"Make Every Line Count" - Pedro de Lemos

A(nother) student of Arthur Wesley Dow's at Pratt Institute in New York, Pedro de Lemos (1882-1945) is known as an artist of the west coast, particularly the Monterey Peninsula, on view in these woodblock prints, made the 1920s.
What gives the cypress trees of Monterey their sublime aspect is the way that they make visible the sculpting power of the wind that bends the trees and erodes the soil, making them cling to the cliff sides. There is drama in these images and a sense of impermanence in this large, rocky landscape, suggested by the artist's rather romantic titles.

Pedro de Lemos was instrumental in organizing the graphic arts at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. He taught design and architecture at Stanford University and was the first director of the Carmel Art Association in 1927. He also founded the Allied Artists Guild in Menlo Park. The stucco home he designed for himself at Palo Alto, Hacienda de Lemos, has been lovingly restored to his original intentions.

Images:

1. Old Pines At Monterey, c. 1915, American Federation of the Arts, NYC.

2. Harp Of The Winds, c. 1925, Annex Gallery, Santa Rosa, CA.

3. Top Of The Hill, no date, American Federation of the Arts, NYC.

4. Seaside Sentinels, c. 1925, Catherine Burns Fine Art, Oakland, CA.

5. The Cliff Dweller, c.1920, Stephen Gray Collection, London.

All The Planets In Heaven, All The Stars: Gaspara Stampa

"All the planets in heaven, all the stars,
gave my lord their graces at his conception;
all gave him their special gifts,
to make one perfect mortals man.
Saturn gave loftiness of understanding,
Jove the desire for noble deeds,
Mars more skill in war than any other,
Phoebus Apollo elegance and wit.
Venus gave him beauty and gentle ways,
Mercury eloquence; but the moon alone
made him too freezing cold for me.
Every one of those rare graces
makes me burn for his brilliant flame,
and one alone has turned him into ice."
- Gaspara Stampa, from Gaspara Stampa, translated from the Italian by Sally Purcell, Greville Press: 1984.

One of the great poets of the Italian Renaissance and, I think, the equal of Petrarch, Gaspara Stampa (1523-1554) was born in Padua and grew up in Venice, where the Stampa family home became a salon where Gaspara and her sister gave musical performances together. During her short life only a few poems were published; most circulated in manuscript form. It was Gaspara's sister who arranged for the publication of Rime, a collection more than 300 poems, after Gaspara died.

Giuliano d'Arrigo (1367-1446) created this fresco for the Sacristy of San Lorenzo at Florence. It shows the night sky over Florence as it looked on 4 July 1442. Visit Museo Galilio here.

Marguerite Burnat-Provins: From Arras To Savoie

"A strong recoil of the modern imagination toward the past, an enormous scientific inquiry and unfamiliar passions towards a vague and still unidentified supernatural, has urged us to incarnate our dreams and even our fear before the new unknown in a strange symbolism which translates the contemporary soul as antique symbolism did for the soul of ancient times.
Only it is not our faith and our beliefs that we put forward; on the contrary, it is our doubts, our fears, our boredoms, our vices, our despair and probably our agony."

- Fernand Khnopff in L'Art Moderne (1886)

Marguerite Burnat-Provins (1872-1952) was born in Arras in northern France, married in London, lived in Egypt, and finally adopted the Valais in Switzerland as her home. Her talents were as varied as her itinerary.

Symbolism was the house style of late 19th century French poets Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud, et al, and artists mined its themes and methods. When nineteen-year-old Marguerite Provins arrived in Paris to study art at l'Academie Julien in 1891, this was the world she entered. Unusual for a woman at the time, she also studied anatomy at the College of Medicine. An early self-portrait shows a young woman holding a pencil and touching a blank paper, her gaze averted, seemingly deep in contemplation. Perhaps she was thinking that she would soon end the dearth of female artists in the Symbolist Movement.

At twenty-three Provins created a series of allegories, done in crayon and sepia, that explored the subconscious life of a girl on the brink of womanhood. An air of unease permeates these dream-pictures, hinting at embedded questions. Is it enough to desire and be desired in return? What other goals does life offer? Ordinary questions for a young woman, but her artistic conceptions reveal intense ratiocination and hint at anguish.

We know that Provins had recently met a young architectural student, Adolph Burnat and that the two would marry in the following year. Allegorie, (1895), is full of ambivalence. The young woman turns away in her sleep from the rising sun and the blossoming of nature. Within the larger frame around the image, she is doubly boxed in by this superifically beautiful world.

Much later, in 1939 Burnat-Provins would produce L'Agitation, a companion piece to La Confiance (at top), and a stark depiction of the effects of time and the experiences of war and dislocation on the human spirit. The eyes are open, but at what price?

Images: 1. La Confiance, 1926. 2. Profile a la Coiffe, 1889, Fondation Neumann, Switzerland. 3. Self-Portrait. 4. Allegorie, 1895. 5. L'Agitation, 1930s.

In 1898 the Swiss painter Ernest Bieler invited Marguerite Burnat-Provins to visit his home in the village of Saviese, in southwestern Switzerland. Located in the French-speaking canton of Valais, Saviese is known for its moderate climate and its productivec vineyards. Burnat-Provins was immediately captivated by the countryside and the people, spending several months there each year with Bieler and other like-minded artists.

Two paintings from the year 1900 show her imagination at work. Vielle aux Rouet (Old Woman from Rouet) is an oil painting, pigments built up in lavish strokes, similar in style to works by Van Gogh or Gauguin, but colored in her usual somber palette. Jeune Fille de Saviese (Young Girl of Saviese), executed in mixed media - crayon, watercolor and pastels echoes the art nouveau style Burnat-Provins grew up with. Characteristic panels framing the portrait contain flowers and vines native to the Valais region.

Delightfully mixing decorative elements with expressionistic portrayal and - who knows what symbolism - is Jarimouche. or The Congested One, painted in 1914.

An engaging writer, Burnat-Provins began to publish books. The first, Petits Tableuax Valaisans (1903), illustrated in a brightly-colored antique style, was intended to evoke the distance between the Saviese and the Parisian art world of her apprenticeship. See Composition aux Salamandres from 1899.
She followed with another book, Heures d"Automne (1904), stories and poems of the season.

Note: You can read the complete text at http://www.culturactif.ch/poesie/burnat.htm

Burnat-Provins also produced such decorative works as tablecloths and wall hangings, influenced by the japoniste taste for extending art to everyday objects. Mures (Blackberries, 1904 - at top) is a decorative panel celebratingg the region's bountiful fruit crops. At about this time, Burnat-Provins opened her own shop - A La Cruche Vert (At The Green Jug) - to market her work. She also founded La Ligue pour la Beaute in 1905, dedicated to preserving the Swiss architectural heritage. The organization, which has accomplished much, is is still active today.

Images: 1. Grape Leaves. 2. Vielleux Rouet, 1900. 3. Jeune Fille Saviese, 1900, Collection del'Art Brut, Lasuanne.. 4. The Congested One, 1914, Schweizer Junst Museum, Switzerland. 5 & 6. from Petits Tableaux Valaisans, 1903, Vevey. 6. Composition aux Salamabdres et Perce-Neige, 1898, Musse Jenisch, Vevey. 8. decorative watercolor, 1904, Fondation Neumann, Switzerland.

She regards the viewer aslant, her figures covering her mouth, partially obscuring her expression. At about this time, the Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff declared that the lips never lie. Cloaked in bright colors, a Symbolist self-portrait of the artist as enigma.

"I like what is wild (sauvage) in a garden."

For Burnat-Provins, the world turned upside down in 1907 when she met and fell in love with Paul de Kalbermatten, an attractive young engineer. Le Livre pour Toi, published that same year, is the first of a series of passionate books about love; it begins with this epigraph: "A great love is a masterpiece."

In her work now, Burnat-Provins revisits her interest in japonisme. Look at the book's cover: the asymmetrical arrangement of the design elements, the single bindweed blossom, and the use of space as an active element of design are deceptively austere, yet manage to convey intense feeling.
In Dream For You (c. 1911) again there is a meeting of l'Art Nouveau and l'Art Orientale in the flowering curvilinear lines wrapping the text in a broad decorative border on the flat white page, yet suggests significance in the reflected landscape at bottom.
Marguerite divorced Adolph Burnat and moved to Savoie with Paul in 1908. The next year she underwent surgery that left her unable to have children. The couple married in London in 1910, then moved to Alexandria, Egypt for two years. While her husband pursued various engineering projects, Marguerite visited the Pyramids and the couple made sight-seeing trips to Lebanon and Syria before returning to France in 1912.
The outbreak of war in 1914 turned their shared world upside down: Paul was drafted into the army and Marguerite, left alone with anxieties for her husband's safety, began to experience tormenting hallucinations. These disturbing visions would recur for years, leading her to consult a psychoanalyst in 1916. Burnat-Provins the artist incorporated these images into her work through a series she called Ma Ville (My City).
The paintings are peopled with beings she called "des etres qui s'imposent" (beings who force themselves on me). She wrote of them, "I endure them, cringe as I feel them coming and simply cannot help drawing them." Unlike the characters she created under the symbolist influence, these creatures confront us open-eyed, faces shaped by expressions that convey fathomless distress. Animals appear, hovering around the humans, perhaps real, perhaps ghostly manifestations of the extreme emotions that can push humans to confront their primordial roots. Birds that hover like vultures appear as ambiguous companions.
In Les Etres d'Albimes they cluster, stare and multiply. But in Anthor et L'Osieau Noir (1922) the bird appears to have fused with the woman it envelopes; here is no protective embrace. Frilute le Peureux (1915) shows a face transfixed by fear, the eyes almost impossible to describe as they hold us transfixed, trying to imagine what terror they aprehend. Some critics have looked at these pictures and concluded that they belong to the style of Art Brut, a movement notably associated with naivete, roughness, and at its extreme, the channeling of insanity. This notion does an injustice to Burnat-Provins' sophisticated, questing mind at work. It misses both the variety of her work and the centrality of women as subjects in her art. It is for these works that you will find Burnat-Provins is included in Collectioin de l'Art Brut of Lausanne, Switzerland. (Visit http://www.artbrut.ch/ )

Note: A fascinating study in French is Marguerite Burnat Provins: De L'Art Nouveau a l'art hallucinatoire by Helen Bieri, published by Somogy, Paris. For information about the Association des Amis de Marguerite Burnat-Provins, visit http://www.cultureactif.ch/associations/mpb.htm

Images: 1. Self-portrait, c. 1900, Bibliotheque Cantonale, Lausanne. 2. A la tour de Peltz, 1904, photograph of Maguerite Burnat Provins, Collection de l' Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland. 3. Dream for You, c. 1911, Vevey. 4. Le Livre pour Toi, 1907, Vevey. 5. Les Etres d'Abime, 1921, Collection de l'Art-Brut, Lausanne. 6. Anthor et l'Oiseau Noir, 1922, Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne. 7. Frilute the Fearful, 1915 Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne.

Laure Albin-Guillot: "Muse Of Portraiture & Decorative Fantasies"

Even in Paris, the undisputed capital of the art world in the 1930s, it was unusual for a woman to photograph nude subjects - especially males. When Henry de Montherlant's La Deesse Cypris (described by its author as an "eloge de la volupte" or a eulogy to sensuality) was published in 1932, illustrated with photographs by Laure Albin-Guillot, it was a remarkably apt pairing. In the book, Montherlant wrote that is was necessary for women to develop their physicality, to shed their sense of inferiority to men, to "prepare for a different way of loving, in which they play a healthier role." It seems that Albin-Guillot, a strikingly indepenedent woman, did so on her own.
A closer look at Albin-Guillot's contribution to La Deesse Cypris bears this out. In the finished product, we see evidence of pictorialism in the aura that surrounds the nude figure, achieved through the use of specialized lens. But the dreaminess coexists with strongly cropped images that fill the entire frame, as though daring the viewer to feret out clues in her chosen props and settings. You can examine the rigor of her shooting methods in two images: the first has the geometrics outlined in pencil; the second is the finished product.
Even more impressive was the collaboration with poet Paul Valery in 1936 on Le Narcisse, the retelling of another ancient myth. Critics greeted it with enthusiam but were unnerved by Albin-Guillot's mastery of erotic subject matter supported by her always stellar technique. Reviews emphasized her adherence to classical forms. None alluded to the rumor that her model, actor Michel Lemoine, was her lover.






But this was a small, though revealing, part of the extraordinary life of Laure Albin-Guillot (1879-1962). Born Laure Maffredi in Paris, she studied drawing and painting before taking up photography, perhaps attracted by the lack of barriers to women in this new field. She married young, at eighteen, to a scientific researcher who introduced her to the world as seen through a microscope. The couple worked together on explorations of plant and animal cells. After Dr. Albin-Guillot's untimely death in 1929, Laure conceived the book Micrographie Decorative as a memorial to him. In twnety-four photographs, with text by Paul Leon, crystals become wonderous and eerie - micro-stars she called them. In practice, Albin-Guillot had arrived at a similar place as Sybil and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy did by theory. It was her good fortune to enjoy a happy marriage and professional collaboration for almost three decades.

An early interest in pictorialist aesthetics (Seaside - 1915) was a constant attribute in Albin-Guillot's outdoor work, but she become eqaully adroit - and in demand - for fashion and news work. She was an early contributor to Lucien Vogel's cutting edge magazine Vu, beginning in 1928. She published the collection Aspects of France ( see Poplars Lining A Cobblestone Street In The Rain) in 1938.
By then, she had received a gold medal from Revue Francaise de Photogrpahie in 1922 and a solo show at the 1925 Salon d'Automne. Her fellow photographers regarded her technical ability and choice of pictorial elements as approaching perfection.

Inspired by her work as the archivist for L'Ecole des Beaux Arts, Albin-Guillot began laying the ground work for a national museum of photography in the 1930s.
After World War II, to celebrate the end of a long and dreary time for France, Albin-Guillot published Splendour de Paris in 1946. to remind The book elegantly documented sights from the iron gates at historic Saint-Cloud in the Parisian suburbs to nigh time at a funfair, reminding her countrymen of their rich patrimony. Close to her own heart, was the Palais de Chaillot, e permanent home of the Societe Francaise de Photographie.

Laure Albin-Guillot died at the Maison d'Artistes, Nogent-sur-Marne in 1962.
Her photographs are in numerous collections, including the Getty Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, National Galery of Canada, George Eastman House, the Biblioteque Nationale and, of course, the Societe Francaise de Photographie.

Aristide Maillol: A Catalonian Nabi

There is something in this image of a stone house alone in the bleached landscape of Roussillon that yet hints at the sensuality we see in the art of Aristide Maillol.

Sometimes called the 'French Catalonia', Roussillon is the county that abuts the northern border of Spain on the Mediterranean. It was here, in the fishing village of Banyuls-sur-Mer, that Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) was born and he maintained his loyalty to Catalonia throughout his life. His artist friends, Maillol's native Midi explained his sunny disposition. For Maillol, it was as close as need be to an earthly paradise - perhaps that is why his nymphs look at home there. In La Cote d'Azur, a modern descendant of Botticelli's Venus appears about to step into the water.

The son of a fisherman, away from home much of the time, and a mother who may have been an invalid, the boy Aristide was raised by two maiden aunts. As a schoolboy, he scrawled drawings in the margins of his his schoolwork. After attending a lycee in Perpignan, he arrived in Paris in November 1882 with little money but a determination to become a painter. Maillol studied at l'Ecole des Arts Decoratifs where he shared a studio with Achille Lauge for three years 1885-1888.

"We painted still lives, mainly of apples...I painted more apples than Cezanne, without ever having seen a Cezanne...It was the Age of the Apple. It was the epoch when we wasted our time."

Maillol often spent afternoons studying the medieval tapestries at the Musee de Cluny. "Today a Gothic tapestry gives me more pleasure than a Cezanne, " he told Judith Cladel in 1937. The garden as a setting for lovers and a symbol of earthly paradise were ideas he found congenial to his own vision.
Maillol married in Banyuls and the young couple returned to Paris in January 1895, where Maillol was drawn into the circle of the Nabis, becoming close friends with Maurice Denis and the Hungarian Jozsef Rippl-Ronai. Through the group, Maillol found two patrons - Prince Antoine Bibesco, who financed a loom for Maillol, and Ambroise Vollard. In 1902, Maillol would receive his first solo exhibition at the Vollard Gallery. Nabi works often presented actions in stop-time, giving to homely activities (sewing, reading, bathing, dancing)the effect of static, perhaps ancient, ritual. The luscious flesh of real women is awash in decorative waves.

"The epoch of the tapestries was the happiest of my life."

Yet Maillol was forced to return home in the summer of 1893 due to lack of money. He set up a workshop with five or six local girls to produce tapestries from his designs. He developed his own plant dyes, telling Cladel that he and his wife Clotilde would walk the fields, armed with a pharmacist's guide, searching for seeds and berries to experiment with. He also began whittling wood in his spare time, an interest that led him, eventually, to the sculptures for which he is best known. Maillol considered himself an artisan and refused the limitations of one medium, the fate that history has betsowed on him.

For his own tapestries, Maillol chose a simpler appearance than the elaborate courtly scenes at Cluny . He usually placed his figures in the foreground and made use of new scientific color theories, as he had in his paintings. "It is necessary that all is coordinated from top to bottom...If you have a blue up high, one needs a blue at the bottom....When a tapestry looks gray in a photo, it is always very good. What is not good are large contrasts." (1950)

Note: You may also be interested in Aristide Maillol: A Neglected Painter, posted here 4 June 2008.

Images:

1. House At Roussillon, undated, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

2. Two Nudes In A Landscape, 1896, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris.

3. La Cote d'Azur, 1895, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris.

4. Girl On A Swing, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris.

5. Banyuls-sur-Mer, c. 1891-1898, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris.

6. The Wave, 1898, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris.

7. The Wave, c. 1896, Musee Maillol, Paris.

8. Madame Maillol, 1895, Musee Maillol, Paris.

9.  Nude - Madame Maillol, 1898, Musee Maillol, Paris.

From The Tokaido Road To Ipswich River

An odd pairing, you might say, of a road in old Japan that connected Tokyo to Kyoto, with a small river that meanders through northeastern Massachusetts. But not to Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922). As a boy, he devoured books on Colonial history at the Ipswich library and, later at the Boston Public Library, he discovered a book of prints by Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai. The Peabody Essex Museum in nearby Salem, oldest museum in the United States, was full of artifacts from the clipper trade, making Asian arts and crafts familiar. As an adult, Dow’s desire to make artworks of high quality available to all - art fit for a democracy - drew on his early memories.

Dow's lasting affection for the North Shore is obvious in an interview with Mabel Kay for Brush and Pencil, August 1899.

“In the fall the sweep of its color is incredible. Then the moors are washed with the purple of the wild cranberries. The blueberries and blackberries are scarlet. In some placed the wild country leads down toward the orange salt marshes, and the maples around the edges of ponds turn scarlet and the bull brier are plates of gold. The whole back country is spicy with bay and fern.

In the spring there is a bloom of wild fruit which spreads like a bridal veil and juicy pear and wild cherries and beach plum, growing in great quantities where the dunes and the woods meet. "

Dow’s formal art training was in tonalism; he once said that he despised Impressionism for what he saw as its lack of technique. What he obviously rejected was their repetitive use of parallel brush strokes. What is most distinctive in Dow's woodblock prints is the absence of modeling and detail: the decorative aspect is in the coloring.

After he began teaching elementary school art in 1879, Dow experimented with lithography in his spare time. He his design principles under

the influence of Utagawa Hiroshige's Fifty-three Stations Of The Tokaido Road (1833-1834) and often employed a color scheme borrowed from Hiroshige Already, he had diverged from the Japanese technique by jettisoning the key block, used to produce line and definition. For Dow, color would do that work.

In 1886, Dow and his friend, Henry Kenyon, traveled to Pont Aven in Brittany where they encountered the new art of Paul Gauguin. They brought home the idea of opening their own studio in Ipswich; the Ipswich Summer Art School opened in 1891.

About his Ipswich Prints (1895), Dow wrote: “My intention was to make it purely a picture-book; not to represent any place, any time of day, or season very realistically, but rather, in an imaginative manner, to use some beautiful groupings of lines and shapes, chosen from the scenery of the old New England town, as a groundwork for different color schemes, a pattern, so to speak, for a mosaic of hues and shades… This possibility of variation, of search for new color harmonies, the constant surprise from unexpected changes of hue and effect, led me to adopt ‘wood-painting’ as a means of expression. The origin of the ideas which culminated in these prints can be traced to the observations and fancies of childhood.”

Images:

1. Color Scheme From Hiroshige, from Ipswich Prints, second series, 1902, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

2. Lily, from Ipswich Prints, second series, 1902, Smithsonian Museum of American Arts, Washington, D.C.

3. Bridge Over The Ipswich River, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, N.J.

4. The Dory, 1895, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

5. A View Of Ipswich River, 1895, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

6. Ipswich Rooftops, c. 1904, Estate of Arthur Wesley Dow, Ipswich, MA.

7. The Derelict, 1916, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, NJ.