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.

“Portrait of a Young Woman” by Pablo Picasso, 1903. Was this the same “Portrait of a Young Woman” that a New Yorker bought in 1922 for $550?

By 1922 America was already a feisty, industrial global power that had banged its stamp on world affairs, but there was still a lot of colonial thinking. The isolationist sentiment that had kept it out of the Great War for so long had come with a self-reliance that let its citizens scoff at other nationalities.

In New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art scoffed at the modern stuff trickling across the ocean from Europe. It would be another seven years before Abby Aldrich Rockefeller founded the Museum of Modern Art as a cradle on Yankee soil for the new ways of looking at things. There were by then, at least, already a lot of good pictures floating around stateside.

But in 1922 the New York Times was no doubt speaking for the majority when it surveyed a gaggle of European artworks being auctioned in Manhattan and allowed itself, while pandering to the more cosmopolitan elite, a Bronx cheer at the lot.

“That there is a demand in this country for the work of modern French artists known as extremists was shown at the opening sale of the collection of French pictures belonging to Dikran Khan Kelekian [*more on him in a bit], under the auspices of the American Art Association, at the Hotel Plaza last evening,” it reported on January 31 that year. [Download the article in PDF format here.]

“What the result of the sale would be every one had been in doubt. It was the first of its kind in this country. ‘You must make your bids,’ said Thomas E Kirby, from the auctioneer’s bench, putting up the first picture, ‘we have no previous records to go upon in this sale.’”

A portrait by Matisse, the paper said, “brought a burst of laughter when it was put up. It was a small picture, a little girl with red hair, a green and black frock, orange bow on her hair, painted against a brilliant green background. The portrait had many characteristics of the work of a child on a slate, but … “

– and now it’s our turn to laugh (or cry) –

“… it started at $100 and went up to $300.”

A Matisse painting for $300. When, oh, when are they going to invent that blasted time machine? Below are Renoir’s “Portrait of a Girl”, which seems to be the one at issue here, and “Roses”, which is coming up for sale in a few moments.

“There were many beautiful things in the sale and others which, while quite normal, seemed to bring prices out of proportion to their beauty. A watercolor, by Cazanne [sic], No 31, ‘Geranium’, was simply a flourishing geranium with green leaves, not even a blossom, as someone said, in a light-toned flowerpot against a buff background. It was a small picture, altogether about the size of of a small pot of geraniums … It brought $650.

“There is little intrinsic value to a picture — its value is in the skill of the artist and his appeal to the people. Six hundred and fifty dollars would have bought a large garden of geraniums, but the sale of the picture shows that the work of the French modern artists appeals to Americans.” Cezanne’s “Two Trees” managed to earn $500.

Flash forward to May 2008. “Geranium” — by Matisse, though, not “Cazanne” — delivers $9.5 million at auction, right here in New York. Christie’s was hoping for $2.5 million to $3.5 million. See the rest.

Part 1 of this post is here.

Shown above is “The Seine with the Pont de la Grande Jatte”, painted in 1887 by Vincent Van Gogh. Perhaps he’d had a go himself after hearing the fuss that Seurat had caused. Van Gogh came to Georges’ studio at the end of 1887, and then joined Seurat and Signac in hanging a few canvases at a show at the new Théâtre Libre on rue Blanche. And Vincent made a final visit to Seurat’s atelier on February 19, 1888, on his was to the train station to leave Paris forever. The next day he was in Arles.

Seurat was bound for different vistas as well, summering that year on the Normandy coast — in Le Crotoy, Honfleur and Gravelines — and painting seascapes and harbour scenes. The following February there was another Les Vingt exhibition in Brussels, and then came Madeleine Knobloch.

Seurat kept his 20-year-old working-class mistress a secret from both family and friends, moving with her into a tiny studio flat at #39 on the elegantly named Passage de l’Elysée des Beaux Arts — it’s the angled building in the middle of the image below. This road is now called rue André Antoine, after a clerk at the Paris Gas Company whose interest in the stage led him to become what some call the “Father of Modern Drama”.

Antoine (1858-1943) established the highly innovative Théâtre-Libre in the street in March 1887, before moving shop in the autumn to rue Blanche in Montparnasse, where Seurat, Signac and Van Gogh helped him “decorate”. Interestingly, 39 rue du Passage de l’Elysée des Beaux-Arts was also Modigliani’s address in 1910 and 1911, but then he did move around a lot.

At this domicile on February 16, 1890, Madeleine gave birth to a son, called Pierre-Georges in a mirror image of his father’s name. Later that year Seurat exhibited just one painting, “Young Woman Powdering Herself”, but he didn’t let on that it was a portrait of his lover. See the rest.

If not in person, Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” has to be seen large. There’s a very good scan on this page at the Athenaeum.

There are moments on hot summer days when we are prepared for a miracle. The stillness and the gently vibrating haze give to our perceptions a kind of finality, and we wait listening for some cosmic hum to enchant, like Papageno’s bells, the uncouth shapes and colours which surround us, so that they all dance to the same tune and finally come to rest in a harmonious order. — Kenneth Clark, “Looking at Pictures”

It’s a pretty Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1885 and we’re having a petit bourgeois luncheon on the grass on on an island in the Seine. La Grande Jatte — the Big Bowl — near Neuilly has been cleaned up considerably after all those years as an industrial canker. There are restaurants and joints where you can dance further along the island, though still lots of factories on the far riverbank, which is why not everyone wants to come here. But now this end of the Jatte is a marvellous green get-away for city folks like us, nice breezes off the river, and we’re doing our best to muck it up with dog shit.

That woman with the monkey is here again too. She keeps it on a leash but it still defecates at the drop of a peanut and alarms the old ladies. Someone ought to complain to the gendarme, but he’s only here for the flirting.

After our quiche we’ll go pester that young Seurat at his easel again. He’s here almost every day, same as last summer, pecking away at his canvases like a pigeon. Millions of little dots. One picture after another. What the hell can he be thinking? He’s such a grouch too — good-looking fellow, nicely dressed, but he definitely deserves to have both of his legs pulled!

Georges-Pierre Seurat was 25 that summer, and if was anti-social, he had a brace of fair reasons. His father, who was in the law game, was a stick in the mud who only showed up at home on Tuesdays; the rest of the week he was at his country villa pecking away at his flower garden like a pigeon. Georges came by his stand-offishness honestly. And besides that, he really had something to prove with his painting. Now was not the time for distractions. 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.