Utamaro: A Prophet In Paris

1888, the year that Siegfried Bing began publishing the influential journal Le Japon artistique, the art dealer also put on the first exhibition in Paris, and indeed in the western world, of prints by the Japanese master Kitigawa Utamaro (c. 1753-1806). In contrast to Hokusai and Hirsohige, to name just two Japanese ukiyo-e artists, whose prints had become know in Paris, Utamaro was an acknowledged master of the classical period from the previous century, rather than a recent vernacular artist.

You can see in the prints of Utamaro that Emile Guimet collected for his eponymous museum, that Utamaro's great subject was women. His portfolios included Famous Beauties of Edo, Array of Supreme Beauties of the Present Day, and Twelve Hours in the Pleasure Quarters, to name a few.

What is striking to our eyes is how familiar the design elements look to us; we can only imagine how Utamaro's works looked to those who first encountered them at Bing's. I'm not thinking, here, of the borrowed motifs, the fans, kimons, standings screens, etcetera. Felix Vallotton's bathers arrayed across the canvas as they step down into the water and Mary Cassatt's mothers holding their infants up close are gestural images from Utamaro's beauties.

Consider instead the multiple layers and shifting perspectives, the strong diagonal elements pointing away from the center, the mixture of patterns, the flat colors, and even the poses - and then think of the Nabis. The group didn't yet exist, as such, but it would shortly, and we knoow from the art historian Klaus Berger's researches, that several of them attended the Utamaro exhibition. The word 'nabi' comes from the Hebrew word for prophet and Utamaro was one in Paris in 1888.

Images: Musee Guimet, Paris.

You may also be interested in Emile Guimet's Promenades Japonaises, posted here 19 June 2010 and also L'Art Nouveau According To Bing, posted here 13 August 2009.

Hector Guimard: The Curve Bends Toward Abstraction

"Line in Guimard, just as in the Japanese guides, is a living incarnation of natural laws. Thus, in an old Japanese manual, there is a catalogue of eighteen different types of line, with such descriptions as ‘floating silk threads’ ropes’ water lines’ or ‘bent metal wire.’ This latter was particularly subtly used by Guimard, who had an inborn sense of the inner tension of line.” - Dore Ashton in Le Monde, 22 May 1970:

French architect Hector Guimard (1867-1942) realized the decorative possibilities of glazed lava, a substance made from mixing pulverized lava with clay when he built a villa for Louis Coillot, (1898-1900) a ceramics manufacturer in Lille who monopolised the distribution of the material. Guimard sided the entire facade of Maison Coilliot in lava stone.

Guimard also used glazed lava to great effect in the nameplate for Castel Henriette (built 1899 - demolished 1969), as well as for his famous signs for the Paris Metro. He designed the graphics for his signs, and here we can see him introduce geometric elements that tend toward asbtraction. The outline of the letters and their rhythm give added emphasis and harmonize the pinks and yellows he used.

In a twist of fate, a largely forgotten Guimard died in New York City in 1942, after fleeing Paris to ensure the safety of his Jewish wife.

Images: Musee d'Orsay, Paris, photographer: Rene-Gabriel Ojeda.

Meander

“Nowhere is there greater beauty of line than in their curving creeks and irregular pools.” - Charles Downing Lay, Tidal Marshes, 1911, Landscape Architecture.

It seems to me that a meandering stream is an objective correlative to the feelings we associate with summer. A meandering walk on a warm day is fine match for body and soul. Marsh creeks meander through the works of Massachusetts native Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922). One of Dow's favorite spots along the Ipswich River was nicknamed 'The Dragon'. You can see one version of it in the background of the woodcut Rain In May and it is the subject of Study Of A Marsh (above).

Nature is often the starting point for design and the meander is a fine example. Rhythmic, ornamental patterns used in art and architecture are known as the Meander, named after the Meander River in southwestern Turkey. Its twists and turns include U-shaped oxbow lakes formed where the river changes doubles back on itself. The first mention that I know of for the Meander River occurs in Homer's Iliad, circa 8th century BCE.

The Greek Fret, a series of square protrusions resembling the notches of a key, originated as an architectural element, and is an early instance of the meander in art. Later the design was adapted by the Romans, along with other plunder, for use in mosaic tiles. A Medieval version of the meander was the Twisted Ribbon pattern, the rectilinear elements softened with curves. A few years ago, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design in New York hosted The Continuing Curve, an exhibition that looked for the roots of Art Nouveau and its current revivals in the Roccoco period. I enjoyed it, but the seduction of meandering has a much longer history.

You can visit The Continuing Curve here.

Images:

1. Arthur Wesley Dow - Bend Of A River, 1898, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

2. Arthur Wesley Dow - Study Of A Marsh In A Color Scheme From Hiroshige, undated, Historic New England.org

3. Arthur Wesley Dow - cover for Modern Art, 1895, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

4. Arthur Wesley Dow - Rain In May, 1907, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC.

Out Of Darkness Comes Light

At the time he painted Poppies And Daisies, Odilon Redon (1840-1916) had studied painting in Paris only briefly with Jean-Leon Gerome (whose influence, fortunately, is hard to see) and failed his examination to study architecture. He went home to Bordeaux where he tried sculpture before discovering etching, the medium that decisively unlocked his imagination. This oil painting suggests an affinity with artists such as Zurbaran and Lubin Baugin. In 1895, Redon painted an Homage to Goya, another master of both darkness and light.

Image: Odilon Redon - Poppies And Daisies, 1867, Art Institute of Chicago.

Remembering Louise Bourgeois

"A woman is her house. That's the thing." - John Updike.

When Womanhouse opened on January 30, 1973, in an empty Hollywood mansion, attendance on that first day was limited to women. Reports have it that the reactions were uninhibited. The artists, (each woman got a room in which to create a total art work) deconstructed and then reconstructed the relationships between women and houses. As Judy Chicago's Woman Closet makes clear, surrealist subversion abounded.
Hovering over Womanhouse like the protective spiders she called Maman, was the spirit of Louise Bourgeois, if only someone had told us then.

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) died on May 31, 2010. French-born, she came to New York with her American husband, art historian Robert Goldwater. Remembrances of Bourgeois have focused on her career as a sculptor, where her achievements were stellar. But before she switched from painting, at the urging of Fernand Leger she said, Bourgeois created a series of images in the late 1940s that she called Femme Maison, pictures that encompass the contradictions between agoraphobia and claustrophobia of conventional female lives.

I don't know whether Judy Chicago had seen Femme Maison, but Woman Closet shares an obvious trope with Bourgeois' work. The vulnerable body is exposed to view, even when the woman's vision is obscured and her identifying face is as completely obscured as if she were wearing a chador. Femme Maison, especially in the black and white drawing above, seems to pose a question from Stevie Smith's poem - waving or drowning?

For a biography of Louise Bourgeois and sldies of her works, visit here.

The New Woman Takes A Vacation

The magazine cost twenty-five cents; the vacation was priceless. A century ago. exercise, freedom, and mobility were new features in the lives of ordinary women. Tied down by cares at home and more frequently working for pay, the very idea of a vacation caused exuberance.

Whether as swimmers in the ocean or dreamers on the shore, the women in these fanciful images are enjoying themselves. New styles in clothing offered freedom of movement and there was the possibility of adventure on the horizon.
It may not be obvious today, but these images are subversive.

Each one depicts a woman doing something for the fun of it. Even today, the majority of vacation advertising caters to the fantasies of men, hinting, with varying degrees of subtlety, at a seraglio-like atmosphere waiting at the chosen destination. Peace and quiet and the sound of the waves - that's a vacation.

Images: 1. Sheridan - cover for Scribner's Magazine, New York Public Library.
2. Franz Griessler - Kuchelau Krapfwaldl, 1925, Museum of Applied Culture, Vienna.
3. Ludwig Hohlwein -Starnberger See, c. 1930, Art Library, Berlin.
4. Kuck - Au-deja-de-Bremen, 1930s, Art Library, Berlin.

Before Beaches: II

On July 6, in Before Beaches, we looked at paintings from the 19th century of coastal scenes before they became popular as bathing beaches. Public bathing - as practiced in the Western world - became a subject for popular arts and the growing mass media while 'fine' artists were still turning out imaginary scenes of voluptuous nude females at play in the water. Not for them the working class families escaping the heat and getting clean in the river or the newly built public baths, or piscines.
Honore Daumier (1808-1879) who lived on the Ile Saint-Louis, overlooking the Seine, also had a view of a large women's swimming pool, and he was not amused. The cheap bains a quatre sous, or nickel baths, of Paris were crowded places where the classes mixed, making many people uncomfortable. His caricatures, particularly Naiads of the Seine, are a counterpoint to the titillating 'high' art of Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1909).
When Daumier turned to similar subject matter in painting, he treated it differently. The young woman wading tentatively appears no more risible than her comrades working on their laundry.
I was inspired by Linda Nochlin's impressive book Bodies, bathers, Beauty (published by Harvard University Press: 2008).
Images;

1. Honore Daumier - Naiads of the Seine, 1847, Linda Nochlin - Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 2004, Harvard University.

2. Hononre Daumier - A Family Bathing in the River, 19th century, National Art Library, Berlin.

3. Honore Daumier - By the Water, c. 1858-1860, Museum of Modern Art, Troyes.

Rodin Poems: Rainer Maria Rilke

Recently we looked at the encounter between the young Rainer Maria Rilke and the great sculptor Auguste Rodin. It ended when Rodin dismissed him, and Rilke may have alluded to it in his poem Buddha.

Not yet a successful writer, Rilke was casting about for a way to make his name - and some money - in 1902, when he hit upon the idea that Richard Murther, editor of the Viennese weekly Zeit (Time), could give him a crash course in art. With no scholarly credentials and a handful of poems that Rodin couldn't understand (because they were in German), Rilke arrived on September 1, to gather material for an article, that later became a book and a profitable lecture tour.

Rilke wrote perceptively of Rodin's works that it needed "a space that was theirs by right of uniqueness, that distinguished them from the other things, the ordinary things, which anyone could grasp." It was the same kind of that he was in the process of carving out for himself, separating himself from his wife and child in the process. There is something unnervingly contemporary in Rilke's quest for 'personal space' and the collateral damage it causes.

Look closely at the photograph and you can pick out Rodin's Eve, Pallas Athene, Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Tragic Muse

"The leaves are falling, falling from far away,

as though a distant garden died above us;
they fall, fall with denial in their wave.

And through the night the hard earth falls
farther than the stars in solitude.

We are all falling. Here, this hand falls.
And see - there goes another. It's in us all.

And yet there's One whose gently holding hands
lets the falling fall and never land."
- Autumn by Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book Of Hours, 1906, translated from the German by Daniel Slager . in Auguste Rodin by Rainer Maria Rilke, Archipelago Books: 2004.



You may also be interested in Rilke's Water Lily, posted here 7 July 2010.

Image: Francois-Antoine Vizzavona - A View of Rodin's Studio at Pavilon de l'Alma, undated, Agence RMN, Paris.

" As if he listened. Silence. Depth.
And we had back our breath. Yet nothing yet
And he is star. And other great stars ring him
though we cannot see that far.

O he is fat. Do we suppose
he'll see us? He has need of that?
Sink in any supplicating pose before him,
he'll sit deep and idle as a cat.

For that which lures us back to his feet
his circled in him now a million years.
He has forgotten all that we must endure,
encloses all we would escape."
- Buddha by Rainer Maria Rilke (The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke)

" His gaze has grown so worn from the passing
of the bars that it sees nothing anymore.
There seem to be a thousand bars before him
and beyond that thousand nothing of the world.

The supple motion of his panther's stride,
as he pads through a tightening circle,
is like the dance of strength around a point
on which an equal will stands stupefied.

Only rarely is an opening in the eyes
enabled. Then an image brims
which slides the quiet tension of the limbs
until the heart, wherein it dies."
- The Panther by Rainer Maria Rilke (from The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke)

Image: Marblehead Pottery - Panther Bowl, c. 1910-1915, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Therese Bonney: Designs For Living

The French call them Les Annees Folles - the 'Crazy Years' and I think the French got it right. The years between the two world wars were heady years for designers of everything. The official name of the 1925 World's Fair held in Paris paid tribute through its official name Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, but it was the 'discovery' of Art Deco design that people remembered.

The fair had been postponed from 1914, because of war's outbreak and the French were eager to reassert their preeminence as the world's arbiter of taste. And if post-war prosperity made it possible to shop freely, the designers and department stores of Paris were ready their with pavilions, each more dazzling than the last. The pavilion of the designer Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann (above) competed for attention with Lalique's Crystal Tower, the department stores Au Printemps and Galeries Lafayette, and in what may have been a marketing first - the Louvre.

American expatriate Therese Bonney covered the exhibition for her design photo service - a busman's holiday considering how many of her friends had works on display. It may be that the success of the Exposition inspired her to write guidebooks on the decorative arts, furniture, and shopping in Paris (1929). It did lead to her commission artists to design a line of wallpapers for sale: Edward Steichen, John Held, Jr., and Raoul Dufy.

As she often did, Bonney may have been wearing clothes by Sonia Delaunay, a Russian emigre who designed for private clients, when she strolled the fairgrounds. If she did, she would attracted attention; Delaunay's self-designed textiles that she began marketing in 1923 were a wearable version of the Orphism that she and her husband, Robert, had introduced around 1911.

The Irish architect Eileen Gray (1878-1976) was in the process of settling in France and, like Robert Mallet-Stevens, whose work we've seen through Bonney's photos, her furniture was sleek and made up with ingenuity what it lacked in ornament. Her bureau with drawers that pivot is as linear as the green and white armchair by Mallet-Stevens, a type of furniture that appealed strongly to Bonney's modernist aesthetic.

The zebra print chaise lounge was designed by Pierre Legrain (1888-1929), whose career was cut cruelly short, for a hotel at Neuilly-sur-Seine. What appears to be an asymmetrical dark arm at one side is actually a clever holder for magazines.

In the playful designs of Swiss-born Jean Dunand (1887-1942) we see abstraction and representation combined during a heady time of experimentation. Considered the greatest lacquer artist in the Art Deco style, Dunand, worked in a variety a media. It may be a legacy of the Nabi movement that the French were less zeaouls at patrolling the boundaries between the fine arts and the applied.

Images:

1. Photograph of the Ruhlmann Pavilion at the Exposition, 1925, French Ministry of Culture.

2. Raoul Dufy - The Tennis Party, fabric design, 1925, Art Institute of c.

Chicago.

3. Raoul Dufy - Seashell Vase, 1925, National Museum of Ceramics, Sveres, France.

4. Jean Despres - Silver Bowl, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris.

5. Sonia Delaunay - Chevron fabric design, 1920s, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris.

6. Sonia Delaunay - Red and black fabric design, 1920s, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris.

7. Eileen Gray - Pivot Bureau, 1927, Pompidou Center, Paris.

8. Robert Mallet-Stevens - armchair, 1923, Pompidou Center, Paris.

9. Pierre Legrain - chaise lounge, 1925, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris.

10. Jean Dunand - bowl, 1920, from Marcilhac, 1991, Editions de l'Amatuer, Paris.

11. Jean Dunand - Dancers and Musicians, c. 1924, from Marcilhac, 1991, Editions de l'Amateurs, Paris.

Summer Siesta

I found the work of Dominique Peyronnet (1872-1943) catalogued under 'Outsider Art' at the Pompidou Center. Ah, I thought - men at work -but even so, do women ever think of themselves as insiders. Are we there yet?

It is almost impossible to look at a French nude after Manet and not think of Olympia, so I haven't even tried. Perhaps the bobbed-haired brunette was thinking of her on that hot afternoon, as well The awkwardness of her pose displays her partial nudity to the maximum effect, the placement of the arms a suggestive framing device.

No servants in this petit bourgeois home, it seems, but instead of the black cat, we have a mottled little dog who clearly wants his mistress to wake up. Surely it will be time for walk soon?
Image: Dominique Peyronnet - Summer Siesta, 1933, Pompidou Center, Paris.

How She Became Therese Bonney ...

A girl from a working class family in upstate New York falls in love with the French language, changes her name and then changes her life to fit the name. This is the story of the smart, plucky girl who became Therese Bonney.
Thérèse Bonney was born Mabel Therese Bonney in Syracuse, N.Y. on July 15, 1894; she died of heart failure at the American Hospital in Paris in 1978.
Bonney‘s family had lived in New York State for several generations. Her mother, Addie Robey, was a bookkeeper and her father, Anthony Leroy Bonney, was an electrician. Her sister Louise was born in 1889. Both sisters shared a vision of the importance of design in modern life: Louise as an industrial designer and Therese as an interpreter and curator of modern aesthetics.
The family moved to California circa 1903, living first in Sacramento and then in Oakland. The family made sacrifices to educate their daughters; Therese also contributed by tutoring students at her Oakland high school in French and Spanish to earn money. She graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1916 and made the move back east alone, attending graduate school first at Radcliffe College and then at Columbia University. The attractions of New York City for a francophile were obvious. Along with halving the distance to Paris, Bonney obtained her first position with the Theatre du Vieux Columbier, on tour in North America. When Louise joined her sister, the two opened a French theater bookshop while Therese doubled as the official English translator of Sarah Bernhardt’s repertory.

At the first opportunity, months after war in Europe ended, Bonney was en route to France as a representative of the American Association of Colleges to set up a student exchange program. After earning her doctorate at the Sorbonne (the youngest person and only the fourth woman), Bonney became a correspondent for newspapers in the U.S., Britain, and France, taking up photography to provide her own illustrations. From 1923-1928, she served as Paris fashion editor for the New York Times. The studio apartment of graphic artist Jean Carlu was an early example of her work, displaying her ability to encapsulate several trends in one shot.

Her signature achievement was the creation of the Bonney Service (1923), the first American illustrated press service, specializing in design and architecture, eventually supplying 350+ photos a month for publication in more than 20 countries. When Bonney had to hire additional photographers, rumors began to circulate that she couldn't do her own work. She was also criticized for promoting her own work. “I am not an expatriate; I am the dean of the American press corps in Paris” was how she explained her unprecedented position.

She used that position to disseminate what she considered the best modern design. Consider the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens (1886-1945) whose work was equally influential during the interwar years as that of Le Corbusier. Founder of La gazette des 7 Arts in 1924, his total design work in the rue Mallet-Stevens, including a villa for the design duo of Jan and Joel Martel.compares more than favorably with the bleak urbanism of Le Corbusier. Unfortunately, for his posthumous reputation, Mallet-Stevens ordered that his papers be burned after his death while his rival promoted the myth of Le Corbusier, the prophet of modern design. (That's Joel Martel photographed in front of Villa Martel. The cat remains anonymous.)
In her spare time, Bonney wrote guidebooks to shopping, restaurants, and the decorative arts of Paris, evn beating Julia Child by decades with her book French Cooking for American Kitchens. About her native country, Bonney wrote: “our furniture and our homes are of the past.” She was well-placed to know: Paris in the inter-war years incubated almost every significant design trend of the 20th century.

A tireless promoter of modern design, Bonney arranged an exhibition of Modern French Decorative Art at Lord & Taylor in New York (1928) and several traveling exhibitions that appeared at the Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.
A successful career in New York enabled Louise to bring her widowed mother to the city. Louise became one of a precious few women appointed to the Board of Design for the 1939 World’s Fair. All three Bonney women were involved with planning the fair from 1935 on. Meanwhile, Therese was an official of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair.
In Finland to cover preparations for the 1938 Winter Olympics when the Russians invaded, Bonney stayed on for two years, going on to cover the Nazi invasion and the Battle of France. Her exhibition Those to Whom Wars Are Done appeared at the Library of Congress in 1940, followed by War Comes to the People at the Museum of Modern Art. For her heroic efforts, the French government awarded Bonney the Croix de Guerre and the Legion d’Honneur. Bonney never married and she kept her personal life private.

Image credits: Bonney donated 4,000 photographic prints to the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in the late 1930s, a unique documentation of a design era. Many prints are also in the collection of the Bancroft Library at the University of California.
The photograph of Therese Bonney was taken by Lee Miller in 1942. The photographer of Louise Bonney is Therese Bonney.

... And How She Shaped Modern Design

In the Parisian salon c. 1925, at left we see an interior design by Pierre-Paul Montagnac, with a rug by Ivan DaSylva Bruns. Its sleek lines, its tactfully placed lacquer and chinoiserie, its luxurious sense of space and light express the Art Deco aesthetic in its most refined and modernist aspects.

More than we realize, our version of modern design's history has been influenced by the photography of Therese Bonney. The designers whose works she championed were an impressive group, Eileen Gray, none accomplished more than Bonney herself.

Among architects, she recognized early that Robert Mallet-Stevens (1886-1945) was the equal of Le Corbusier; his total design of Rue Mallet-Stevens in the 16th arrondissement of Paris compares favorably with bleak urbanism of Corbusier's 'Radiant City'. But while Corbusier manufactured the myth of himself as a modern design prophet, Mallet-Stevens ordered that his archives be destroyed upon his death. His wishes were honored but Bonney's record of his work continues to speak for his achievements and inspires younger designers like Jacqueline Salmon (b. 1943).

Mallet-Stevens, as architect, collaborated with designer Elise Djo-Bourgeois (1898-1937) on one of the 20th century's iconic homes - the Villa Noailles at Hyeres for Vicomte Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles in 1925. The couple, especially the Vicomtesse who included both American Quakers and the Marquis de Sade among her ancestors, were important patrons of the arts, especially the Surrealists.

Bonney's working methods included photographing from the street, the “true democratic museum” as architect Rene Herbst called it. Before Brassai, she realized that certain designs could be best understood at night. The bottle of booze that is the light-draped Hotel de Ville looks all too familiar these days, but we are still riveted by the new (in 1925) Citroen showroom in the rue Marbeuf, suggesting either an automat or a parking garage.

The characteristic Art Deco lettering on the soap truck, done by graphic designer Jean Carlu dates from 1930, as does the escalator at the department store Au Printemps. At the time Bonney shot several buildings, deliberately focusing on the signage, notably the Andre Balmann fleuriste and the newspaper offices of La Semaine.

Bonney supported the work of other talented women through her photographs, and even modeled clothing designed by Sonia Delaunay. Indeed, designer Madeleine Vionnet was her closest friend, after sister Louise. Her canny juxtaposition of Austrian artist Hilda Polsterer at work in her studio on a mural for a fashionable dining room was typical. She also photographed the painter Tamara de Lempicka touching up a portrait of her husband Tadeusz. Possibly this type of photo was inspired by the rumors that Bonney affixed her name to the work of others.
In effect, Bonney became an early image maker. Paolo Garretto, the Italian caricaturist strikes a serious pose as his creations wink or roll their eyes, as if to say that they know him better and we are part of the joke.

Therese Booney must have been captivating as well as hard-working, because the people she photographed often became her friends. Many artists painted her during the 1920s and 1930s: Robert Delaunay, Alicia Halicka, Raoul Dufy - three times, and Georges Roualt, six times. After World War II, when Dufy became ill, Bonney arranged for medical treatment in the United States that prolonged the artist's life.

Note: I am indebted to L'Invention du Chic: Therese Bonney et le Paris Moderne by Lisa Schlansker Kolosek, Norma - Thames & Hudson, 2002, for biographical cinformation about Bonney.