The Metamorphosis of Gradiva) is a Freudian illustration drawn directly from the Jensen story. In the painting we see a large woman, half flesh, half marble sprawled on a marble plinth, the base of which is starting to crumble. Her legs are splayed apart and between them we see a beef steak and a gaping shell-like vagina. To the right of her, on the wall in the background, we see the erupting volcano. To the left of her we see a large crack in the side wall signifying that the building she is in, is about to collapse. Another strange addition to the painting is a swarm of bee-like creatures which seem to swarm in arc-like fashion behind the figure of the woman, similar to the arc formed by the way her marble arm arches over her head. Why depict bees? The whole of the painting is bathed in a flickering reddish light which highlights a clump of poppies which can be seen in the left foreground of the work. I have tried to explain some of the iconography of this painting but I will leave you to try and figure out if there are more hidden meanings to what you see before you.

Finally for those of you who would like to read the complete version of Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva then you can get a copy from Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Gradiva-Pompeiian-Fancy-Classic-Reprint/dp/B0094OOP36

or Amazon.co.uk:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gradiva-Pompeiian-Fancy-Classic-Reprint/dp/B0094UEIIW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1364119670&sr=8-1

I must apologise for the length of this blog but once I got started researching the life of the painter, the painting itself and the story of Gradiva I was loathed to cut anything out. Not being a master of the art of précising, I don’t think I would make a good journalist !!!!!

Figure at a Window by Dali (1925) and Young Virgin Autosodomized by her Own Chastity by Dali (1954)

My blog today looks at two paintings by the same artist, completed twenty-nine years apart. There is an obvious a similarity about the works and yet they could not be more different. As a non-painter, it is this difference in style which intrigues me. The artist in question is Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, better known simply as Dali.

Dali was born in 1904 in Figueres, a Spanish Catalonian town close to the border with France. He was born into a middle-class background. His father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, was a lawyer and notary and a fierce Catalan federalist. His mother was Felipa Domenech Ferrés, a demure and pretty Barcelona girl, two years younger than her husband. Felipa’s mother had been a talented craftsman, who had run a long-standing family establishment that specialized in making objets d’art. Felipa Domenech before her marriage to Dali’s father in 1900 used to help her mother in the workshop and developed a considerable skill as a designer of `artistic objects’. She was deft with her fingers, and was accomplished in drawing. She would spend time fashioning delicate wax figurines out of coloured candles which was a source of amusement to her son.

It has been recorded that young Dali was both an intelligent and a precocious child. His father was a strict disciplinarian and, thankfully for Dali, this was countered by the love he received from his mother, who often indulged her young son in his artwork and his many eccentricities. This coddling of her son was probably partly due to her fear that she would lose him to illness as she did her first son. It was not just his mother who spoilt him as he was the centre of attention of his maternal grandmother, Maria Ana Ferrés and his aunt Catalin. His mother doted on him and at the first sign of illness he was allowed to take to his bed. In her controversial book about her brother entitled Salvador Dali, Seen through the eyes of his sister, Dali’s sister wrote how her mother only rarely let young Salvador out of her sight and would often sit by his bedside for hours at night as he slept for if he awoke and found himself alone, he would cause quite a commotion. However his father’s relationship with his son was quite different. He would never tolerate his son’s so-called eccentricities and often punished him. Dali would often turn to his mother for affection after being chastised by his father and this would further annoy his father who looked upon Dali’s closeness to his mother as a kind of threat to the affection she gave to him, her husband and in consequence the father-son relationship deteriorated. I am sure psychologists would consider this triangle of affection to have caused some of Dali’s future mental turmoil.

Dalí had had an older brother who was born nine months before him. He had also been named Salvador but had died of gastroenteritis in infancy, just nine months before the artist was born. The naming of their second son the same as their deceased son (as was the case with Vincent van Gogh and his deceased elder brother) may have played on Dali’s mind and he once recounted the story of the time, when he was just five years old, that his parents took him to the grave of his older brother and told him he was his brother’s reincarnation. Dali later wrote of this event and of his dead brother, saying:

“…[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections. ” He ” was probably a first version of myself, but conceived too much in the absolute…”

In 1908 his sister Ana Maria was born and it is her who features in the first of today’s paintings. Dali started school at the age of four, attending the Escuela Pública (public school) in Figueres. This was not the local Catholic school which he could have attended but his father who held an anti-Catholic sentiment decided to send him to the local state school. Dalí had an aversion to school life, found concentrating during lessons very difficult and he spent most of his time daydreaming. This lack of attention to his school work and his seemingly lack of progress with his academic work after the first year annoyed his father and caused him to have a re-think about his son’s schooling. He eventually decided to have his son transferred to a private Catholic school, one run by the brothers of the French La Salle order, where all of his classes were taught in French. This had a profound effect on Dali’s future life as although at home he spoke Catalan, he had been taught Spanish at that early school. With his transfer to this new French speaking school, French was to become the language that he would use during his artistic career. Dali was still not happy with life at school, maybe because he was bullied but also to him, being confined in a small classroom, which he looked upon as a kind of gaol, was very claustrophobic.

What Dali liked was the school holidays when the family would spend time together in the seaside town of Cadaqués, where his father had been born and where the family had a small holiday house. It was during these long summer holiday periods that he felt free from the constraints of school life, free to paint and draw pictures of his family and his beloved Catalan coastline and it was whilst holidaying at Cadaqués that he met the artist, Ramón Pichot, who was a family friend . Pichot was an artist who painted mostly in the style of the Impressionists, but more importantly to Dali, Pichot also liked to experiment with some styles of the Catalan avant-garde.

On February 6^th 1921 Dali’s mother Felipa died of breast cancer. The death of his mother hit the sixteen year old Dali very hard. It was a very traumatic time in his life. He described the time as:

“…the worst blow of my life. I worshipped her; she was unique….. Weeping and with clenched teeth I swore that with all the power of the holy light which would one day circle my glorious name I would rescue my mother from death and from fate…”

Dali’s father quickly married his deceased wife’s sister Catalin who had already been living with the family for the past eleven years.

Ramón Pichot continued to mentor Dali during his youth and it was he who managed to persuade Dali’s father to let his son leave school and enrol at the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid. In the autumn of 1922, Dali along with his father and sister travelled to Madrid and Dali sat a gruelling six day entrance examination which comprised of the candidates having to prepare drawings of a classical sculpture. Dali passed the exam and aged 18, he became a student at the Academy. Life at the Academy was so different to life at school and Dali revelled in the freedom of self-expression. Whilst there he made a number of friends including Federico García Lorca, who would become one of Spain’s leading poets and dramatists and Luis Buñuel, who became an international film maker and film director half a century later. Whilst at the Academy Dalí experimented with a number of painting styles, mainly avant- garde, such as Cubism, Futurism and Purism, which he studied through reading articles and studying reproductions in art journals. Dali started exhibiting his work in galleries in Barcelona and Madrid and was allowed two solo exhibitions. He would also exhibit work at exhibitions with other Catalan modernists. His work was greeted with acclaim which boosted his confidence. He believed that he was progressing steadily in the art world but he believed such progression was, in a way, being nullified by the type of artistic tuition he was receiving at the Academy. He felt that neither the tutors nor the art syllabus was sufficiently challenging enough. His dissatisfaction led to him often criticising and openly challenging the authorities at the Academy which eventually lead to him being asked to leave in 1926.

I will leave Dali’s life story at this point to concentrate on the first of my two featured paintings, entitled Figure at a Window, which Dali completed in 1925. The painting is not one which we would immediately attribute to Dali. Like many of his early works it features two of Dali’s favourite depictions – the Catalan coastline and a member of his family. This early work by Dali, completed when he was twenty-one years of age, is one of Dali’s best known and most important early oil on canvas works. Dali used his sister Ana Maria as his model. She would remain the artist’s only female model until his beloved Gala came along in 1929. Salvador’s relationship with his sister was very close, even more so when their mother died in 1921 and in some ways she took over the role of the mother who had to constantly cope with the ever discontented son. The work we see is the height of tranquility. This serene and peaceful feeling one gets when one studies the work is a result of Dali use of the predominant colours of light blues and lavenders. There is a stress-free intimacy about the painting, which would soon disappear from his works. We cannot see the face of the girl. She has her back to us as she leans against the sill of the open window. She gazes out at the bay at Cadaques, the seaside resort much loved by Dali. This viewpoint, while lending the picture an air of intrigue, ensures that the viewer’s eye is drawn, like the girl’s, to the landscape ahead.

Although this is simply a painting of his sister looking out of a window with a view across a stretch of water, there is something about the way he has depicted the girl and the way she is dressed which adds a modicum of sensuality to the painting. The clothes Ana Maria wears cling tightly against her and one cannot help but notice the way the tight fitting dress accentuates the swell of her buttocks. It is interesting to note that a year later Dali painted The Girl of Ampurdam in which we once again see the rear view of a girl, standing in a provocative pose which again accentuates the curvature of the cheeks of her bottom. It is not certain whether Ana Maria was the model for this painting but once again we can be in no doubt as to the part of the female anatomy that appealed to Dali the most ! Ana Maria commented about the way in which Dali portrayed her and also incorporated the Catalan landscape:

“…During the hours I served him as model, I never tired of looking at the landscape which already, and forever, formed part of me. He always painted me near a window. And my eyes had time to take in all the smallest details….”

Young Virgin Autosodomized by her Own Chastity by Dali (1954)

And now to the second painting, which although in complete contrast to the first, I am sure you can recognise a certain similarity. In this second work, which has the bizarre and somewhat tasteless title, Young Virgin Autosodomized by her Own Chastity, the tranquillity and the innocent peacefulness of the first painting is nowhere to be seen. Why would an artist suddenly change the atmosphere of the painting? Why would he want to depict the violation of the female, who held a similar pose to the one in the earlier painting, which had been modelled by his sister?

For the answer to that maybe we need to consider a couple of books, one an autobiography and one a biography. In 1942 Dali published his autobiography entitled, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí and seven years later in 1949 his sister, Ana Maria published her own biography of her brother, Salvador Dali as Seen by his sister. Unfortunately Dali’s autobiography was a somewhat sanitised version of his life story and was quite different to the way in which his sister viewed him in her book. Dali was horrified by Ana Maria’s version of his life and the way in which he lived it. He felt it cast him in an unflattering light and viewed her words as a blatant betrayal and sadly his perceived view of her disloyalty led to the total collapse of their relationship. So incensed was he by this betrayal by his sister that in 1954 he decided to paint another version of his 1925 Figure at the Window which had featured her. He called his new painting Young Virgin Autosodomized by her Own Chastity. The figure of the young woman was, according to Robert Descharnes 2002 Dali biography, Dalí, L’héritage infernal, based upon a photograph published in a 1930’s pornographic magazine.

In the painting we once again have a rear view of a woman who is looking out over a stretch of water at a distant landscape. She is depicted leaning over a rail with horned shaped objects being pointed at her. One of these horns has positioned itself as the one which will sodomize her. These horned shaped objects are phallic-like in shape. So what do the horns symbolise? According to one of his biographers, the rhinoceros horns in the painting were symbolic and that a rhinoceros is a very forceful animal as well as a very dangerous one. The one thing about a rhinoceros, though, is that they do not attack unless provoked. This adds another element to the painting. Is it that Dali was provoked by his sister’s autobiography to paint this work? If the woman is being sodomized, is it because she brought it upon herself? The railing, which she is bent over and which is shattered by one of the larger phallic horns, symbolizes a chastity belt and its destruction symbolizes the destruction of her chastity.

One would wonder who would want to own such a disturbing painting. However we do know who owned it up until February 2003 at which time he sold it at Sotheby’s London auction. It was none other than Hugh Heffner who had, on behalf of Playboy Enterprises, sold it for two million pounds. It had been hanging in the entryway to the dining room of the Great Hall in his Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.

I am not sure it is the kind of painting I would like to have hanging in the dining room of our Bed & Breakfast establishment.

Victorine Meurent

The painting above, Le Jour des Rameaux or Palm Sunday, is unique in as much as it is the only surviving painting by my featured artist. It was recovered in 2004 and can now be found hanging in the local museum of Colombes, a suburb of Paris. The artist who completed the work in the 1880’s is Victorine Meurent. “Victorine who? “, do I hear you say. If you haven’t heard the name as an artist, you may have heard of her as an artist’s model.

Victorine Meurent was born into a working class family in Paris in 1844. It is thought that her father worked as an engraver, a patinator of bronze, and her mother worked as a milliner. Little is known of Victorine’s teenage years but it is known that she had a musical aptitude being able to play various instruments, such as the guitar and violin. It is also thought that she must have shown an interest in art as it is believed that in 1860, at the age of sixteen, she worked as a model at the Senlis studio of the French history painter, Thomas Couture, and it was here she probably received her first artistic tuition. Two years later, in 1862, she met Édouard Manet. One account tells of their meeting at Couture’s studio, another version of the meeting was that Manet saw her walking down a Paris street carrying her guitar. Whatever the circumstances of that first encounter, there was an immediate rapport between these two very different characters. She was a young unsophisticated girl from a poor background eking out a living as an artist’s model whilst at the same time struggling to become an artist in her own right. Édouard Manet, on the other hand, was twelve years her senior, a wealthy painter who came from an aristocratic background. So what could the two offer each other? I suppose it is obvious. For her, Manet could provide her with employment as his model and at the same time offer her some drawing tuition. For him, being a painter, he was always on the lookout for a good looking young female model and Victorine with her eye-catching long unruly red hair was just what he liked. She was small, slightly dumpy in stature, which often led her to be given the nickname, la Crevette, the shrimp. She was not what one would describe as an elegant beauty but she appealed to Manet. It was almost a marriage made in heaven and she would, for the next ten years, become Manet’s favourite model.

The first time Manet used Victorine as a model was for a painting in 1862. The painting is entitled Street Singer, which is now owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The woman we see depicted is modelled by Victorine. She is hurriedly leaving a café, with her guitar securely tucked under her arm. She is dressed in a drab brown gown alluding to the fact that she was poor and did not have the money to buy a new one. She has been performing her music at the café and appears to be in a hurry to get to her next musical appointment. Although she has no time to loiter, she quickly glances towards us and, at the same time, crams cherries into her mouth. This gesture once again alludes to the fact that she is not one of Paris’ refined ladies. She is too busy to stop and soon will disappear amongst the bustling Parisian crowd. This painting by Manet was in some ways a new kind of art. It was not the academic art which depicted women in scenes from the bible or from mythological stories. This art of his depicted real life, real people and as he himself said:

“…You must be of your time and paint what you see…”

Probably the two most famous or maybe infamous works by Édouard Manet, and which also featured Victorine Meurent, were the nude portrayals of her in his 1862 painting Olympia (see My Daily Art Display Oct 12^th 2011) and his 1868 painting, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (My Daily Art Display Oct 23^rd 2010)

Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe by Édourad Manet (1862-1863) — Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe by Édourad Manet (1862-1863)

The larger version of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe can be found at the Musée d’Orsay whilst a smaller version is housed in the Courtauld Gallery in London. We see her completely naked with two fully clothed men lounging on the grass having just partaken of a picnic with two gentlemen friends. The painting caused a furore and Victorine was caught up in the public scandal which followed the exhibition of the work. It was said that respectable men hurried their wives past the naked depiction of Victorine before they themselves returned for a closer look !!! Emperor Napoleon III who visited the exhibition was vociferous in his condemnation of the work saying that it was disgusting.

What particularly shocked the public was that she was portrayed as a naked woman who exhibited no mortification at her compromising position alongside two fully clothed men. The man sitting next to Victorine was modelled by Manet’s brother-in-law, Ferdinand Leenhoff, and the man laying back opposite her is a composite of Manet’s two younger brothers, Eugène, who went on to marry the artist Berthe Morisot, and his other brother Gustave. If we looked at historical paintings of the time, naked women who were depicted as nymphs or goddesses were more likely to be shown shrinking from the viewer in order to reach some piece of clothing to hide their nudity. In Manet’s picture, the young woman makes no attempt to hide her nudity. She just sits there, seemingly bored by her companions and what they had to say and appears to have been lost in thought until we came on to the scene. Now she fixes us with her gaze and we are made to feel uncomfortable as we take on the role as voyeurs. It was maybe not just Victorine’s state of undress that shocked the public but her haughty and reproving gaze that caused the upset. This painting had been rejected by the jurists of the 1863 Paris Salon and so Manet had to turn to the Salon des Refusés for inclusion in their exhibition.

As Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe shocked the public and caused such a stir one may have been forgiven for thinking that Manet, with his model, Victorine Meurent would tone down his next work. Far from toning down the subject of his next painting, he shocked the public even more with his following work which he completed in 1863, and which was entitled Olympia. If we recall Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe we have to admit that there was no hint of sexual activity having taken place at the picnic. The furore was caused by a naked woman being depicted next to two clothed gentlemen and if we, the viewers, wanted to accept a sexual connotation to the depiction then that was more of what was in our mind and not what was depicted on the canvas. However Olympia went a step further by depicting the lady, modelled by Victorine, as a courtesan awaiting her next client. The bedclothes she lies upon are still rumpled from her previous sexual encounter. Her black maidservant has just brought her flowers from her next eager client but the courtesan ignores them and just looks out at us, a sign that the flowers meant nothing to her and it was simply a case of business is business. One can just imagine how the visitors to the exhibition felt when they saw this work. It is believed that this depiction of a female nude by Manet was the first time an artist had depicted a naked female.

Although similar to Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus Manet’s work did not hide the nudity as part of a mythological scene. Another reason for the public’s condemnation of the work was the fact that Victorine’s face is clear. Manet has not depicted the naked woman with just an indistinct face. The face is real and by doing this Manet has humanized his courtesan or prostitute and it is that which upset the viewing public. Maybe the gentle folk of Paris did not want to be reminded that prostitution existed and flourished in their fair city. Courtesans had been depicted before in 19^th century paintings but it was Manet’s unabashed and honest depiction of a prostitute lounging in bed, naked except for a pair of slippers and a necklace, which shocked the Parisians.

Gare Saint-Lazare or The Railway by Édouard Manet (1873)

The Manet painting I like the most which also featured Victorine was his 1873 work entitled Gare Saint-Lazare often known as The Railway (My Daily Art Display Nov 9^th 2011). This was the last painting by Manet featuring Victorine and can be seen at the Royal Academy’s current exhibition Manet, Portraying Life.

Although Victorine Meurent was used as a model in those three paintings, were they accurate portraits of the model? Not really and one must remember they were never supposed to be portraits of her but if we really want to see what she looked like at the age of eighteen we should take a look at Manet’s 1862 portrait of her, Victorine Meurent. She is not a Society beauty and yet Manet has afforded her all his time to depict her beautifully in this portrait. The first thing that strikes you about this young woman is her red hair. We do not see the flowing locks we knew she had as her hair is held in place by a blue ribbon bow. Her eyelashes are much lighter than the colour of her hair. They are almost blonde and are somewhat difficult to detect. There is a strange blankness about her expression. It is a look of indifference. Her lips are pressed tightly together. She has a square jaw and a cleft chin. We look at her face and wonder what she was thinking when Manet was painting her portrait. Her forehead and left cheek are lit by an external light source which comes from her right.

During the time she was Manet’s model, she also worked as a model for Manet’s artist friends, Edgar Degas and the Belgian artist, Alfred Stevens who it is rumoured would later become her lover. The Manet-Victorine Meurent partnership ended shortly after the artist had completed The Railway. Victorine, by then, had taken up formal art lessons and her love of art leaned towards academic art which was anathema to Manet and may have caused the two to go their own separate ways. In 1876 she had her self portrait exhibited at the 1876 Salon. This was the same Salon that rejected two of Manet’s works, The Laundress and The Artist. Manet was so annoyed by that decision that he opened his studio to the public to exhibit the refused paintings and other works. Three years later in 1879 Victorine Meurent had her painting, Bourgeoise de Nuremberg au XVIe siècle, accepted at the Salon. This time Manet’s works, Boating and The Greenhouse were also accepted for the exhibition. Victorine managed to have her works accepted at six different annual Salons.

Victorine remained and worked in Paris, but times got harder for her and there is no doubt that she was suffering financial hardship. In total desperation, it is said that in August 1883, five months after Manet’s death, she approached Manet’s widow for financial help. She told Madame Manet that her late husband, Édouard, had promised to provide her with some money if he ever was successful in selling the paintings for which she had posed. At the time Victorine had declined Manet’s offer but had told him that she would remind him of it once her career as an artist’s model was over. Her appeal for money to Manet’s widow fell on barren ground and Victorine was never recompensed. According to Édouard Manet’s biographer, Adolphe Tabarant, Victorine, in the 1890’s spent a lot of time around Montmartre drinking heavily, and telling stories about her and Manet to anybody who would listen to her and buy her a drink. It would appear that things got somewhat better for Victorine for in 1893 as it is recorded that she was again exhibiting her artwork, this time at the Palais de l’Industrie.

In 1903, aged 59 she was made a member of the Société des Artistes Français. Three years later she left central Paris and moved to the northern suburb of Colombes where she lived with a friend, Marie Dufour. The local census records show that Marie Dufour worked at different times as a secretary and a piano teacher and Victorine was listed as an artist. Meurent died on March 17, 1927 aged 83. After the death of Marie Dufour, in 1930, the contents of the house were liquidated; in the late 20th century, elderly neighbours recalled the last contents of the house, including a violin and its case, being burnt on a bonfire.

Many rumours still surround the life of Victorine Meurent. She was rumoured to have plumbed the depths through drink and unsavoury tales abound regarding her sexual habits and her sexuality but I would rather just think of her as Manet’s muse and inspiration who, as a young girl, became part of some of his greatest works of art.

Kees van Dongen, his life, his family and his art

Portrait of Guus Preitinger by Kees van Dongen (1910)

Last Thursday I embarked on my monthly pilgrimage to London to visit a couple of art galleries and take a look at two new art exhibitions and it was during those visits that I found a few paintings which I will include in my forthcoming blogs. Two of my featured paintings today were not in a specific exhibition but were in the permanent collection of The Courtauld Gallery, which is a veritable gem when it comes to medium sized galleries and one you should put on your “to visit” list the next time you are in the capital. Today I am highlighting some works by the Fauvist Kees van Dongen, which feature his wife and daughter.

Cornelis Theodorus Marie van Dongen, better known as Kees van Dongen, was born in January 1877 at Delfshaven, which is now a suburb of Rotterdam. At the end of 1892, he enrolled as a student on a five-year course at the Akademie voor Beeldende Kunsten (Academy of Visual Arts) in Rotterdam, now known as the Willem de Kooning Academy, named in memory of the famous Dutch artist Willem de Kooning. As a student he also needed to earn some money and so he carried out some illustrative work for the local newspaper, Rotterdamsche Nieuwsblad. His own artistic work in these early days was greatly influenced by the Dutch artist, Rembrandt and many of his works displayed the dark tones of the great Dutch master.

It was whilst he was at this Academy that he became very friendly with another art student, Juliana Augusta “Guus” Preitinger. Guus had been born in Cologne but early in her life the whole family had relocated to Rotterdam and eventually they all became Dutch citizens. She revealed a great aptitude for drawing in her childhood years and her family supported and encouraged this artistic talent and had her enrol at the Academy. On completion of their studies, Kees and Guus decided to move from The Netherlands and seek their fortune in the European capital of art, Paris. Guus went off to Paris first in search of employment and Kees followed in 1899. Shortly after arriving in Paris van Dongen met Félix Fénéon, the art critic and Parisian anarchist who had become a great supporter of a new group of French artists lead by Georges Seurat, whom he had christened, Neo-Impressionists. Van Dongen and Fénénon became great and long lasting friends.

Between 1900 and late 1903, van Dongen did very little painting, probably due to financial difficulties. Through the good offices of Théophile Steinlen, a Swiss-born French Art Nouveau painter and printmaker, who worked for the satirical papers of the day, L’Assiette au beurre, Le Rire, L’Indiscret and Le Frou-Frou , he managed to get some work for van Dongen on these periodicals and with the money van Dongen earned as an illustrator he managed to set up house with Guus Preitinger.

L'Assiette au Beurre magazine cover of 1902 — L’Assiette au Beurre magazine cover of 1902

Van Dongen’s began to take an interest in the social and political affairs of Paris. He especially took a great interest in the environment and lifestyle of the city’s prostitutes and courtesans. He spent a lot of his time producing illustrations for political and social publications especially the journal L’Assiette au beurre, which was the most remarkable and resilient of cartoon journals of social protest in France during the first decade of the twentieth century. It was a journal which looked at things such as the corruption of politicians and the country’s violence against the poor and the downtrodden. Van Dongen illustrated an entire issue of L’Assiette au beurre (dated 26 October 1901) which was devoted to the subject of prostitution from the perspective of the conditions of the prostitutes and the tone of the edition indicated their belief that prostitution in contemporary Paris was a phenomenon symptomatic of the degeneration of the bourgeoisie.

In June 1901, Kees van Dongen and Guus Preitinger married. Their first child, a son, was born that December but died when only two days old. In 1904, Kees van Dongen was sponsored by Paul Signac and Maximilien Luce, to exhibit at the Salon des Indépendants and in that same year he had a major breakthrough with his art when he was granted gallery space at Ambroise Vollard’s establishment. Vollard, one of the major art dealers in Paris, was a champion of avant-garde art and allowed van Dongen to show almost a hundred of his works, most of which were his early works depicting scenes from Holland, the Normandy coast and Paris. The following year, van Dongen exhibited two of his works at the Salon des Indépendants, and at the infamous 1905 Salon d’Automne exhibition. The Salon d’Automne was founded two years earlier by a group of artists and poets that included Renoir, Eugène Carrière, Georges Rouault and Édouard Vuillard, under the leadership of the Belgian architect, Frantz Jourdain. They set up their Salon in direct competition to the conservatism of the official Paris Salon and the Salon des Independents and welcomed any artist who wished to join. The decision on what would be allowed into their exhibition was, like the Paris Salon, to be decided by their own jury, which was selected by drawing straws from the new group’s membership, and it was their intention to give the decorative arts the same respect accorded the fine arts. Their 1905 exhibition, which included the two works by van Dongen, was probably their best known for it was at this show that one of the visitors was the art critic Louis Vauxcelles, who on entering a room set aside for paintings by Matisse, Vlaminck, Albert Marquet, André Derrain and van Dongen, he commented on the “violence” of their works and their uninhibited use of pure non-naturalistic colours. Seeing a traditional sculpture uncomfortably situated in this room amidst these hotly coloured paintings, Louis Vauxcelles joked to Matisse that it was like “a Donatello among the fauves [wild beasts]”. This group of painters was from that day on known as the Fauves and Fauvism as such was born.

In April 1905 Kees van Dongen and his wife Guus had a daughter whom they named Augusta but would always be known as Dolly. The family moved to the Montmatre district which was a favourite haunt of the artistic community. They moved into an apartment in the somewhat dark and squalid building on the heights of Montmatre, nicknamed Le Bateau Lavoir. Pablo Picasso and his companion Fernande Olivier had a studio next to theirs and the two artists became close friends. Fernande Olivier referred to the strong ties between the two artists and their respective entourages in her memoirs Picasso and His Friends and In Love with Picasso. In the latter she recalled how Picasso loved Kees and Guus’ daughter Dolly. She wrote:

“…Pablo loved little Gusie and played with her without getting bored, she could get him do whatever she wanted. I didn‘t know at the time that he could take so much pleasure in being with children. We would have liked to have a child, but as this wish was never realized, we had to be content with the little Van Dongen…”

Fernande Olivier by Kees van Dongen (1905)

It was whilst living here that Picasso painted his famous Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Many other artists moved into the apartment block and it soon became a meeting place for all the contemporary artists of the time. Although the paintings by van Dongen continued to show the power and passion of Fauvism, by 1907 most of the other Fauvists had moved on and had begun to explore new styles. Van Dongen produced a series of portraits of Picasso’s “lover” Fernande in a wide range of styles, and she established herself as his preferred model, alongside his wife Guus. His painting at this time was turning increasingly to women, and the often erotic depictions were out of step with the time, and would often provoke a somewhat prudish reaction

In 1907 van Dongen had met the German Expressionist Max Pechstein who was visiting the French capital. Pechstein was one of the most prominent artists of German Expressionism. He was hailed by some of his contemporaries as the leading member of the Dresden-based Die Brücke group. Their meeting led in 1908 to Van Dongen being invited to exhibit alongside the group. His works went on to influence a number of its members. In the winter of 1910-1911 van Dongen visited Spain and Morocco. This was his first time he had been able to observe, first-hand, Moorish architecture, with its palaces and the mosques with their fascinating minarets, the contrast of dark passages and dazzling white walls baked by a scorching sun. What fascinated Van Dongen was the look of the Andalusian people, the movement of the bodies of the flamenco dancers as they danced to the wild rhythms of their tambourines and the colours of the flower-embroidered Manila shawls. After his travels, an exhibition of his works was held at the Galerie Bernheim Jeune in June 1911 under the title Hollande, Paris, Espagne, Maroc and this further established the reputation of the works which were influenced by his travels through the southern lands.

It was around this time van Dongen began to develop a reputation as a socialite. He often hosted masquerade parties at his new home, which was an apartment in Montparnasse. His lifestyle and his art was the talk of the Paris fashionista. His paintings now often depicted licentious nudes and other such erotic subjects, which often caused uproar among critics and admirers alike. One such painting was a nude portrait of his wife Guus which he completed in 1913 and was entitled Tableau (also known as The Beggar of Love or Nude with Manila Shawl). The figure crouching on the floor to the right is of Kees who is admiring and bowing before the beauty of his wife. He exhibited the work at the 1913 Salon d’Automne and the work was considered so scandalous and immoral that the police removed it from the gallery. Van Dongen condemned its removal saying:

“…For all those who look with their ears, here is a completely naked woman. You are prudish, but I tell you that our sexes are organs that are as amusing as brains, and if the sex was found in the face, in place of the nose (which could have happened), where would prudishness be then? Shamelessness is really a virtue, like the lack of respect for many respectable things…”

Portrait de Mme Jasmy by Kees van Dongen (1916)

In 1914, Guus took her daughter Dolly to Rotterdam for the summer to see their families. However the outbreak of World War I prevented them from returning to Kees in Paris until 1918. In 1917, Kees van Dongen, whilst living alone in Paris, started a relationship with a married socialite, the fashion director Léa Alvin also known as Jasmy Jacob. She proved to be the conduit between van Dongen and the upper classes and through her introductions, came numerous portraiture commissions. When Guus and Dolly returned to Paris it was not long before Guus heard rumours about her husband’s infidelity. This proved to be the final straw in the break-up of their marriage and they eventually divorced in 1921. Guus Preitinger died in 1946.

In 1926 he was awarded the Legion of Honour and the following year the Order of the Crown of Belgium. In 1929 van Dongen became a French citizen. He and his art, were the toast of French society. He cut an ostentatious and colourful figure in Paris. His lifestyle was full of controversy and his extravagant nightly studio parties were attended by film stars, masqued politicians and artists. He spent most of his time completing portraiture commissions. He was the typical society artist who lived a bohemian lifestyle and who brought added colour and excitement to the Parisian upper classes. He was only too well aware how to please his female sitters, saying:

“…The essential thing is to elongate the women and especially to make them slim. After that it just remains to enlarge their jewels. They are ravished……….Painting is the most beautiful of lies…”

His success as a society portraitist enhanced his reputation as an artist with the French bourgeoisie, especially the society women, and his numerous commissions allowed him to live a carefree and affluent lifestyle.

In 1938 he met Marie-Claire Huguen, who two years later bore him a son, Jean Marie. At that time van Dongen was 63 years old !! The couple finally married in 1953, and this new second family gave van Dongen new purpose, a new life. He carried on working on his portraiture work which was much in demand and he also continued with his illustrative work for books by the likes of Voltaire, Proust and Kipling. The latter years of his life was spent with his family in Monaco where he died at home in 1968 at the age of 91.

The Torso or The Idol by Kees van Dongen (1905)

One of the paintings by Kees van Dongen, which I saw at London’s Courtauld Gallery was entitled Torso, sometimes known as The Idol, which he completed in 1905 and was one of two portraits of his wife, Guus Preitinger, which he exhibited at that year’s Salon d’Automne. It is a large and somewhat “in your face” painting. There is an overt sexuality about this work. It is a depiction of complete sexual abandonment. Guus lies back with her hands behind her head. Her arms form two triangles of space either side of her head. The curvature of her arms mirrors the curvature of her hips in the lower half of the work. Prominently depicted in the very centre of the painting are her nipples. It is if the artist wants them to have pride of place. Van Dongen has used various shades of red and pink to depict the flushed cheeks of her face. Could it be she was embarrassed by the artist, her husband’s, gaze as he painted her image? Her pale body is set off dramatically against the heavy black and brown lines which he has used to outline her torso and her breasts. The paleness contrasts with the dark background. I found it a rather disturbing painting. It did not have the beauty of many depictions of the female nude I have seen before. There was something very rough, almost unpleasant about the full-frontal depiction and in some ways this diminished the sense of eroticism. In my opinion, the female body in this painting has not been put on a pedestal for us to adore its beauty. That is just my opinion and I am sure many of you will beg to differ. However, when I stood in front of this work, it had the same affect on me as when I stood before many of Egon Schiele’s nude or semi nude portraits.

Portrait of Dolly by Kees van Dongen (c.1912)

One of Kees van Dongen’s favourite models for his paintings was his daughter Dolly and she appears in many of his portraits. In the one at the Courtauld Gallery she is probably just seven years old. This a portrait of a child, his young daughter but by the way she is given an open pose, and the way he has given her red cheeks, painted lips and large eyes, there is something of an adult feel to the painting.

I came across a couple of fascinating videos on the internet, one of which was a sub-titled interview with van Dongen’s daughter Dolly, aged 82, made in 1987 in which she talks about her father and his paintings. I am sure you will find it interesting.

http://www.arttube.nl/en/video/Boijmans/Dolly#.UTWlQ6KeMsJ

Zinaida Serebriakova – Part 2.

My blog today continues with a look at the life of the Russian painter, Zinaida Serebriakova. At the end of my last entry I told you that she and her family’s life had been turned upside down by the onset of the October Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Lenin, who was the leader of the Bolsheviks, wanted to keep the peasant classes on his side so when he made his attempt to overthrow the provisional Russian government, he ensured the neutrality of the peasants by offering them land, owned by the aristocracy. The Revolution saw the riches, property and lands owned by the aristocratic classes being taken from them by the Bolsheviks and redistributed to the peasants. That October, Serebriakova had been living at her family estate of Neskuchnoye when the Bolshevik forces descended upon her and her family. When it was all over the reserves of Neskuchnoye had been plundered and the family was left without food. Zinaida was left with nothing – no income, no husband, for he had been dragged off by the Bolsheviks and jailed and would die of typhus, which he contracted during incarceration, two years later. Notwithstanding the fact that she was penniless and had no means to earn money, she was responsible for the upbringing of her four children as well as having to care for her widowed mother. Zinaida was forced to give up oil painting in favour of the less expensive techniques of charcoal and pencil sketching

Zinaida eventually managed to get some work at the Kharkov Archaeological Museum, where she made pencil drawings of the exhibits. In December 1920 she and her family went to live with her grandfather who had an apartment in Petrograd. Petrograd had formerly been known as St Petersburg but when World War I broke out in August 1914 it was decided to change the name of the Russian capital from the Germanic St. Petersburg to the more Russian equivalent, Petrograd. It was not until 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the city reverted back to the name of St Petersburg. Because of a Bolshevik dictate which stated that all inhabitants of private apartments had to share their living space with other people, Zinaida found herself sharing her lodgings with artists from the Moscow Art Theatre.

In Ballet Dressing Room (Big Ballerinas) by Zinaida Serebriakova (1922)

Serebriakova’s work during this period focused on theatre life. It was around this time that her daughter Tatyana became interested in ballet and her mother managed to get her enrolled at the prestigious ballet school of the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre, the home of the Russian Ballet, where Zinaida’s uncle, Alexander Benois was the scenic director. Much of Zinaida’s time was absorbed by the theatre and she produced a series of exquisite pastels on the balletic life at the theatre. Many of her works showed young ballerinas in their dressing room preparing to go on stage.

In 1924 Zinaida Serebriakova got the offer of work in Paris and with some financial help from her uncle Alexander Benois, she left St Petersburg and headed to the French capital, leaving behind her four children with her ailing mother. A few years later Zinaida managed to bring her son Alexander and her daughter Katya to live with her in Paris but her son Yevgenyi and her daughter Tatiana had to remain in Russia with their grandmother, and it was not until 1960 that she was able to have Tatiana visit her in Paris.

Zinaida was now one of many Russian exiles living in Paris who could not return to her homeland. She earned a living by painting society portraits. Her children also often featured in her work, and her daughter often posed in the nude. She also painted other female models, reclining in her studio with patterned wraps and decorative drapes. These works were of a very informal nature and often highly erotic. According to her daughter Ekaterina these nude studies were probably the most intimate images of the female body in Russian art. She later wrote:

“…The female nude was mother’s favourite subject. While she was in Russia young peasant women would pose for her. In Paris her friends would come over to her studio, drink a cup of tea, then they would stay and pose for her. They were not the professional models that you might find in Montparnasse and maybe this is the reason why they are so natural and graceful…”

Sleeping Nude (Katya).by Zinaida Serebriakova (1934)

Zinaida completed one of her best known nude studies of her daughter, Ekaterina, in 1934, entitled Sleeping Nude (Katya). It was a veritable masterpiece which is similar in imagery to the sleeping Venuses of the Venetian masters, the nymphs of Boucher and the bathers of Cabanel and Renoir. In this work, Zinaida does not offer us some anonymous heroine from Greek mythological tales but presents us with an innocent young girl, who lies before us, totally relaxed, her cheeks flushed from sleep. It is so natural and it is even more endearing knowing that the model for this painting was her twenty-two year old daughter, Katya who had modelled for her mother for the previous fifteen years.

Sleeping Girl in the Blue (Katyusha on a Blanket)by Zinaida Serebriakova (1923) — Sleeping Girl in the Blue (Katyusha on a Blanket)
by Zinaida Serebriakova (1923)

In 1923, before Zinaida left for Paris she had painted a nude study of the then ten-year old Katya, entitled Sleeping Girl in the Blue (Katyusha on a Blanket), in which we see her young daughter, in all her innocence, sprawled across a blue blanket.

Zinaida’s uncle Alexander Benois, an artist, art critic and co-founder of the art magazine and movement Mir iskusstva (World of Art), commented on the way his niece had portrayed her naked young women. He wrote:

“…[Her nude studies were] not by a generalised sensuality but by something specific, which we recognise from our literature, from our music, from our personal experiences. This is truly the flesh of our flesh. Here is that grace, that comfortable languor, that cosy, domesticated side to Eros – all of which are actually more alluring, more subtle and sometimes more perfidious, more dangerous than what Gauguin found on Tahiti and in search of which blasé Europeans left their pampered life at home and set off in the footsteps of Pierre Loti, across the whole of the white, yellow and black world…”

Zinaida Serebriakova’s nudes were always dignified, self-assured and classically beautiful. She created the most sensual and intimate images of the female body in the Russian art and remained true to the Neo-Romantic tradition and her classical training. At an exhibition of Russian art at the Midi Fair in Brussels in 1928, people noted Serebriakova’s ‘nude’ oeuvre and it was here that she met the industrialist, the Belgian nobleman, Baron de Brouwer. So impressed was he with her work that he became her patron and commissioned her to paint portraits of his family.

Reclining woman (Etude de femme hadija) Marakech by Zinaida Serebriakova (1932)

De Brouwer also financed her painting trip to Morocco where he owned a plantation. Zinaida set off for North Africa on her own and fell in love with the colour and light Morocco afforded her. The baron had wanted her to bring back paintings of the area and its people. He had also said that he had wanted to some nude studies of the Arab women but Zinaiad found this very difficult to achieve. She wrote:

“…He (Brouwer) wants nude paintings of the lovely native women, but it’s a fantasy hardly worth dreaming about – even in their veils which cover everything but their eyes nobody will pose for me. There is no question of a nude…”

However she did return with many paintings of the area and the Arab and Berber women, some of whom she had even managed, with much haggling and offers of financial rewards, to get some to pose in the nude but it was difficult. She wrote of this time:

“…As soon as you sit to draw the women walk away – Arabs don’t wish to be drawn, so they immediately close up their shops or charge up to 10 or 20 francs for tea an hour!…”

De Brouwer was delighted with the works Zinaida brought back from North Africa, so much so, that he commissioned her to paint a series of murals for his villa Manoir du Relais in Pommeroeul near Mons, in Belgium. Zinaida customized the theme of this mural series to that which appealed to her patron. The baron had a love of classical art, which of course was ideal for somebody like Zinaida who had a talent for painting portraits of the naked human form. She set about the commission and decided to paint four separate vertical panels each displaying a standing nude, each with their allegorical attributes which in some way would mirror the leisure activities and talents of de Brouwer.

Jurisprudence by Zinaida Serebriakova (1937-8)

One of the figures would be Jurisprudence, which would represent the baron’s career as a lawyer. A second would be Flora, which would symbolize his passion for gardening, his plantations and his love of flowers. Light, would be another figure which referred to his role as a director of power and gas plants and finally Art which would embody his interest and patronage of the arts. For Zinaida there could only be one possible candidate for the role of model for the four nudes, which would be depicted on the four vertical panels. It was to be her daughter Katya. Her stance in each panel was to be different turning slightly for each depiction. A further two large horizontal panels (145cms x 710cms) were also created and these depicted four maps in cartouches. Zinaida left the painting of these to her son, Alexander, and these were of Flanders, Morocco, India and Patagonia. Next to the maps Zinaida had added half-seated female nudes which were initially intended to represent the four seasons, but she later changed their titles to the countries represented on the maps they adorned. Years later, Zinaida wrote about this commission:

“…The assignment was to paint decorative geographical maps in the 18th-century style, single-tined (my son did the maps); and I painted in the corners of the maps, against that background, the images of the ‘four seasons’ (summer with a sheaf, spring with flowers, etc.), and four figures standing in ‘niches’ on another wall. I painted all this in Paris and, unfortunately, did not see how all this looked on the walls, because the house was not quite ready yet, and the residents were yet to move in … during the war the area was a battlefront, and de Brouwer’s summer house was destroyed…”

Even more pleasing to Zinaida’s was the comments by her artist brother Yevgeni Lanceray, who on seeing photographs of the paintings wrote to her:

“…I love them..You have exactly that which others around you do not – an understanding of composition. The panels are excellent in the simplicity of their execution, completeness of shape, and so monumental and decorative. You completely understand the form of objects. Particularly difficult, I think, is the panel Jurisprudence… It is especially elegant and richly executed. In everything is simplicity and parsimony, so to speak, of decoration and attributes. I envy you your ease, your flexibility, and how broad and accomplished is your representation of the body…”

Nadezhda Tregub of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow wrote about the four nude figures:

“…These murals can be considered entirely cosmopolitan works: they were accomplished on a commission from Belgium, by an artist from Russia who worked in France, and who drew on the major achievements of all European art…”

Sadly the baron and his wife did not have much time to enjoy the murals which were completed in 1937/8 as both died during the Second World War, and it was also thought that their house had also been destroyed. In fact this assumption was incorrect as the house remained standing and even changed ownership a number of times. The murals also remained untouched for over 70 years, but curiously the owners did not recognise the work as being done by Zinaida. They thought they had been executed by an unknown Flemmish artist.

In 1966 a large exhibition of Zinaida Serebryakova’s works was mounted in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev and the critics loved what they saw. In September of the following year Zinaida died in Paris, at the age of eighty-two. She was buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Orthodox cemetery in Paris. The cemetery is a burial place for more than 10,000 Russian emigrants, including the celebrated ballet dancer, Rudolf Nureyev.

Zinaida Serebriakova. Part 1

House of Cards (1919)by Zinaida Seberiakova — House of Cards (1919)
by Zinaida Seberiakova

One of the most pleasing aspects of this blog for me is discovering artists I had never heard of before. It is an even greater pleasure when the “new-to-me” artist is a female for I am often made aware in my look at the lives of painters, the difficulty it has been for a female artist to attain credit for her ability. In the past I have looked at works by Artemisia Gentileschi, Frida Kahlo, Gabriele Münter and Vigée Le Brun, to mention just a few, and I have been mesmerised by their works and the passion that went into them. In my next couple of blogs, I want to introduce you to Zinaida Serebriakova, one of the greatest Russian female artists, whose life story is enthralling and whose works are entrancing.

Zinaida Serebriakova, née Lanceray, was born in 1884, on the family estate of Neskuchnoye, near Kharkov, which now lies in Ukraine. She is descended from two great wealthy and powerful Russian dynasties. On her father’s side there was the Russian Lanceray dynasty and on her mother’s side was the great Franco-Russian Benois family dynasty. Zinaida’s father was the sculptor, graphic artist, and painter, Yevgeny Lanceray, who died when she was just two years of age and her mother was Ekaterina Benois. Zinaida had two brothers, Nikolai and Yevgeny who also excelled artistically and many of her ancestors excelled artistically so it comes as no surprise when she showed both and interest and talent for drawing and painting.

Country Girl by Zinaida Serebriakova (1906)

Zinaida spent her childhood and youth split between living in St. Petersburg, where her grandfather the architect Nicholas Benois lived, and at the family estate of Neskuchnoye. Her initial artistic tuition came in 1901 after she had completed her grammar school education the previous year, when at the age of seventeen, she enrolled at the Princess Tenisheva Art School in St Petersburg, where the lead tutor was the distinguished Russian painter and sculptor, Ilya Repin. The following year she travelled to Italy and in 1903 she began a two year apprenticeship at the St Petersburg studio of the Russian portraitist Osip Braz. Living in St. Petersburg she was able to visit the Hermitage Museum and gaze in wonderment at the classical paintings of the Masters. Of all those artists which she admired, the one who stood out the most for her and was to influence her future work was her countryman, Alexey Gavrilovich Venetsianov. He was famous for his paintings which focused on the simple life of ordinary people and the struggle for survival of the peasant classes. He often painted portraits of the peasants and Zinaida was captivated by the innocence and virtuousness of his imagery and many of her future works would incorporate scenes from peasant life. An example of this is the early work which she completed in 1906 entitled Country Girl.

Boris Serebriakov by Zinaida Serebriakova (c.1905)

Apart from seeing these works by Venetsianov, she was fortunate to live at Neskuchnoye and savour the beauty of the surrounding countryside and the tranquillity of country life. She also spent much of her time completing portraits of her family members. In 1905, Zinaida Lanceray married Boris Serebriakov, who was her first cousin. They had met at Neskuchnoe whilst he was studying engineering and he would later become a railroad engineer. Zanaida and her husband went off to Paris where she continued her art studies at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. This art establishment which was founded three years earlier by the Swiss painter Martha Stettler operated as a ‘free’ academy, where art students, both professional and amateur alike could enter to draw and paint at will.

At the Dressing Table (Self Portrait) by Zinaida Serebriakova (1909)

Her popularity as an artist took off shortly after she exhibited her Self Portrait at the exhibition held by the Union of Russian Artists in 1910. It was a work she had completed the previous year and showed her image, as seen in a mirror, seated at her dressing table, combing her hair. The painting can be seen at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Her uncle Alexander Benois wrote about this work:

“…A young woman lives in a remote country area … and has no other pleasure, no other aesthetic enjoyment on winter days that seclude her from the whole world, than to see her gay young face in the mirror and to watch the play of her bare arms and hands with a comb … Her face and everything else in the picture is young and fresh. There is not a trace of modernistic refinement. But the simple, real-life atmosphere, illuminated by youth, is joyous and lovely…”

In 1916 Zinaida’s uncle, Alexander Benois was commissioned to decorate the Kazan Railway Station in Moscow and he invited her to help him by becoming part of his team. Serebriakova took on the theme of the Orient: India, Japan, Turkey, and Siam were represented allegorically in the form of beautiful women. It is recognised that the work she produced between 1914 and 1917 were some of her best.

Bleaching Cloth by Zanaida Serebriakova (1917)

She created a series of works, the theme of which was the rural life she witnessed all around her. In 1917 she completed one such painting entitled Bleaching Cloth which in some way is her homage to the female peasant workers. Against a background formed by a blue sky and partly veiled by light greyish white clouds, we see the women hard at work in the fields with their bales of cloth. The red, green and brown colour of the peasants’ clothes gives the painting a beautiful vibrancy and the figures seen against a very low horizon gives the depicted peasants a commanding and grandiose quality. The work, measuring 142cms x 174cms, was a testament to Zinaida’s talent as a monumental artist. The painting is now held at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

The year 1917 proved to be her annus horriblis and changed her life and that of her family forever. The Russian Revolution led by the Bolsheviks under the leadership of Lenin started in October of that year and soon spread throughout the country. The Bolsheviks believed that the working classes would, at some point, liberate themselves from the economic and political control of the ruling classes. It was an uprising by the “have-nots against those who had” and as such the family estate owned by Zinaida’s family, where she was living was a target. Much of the estate was taken over or destroyed. All the reserves of Neskuchnoye had been plundered which resulted in the family suffering from hunger. Her husband had been taken away by the Bolsheviks and was incarcerated in jail where he died of typhus in 1919. Zinaida was left without any money and yet was responsible for her four children and her sick widowed mother.

This was a traumatic time in Zinaida’s life and it was in that very year that her husband died that she completed one of her most famous works and which is my featured painting of the day, entitled House of Cards which depicts her four orphaned children, Alexandre, Ekaterina, Eugene and Tatyana playing cards. It is a tragic painting featuring her children, who probably could not understand what had happened to dramatically change their way of life. Their safe and privileged existence had suddenly collapsed like a house of cards.

In my next blog I will take you through the story of the rest of Zinaida Serebriakova’s life story and have a look at some of her later works.

I and the Village and The Birthday by Marc Chagall

I and the Village by Marc Chagall (1911)

Having just completed my four part look at the quartet of Scottish Colourists I am turning to a painter from the same era but one who could not be more different in style. For my blog today I want to look at the early life of and two fascinating paintings by the Russian-Jewish artist, Marc Chagall. He was a painter of poetic, surreal images that to him, represented a topsy-turvy world, combining fantasy and spirituality with a modernist style

house — Chagall’s family home in Vitebsk

Marc Chagall, a name he did not use until 1915 when he arrived in Paris, was born Moishe Segal on the 7th of July 1887 in the small Jewish shetl of Liozna part of the town of Vitebsk, which was in the Russian Empire but now is situated in Belarus. He was the eldest of nine children born into a Hasidic Jewish family. His parents led a simple yet spartan life. His mother Feige-Ite ran a small grocery shop from their home. His grandfather worked as a teacher and a cantor in a local synagogue and had secured a position for Marc Chagall’s father as a clerk at a wholesale herring merchants but in Marc Chagall’s autobiography, My Life, he criticised his grandfather for his father’s placement and derided the job description of “clerk”. He wrote:

“…My grandfather, a teacher of religion, could think of nothing better than to place my father – his eldest son, still a child – as a clerk with a firm of herring wholesalers, and his youngest son with a barber. No, my father was not a clerk, but, for thirty-two years, a plain workman. He lifted heavy barrels, and my heart used to twist like a Turkish pretzel as I watched him carrying those loads and stirring the little herrings with his frozen hands……Sometimes my father’s clothes would glisten with herring brine. The light played above him, besides him. But his face, now yellow, now clear, would sometimes break into a wan smile…”

Chagall would always remember those early days of hardship and how hard his father worked to provide for his family. In his 1922 autobiography, My Life, Chagall recalled those difficult times:

“…Day after day, winter and summer, at six o’clock in the morning, my father got up and went off to the synagogue. There he said his usual prayer for some dead man or other. On his return he made ready the samovar, drank some tea and went to work. Hellish work, the work of a galley-slave. Why try to hide it? How tell about it? No word will ever ease my father’s lot… There was always plenty of butter and cheese on our table. Buttered bread, like an eternal symbol, was never out of my childish hands…”

As a young child, Chagall went to the local heder, an elementary Jewish school in which children were taught to read the Torah and other books in Hebrew. Later he transferred to the local secular secondary school and it was here that young Chagall started to show an interest in art. The fact that he, as a Jew, was allowed to go to the local secular school was in itself rather unusual as according to government dictates at the time, Jewish children were not allowed to study at secular schools. In 1906 when Marc was nineteen years of age and with help from his mother, and despite his father’s protests, he enrolled at a private school of drawing, Artist Pen’s School of Drawing and Painting run by Yethuda Pen. Yethuda Pen was a talented Jewish artist and art teacher and one of the outstanding figures of the Jewish Renaissance in Russian and Belarusian art. Chagall remembers the day he first cast his eyes on the school and how it impressed him. He recounted the time in his autobiography:

“…I learned about Pen when I was riding on a streetcar. It was crossing the Cathedral Square and I saw a banner – white letters on blue: Artist Pen’s School. ‘What a cultured city is our Vitebsk,’ I thought...”

Later, in 1921, Chagall told his former tutor, Penn, about the day he first entered the college, accompanied by his mother, for an interview for a place on Penn’s art course and how nervous he was. He wrote:

“…I recall how, as a boy, I climbed the steps of your studio. And the tremor with which I awaited you: you were to decide my fate in my mother’s presence. I know how many other young boys in Vitebsk and the entire gubernia [administrative district] had their fates decided by you. For dozens of years your studio was the first to lure people in town… You have trained a vast generation of Jewish artists…”

He remained only a few months at Penn’s art school and in 1907 with little money, he left Vitebsk and headed for Saint Petersburg. Chagall had already seen and felt the full force of the anti-Semitic Russian laws in his home town but they paled into insignificance compared to the discriminatory policies against Jews in Saint Petersburg. However for Chagall these legal hardships and the fact that he had little money to live on, was of little consequence as he was now able to immerse himself in the whirlpool of artistic life. These were also revolutionary times and the revolutionary mood of the Russian people against their Tsarist ruler could be seen in every-day life, through avant-garde magazines and art exhibitions which pioneered new and modern western art. The art world was waking up to the new art of the French Fauves, the German Expressionists and the Italian Futurists. This was an exciting time for the young Russian artist, Chagall, and this new art would greatly influence him. Although he absorbed this new art and knew about the various artistic groupings, he was his own man and he wanted to stand alone and create his own unique artistic style. The one thing Chagall was determined about was that he would never ever forget his childhood background and the people of Vitebsk. He would never forget his family’s or his poor but happy upbringing and the family’s lowly status. He would never forget the hand to mouth existence and the importance of the land and the farms that provided food for its people. He would never forget the onion-shaped cupolas of the churches, the wooden houses with the grass roofs which helped insulate them. His home town of Vitebsk was tattooed on his very heart and he would always remember it in his art with great affection.

Whilst living in St Petersburg Marc Chagall earned a living by working at the editorial office of the Russian-Jewish periodical, Voskhod. He also carried on with his artistic studies first at the school of the Society for the Encouragement of Art Society of Art Supporters where he studied under the Russian painter and stage designer Nikolai Roerich and the following year he enrolled as a student at the Yelizaveta Zvantseva’s School of Drawing and Painting where one of his teachers was the great Russian artist and costume designer Leon Bakst. Bakst had lived in Paris from 1893 to 1897, where he studied at the Académie Julian, and he would eventually persuade Chagall to head for the French capital, the then art capital of the world, so as to best continue his artistic studies.

Bella Rosenfeldcourtesy of http://www.marcchagallart.net/ — Bella Rosenfeld

In 1909, Chagall met Bella Rosenfeld who lived in his home town and had been visiting friends in St. Petersburg. It was love at first sight and within a short time they had become engaged. Although both Marc and Bella were from Vitebsk, their social worlds could not have been more different and for that reason Bella’s parents were very unhappy with the liaison. Bella’s parents, Shmule and Alta Rosenfeld were extremely wealthy and ran a very successful jewellery business back in Vitebsk and had managed to put Bella through the best education culminating at the University of Moscow. She was particularly interested in the workings of the theatre and in art, and whilst studying at university, she contributed articles to a Moscow newspaper. Chagall’s love for Bella, who became his wife in 1915, was deep and enduring and in his autobiography he wrote with passion about his true love:

“… Her silence is mine, her eyes mine. It is as if she knows everything about my childhood, my present, my future, as if she can see right through me; as if she has always watched over me, somewhere next to me, though I saw her for the very first time. I knew this is she, my wife. Her pale colouring, her eyes. How big and round and black they are! They are my eyes, my soul…”

In 1910, Chagall held his first solo exhibition, which was in the editorial office of the St Petersburg avant-garde magazine Apollon. One of the visitors to the exhibition was Maxim Vinaver, a lawyer and deputy of the State Duma. Vinaver, who was one of the outstanding figures in Russian Jewry of his time. He played a distinguished role as a Jewish communal leader, as well as one of the leaders of the Liberal Cadet Party. He was always a champion of the Jewish cause and as a deputy in the Russian Duma, Vinaver organized the Society to Secure Equality for the Jews in Russia. Impressed by the talent of Chagall, he became his patron and gave him a monetary scholarship and with this financial assistance Chagall was able to go to Paris to carry on his artistic studies. It was on arriving in the French capital that Moishe Segal adopted the French-sounding pseudonym, Marc Chagall.

I will leave the life story of Marc Chagall at this stage of his life and return to it in a later blog but for now I want to look at two of his paintings. The first painting, and one of his most famous, is entitled I and the Village, which he completed in 1911, whilst living in Paris. It is currently housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The painting on first sight is, like many of his works, unfathomable and one has to look carefully at all the elements depicted to try and understand what was going on in Chagall’s mind as he put brush to canvas. It is a dream-like image with many overlapping elements. This lively composition and the geometrical structures, such as lines, angles, triangles, circles, and squares clearly displays aspects of Cubism. Some would have us believe that Chagall’s assortment of large and small circular forms are meant to depict the sun’s revolution within our solar system as well as the earth’s revolution around the sun, and the moon’s revolution around the earth. The moon being in the lower left of the painting is causing an eclipse of the sun. However, maybe like me, this cosmic interpretation of the painting is possibly a step too far!

It is a collage of various objects. It portrays the artist’s memories of the Hasidic Community of Vitebsk in which he was brought up, a peasant community, which relied heavily on the land and their animals for food. There are human and animal elements in the work which are both fragmented and randomly assembled to produce an abstract composition. The colours Chagall uses are vibrant and he has produced a severe contrast between the red, the green and the blue which he has liberally used.

Let us look more closely at the work and see if we can unravel the meaning of some of its elements. If you look at the top right hand corner of the work you can make out a small town. There is a church with its onion-shaped cupola and some brightly coloured houses some of which are upside down. This inclusion, as he did in many of his works, is probably Chagall’s home town of Vitebsk and the fact that some of the houses are upturned could well be his way of illustrating that it is his town as visualised by him in his dream. In front of the row of houses is man dressed in black with a scythe over his shoulder, presumably returning home after a hard day’s work in the fields. In front of him is an upturned woman. The woman, according to some descriptions is playing a violin. However although people playing violins feature in many of Chagall’s works I beg to differ as far as this woman is concerned. I have studied pictures of the painting, inverted it to see her better, and have concluded she is simply a peasant woman swinging her arms as if dancing. I will let you decide. This dream-like depiction of the peasant woman whether a violinist or a dancer could be a reference to the importance that music and dance played for entertainment for the people of Chagall’s erstwhile small Jewish community.

The two main elements of the painting are, on the right, a green-faced man wearing a cap and on the left an animal. The green colour of his face is an example of Fauvism where the colour used is not the one we would normally associate with in reality. On the left is the head of an animal, possibly a horse or goat or cow. On its cheek Chagall has painted an image of smaller goat or cow being milked. If you look carefully you will see Chagall has drawn a line between the eye of the man and the eye of the animal and this probably refers to the close relationship, the inter-dependence between a peasant and his animal – a kind of “seeing eye to eye”, understanding the important relationship between man and beast. The man, who wears a cross around his neck, clutches hold of a small flowering branch, the seeds from which seem to be scattering, which could allude to the sowing of seed in the ground.

The reason why I chose Chagall for my blog today was because it was Valentine’s Day and I wanted to feature a painting which in some ways was the essence of true love between two people. I could have gone for The Kiss by Gustave Klimt or Francesco Hayer or some other erotic and sensuous painting but I came across the painting by Chagall entitled Birthday and in a way it said everything to me about the love between two people. Chagall painted the picture in 1915, the year he married his beloved Bella Rosenfeld. For Chagall his relationship with her was everything he could have wanted and I believe the couple in the painting are Marc and Bella.

Bella with White Collar by Marc Chagall (1917)

Chagall painted Bella in many of his works and I believe this is one of them. The painting depicts the man and the woman. Although the woman’s face is clearly defined the man’s face is somewhat of a blur. In the work we see them both seemingly elevated by their love for each other. For them it was possible to float above the reality of the world and just enjoy each other’s company. Look at the feet of the man and the woman. They seem to be pointing in opposite directions. Maybe he has given her the bunch of flowers and has walked past her but realises that the flowers without a kiss is not enough and so he literally bends over backwards to please his loved one by offering up a kiss. She holds the flowers that he has given her and purses her lips in readiness for his kiss but he has walked past her. However before disappointment can set in he returns, lips ready to kiss his beloved girl! What could be more romantic? However there is much more to this work of art than the two lovers. Look at the amount of detail Chagall has put into the painting. See how he has depicted the seeds of the watermelon which lies on the counter, the exotically detailed Indian blanket which lies on the bed and the blue lace fabric which hangs below the window.

I end by wishing you all a Happy Valentine’s Day and hope that your loved one manages to bend over backwards for you !!!

The photo of Chagall’s home and Bella Rosenfeld were courtesy of http://www.marcchagallart.net/