In her 1909 autobiography Le Couer sauvage (The Savage Heart) Burnat-Provins pays tribute to her father, a cultured man who loved the arts and encouraged his daughter to make of her own life an original work. She recalled writing dramas and verses from the age of nine. Supported in her intellectual aspirations by her father, Marguerite was a free spirit whose view of life existed in tension with a world that was wary of feminist impulses. Her divorce from Adolph Burnat and her relationship with Paul de Kalbermattan were at odds with the values of her adopted home of Valais. As with her contemporaries Colette and Camille Claudel, rumors of scandal attached to Burnat-Provins adventures.
Arriving in Paris at nineteen, she had enrolled in the women's atelier at Academie Julian where the painter Benjamin-Constant (1845-1902) became her mentor. In May of 1895 she met Adolph Burnat and his brother, architect Ernest Burnat, from Vevey, Switzerland. The marriage of Marguerite and Adolph, celebrated on Febraury 13, 1896,was mixed in other ways than nationality and cosmopolitanism versus rural: the Burnats were Protestant and the Provins were Catholic. The couple sttled in Vevey, where they became friends with another painter, Ernest Bieler (1863-1948) who introduced Burnat-Provins to the village of Saviese. her enthusiasm for the Valais region contrasted strongly with her boredom at Vevey.
Her work, as her personality, tried on various personae. Her version of Art Nouveau was influenced by Symbolism during her youthful Parisian years. After moving to a farming canton in southwestern Switzerland her vision, though still decorative, appears more conservative, certainly influenced by her subject matter and her relatively tranquil personal life at that time. Her portrait of her sister Marie-Therese from 1900 presents an ambivalent female image set in decorative foliage: abundant hair and evident nudity suggest sensuality, yet the eyes and the turn of the lips hint at fragility in this watercolor portrait.
The psychological state that Burnat-Provins described as "la division du moi" became explicit during wartime but had been prefigured during an episode of typhoid fever in 1910, while she lived far from home in Egypt. Her fever-induced hallucinations appeared to her as "ames parasitaires" (parasitic souls) engaged in a combat for her spirit between the forces of unity and disintegration. She visualized them as bird-like creatures with a sinister mien, intensified by their inscrutability. And although it is obvious in L'Etres de l'Abime and Anthor et l'Oiseau de Noir (posted previously) where the creatures hover and enclose their prey, the sketch at left of a lone winged creature exudes menace.For Burnat-Provins, art was a means to the creation of a rich vocabulary of images and symbols to portray the inner life. Because she was an original and a woman among a fraternity, her work has been misinterpreted as primitive. Sophisticated and restless, it is anything but.
Images:
1. Tristesse de l'Amour, 1917, Collection de l'Art-Brut, Lausanne.2, Poivres d'ornement (Ornamental Peppers), c. 1912, Sion, Musee cantonale des beaux-arts, Valais.
3. La femme a la fontaine, 1898, Sion, Musee cantonale des eaux-arts, Valais.
4. Portrait of Marie-Therese Provins, 1900, Sion, Musee cantonale des beaux-arts, Valais.
5. Bird, 1934, Sion, Musee cantonale des beaux-arts, Valais.
2 comments:
Oh, I agree, Jane. I read your text with great interest. The watercolour of her sister looks very much like my mother when she was my age. Thank you for this!
Writings about Burnat-Provins try to place her within the concerns of male artists of her day, where her work doesn't fit very well. Curiously, they end by placing her as a conservative artist when her life was anything but that. Another casualty of inflexible art history.
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