Henry de Waroquier On The Isle Of The Monks

Imagine a  miniature world of contrasting landscapes of beaches, woods, and hills, an island where one is never more than some hundreds of feet from the sea.  On the Ile-aux-Moines, the camellias, Hortensia, and mimosa crowd around old stone houses and ancient megaliths, refreshing the land as the tides do the shore. A place of beauty and the quiet necessary for contemplation. How much like paradise would this place have been to a young artist who also loved the natural world and its creatures?

Henry de Waroquier (1881-1970) .was born in Paris 18 January l881. As a child, his imagination was stirred by scientific discoveries so he  went back and forth between biology and art before choosing a vocation, writing of his struggle: “What interests me isn’t art, but life.”   In the evnt, he chose both.

Paris in Waroquier’s youth offered the new art at Galerie Durand-Ruel and the Japanese art at L’Art Nouveau Bing., both nearby, a heady  abundance of Impressionism and “la lecon orientale.” In 1903 Enrolled at L’Ecole Estienne in 1903, Waroquier’s instructors practiced the cult of the curvilinear. Her later wrote that in his early works he tried to understand the relationship between land, water, and sky through the lines that joined them.

Between 1901 and 1910 Waroquier made extended annual visits to the Gulf of Morbihan in Brittany, attracted to its ancient, stony landscape and the chance to observe marine life from close up. He stayed on  L’Ile -aux –Moines (Island of the Monks) near Locmariaquar, famous for its oyster fishing, and also on Belle-Ile-en-mer, another  nearby island.  In Breton, Mor bihan means “small sea” and the term refers to its characteristic tidal estuaries.  Indeed, many of the place names in the area describe the landscape in evocative ways: : bois d'amour, bois de soupirs, bois de regrette (the forest of love, the forest of sighs, the forest of regret.

Waroquier began to study the techniques used by Divisionist painters around 1905 and later turned his hand to Cubism,  his.pole star continued to be the diluted colors  borrowed from faded, old Japanese prints. He also expressed his affinity for another painter of Breton scenes,  the somber realist Charles Cottet.

But Waroquier, the japoniste,  eschewed the use of traditional perspective. His many studies of waves, bouquets of trees, and panoramic views leave the viewer up in the airo to speak.  Perhaps Waroquier imagined himself as part of the ‘floating world’ when  he painted;  some of his pictures are annotated with text, as are many ukiye-o works.

In later life,  he created a series of clustered masks that were displayed on the Boulevard Saint-Michel during the protests of May 1968. . Henry de Waroquier died in 1970.

Note: My thanks to Neil Philip of Idbury Prints for his comments on an early version of this article, especially for pointing out that Henry de Waorgquier lived across the street from Galerie Durnad-Ruel as a child.

Images:  from Henry de Waroquier: Images de Bretagne by Jean-Pierre Fourcade, Paris, Somogy: 2000.

Study of Fish, 1900, pastel.

Still Life on Japanese paper,  1909.

 Golfe de Morbihan, 1907, pastel.

Le chemionde la longue de la cote, 1908, watercolor and charcoal. 

La Greve - Ile-aux-moines,  (with cows at left) 1908, Musee de beaux-arts, Rennes.

Ile-aux-moines, 1906.

Boats. Ile-aux-moines, 1906.

 

A Multi-Storied Cosmos

Over the course of the last millennium, the shape of the cosmos has changed.  To the people of medieval Europe the harmoniously ordered universe was like a multi-storied building, organized on a vertical axis.  To those devout (more or less) Christians the vertical cosmos existed as much more than a description of  physical space, rather it was a transcendent vision of space-time.  Humans understood their place in the cosmos as being rooted in the earth, in the seasonal rhythms of nature from the vernal equinox to the harvest and around again.  In the height of the sun as it moved across the sky and the changing positions of the stars at night,  they saw the changing seasons as a reminder to look upward toward the giver of all things and intimations of  a divine architecture  From this cyclical understanding of time came the circle as a symbol of perfection and many suggestive metaphors.  

The humanist thinkers of the Renaissance gradually supplanted this vision of the cosmos through their secular understanding of nature. By a combination of accident and deliberation, a  profound reorientation occurred” the cosmos became horizontal.  The mythical realm remained sacred, transcendent, and eternal but a social realm, profane and determined by  new ideas in mathematics and science, spread by way of increasing literacy and  commerce.   Farmers and other peasants continued to live in the vertical cosmos until the early 20^th century while the horizontal cosmos took hold in growing cities.  Thanks to the use of mathematical perspective, prosperous Italian villa owners decorated the walls of their homes with expansive vistas or human activity.  Nature lost its numinous aura to become an object of aesthetic contemplation.  

Of course, medieval artists had been aware that objects looked smaller the farther away they were from the observer but they felt no need to develop a method to describe it, as their cosmos was secure.    One of my art history professors pointed out that, in the paintings of Fra Angelico, space should be understood  not by mathematics but through metaphysics. 

 

Fast forward to the second half of the 20th century, the cosmos may not be circular but the arguments about it still trace a circle that the ancient Greeks would have recognized:  the uncertainty of human observation as a means to discover eternal truths versus the seeming reliability of geometrical theorems. An energetic and restless presence during the years  he taught astronomy at Cornell University, Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was interested in cosmology even when the very word was out of fashion. 

Sagan has at last received a fitting memorial in Cosmos, an installation by Leo Villareal.   Comprising 12,000 LED (light emitting diode) lights that generate constantly shifting celestial patterns,  Cosmos was unveiled in 2012, the culmination  of  two years of design and planning.  Villareal created the light patterns on his computer, adding to them as he observed the movement  of the clouds and  of geese flying over Ithaca in early autumn from various points on the Cornell campus. The  Mallin Sculpture Court adjoining the fourth floor of the Johnson Museum was chosen as the location for its high visibility not only on campus but also from various points around the  city of  Ithaca.   At night the ceiling dematerializes, matter giving way to a world of light, an expression of the wonder with which Sagan surveyed the cosmos, a wonder he shared with the natural philosophers of the middle ages.

'Into the emptiness that weighs
More than the universe
Another universe begins
Smaller than the last.

Begins to smaller
Than the last.
Dimensions
Do not yet exist.

My friend, the darkness
Into which the seed
Of all eleven dimensions
Is planted is small.

Travel with me back
Before it grows to more.
The church bell bongs,
Which means it must be noon.

Some are playing hopscotch
Or skipping rope during recess,
And some are swinging on swings,
And seesaws are seesawing.

That she is shy,
Which means it must be May,
Turns into virgin snow
And walking mittened home with laughing friends.

And the small birds singing,
And the sudden silence,
And the curtains billow,
And the spring thunder will follow—

And the rush of freshness,
And the epileptic fit that foams.
The universe does not exist
Before it does."

 Into The Emptiness from The Cosmos Poems by Fredreick Seidel, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2000.

Leo Villareal (b. 1967) is an American artist who studied sculpture at Yale University.

Images:
All photos are by James Ewing (1, 2, 4) appear courtesy of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, except those (3, 5) that appear courtesy of Ithaca Journal.

Three Women And The Artists Who Painted Them

How unusual to find these particular artists grouped together but the three paintings form an improbable but satisfying triptych.  From left to right John Singer Sargent's Javanese Dancer, Jules Pascin's Woman In A Pink Dress and William-Adolphe Bouguereau's Madonna and Child.  The space now occupied by two of them has long been  taken up by a very large landscape - Fields In The Month of June  (Les champs au mois de juin, 1874,) by Charles-Francois Daubigny). Someone with an  eye for color connected the thread of reddish pink and pinkish red and the blue-green from the Bouguereau to the pictures brought out of storage.

As I approached them the other day  I was delighted to see a bench positioned before them because a glance around the gallery that I have visited many times at the Johnson Museum at Cornell University persuaded me that this was what I had come to see.
The three choices available to women  a century and more ago, I thought: madonna (Bouguereai), whore (Pascin) and performer (Sargent).  The last one freer than the other two but morally equivocal, caught in a sexual demilitarized zone, so to speak.
Three variations on the use of oil painting, too.  Bouguereau made his canvas disappear, creating an illusion that the air between the viewer and the painting is pure, free of dust motes.  Pascin's use of grey hues with his colors may indicate the air in a room where cigarettes were smoked, an indication that the woman is a prostitute, as his sitters often were.  He also used the weave of the canvas part of his painting, a different relationship between the artist and the viewer than the one Academic artists like Bouguereau aspired to.  A fitting choice for a subject (probably Lucy Krog) who has few illusions of her own.

Bougeureau, the painter most concerned to achieve a recognizable realism, created the picture least connected to reality. Mary and Jesus sit, the infant already bestowing a blessing on a little disciple.  The devotional imagery of the Italian Renaissance has morphed into a 19th century French drawing room.

Javanese Dancer is the finest of Sargent's attempts at this particular subject, posed to be sure but  conveying a sense of dance as movement.  Her sash as she swings it from her chartreuse shadowed right arm (what a color) and the diagonals of her skirt pull on the viewer's eye.   At the same time the formality of the gesture of her left arm, not to mention the ceremonial dagger she wears suggest self-possession, perhaps a denial of the Western assumption of the sexual availability of female performers in Sargent's time.  Sargent worked his colors into the canvas with a zest that makes me think this was a bus-man's holiday from all those delicate watercolors he did.

As I sat there, I could see out of the corner of my eye, Otto Dix's Woman Reclining On A Leopard Skin (1927), both of them ready to confront the culture represented by my chosen paintings.  But that experience belongs to another day.

And now some notes on the painters.  According to those who knew John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) his musical talent was equal to artistic gifts so his numerous studies and finished works of dancers come as no surprise.  Although he lived and worked through the days of Impressionism, Expressionism, fauvism, and Cubism, he remained committed to his own realistic style.  There has never been a critical consensus regarding Sargent's work, to put it mildly.  It is as though his masterly renderings of beautiful women and powerful men might compel us to admit that we are in thrall to them as much as Sargent was.

Jules Pascin (1885-1930), the least well-known of the these three painters,  was born in Bulgaria to Italian-Serbian and Spanish-Jewish parents. He attended art school in Munich but moved to the United States to avoid the draft during World War I.  Paris was the place that he loved and he returned there in 1920.   An excess of debauchery led to his suicide by hanging.  He applied his excellent draftsmanship to his many studies of women; his models were often prostitutes.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) was a French painter of a much more conventional type, although he was represented on this site recently  by Nymphs & Satyr.  To the Impressionists, who despised him, Bouguereau represented everything that was wrong with official art.  Think of someone today daring to sneer at the results of an art auction at Christies and you will get the idea of how large Bouguereau's reputation was at one time.  In recent decades, thanks to renewed interest in figurative painting, Bouguereau has been rediscovered by a new generation.  With over 800 paintings to his credit, many of them in major museums, he could hardly avoid a comeback.

 Note: I have tried to reproduce these three paintings at their relative sizes to give readers as good a sense of the experience in the gallery as possible.

Images; from the collection of Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
1. John Singer Sargent - Javanese Dancer II, 1889.
2. Jules Pascin - Woman In A Pink Dress, (probably Lucy Krog), undated but probably c. 1915-1920.
3. William-Adolphe Bourguereau - Madonna And Child With Saint John The Baptist, 1882.