Dali House

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.

Vincent has rented four rooms along one side of the big yellow house on Place Lamartine at 15 francs a month. He’d had a falling-out with the landlord at the Carrel, who was charging five francs a week for just his one room. Vincent was so incensed that he took the matter to an arbitrator, and ended up paying one franc a week less!

Meanwhile he’s moved into Joseph Ginoux’s Café de la Gare just along the way and is waiting for the yellow house to be furnished, though he can begin using it as a studio. This is where he wants to open his “Studio of the South”, an artists’ co-operative that will explore new ways of doing things, what he calls, none too modestly, the “art of the future”.

He signed the lease on May 1 for two large rooms on the ground floor and two smaller ones above, facing Place Lamartine. The other half of the building houses a grocery, and just across from it is the restaurant that his landlady, the widow Venissac, operates, where Vincent takes his meals.

He’s started a series of paintings with which to decorate his future home, mostly sunflowers, and has made a large picture of the house itself, which he calls “La Maison et son entourage”, but he’s thinking of retitling it “La Rue” after Raffaëlli’s new paintings of the streets in Paris.

You can see Vincent’s main street along the right of the picture, Avenue Montmajour, which leads to the railway bridges, one going across the river to Lunel, the other linking Paris and Lyon to Marseille. On the left in the painting, shaded by a tree, is the restaurant, and just beyond that, not visible, is the night café, which Vincent is also painting. He’s sent a sketch of “La Maison” to his brother Théo and proudly pointed out how everything is transformed by the “sulphur sun under a pure cobalt sky”. See the rest.

A few days after Henri Matisse came teetering into Gertrude Stein’s apartment in Paris in that 1907 spring with the great lump of a sculpted African torso he’d just bought, making Picasso’s eyes bug out even more than usual, Pablo dragged his pal André Derain over to the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnology, as the Museum of Man at the Palais de Chaillot was then known. It had a 30-year-old collection of the African stuff. It still has (along with René Descartes’ brain, for some reason), but back then the knickknacks of colonialism were all mouldy and neglected, and the Spaniard was miffed in the must.

“I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately,” Picasso recalled, “but I forced myself to stay.” And stay he did, elevating the centuries-old tribal “objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose” into the most modern of all European art forms. Matisse, Braque and Modigliani kept pace with him, re-moulding the rough-hewn angularity into a new way of seeing the world … but what happened to Derain?

André Derain was 27 when Pablo pulled him into the dusty Trocadéro archives. He hailed from Chatou on the Île-de-France, and was going to be an engineer, but then veered into the less reasonable side of design. He took painting classes at the Académie Carrière and sketched up and down the Parisian Seine and at the Louvre, where in 1899 he met an old classmate, Georges Florentin Linaret, who was by then studying under Gustave Moreau, as was Matisse.

To their extraordinary experiments, Derain brought his admiration for Cézanne and, following the 1901 tribute exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune, of Van Gogh. At this show Derain introduced Matisse to Maurice de Vlaminck, with whom he was by then sharing a studio in Chatou in the western suburbs, where the impressionists once conspired at the Maison Fournaise (it’s on the same street as Dali House).

Derain was drafted for a three-year stint with the army, and painted little during that time. Only two of his works have been ascribed to 1903: “The Soldiers’ Ball of Suresnes” (detail here), done while he was on leave, and “Self-portrait in the Studio”, now at the National Gallery of Australia.

The latter was a fast look in the mirror between bugle calls, but thoughtfully composed around flashes of bright hue. Compare that with “Portrait of the Artist” (Minneapolis Institute of Arts) from about a decade later, on the right, and you’ll see where this post is heading.

When Derain was through with marching, Matisse — who found him delightfully open-minded and a solid, quick worker — was ready to talk his parents out of the engineering nonsense altogether and got him into the Académie Julian. Things proceeded apace, a career blossomed, and by 1905 Derain was able to sell everything in his studio to Ambroise Vollard, and he and Matisse spent the summer in Collioure on the overbright southern coast, where they went completely bonkers with the colours. See the rest.

A Danish artist, Christian Vilhehn Mourier-Petersen, who’s 30, accompanies Vincent on his outings each day.

Vincent has prepared three paintings for the Société des Artistes Indépendants next week.

The neighbourhood around Place Lamartine where Van Gogh was based in Arles, showing the former locations of the Hôtel Restaurant Carrel on rue de la Cavalerie, the Café de la Gare and the building Vincent ultimately moved into, known as “the Yellow House”.

None of these places has survived, and gone too is the railway bridge that used to carry the trains across the Rhône River after they’d rumbled over the arc of the track at the bottom of this picture.

Vincent has come to Arles. He is living at the Hôtel Restaurant Carrel on rue de la Cavalerie, in view of the old Roman arena. The town, he says, is full of happy people – it’s as “formidably cheerful as Holland is sad” – but he complains that the citizens are lazy and irresponsible too.

The compensation is in the landscape, on windless, cloudless days, when the air itself is alive with biting colour, its vibration the only movement in vast vistas of serenity. He is wasting no time, the canvases filling with fever. All of it has to be painted, everything he sees.

Let us pray the mistral wind, when it comes, is not too severe. It carries madness in its arms.

A satellite image of France showing the relative positions of Paris and nearby Auvers-sur-Oise and, far to the south, Arles.

Van Gogh was in Arles from February 1888 to May 1890, though a full year of that time was spent at the asylum of St Paul-de-Mausolée in Saint-Rémy de Provence, 15 miles to the northeast. He lived in Auvers from the end of May 1890 until his death two months later. The photo shows Vincent when he was just 19. By the time he moved to Arles he was nearly 35 years old.