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.

“Drawing is the backbone of all art,” Vincent Van Gogh once wrote, voicing a weary truth that’s nevertheless undermined by the fact that paper makes for a vulnerable spine. How many thousand would-be treasures by the masters have flown off with the wind and been consumed by time, never to be seen again?

And yet drawings by Van Gogh continue to reappear in the present, back like Van Winkle from presumed demise. Even 118 years after Vincent’s death, a notebook has been submitted to the experts to decide if it was his. One of its pages is shown above, another here. Further down is a sketch recently found, already authenticated and up for sale.

The sketchbook of some 60 pages was found in a storage box in an Athens home by the daughter of a Greek resistance fighter, Reuters reported in January this year. He evidently took it from a train carrying Nazi loot at the end of World War II.

One expert has said it’s Vincent’s work, and now Doreta Peppa is awaiting confirmation from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. If she gets it, she believes the book could be worth at least four million euros, although she says, “I don’t want it to leave my hands.”

Uncovered along with a photo that Peppa says shows Vincent, the sketchbook bears a Nazi stamp and the mark of the Brussels Royal Academy of Art. Van Gogh moved to the Belgian capital in 1880.

At its sale of “Modern & Contemporary Art” in Amsterdam on June 25, Sotheby’s sold “Old Man and Woman” (”Oude Man en Vrouw”), drawn in 1882 in carpenter’s pencil and rubbed lightly here and there with a lithographic crayon, for 108,750 euros.

Calling it a “recent” find, the auction house says it’s only the eighth drawing to be positively attributed to Van Gogh since 1970, which gives an indication of what Doreta Peppa is up against in her quest for authentification.

“Because of the rarity of such a discovery,” Sotheby’s notes, the Van Gogh Museum devoted a special presentation to it in February and March. See the rest.

Two further additions to the “Call for Help” links list at Dali House:

In operation since December, the Van Gogh Gallery Blog is an extension of Templeton Reid LLC’s well-established Van Gogh Gallery, and appears to be matching it for informativeness.

It’s a good place to pose questions about the artist, such as what the word mousmé means in his “La Mousmé, Sitting”, shown here.

Recent entries have included the discovery in January of one of Vincent’s sketchbooks (in Greece!) and the upcoming opening of Vincent vanGoghHuis, a shrine occupying the site of his birthplace in Zundert.

From the Van Gogh Blog’s own blogroll I’ve commandeered the address of Art Blog by Bob, in which a Philadelphia-based “amateur art historian” has a good look around. There are tiresome reviews and lots and lots of Blogspot’s patented single-page scrolling, and Bob embraces the current wisdom about Dali — “to put it kindly, a nut, but a nut who could paint” — but there’s plenty of engaging writing on all kinds of art, and he’s got terrific taste.

Just back from a five-day jaunt to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Vincent is hard at work on paintings of the seaside. If he hadn’t fully embraced the Midi before this, he is now enrapt with life in the south.

Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer on Google Earth

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.