A Little Tour of Brittany - With Paintings

"One could see, outlined into the far distance, one beyond the other, all the indentations of the coast, the land of Brittany ended in denticulated points which stretched out into the tranquil emptiness of the waters. In the foreground, rocks riddles its surface; but beyond, nothing disturbed its mirror-like polish; it gave out a scarcely perceptible caressing noise, soft and immense, which ascended from the depth of all the bays. And the distances were so calm, the depths so still! The great blue emptiness, the tomb of the Gaoses, preserved in impenetrable mystery." - Pierre Loti, from Pecheurs d'Islande (1886), a novel of the fishers of Paimpol.
Jutting out into the Atlantic, surrounded on three sides by water, Brittany is the westernmost province of France. The ocean is never more than sixty miles away but local residents only took up swimming when the tourists brought the pastime with them after World War I.

With its dramatic coastal confines, Brittany contained fields that produced wheat to make the gallette, a heavenly buckwheat pancake that could be stuffed with anything imaginable- pears and apples from local orchards, oysters and mussels fished from the sea, or pork from the wild boars and domesticated pigs that roamed the countryside. But not - I think - with the puffins, those northern cousins of the penguin, that nest among the crags of the Cote du granite rose, named for the distinctive color of its granite, oxidized by the scouring winds off the Atlantic.

The Breton region was the last to cede sovereignty to the French monarchy under Francis I in 1532, and to be brought into conformity with the national government in the late 19th century. This remote corner of France was barely touched by Roman occupation, but the Breton Celts came to stay some two thousand years ago, at least. They built the megaliths, the mounded or standing stones that functioned as burial vaults and astronomical guides. Menhirs, the standing stones, and trees were believed to contain sacred energies and might even be the spirits of the dead, turned to stone.

Many legends attach to this ancient land. Paimpont in eastern Brittany is though t to be the Broceliade of Arthurian tales, where the King sent his men into the forest in search of the Holy Grail. Tristan and Isolde consummated their great love here. And on a coastal shelf submerged beneath the waves of the Bay of Douarnenez lies the City of Ys, reputed to be the most beautiful city on earth. Modern science has confirmed that the level of the ocean around the Bay was some fifty meters lower during the last Ice Age.
The railroads began bringing vacationers en masse to Brittany in the 1860s, including dozens of painters eager to try out the new plein air style. It helped the region's popularity that Claude Monet was born in nearby Le Havre and that, after he became famous, he purchased a home at Giverney in his native Normandy.

Brittany possessed the attraction of being even more remote and therefore more romantic than Normandy - the wild west of France. Balzac, who vacationed there in the 1840s, wrote that it was unnecessary to visit America to see savages. "The Redskins of Fenimore Cooper are here. " he declared, giving his estimate of Breton civilization. Madame de Sevigne (1626-1678) had maintained a country retreat at Les Rochers, near Vitre, immortalized in her writings.

The English poet Ernest Dowson was smitten on his visit in 1899, penning In A Breton Cemetery.


"And now night falls,
Me, tempest-tost, and driven from pillar to post,
A poor worn ghost,
The quiet pasture calls;
And dear dead people with pale hands
Beckon me to their lands."


Sidonie Gabrielle Colette spent summers at Villa la Gaimorais, on the northern coast between St. Malo and Cancale, where she wrote Le Ble en herbe (1923), translated into English by Roger Senhouse as Ripening Seed. As this story of adolescent love and awakening sexuality follows two teenagers, Vinca and Phil, through the summer. the Breton countryside becomes a third participant, its presence palpable.

"All that could be seen through the window was the westerly weather of August, bringing rain in its wake. The earth came to an abrupt end out there, on the brink of the links. One more squall, one more upheaval of the great, grey field furrowed with paralell ridges of foam, and the house must surely float away like the ark."


More recently, Bodil Malmsten, a Swedish author who moved to Finistere in 2000, published a novel The Price Of Water in Finistere (London, Harvil Press: 2001). In it, Malmsten explains her move from Sweden at midlife, in the words of her protagonist: "In the same way that there's a partner for every person, there's a place...My Place lies where the land comes to an end in Europe - fin de terres - finis terae - finistere."
On the southern coast, the quiet towns of Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu were the largest artist colonies, thanks to Paul Gauguin who who settled into the Pension Marie-Jeanne Gloane in 1886. Henri Riviere (1864-1951), a Montmartre native considered by many to be the ultimate Parisian, made his first Breton vacation in1886 with his brother at Saint-Briac. His beautiful lithographs and woodblock prints appeared in several successful folios (Le beau pays de Bretagne, Le paysages Bretons, Les apsects de la nature, etc.).
As always, click on the images for details on the artists, titles of works, and sources.

Louis Kahn And The Wonder Of Light

"I have no color applied on the walls in my home. I wouldn't want to disturb the wonder of light...The changing light according to the time of day and the seasons gives color. Then there are reflections from the floors, the furniture, the materials, all contributing to make my space made by the light, mine." - Louis Kahn, from a lecture given in 1972.

Anyone who saw the 2003 Academy Award
nominated documentary My Architect: A Son's Journey by Nathaniel Kahn knows that there were many sides to the great modernist architect Louis I. Kahn.

Kahn (1901?-1974) was born on an island off the coast of Estonia and immigrated with his parents to Philadelphia, where he lived for the rest of life, at age five. As a student, Kahn was offered a scholarship in drawing, but chose architecture instead as his career.

Whether in the design of large buildings or the creation of small drawings, Louis Kahn always pursued the wonders of light. Rock Formations, Massachusetts (above), painted in 1934, suggests the geometry and the play of light that Kahn rendered spectacularly in three dimensions for the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1961-1982). The Piazza del Campo (1951) hints at the sweep of space Kahn would build for the Salk Institute, La Jola, California (1959).

Kahn's drawings were an alternate means of expression, not just a preliminary stage of his design work. Everywhere he traveled, Kahn recorded his emotional responses to what he saw in pastel, watercolor, and charcoal. Gabled Manor (1928) is an example from a tour of Europe showing Kahn's eye for vertical shapes, here evident in the trees as much as the buildings.

Though spare in detail, Oracle At Delphi (1951) conveys the emotion the site evokes; the nearer mountains are barely suggested, yet the more distant shrine holds the vibrates.

The recent exhibition at Lori Bookstein Gallery in New York City offered the chance to see these works assembled on their own terms. Visit http://www.loribooksteinfineart.com/

Grace Crowley: A Cubist Moment

I first encountered Grace Crowley's Portrait of Lucia Beynis or Cubist Mood (1929) on the cover of a 1980s Virago Press reprint of Christina's Stead's 1936 novel The Beauties And The Furies. At the time I had no way to know how apt the pairing was. Stead (1902-1983) was a modernist writer who left her native Australia for Paris in 1928 and this, her first first major novel, was set in the bohemian Paris of youth, beauty, romanticism, and social idealism.

In fact, this was the world Grace Crowley (1890-1979) inhabited for three creative years from 1926 to 1929, before family duties and the care of an invalid mother brought her back, not merely to Australia but to the bush town of Tamworth. Crowley belonged to the brilliant post-war generation of women artists; she studied at Academie Lhote and exhibited at Galerie Berheim-Jeune while in Paris. Her art was widely admired and included an abstract series of Cubist Studies (Cubism In Green - at left) and striking portraits like Sailors And Models - 1928, below).

What if Crowley had been able to stay on in Paris to pursue her career? What if she been able to travel again before the age of sixty? Although she lived for nine decades, there are only about fifty works that she did not destroy, and half of them are now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. To look is to admire - and to wonder.

Andre Devambez: An Observer Of Crowds

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An astonishing observer of human action, he painted in modest dimensions yet managed to capture crowds in all their unchoreographed movements.

Andre Devambez (1867-1944) was a native of Paris, a frequent contributor to the periodical L'Illustration, and a member of the Academie de Beaux-Arts.

We know that La Charge (1902) depicts a demonstration on the boulevard Montmarte; what is uncertain is whether these are anarchists, trade Unionists, or Dreyfusards. The picture may commemorate an actual event or it may be an archetype. The psychologist Gustave Lebon had created a sensation with his study La psychologie des foules (The Crowd, published in 1895 and Devambez would doubtless have heard Lebon's ideas debated in the salons of Paris. However, based on his art, Devambez appears to have a more generous - or more nuanced - view of people in crowds. The artist obviously devoted much thought to his choice of perspective in each scene; here the bird's eye view allows us to see a moment of suspense as the participants could not. At 4.2' by 5.3', La Charge is a large work for Devambez, but the wealth of individual detail is cinematic in scope.

Reception de l'ecole Normale par le conseil de l'Universite (1905) is a solemn academic occasion rendered in operatic style. The main players, brightly arrayed, sweeping down the grand stairway as the chorus on the upper landing comments on the scene. Amazingly, it measures only 1.6' by 1 foot.

Created in 1910 for L'Illustration , Le Cinema was the record of an amusing novelty in primary colors, while Concert Colonne (2.4' by 1.9') records an evening's serious musical entertainment in subdued hues.

His work was so well respected that, in 1909, Devambez was commissioned to make twelve decorative wall panels for the French embassy in Vienna. An enthusiast of modern technology, Devambez chose motor cars, telephones, subways, and airplanes as his subjects, even doing research at the Mourmelon aviation training camp. In 1934, he was appointed as the official artist for the newly created French Air Ministry. One of his best-known works depicting an early bi-plane, The Only Bird That Flies Above The Clouds (1910), is in the collection of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, as are the three oil paintings reproduced here.

Edith Bry And Djuna Barnes: New York 1910s

Adolescent Dream

- lithograph by Edith Bry

Loeb Art Center,

New York University (1911).

"Someday beneath some hard

Capricious star -

Spreading its light a little

Over far,

We'll know you for the woman

That you are."

- From Fifith Avenue Up from The Book Of Repulsive Women by Djuna Barnes (1915).

Edith Bry (1898-1992) was born in St. Louis and studied art in Paris and Madrid, and also studied with Alexander Archipenko at the Art Students' League in New York. During her long life Bry lived in North Africa, the West Indies, and South America. Her her is in many public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Library of Congress.

Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was a journalist and women's suffrage activist in Greenwich Village when The Book Of Repulsive Women was published. Extremely frank about the lives of women, the book later embarrassed her, yet it remains one of her most often reprinted. Two decades later, in 1936, Barnes published one of the great modernist novels, Nightwood.

Both Bry and Barnes were 'New Women" as they were then called, exploring ideas in their works deemed unsuitable for ladies.

Gisbert Combaz: "Every Year Is A Voyage To The Unknown"

One of the finest poster artists of the late 19th century was Gisbert Combaz (b. 1869, Antwerp - d. 1941, Brussels), a sometime lawyer, teacher, and scholar of Oriental cultures. The golden harbor scene at left is one of many posters designed by Combaz between 1894 and 1907 for La Libre Esthetique, a yearly exhibition of Belgian art born out of the ashes of a previous avant-garde group, Les XX. The new group determined to create decorative art that would be available to a broad - and not necessarily wealthy - audience.

To this end, Combaz entered a competition in1896 to design a postage stamp to commemorate the 1897 International Exposition to be held in Brussels.

He designed three series of art postcards for the firm of Dietrich & Cie: Les Elements (1898), illustrating the forces of nature; La Mer, on the sea and its presence in Belgian life, particularly in fishing villages, was exhibited at La Libre Esthetique in 1899; and Les Devises (or 'Sayings'), illustrating various bits of common wisdom.

Combaz freely admitted that his work was influenced by his favorite works by fellow artists Georges Lemmen 91865-1916) and Henri Meunier (1873-1922). The Combaz cover for a Catholic magazine, La Durendal (1898) obviously borrows the color scheme and the wave pattern from Georges Lemmens' 1891 poster for Les XX.

Equally apparent is the debt to Henri Meunier's poster for Concerts Ysaye in his 1897 poster for La Libre Esthetique.
During World War I when the Germans occupied Belgium, Combaz' alma mater Institut Saint-Louis was a center of the Belgian resistance. La Libre Belgique was published there, with illustration by Combaz, among others, leading to his interrogation by the police. Though the war destroyed many lives, his was not one and Combaz continued to work, convinced that creation remained worthwhile. After all, back in 1895 he had declared: "Chaque annee est un voyage vas l'inconnu." ("Each year is a voyage to the unknown.")

Jane Block's book Gibert Combaz: fin-de-siecle artist (Pandora Books - 1999) is the source for the images, unless otherwise credited when you click on them.

Xavier Mellery: "Souls In Things"

“The soul of things? There it is flowing from the walls, at once pensive and familiar. For a moment this is a hallway filled with plaster casts and illuminated by a lamp. But the light is waiting. Something is watching. There is a mysterious voice in those shadows and highlights.” – L’Art moderne (1895)

My Vestibule (c.1889) is a drawing of the hall in the home of Xavier Mellery's parents. The large sculpture, La Poverella, made by Mellery's friend Paul de Vigne (1843-1901), depicts a sitting woman, her eyes closed in true Symbolist fashion. The sense of looking inward, on the part of the woman in the statue, by the artist, is palpable.

We can see that Mellery's drawings are studies of the effects of light. Yet his familiar corridors and stairways often appear unfamiliar, even hallucinatory.

Aristotle thought that stairways symbolized the divine order of the universe, but the jug at the bottom of the stairs and the hint of a disappearing figure in The Stairway (1889) suggest disequilibrium, a mystery in space. The English polymath, Jonathan Miller, published Steps And Stairs in 1989, a book that explores the symbolism of this transformative, and even metaphysical, invention.

Xavier Mellery (1845-1932) was the son of a royal gardener who became a prize-winning art student in Brussels. Mellery exhibited with Belgium's avant-garde groups, notably with Les XX and then with La Libre Esthetique. Mellery was Fernand Khnopff's first teacher.

“These drawings only show empty interiors, yet they are haunted by something that lives.” - L'Art moderne (1889)