Dali House

This is Émile Bernard chipping his name into the granite of 20th-century art history, a lovely painting by any measure, “Le Repos a Pont-Aven”, which also shares the title “Le Gardeuse d’Oies”. Here the guardian of the geese is a Breton lass recalled from his hike around Normandy, possibly Émile’s sister Madeleine.

The Grimms’ tale of a lost princess destined to mind geese and pine for her royal fiance, “The Goose Girl” had been delightening readers since 1815, though here, eight decades later — and in Camille Pissarro’s slightly earlier etching, seen below — I can’t help thinking that Leda and her swan aren’t making discreet appearances. See this post.

The main title of Bernard’s version is intriguing. Much has been made of his bravery in breaking with Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School and going “beyond modernity and present-day reality”, as he put it, in pursuit of the stark post-impressionist vista that’s known rather weightily as pictorial symbolism. “What I wanted to do was create a style for our age,” he wrote.

In fact, what didn’t become abstract became merely decorative.

Was Bernard putting Pont-Aven “at rest”, or was he putting it “to rest”? Without an answer, I fail to see any bravery in his retrograde reclamation of the Renaissance and the classics, and I wonder if the lack of clear inspiration in this painting had anything to do with the fact that it raised “only” $301,000 at Sotheby’s New York on May 8 when the seller was hoping for between $400,000 and $600,000. See the rest.

I’ve just signed up for online notices from Sotheby’s, which may turn out to have been a huge mistake. Right off the bat I’ve had email alerts about three upcoming shows in New York at which the jaw-dropping collection of Texas property magnate Raymond Nasher and his wife Patsy is being sold off. Not only are the pieces stunning, Sotheby’s terrific presentation suggests to me that I’ll have to use considerable restraint to avoid reproducing everything here.

But what the hell. With amiable thanks to Sotheby’s and a respectful nod to Mr Nasher, who died in March 2007 (and his wife, who predeceased him by 19 years), here are two of the items up for bids. Above, Paul Signac’s “Clipper (Opus 155)” from 1887, and here, Rene Magritte’s “l’Okapi” from 1958.

The Nasher collection is going on the block in three segments — an “Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale” on May 7, “Property from the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection” on May 9 and “Contemporary Art Evening Auction” on May 14. Included are Morisot, Monet, Braque, Picasso, Miro, Leger, Munch, Giacometti and many others. The catalogue alone is a droolfest.

Nasher, who built Texas’ biggest shopping mall before he established the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in North Carolina and founded the Nasher Sculpture Centre on Flora Street in Dallas in 2003 (pictured below from Google Earth), started collecting art by buying a Ben Shahn (Dali House post) painting in 1954. He and Patsy invested in pre-Columbian art, then Arp and Moore, and just kept on going.

Signac’s “Clipper”, expected to bring between $5 million and $7 million, was painted in the same vicinity as the considerably more famous “Bathers at Asnières” by the considerably more famous pointillist Georges Seurat, a work that will coincidentally be popping up again in a forthcoming post here.

As Sotheby’s notes, the northwestern Paris suburb was popular with avant-garde landscape painters in the 1880s. In 1887 both Van Gogh and Emile Bernard portrayed the same parallel bridges, but Signac had been there before them, and returned twice more afterward to capture the scene. Like Seurat, he was struck by the mingling of industry and leisure, sailboats sharing the frame with factories.

Magritte’s “l’Okapi”? Yours, perhaps, for $3 million or $4 million. Stay tuned.

… sound of stock ticker … DING!

Here we go: “l’Okapi” went for $3.8 million, and Signac’s “Clipper” sold for $5.6 million.

With great difficulty I gained my feet, and looking dizzily around was, at first, struck with the idea of our being among breakers; so terrific, beyond the wildest imagination, was the whirlpool of mountainous and foaming ocean within which we were engulfed … Amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering, oh God! and — going down.
— Edgar Allan Poe, from “MS found in a Bottle”. (Read about his actual demise in Dorseyland.)

“Explore the world’s oceans — shipwrecks galore!” says ShipwreckCentral.com, and Wikipedia records the details of hundreds of them, anywhere there’s water this side of your Jacuzzi. How many? Three million, reckons the United Nations.

That’s a lot of journeys interruptus, many pilgrimages aborted, myriad dreams denied entry by the bouncers of the bounding main. Noah barely made it, having blown a kiss to the sinners left behind on the boarding ramp, “those doomed antediluvians left to perish”, as Julian Barnes put it in “A History of the World in 10½ Chapters”.

A couple of chapters along, Barnes fretted over the survivors aboard Theodore Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” (crucial Dali House post here) — and what they represented. “We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.”

Ivan Aivazovsky’s “The Shipwreck”, from 1871, and here a detail from his earlier “Moonlit Seascape With Shipwreck”.

Noah has been painted since, well, biblical times, but the very real possibility of shipwrecks seemed to particularly haunt French and British (and Russian) artists across the bridge of the 18th and 19th centuries, probably because man’s position in the universal hierarchy had been diminished by scientific discoveries, and as a result of the emerging spiritual awareness that he was perhaps not God’s pet project after all. Nature’s awesome power, fresh evidence of which turned up in every new place he explored, became a metaphor for his new sense of helplessness.

Géricault’s hero-less raft, tossed upon the public consciousness in 1819 amid horrific newspaper accounts of the catastrophe it depicted, was merely the most celebrated of the shipwreck paintings. JMW Turner, 16 years his senior, offered a much more frenzied scene, “The Shipwreck”, in 1805, above, and, living by the sea, couldn’t let the subject go. In 1810 he painted “The Wreck of a Transport Ship”, in 1823 — by which time Géricault was already dying of tuberculosis — “The Storm (Shipwreck)”, in 1825 “Shipwreck off Hastings” and in 1835 “Fire at Sea”, sometimes referred to as “Disaster at Sea”.

His creativity always in danger of subsiding in a doom of its own making, Turner nevertheless managed to live far longer than most of his species in those wretched times. See Dali House’s Turner biography.

The 1823 picture reproduced above, now at the British Museum in London, came three years after Géricault’s “Raft” was shown at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, where Turner joined the 40,000-strong throng who came to see what all the fuss in France was about. JMW may well have been impressed by the younger artist’s forceful composition as well as its subject matter. At one point Turner was crossing the sea himself when a gale blew up and he ventured on deck, sketch pad in hand. Warned off by the crew, he told them to lash him to a mast so he could watch the fury in relative safety.

And so he did, for four hours, spinning in the vortex of the wind, and that’s how he depicted all the elements of his hurricanes. What had to be aligned on the canvas was aligned in spirals askew, and with sharp diagonal elements almost forcing the viewer to lean to one side as if on a sloping deck.

The ship staggered under a thunderous shock
That shook us asunder, as if she had struck and crashed on a rock;
For the huge sea smote every soul from the decks of The Falcon but one;
All of them, all but the man that was lash’d to the helm had gone.
— Alfred Lord Tennyson, from “The Wreck”. See the rest.

The Auberge de la Bonne Franquette at the corner of Rue des Saules and Rue Saint Rustique was called Aux Billards en Bois in the 1890s, when Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Monet and Zola were among the clientele. The owners still take pride in the fact that Van Gogh painted its garden in “La Guinguette” in 1886.

At the Montmartre Museum at 12 Rue Cortot there are art exhibits, musical performances and many valuable documents, but no visitor can ignore the fact that this 17th-house was the home at different times of Renoir, Raoul Dufy, Erik Satie and Emile Bernard, and then a café that provided lodgings for Maurice Utrillo and his mum.

The main house is the “maison de Rosimond”, so named for its one-time owner, Rose de Rosimond, a stage actress in Molière’s troupe who died onstage in mid-scene, just as Molière had done. Not much to look at out front, but it has a lovely garden in the back.

The Brasserie des Martyrs, once situated at 75 Rue des Martyrs, was the place to be seen in the days of Courbet, Baudelaire, Proudhon and Gauthier, and remained so for the generations that followed.

The great Renoir – whose “Seated Female Nude”, also known as “After the Bath”, is seen here – was among those who had their own designated tables in the huge, three-storey restaurant. Monet and Pissarro would hover around his, trying to muster the courage to speak to him. See the rest.

Continued from here.

In 1894 Rodin visited Claude Monet’s lush estate in Giverney, where he met Paul Cézanne. The painter’s country garden may have spurred him to buy the Villa des Brillants in Meudon, which he’d been renting since 1893. Here he began amassing his collection of antiques and paintings.

This Louis XIII villa of red stone and brick stands on a rise overlooking the Val Fleury, its vast grounds sloping to the River Seine. The sculptor gradually made it a workplace, buying neighbouring homes and turning them into studios and offices to accommodate the 50 or so assistants he employed by 1900.

One room became “the studio of antiquities”, a gallery for his work and the Old World pieces he collected, and elsewhere hung paintings by Monet and Van Gogh, among others.

Until 1900, although Rodin continued to spend every day at his Paris studios, it was in the intimacy of Meudon that he accomplished his most creative work. See the rest.