Frédéric Jousset: From the Beaux-Arts tradition to the innovation of Art Explora

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Alexandre Leforestier, art criticism, Art Explora, arts, Buno Juillard, Claudia Moscovici, Frédéric Jousset, Google Art Project, Panodyssey, Valentin Bert

Frédéric Jousset: From the Beaux-Arts tradition to the innovation of Art Explora

By Claudia Moscovici

Frédéric Jousset has spanned the gamut in the arts in the course of his career. Raised in an artistic family—his mother, Marie-Laure Jousset was the Chief Curator at Beaubourg and his father, Hubert Jousset, was President of the École normale de musique de Paris—Jousset has played a key role in French culture. He began his career in the fields of marketing and finance, which he later relied upon to support and fund the arts. In 1994, he started working for L’Oréal (Kérastase) in several marketing roles, followed by managing private equity funds for the international investment firm Bain & Company. In 2000, he partnered with Olivier Duha to establish his own Internet search company, called Webhelp SA. The firm spread to over 40 countries across the world, generating nearly 1.5 billion Euros in revenues in 2019. While thriving as a businessman, Jousset did not forget his artistic heritage. Between 2011 and 2014, he served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris and as a member of the acquisitions committee of the Musée du Louvre (2007-2014). In this role, he developed the museum’s website and funded the purchase of a famous painting by Nicolas Poussin, La Fuite en Egypte (1657).

Beaux-Arts Magazine and the Beaux-Arts System

Jousset eventually became an administrator of the Louvre. In 2016, he became the CEO of the prestigious Beaux Arts Magazine, a monthly art journal founded in 1983, which covers the history of art in all fields from antiquity to today. The magazine is named after the Académie des Beaux-Arts founded in 1816, under the rule of Louis XVIII. This Academy, in turn, merged the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, the Academy of Music, and the Academy of Architecture: all originally founded by Louis XIV’s culture minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. The Beaux-Arts system was instituted to meet the requirements of the Academy, which were taught at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. These included the following principles:

1. A respect of the hierarchy of genres which privileged, in descending order, history paintings, religious themes, portraits and still-lifes. Of course, principles are always somewhat different from public taste and practice. Even during the eighteenth-century, when Chardin’s still-lifes were extremely popular and defended by notable philosophes such as Diderot, the hierarchy of genres instituted during Louis XIV’s reign was being called into question. During the nineteenth century, with the rise in popularity of realism and the representation of every-day subjects and life, it was even more radically altered. Although some well-respected artists, such as Cabanel and Bouguereau, continued to observe its rules, many artists did not. As Théophile Gautier announced in the 1846 Salon, “religious subjects are few; there are significantly less battles; what is called history painting will disappear… The glorification of man and of the beauties of nature, this seems to be the aim of art in the future.”
2. Drawing is more important than color. The reason behind this rule was that the drawing of forms was considered more abstract because it was not already found in nature. Thus, it was assumed that it took greater artistic talent to convey forms by drawing their shapes and outlines rather than by blotting, from nature, their colors.
3. Drawing from live models in conformance to the study of anatomy, not in order to convey nature as is, but to improve it by rendering it more noble, elegant and beautiful. During the seventeenth century, Neoclassicism perpetuated this improvement of nature, or capturing la belle nature.
4. Painting in the studio, as opposed to in the open air, since the studio was a place where the source and intensity of light and, more generally, the whole painting environment could be controlled to suit the aesthetic needs of the artist.
5. Paintings had to be elaborately detailed, meticulously executed and, above all, look polished and finished.
6. The overarching and unspoken framework behind the Beaux-Arts system was verisimilitude: or representing in painting—through shading, foreshortening, sfumato and the observance of one-point perspective—the three-dimensionality of objects as seen by the eye.

By the mid- to late- nineteenth-century, the Impressionists would undo much of the Beaux-Arts system and its stringent rules with their plein air, quick brushstroke, blot of color paintings. But the legacy of a strong institutional tradition valuing the arts continues in France to this day, a country whose top contribution still is, arguably, culture and whose main industry remains tourism, largely centered around its invaluable artistic heritage and exquisite museums.

21^st Century Artistic Innovation: The Google Art Project and Art Explora

To preserve an artistic heritage anywhere around the world we must keep up with—and even invent—the technologies of our times. In this fashion, we can engage with new audiences and expand the reach of the arts to more and more places, worldwide. About a decade ago, Google made it possible to visit museums virtually, without having to travel there. On February 1, 2011 it launched the groundbreaking Google Art Project. (See https://artsandculture.google.com/) This website offers an online, high-resolution compilation of some of the greatest works of art, featured in some of the world’s most famous museums: including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Frick Collection in New York City; the Uffizi in Florence; the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée Rodin in Paris and the Tate Gallery in London. Since its inception, 600 museums in 60 countries have participated in this revolutionary artistic venture.

According to the Wikipedia, Elizabeth Merritt, the Director of the Center for the Future of Museums, described the project as an “interesting experiment.” Other leaders in the world of art greeted this venture with more optimism. Julian Raby, the Director of the Freer Gallery of Art, stated that this project would increase viewers’ interest in visiting the actual museums. Brian Kennedy shared this view, stating that even though the virtual museum and gallery tours offer better resolution and panoramic perspectives, that’s still not a substitute for seeing the works of art in person.

It’s not the same, but, in my opinion, the Google Art Project represents the wave of the future–if not the present–not just for museums, but also for art galleries. Galleries in particular have taken a terrible hit during the past few years. Many were forced to go out of business. During tough economic times, art is seen as a luxury that many consumers are willing to forgo. The Google Art Project generates interest in great works of art once again. And with interest comes visits to the museum and galleries, which in turn, increases the number of  art collectors and buyers.

The world of art has reached a pivotal turning point due to this, and similar, technological advances. Those galleries that will adapt to these new ways of reaching viewers to inform and attract the general public will be much more likely to survive than those that will not. I can’t see virtual reality becoming a substitute for actual reality in any domain: be it art, sex or entertainment. But I do see virtual reality as the most effective–and now, indispensable–way to spread information about the reality that will count most in the twenty-first century.

Art Explora: “Beauty will save the world”

Frédéric Jousset apparently shares this vision because lately his focus has been on an artistic innovation similar to the Google Art Project. In December 2019, he partenered with Bruno Juillard and launched Art Explora. Juillard, a former First Deputy to the Mayor of Paris, brings to the table his considerable experience in the arts. Between 2014 and 2016 he was in charge of cultural institutions as well as assuming the role of Chairman of Paris Musées, which included 14 major Parisian museums. He became the Director of the Foundation Art Explora. As with the Google Art Project, the goal of Art Explora is to make the arts more accessible to a greater number of people across the globe. As Jousset states on its website, “I am convinced that art is essential to everyone’s life but that the inequalities related to the access of its creation are still too deep. There is an urgent need for culture to come out of its comfort zone and reach a wider audience. I am creating Art Explora to take up this major challenge: sharing culture with as many people as possible” (https://artexplora.org/en/who-are-we/).

Art Explora adopted Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous phrase, “beauty will save the world”. But this new forum goes far beyond what the nineteenth-century might have considered beautiful. As Art Explora’s Manifesto elaborates, in the 21^st century “Culture can take many forms, opera or hip-hop battle, Munch’s Scream or Hitchcock’s Birds, it is a constant metamorphosis. It passes from one hand to the other, from one ear to the other, from one glance to the other and is transmitted by the power of the senses.” Art Explora aims to bring all of the arts to us, not only online but also through its exciting Art Explorer tours. Since about 60 percent of the world’s population lives close to coastlines, Art Explorer, “the largest catamaran in the world,” features immersive artistic events that can be attended by 200 people per day. Wherever it will be anchored, Art Explorer will strive to include the local communities, hosting cultural events that welcome local artists and art lovers. The floating artistic exhibit is set to launch its first tour in 2023. Right now, Art Explora is developing its digital and educational platform, collaborating with the prestigious Sorbonne and with the Cité international des arts in creating courses in the history of art.

I learned about these exciting new developments in the arts through my participation in another new French cultural venture, Panodyssey, which also seeks to reach and unite an international audience. Panodyssey creates “creative rooms” where artists, writers, film directors, architects and explorers of the arts of all kinds can collaborate on joint projects and goals. As I stated in my article about Panodyssey’s mission, during the creation of the Beaux-Arts system, kings, the clergy and the aristocracy were the patrons of the arts. (See https://panodyssey.com/en/article/culture/claudia-moscovici-brbq6rstuk58) Today, it is innovative entrepreneurs who love the arts—creators such as Frédéric Jousset, Bruno Juillard, Alexandre Leforestier and Valentin Bert—that are ensuring that art, in all its forms, continues to not only survive, but also expand and thrive.

 

 

The Dynamic Abstraction of Nicolas Longo

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Abstract art, art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, Cubism, Nicolas Longo, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian

The Dynamic Abstraction of Nicolas Longo

By Claudia Moscovici

I don’t know if Nicolas Longo likes to be compared to other artists. Many artists don’t, yet nobody lives in a cultural vacuum. As an art historian and art critic, I try to describe the innovations of new artists in terms of the legacies of the past. Nicolas Longo is a young Argentinian artist. He started painting Abstract art at the age of twelve, growing up in the age of digital art and the Internet. His geometric art seems to come to life: the abstract shapes pile up, one upon the other, in multiple dimensions and countless angles, beckoning to the viewer with their vivid colors.

In Longo’s art we can see traces of Piet Mondrian’s obsession with primary colors and simple geometric shapes, which the artist viewed as spiritual basics. As Mondrian famously stated in 1914: “Art is higher than reality and has no direct relation to reality. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. We find ourselves in the presence of an abstract art.” Perhaps echoing this idea, Longo observes: “I feel that the common trait in contemporary art is having nothing to say. I only focus on painting until my hands burn.”

While Longo’s artwork makes no claim to mirroring or expressing reality, it certainly evokes emotion. His vivid colors—bright reds, deep purples, and strident neon greens–clamor for our attention. Their geometric shapes burst unto the screen in a manner foretold but perhaps not fully imagined by Pablo Picasso’s Cubism, which depicted objects—and subjects—in terms of their underlying, simpler geometric shapes while allowing the viewer a fuller, richer three dimensional perspective from several angles. Multiply that Cubism by a hundred and you get Nicolas Longo’s dynamic Abstraction: a geometry bursting at the seams, moving with a mesmerizing force in a dance of color and form that overwhelms the senses and tantalizes the imagination.

 

Darida Paints Brancusi

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Alexandru Darida, art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, Constantin Brancusi, Darida paints Brancusi, postromanticism

Constantin Brancusi by Alexandru Darida

Darida Paints Brancusi

by Claudia Moscovici

Alexandru Darida was born in 1955 in Romania. He benefited from an extensive artistic training. He studied at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Romania, the Liberal Academy of Art in Rome and the American Academy of Art in Chicago. His work has been featured in Municipal Galleries and the National Museum of Art in Bucharest, Romania. It has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Formello-Rome International Prize for painting.

The artist was born in Transylvania, the region best known in the West for its ruthless ruler, Vlad Tepes, and the myth of Dracula that it later inspired. Yet his is not a regional work, but an art that recaptures the timeless magic and imagination of fairy tales. His iconographic paintings, though they retain an Eastern European feel, transcend any particular place and time, in the same way the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm did during the eighteenth-century and the Romantic poetry of Romania’s national poet, Mihai Eminescu, did during the nineteenth-century.

Just as the Romantics sought inspiration in medieval and gothic literature, architecture and art, so the postromantic art of Alexandru Darida harks back to the radiance of medieval illuminations. His mysterious, ethereal female figures seem transposed from a distant place and time; a time when femininity was associated with magic, mysticism and spirituality. Light, winged, golden and glowing like religious icons, embellished with flowers and crowns like classical goddesses, Darida’s women are allegorical phantasms that populate our childhood fantasies and dreams. His application of paint is both delicate and rough. Soft plays of light and shadow highlight the luminosity of gold. At the same time, the vitality of heavy, swirling and knife-edge application of paint endows his paintings with a modern feel: as if bringing down to earth, into our very lives, the lightness and elevation of his fairytale-like art.

Alexandru Darida is especially esteemed in his native  Romania for keeping alive–and bringing to international attention–its most famous cultural figures. Darida has painted iconic portraits of some of Romania’s best-known writers, philosophers and artists: the absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco, the Romantic poet Mihai Eminescu, the philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade, the modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Darida’s portrait of Brancusi (above) captures the contemplative, mystical nature of the sculptor, his gaze directed downward, as well as the artist’s unique mixture of Romanian peasant garb (reflecting his humble origins) and Western intellectualism, as this simple man became one of the principal founders of European modernism.  Brancusi’s legacy remains extremely important today, not only to Romanians but also abroad. In what follows, I’d like to analyze some of the reasons why we–still–love Brancusi.

Why we love Brancusi

Like his magnificent statues, for Romanians, the artist Constantin Brancusi(1876-1957) is a national monument. To extend the metaphor, he’s also one of the pillars of Modernism. A favorite in his host country, France, he even has, like his mentor Auguste Rodin, his own museum in Paris.  Like many art lovers, I’m a big fan of Brancusi’s sculpture and, like many native Romanians, I also take a certain pride that one of my compatriots has made such a big impact on art and culture. It seems obvious why so many people appreciate Brancusi. But as an art critic and aesthetic philosopher, I’m tempted to examine in greater detail answers to the question: Why do we love Brancusi?

1)   He’s got Fame

This question of why we love Brancusi might not even come up if people didn’t know about the sculptor and weren’t exposed to his art in museums, galleries, and books about Modernism and the history of art. One of the most famous Romanians—up there with Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran (in philosophy and the history of ideas) and Eugen Ionesco (in drama), Constantin Brancusi is well known and much appreciated internationally. Almost every major museum in the world exhibits his art nowadays. But Brancusi achieved both fame and notoriety during his own lifetime.

He studied with the legendary sculptor Auguste Rodin but was smart enough to leave his famous teacher after only two months to seek recognition in his own right, famously stating: “Nothing can grow under big trees.” Soon he became one of the “big trees” himself, becoming known throughout the world for his sculptures The Kiss (1908), variations of Bird in Space (1928) and, of course, his chef d’oeuvre in Tirgu-Jiu, Endless Column (1938). Wealthy investors, including John Quinn, bought his sculptures. He exhibited his works in prestigious places, including the Salon des Indépendants in Paris and the Armory Show in New York.

One of the premier Modernist artists and a bohemian at heart, Brancusi kept company with some of the most influential artists, poets and writers of his time, including Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Amedeo Modigliani, Ezra Pound, Guillaume Appollinaire, Henri Rousseau and Fernand Lèger. His list of acquaintances and friends reads like a Who’s Who of famous Modernist artists, poets and writers.

2)   He’s got Personality

The artists that make it big often do so not only through their artistic accomplishments, but also through their magnetic personas and promotional antics. It’s difficult to say if Pablo Picasso would have had such an impact without being able to manipulate art deals and shape the public taste or if the Surrealist movement would have become so prominent without Salvador Dali’s zany antics, which weren’t completely random. For instance, to underscore the lobster motif in his art, Dali gave a talk in New York City with his foot in a bucket and a lobster on his head.

Similarly, Brancusi stood out from the crowd through his quirky combination of bohemianism (his free-spirited thirst for life, women and parties)  and severe asceticism. The apparent contrast between his simple, Romanian peasant roots and his sophisticated tastes and wide-ranging intellectual curiosity (he was interested in mythology, art, craftsmanship, music and transcendental philosophy) also drew attention. Furthermore, sometimes retreating at the pinnacle of your success can be a good career move. After creating the monumental Endless Column—which marked the apex of his artistic career—the artist became reclusive and created very few works of art.

While prolific and sociable up to then, during the next 19 years of his life Brancusi created fewer than 20 works of art, all of them variations upon his previous works. The former bohemian socialite also retreated from public view, while, paradoxically, his fame continued to grow. In an article in Life Magazine(1956), the artist is described as an eccentric hermit: “Wearing white pajamas and a yellow gnomelike cap, Brancusi today hobbles about his studio tenderly caring for and communicating with the silent host of fish, birds, heads, and endless columns which he created.”

Years earlier, Brancusi also attracted attention through the shocking novelty of his art: particularly his sculpture called Princess X (1920), a phallic sculpture representing Princess Marie Bonaparte, which created such an uproar at the Salon of 1920 that it was eventually removed from the exhibit. In a clever and rather accurate pun, the art critic Anna Chave even suggested that it should have been named “Princess Sex” rather than “Princess X”.

Brancusi found himself again in the limelight in 1926, when he shipped a version of Bird in Space to the American photographer Edward Steichen. Not viewing the sculpture as a work of art, which would be duty-free, the customs officials imposed taxes upon the piece for its raw materials. Although both of these incidents got Brancusi international attention—or notoriety, depending upon your perspective–artistic magnetism goes beyond mere shock value or even publicity stunts.

Such magnetism is perhaps best described by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche when he urges every person to live his or her life as a work of art: “For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” Artistic fame happens when both the artist and the art are able to intoxicate us, as Brancusi clearly does.  A peasant and an erudite artist and intellectual; a bohemian and an almost saintly aesthete; a socialite circulating in Paris’s most elite artistic circles and a recluse, Brancusi’s paradoxical and enigmatic personality attracted almost as much attention as his truly innovative art. Which brings us to the next—and most important– factor: Brancusi’s talent.

3. He’s got Talent: Brancusi’s Originality, Exemplarity and Inimitability

a)    Brancusi is Original.

Although this doesn’t always happen in the history of art, I’m not alone in believing that Brancusi’s fame is very well deserved and that he’s a very talented artist. However, it’s tough to dissect or explain talent philosophically: usually people say they know it when they see it. Sometimes we need to appeal to aesthetic philosophy to understand more closely the reasons behind something that seems obvious or intuitive. In this case, I believe that Immanuel Kant’s second aesthetic criterion from The Critique of Judgment(1790): namely, his definition of artistic “genius” (or what we would call today, somewhat more modestly, “talent”), offers us helpful ways of evaluating the merit of Constantin Brancusi’s art.  This brief digression into Kant’s aesthetic philosophy will help us understand why Brancusi’s art is original, exemplary and inimitable or, simply put, why he’s got talent.

Kant defines artistic talent as “the innate mental aptitude through which nature gives the rule to art.” (The Critique of Judgment, 225) In other words, talent is partly innate, not just acquired by training and practice. Moreover, producing a work of art is an inherently creative endeavor that requires talent. It’s never just generating a mirror image of reality, but rather a creative interpretation of that reality (or what he calls “nature”). Furthermore, Kant maintains, not all artistic creations are equal. Some stand head and shoulders above the rest, even generating new artistic movements. He offers three main criteria that distinguish artistic talent. First of all, for a work of art to show real talent, “originality must be its primary property” (The Critique of Judgment, 225).

Brancusi is, without a doubt, original. His first major work is The Prayer (1907), a minimalist sculpture that reflects the artist’s unique and eclectic mixture of influences: Romanian folkloric peasant carvings, classical sculpture, African figurines and Egyptian art. A very talented craftsman and woodcarver, Brancusi also innovates a new method of creating sculptures: carving them from wood or stone as opposed to modeling them from clay or plaster, as his mentor Auguste Rodin and many of his followers were doing at the time. Most likely deliberately named after Rodin’s The Kiss (1908), Brancusi’s second major sculpture (by the same name) effaces the realism of the lovers, as they embrace to form one rounded, harmonious monolith: quite literally, a monument to love.  Years later, in Bird in Space (1928), the artist conveys movement, altitude, aerodynamics and flight rather than the external features of the bird itself. The pinnacle of his career and the logical conclusion of capturing feelings and concepts through essential forms, Endless Column  (1938) represents the soaring spirit and heroism of the WWI Romanian civilians who fought against the German invasion. It’s a monument for which, incidentally, Brancusi refused to accept payment.

One of the most innovative aspects of Brancusi’s art is that his sculptures capture the essence rather than the form of objects. Relying upon the Platonic and Aristotelian definitions of forms, the artist distinguishes his minimalismfrom abstraction. Brancusi protests: “There are idiots who define my work as abstract; yet what they call abstract is what is most realistic. What is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things.” For Plato, Forms are the original, essential perfect models—such as goodness, virtue or humanity–for concepts and objects. Aristotle transformed this Platonic notion of Forms, distinguishing between the essential and the contingent, or essence and accident. The essence of the object defines what it is no matter how much it changes its appearance or state. Relying upon this Aristotelian concept, Brancusi was one of the first and best known Modernist artists who sought to capture the essence of the emotions and objects he conveyed: be it love and sensuality or heroism and courage.

b)   Brancusi is Exemplary

But originality–in the sense of producing an artifact without imitating other artifacts and without learning how to produce art–does not suffice to qualify an artist as a genius (or talented). An artist may create, as Kant puts it, “original nonsense” that nobody cares about or likes. Taking this possibility into consideration, Kant argues that, secondly, artistic objects must also be “exemplary; and, consequently, though not themselves be derived from imitation, they must serve that purpose for others, i.e. as a standard or rule of estimating.” (The Critique of Judgment, 225) When one produces truly innovative works of art, other artists tend to follow suit. Brancusi set the standard for Modernist sculpture, influencing tens of thousands—if not millions–of artists, many of whom continue his tradition today.

c) Brancusi is Inimitable

Yet there is only one Brancusi. As an anonymous art critic writing for the art website Brain-Juice.com aptly states: “The sculptures of Constantin Brancusi blend simplicity and sophistication in such a unique way that they seem to defy imitation. Yet it is impossible to think of an artist who has been more influential in the twentieth century. Almost single-handedly, Brancusi revolutionized sculpture, invented modernism, and shaped the forms and concepts of industrial design as we know it today.” (Brain-Juice.com on Brancusi) This brings me to the third criterion of aesthetic value that Kant offers to explain artistic talent: inimitability. Although good art is exemplary—in motivating other artists to imitate it—it is also difficult to copy because each talented artist has his own unique style. Brancusi has a signature style that many may emulate, but nobody can replicate.

His host country, France, has long recognized his genius and set up an Atelier Brancusi at the Centre Georges Pompidou. Many of us who love Brancusi’s monumental art are eagerly awaiting a Brancusi Museum in his native country, Romania, as well. In the meantime, we’ll continue to enjoy the Brancusi exhibits throughout the world and his newly restored Endless Column in Tirgu-Jiu.

Paola Minekov’s Undercurrents: The cover for Holocaust Memories

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Claudia Moscovici Holocaust Memories, Paola Minekov, the Holocaust, the Holocaust in Bulgaria, Undercurrents by Paola Minekov

Undercurrents by Paola Minekov

I have chosen Paola Minekov’s painting Undercurrents as the cover for my book of reviews of Holocaust memoirs, fiction and films, Holocaust Memories. Paola is a Bulgarian-born Jewish artist living in London, England. The daughter of the notable Bulgarian sculptor Ivan Minekov (who is known, among other things, for a famous sculpture of the national leader during WWII Dimitar Peshev), Paola perpetuates her father’s legacy through her own art. Her native country, Bulgaria, was one of the few European states that didn’t give in to Hitler’s demands to send its Jewish population to the Nazi concentration camps. As is often the case, politics are quite complicated, especially morally. In March 1941, Bulgaria entered into a military alliance with Nazi Germany. Soon thereafter, Tsar Boris III enacted the Law for Protection of the Nation, a discriminatory decree against Jews modeled after the German Nuremberg Laws of 1935. In March 1943, the Bulgarian military and police deported over 13,000 non-Bulgarian Jews living in the country and its territories, handing them over to the Nazis. But as the tide of the war began changing, Tsar Boris III changed his country’s course as well. Under pressure from Dimitar Peshev, a leader of Parliament, and the Bulgarian Church, Tsar Boris III refused to deport the 48,000 native Jews that would have been threated with annihilation. Thus, despite its alliance with Nazi Germany, Bulgaria is one of the few European countries that didn’t doom its Jewish population.

Although not explicitly about the Holocaust, Paola’s painting fits this somber subject. Reminiscent of aspects of Picasso’s blue period, it is painted in a softer, more flowing, Cubist manner in shades of blue, a color associated with melancholia. The delicate figure in the painting’s foreground, hominid and feminine, her gaze lowered, her mouth reduced to a small sliver of silence, appears to contemplate a subject of unspeakable sadness. The man behind her looms large in darker shades of blue and grey; he is only a shadow. To my eyes, he is kept alive solely by her memory, her mourning and her sadness. To me, she represents survivors: not only the survivors of the Holocaust, but also us, the generations who live with the burden of the past. It is up to us, Jews and non-Jews alike, to learn and remember the past so that such acts of genocide are not repeated in the present and future.

 

Claudia Moscovici

Holocaust Memories

 

The Impressionist movement and the artwork of Chris van Dijk

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art criticism, art history, Chris van Dijk, Claudia Moscovici, Impressionism, Romantic Impressionism, The Impressionist movement and the artwork of Chris van Dijk

By Claudia Moscovici

 

More than a style of art, Impressionism is a movement and a unique way of looking at the world that was shocking in its day and continues to have relevance to contemporary artists. Originally, the Impressionists were considered subversive. Manet, Impressionism and Postimpressionism have become analogous with the violation of the official academic standards and thus also with artistic modernity. It is said that Impressionism entailed a rejection of the principles taught by the Ecole des Beaux Arts and esteemed by the academic judges of the official Salon. In fact, the works of the Impressionists were repeatedly rejected from the Salon run by the Academy of Fine Arts established by Colbert under the reign of the Louis XIV, which continued to rule the artworld for two hundred years. Because they were unconventional, the paintings of the Impressionists were relegated by Napolen III to the Salon de Refuses (the Salon of the Rejected) in 1863. Rather than accept defeat, many of the Impressionist artists—most notrably, Monet, Morisot, Pissaro, Sisley and Renoir—coalesced into an informal movement that convened in popular cafes in Montmatre. They created their own exhibit in 1874, called La Societe Anonyme (The Anonymous Society).

Even when they united, however, the Impressionists initially suffered critical derision. The critic Louis Leroy, who coined the term “Impressionists” based on Monet’s painting in the exhibit “Impression: Sunrise”, wrote dismissively: “Impression; I was certain of it. I was just thinking that I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it. And what freedom! What ease of handling! A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more highly finished than this seascape.” Writing in the same derogatory vein, the critic Albert Wolf, from Le Figaro, charged that Renoir—today known as the painter of sensuality and women–didn’t know how to paint female nudes, making them look like putrid, decomposing corpses: “Try explaining to Mr. Renoir that a woman’s torso is not a heap of rotting flesh, with green and purple patches, like a corpse in an advanced state of putrefaction.” Most art critics at the time, with the notable exception of the naturalist writer Emile Zola (who championed the art of Manet and the Impressionists), considered Impressionist artwork as unfinished, ugly and poorly executed. Which leads us to ask how and why did the works of the Impressionists strike critics and viewers as so different from other art of the time?

This notion of the subversiveness of Manet and of the Impressionists has been, since Zola, deliberately overplayed to draw a firmer marker that separates old traditions from new art. For not only did Manet and the Impressionists regularly exhibit at the official Salon—with Manet and especially Renoir seeking its approval to the very end of their lives—but also they were influenced, along with the officially sanctioned artists, by the most famous Renaissance artists as well as by the masters of Romanticism and Realism: Delacroix, Corot, and Courbet.

Yet, without a doubt, Manet and the Impressionists did violate some of the important rules of what is called the “Beaux-Arts system.” The Beaux-Arts system was instituted to meet the requirements of the Academy, which were taught at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. These included the following principles:

 

1. A respect of the hierarchy of genres which privileged, in descending order, history paintings, religious themes, portraits and still-lifes. Of course, principles are always somewhat different from public taste and practice. Even during the eighteenth-century, when Chardin’s still-lifes were extremely popular and defended by notable philosophes such as Diderot, the hierarchy of genres instituted during Louis XIV’s reign was being called into question. During the nineteenth century, with the rise in popularity of realism and the representation of every-day subjects and life, it was even more radically altered. Although some well-respected artists, such as Cabanel and Bouguereau, continued to observe its rules, many artists did not. As Théophile Gautier announced in the 1846 Salon, “religious subjects are few; there are significantly less battles; what is called history painting will disappear… The glorification of man and of the beauties of nature, this seems to be the aim of art in the future.”

 

2. Drawing is more important than color. The reason behind this rule was that the drawing of forms was considered more abstract because it was not already found in nature. Thus, it was assumed that it took greater artistic talent to convey forms by drawing their shapes and outlines rather than by blotting, from nature, their colors.

 

3. Drawing from live models in conformance to the study of anatomy, not in order to convey nature as is, but to improve it by rendering it more noble, elegant and beautiful. During the seventeenth century, Neoclassicism perpetuated this improvement of nature, or capturing la belle nature.

 

4. Painting in the studio, as opposed to in the open air, since the studio was a place where the source and intensity of light and, more generally, the whole painting environment could be controlled to suit the aesthetic needs of the artist.

 

5. Paintings had to be elaborately detailed, meticulously executed and, above all, look polished and finished.

 

6. The overarching and unspoken framework behind the Beaux-Arts system was verisimilitude: or representing in painting—through shading, foreshortening, sfumato and the observance of one-point perspective—the three-dimensionality of objects as seen by the eye.

 

The Impressionists’ greatest contribution to art was not so much to change the notion of painting as representing what the eye can see—or the standards of verisimilitude that had been dominant since the Renaissance—but to alter what the eye should see as well as where and how it should see it. Their violation of the rules of the Beaux-Arts system was not revolutionary—in the sense of transgressing its underlying premises or goals—but it was thorough, in the sense of changing almost all of the means of reaching those goals. The Impressionists considered that the best forum to observe and represent nature would be in the open air—which is why their works were called plein air paintings—where the play of light and shadows would be most natural, striking and intense, rather than under the dim and artificial lighting of the studio.

Furthermore, as noted, the art students in the academies conveyed the three-dimensionality of forms by means of the subtle shading which was first perfected by the Renaissance masters. The Impressionists, on the other hand, evoked a sense of three-dimensionality by representing the dramatic contrasts of color which can be observed in vibrant sunlight. In seeking to capture visually the play of light and shadow—and its transformations—the Impressionists used rapid brushstrokes to produce paintings that looked rushed and unfinished as opposed to the well-rounded, glossy and polished forms and subtle shadings respected by the Beaux-Arts system. Similarly, rather than de picting a posed or characteristic angle of the objects painted, Manet and the Impressionists showed objects from uncharacteristic, and often, truncated perspectives. This truncation of subjects and objects, which is especially obvious in the paintings of Renoir and Degas, openly acknowledges the incompleteness of our field of vision and powers of representation.

Impressionism remains highly relevant in a historical sense, as an important artistic movement associated with innovation and modernity. But it is also alive today as a way of looking at the world that influences the vision of contemporary artists. To offer one notable example, the artist, art dealer, and gallery owner Chris van Dijk paints in a style influenced by Impressionism and by the Romantic movement, calling his work “Romantic Impressionism”. In 2002, he opened his own highly successful gallery in Dordogne, a beautiful area in Southwestern France between the Loire Valley and the Pyrenees Mountains. His gallery features some of the most important artists working in the Realist, Romantic and Impressionist styles. Since 2013, Chris has also devoted his time to creating his own paintings, which, true to their Impressionist inspiration, focus on plein air scenes: at the beach, in the forest, or in the picturesque poppy fields of Dordogne. Like the works of Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, the paintings of Chris van Dijk often feature women and children. The scenes look unposed, as if the subjects were caught unawares. Most of the time, they look away from the viewer, engrossed in their daily activities, such as playing in the sand, walking in the woods or picking wildflowers. They seem to be at home in their natural surroundings. Chris van Dijk’s paintings, like the works of the Impressionists, are a celebration of the beauty of nature and life. You can see many more of the artist’s paintings on his website, http://www.galleryfrance.com/chris-van-dijk.html.

 

 

Rodin’s Muses: Camille Claudel and Rose Beuret

Tags

Auguste Rodin, Camille Claudel, Claudia Moscovici, Romanticism and Postromanticism, Rose Beuret

Rodin’s Muses: Camille Claudel and Marie-Rose Beuret

By Claudia Moscovici

It would not be an exaggeration to state that Rodin’s artistic career was shaped by women. They were his source of inspiration, his assistants, his models, his sexual and romantic partners, his best friends, his patrons of the arts and, sometimes, his jealous enemies.

His life-long partner, assistant and friend was Rose Beuret. She was a country girl, the daughter of a provincial family that owned a vineyard in Vecqueville, Champagne. He met her in Paris in 1864, when she was only eighteen years old. Perhaps largely due to Rose’s devotion and loyalty to the sculptor, they stayed together—in on and off relationship—for over fifty years. Like nearly all of Rodin’s romantic relationships, theirs was tumultuous. It began as a passionate love affair between model and artist. Rose had recently arrived in Paris to work as a seamstress, but she also did part-time work as an artists’ model. This is how she met Rodin. The art historian and biographer Ruth Butler cites one of their mutual friends’ (Judith Cladel, who would also become Rodin’s mistress) description of young Rose:

“At age twenty Marie-Rose was more than just a pretty woman. Her traits were a bit boyish, she had brown eyes that blazed at the least sign of feeling. Her abundant mass of brown hair was curled and coiffed with splendid originality, and, as simple as she was, she liked to complete her costume with a large hat that she knew how to wear with considerable elan, composing herself in a manner which one would call ‘un type’.” (Rodin: The Shape of Genius, Yale University Press, 1993, 49)

Taken with his fresh-faced new model, Rodin affectionately called Rose Beuret “Mignon”, or “Cutie,” and sculpted her beautiful face and open expression in a work bearing her pet name (Mignon, 1865-68). Soon Rose became pregnant with their child, a boy they named after his father, Auguste. Although the baby inspired several of Rodin’s mother-and-child sculptures (Mother and Child, 1865), unfortunately it didn’t inspire much paternal—or even maternal–love. As a child, Auguste was passed off to be raised by various relatives. Despite this fact, throughout his life, Auguste manifested a deep respect and devotion for his increasingly famous father.

Although Rose may have been too busy modeling and assisting Rodin with his sculptures to be an attentive mother, she did aspire to a normal family life. She wanted Rodin to marry her. But that was not part of his plans. Bourgeois marriage was viewed as a philistine institution by many French artists of his time. Yet for all intents and purposes Rose Beuret was his common law wife, his partner for life. They eventually married just a few days before her death, in 1917. By then it wasn’t to lead the normal middleclass life she had always wanted, but rather to guarantee that Rodin’s sculptures would pass to her, and then to the French state, in the event of him dying first. The state didn’t want to risk Rodin’s artwork becoming the contested property of his many other mistresses.

Despite the fact Rodin never fully committed to her, Rose Beuret remained staunchly loyal to him. Throughout the years, she was his helpmate and assistant, no matter how many other women—can-can girls, models, disciples, artists and wealthy society ladies—he cheated on her with. She was as jealous, however, as she was fiercely loyal. Rodin captures her dual emotions best not in a sculpture, but in a painting entitled Rose Beuret (1872-73). As Ruth Butler aptly describes, “The girlish beauty of Mignon has been replaced by a seriousness and intensity. It shows in the eyes that dart quickly to the left and in the trembling lips. We recognize in a flash that quality of immediacy—of real presence. By all reports, whenever people met Beuret they were struck by the intensity of her nature, which showed itself most vividly in angry outbursts of jealousy” (87).

If Rose had any reason to be jealous of anyone, it was of Camille Claudel. Camille was Rodin’s model, muse and fellow sculptor for about fifteen years. The two women, while hardly in contact, each resented the central role played by the other in Rodin’s life. Rodin met Camille in 1882, when he substitute taught Boucher’s female students, while the latter, who had won the famous Prix-de-Rome, was on a one year trip to Italy. At the time, female artists were not accepted by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Women who wanted to paint or sculpt were obliged to take classes at the ateliers of established artists and learn from them as apprentices. Seventeen-year-old Camille left a lasting impression upon Rodin, both as a young woman and as a very talented artist in her own right. He fell passionately in love with her and as much as she assisted his artistic production—as his model, muse, sculptor’s assistant working on the hands and feet of Rodin’s sculptures, and as an insightful artist—he promoted her artistic career, even after their bitter breakup.

Above all, however, Camille inspired the sculptor’s passion, which showed through in his sculptures at the beginning of their liaison. Rodin created some of the most sensual and beautiful works of his life while entranced by Camille Claudel: Crouching woman, 1881-82; Je suis belle, 1882; The Kiss, 1884 and Eternal Springtime, early 1880’s. As Camille was a jealous woman, she made him sign a pact (which he never honored) that he would accept no other student or lover than Mlle Camille Claudel (Ruth Butler, Rodin: The Shape of Genius, 197-198).

Camille was also inspired to create sculptures that can be seen as hymns to love: particularly The Waltz (1889-1905). This spectacularly elegant sculpture was criticized by art critics as too sensual: particularly since it was executed by a female artist. One critic, Dayot, objected to the “’pungent emphasis on tendering the reality of the two sexes, so surprisingly sensual in expression that it appears to exaggerate the nudity’” (268). While Rodin’s and Camille’s artwork may have thrived, their passion began to wilt as she demanded more and more commitment from Rodin. No matter how devoted he may have been to Camille, Rodin couldn’t fulfill the one promise that mattered to her most: that he leave his partner, Rose Beuret. Camille became increasingly obsessed with that relationship, and her jealousy was reflected in her later art.

This would turn out to be a main reason for the eventual dissipation of the love affair between Rodin and Camille Claudel, as well as for her psychic disintegration into a state of paranoia. Overcome with suspicion and jealousy, Camille kept sketching and sculpting images of an old hag, whom she took to be Rose (Clotho, 1893), and of an old couple who, try as they might, could’t separate, representing Rodin and Rose. In 1893, realizing that Rodin would never leave Rose, Camille Claudel left him.

Contrary to her own feeling that Rodin strove to undermine her career after their breakup, on the contrary, for a long time he continued to support it. As Butler recounts, “Rodin did not withdraw his support from Claudel even when their personal relationship changed. He continued to hold the lease on 113 boulevard d’Italie and presumably pay the rent” (274).

Unfortunately, with the death of their passion, Rodin’s career continued to rise while Claudel’s plummeted as she began to suffer from paranoid delusions. By 1905, she became seriously mentally ill, destroying her sculptures in rages against Rodin, long after he had moved on from their relationship to other muses, other women. In 1913, Camille Claudel was confined by her mother and brother to the psychiatric hospital of Ville-Evard in Neuilly-sur-Marne, a beautiful location which she nonetheless regarded as a prison. She spent the rest of her life there, unhappy and abandoned, until her death in 1943, at the age of 78.

Art and Emotion

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Art and Emotion, Auguste Rodin, Claudia Moscovici, emotion in the history of art, history of art, Romanticism and Postromanticism

Emotion in the history of art

by Claudia Moscovici

We tend to associate art and emotion. The Romantic notion of art as the product of an emotive, sensitive and inspired artist who creates masterpieces to move the public has not altogether disappeared from the popular imagination. Yet, in recent history—particularly since the movement of art for art’s sake in the nineteenth century and the formalist and conceptual currents of the twentieth century—emotion has almost disappeared from art itself. Even in the movement of conceptual art most closely associated with emotion and spirituality—abstract expressionism—emotion is a part of the process of artistic creation and palpable in the moving effect of art upon (some) viewers rather than readily recognizable in the artistic object itself. There is, of course, no eternally valid rule that dictates that emotion should be an inherent part of a work of art—or of any part of the artistic process, for that matter. And, in fact, art has not always existed as separate from artifact and artistic objects have not always been valued for their expressive powers.

For the ancient Egyptians, to offer one notable example, art served a largely symbolic and religious function. Tombs, busts and paintings were used as a means of preserving and glorifying the souls of kings, queens and other privileged members of society. E.H. Gombrich tells us that, appropriately enough, one Egyptian word for sculptor was “He-who-keeps-alive.” Egyptian artists depicted the human figure not as they saw it, nor to express or provoke emotion, but to capture the essence of an important person’s spirit for the afterlife by representing his or her body from its most characteristic angles. The face was shown in profile; the eye from the front; the shoulders and chest from the front; the legs from the side, with the feet seen from the inside and toes pointed upward. (The Story of Art, 60-1). For millennia Egyptian figures had a frozen and immobile, non-expressive look that strove to freeze the souls of powerful men and women in time and to safeguard their happiness in the afterlife.

Greek art was perhaps the first—and certainly the most influential art in the Western tradition–to capture the essence not only of the human spirit, but also of the human form, with all its movement and powers of expression. In Greek art, we feel, even the body seems infused with a soul. Myron’s famous sculpture of the discus thrower, Discobolos (c. 450 B.C), which is of the same era as the better known works of the sculptor Pheidias, displays the beauty, poise, force and movement of a young man’s efforts to launch the discus he holds in his hand. The sculpture is not entirely naturalistic—in the sense that athletes who would try to assume the same position would not be able to throw the discus very far. Nonetheless, it captures the elegance and athleticism of the male body in the first blush of youth. Part of this sculpture’s naturalism lies in the way it conveys movement and emotion through the positioning and poise of the body. This artistic video on classical sculpture by Philip Scott Johnson highlights this phenomenon:

More generally, classical Greek and Hellenistic sculptures rarely look stiff or contrived because of the way in which the human form is balanced: often in a position of counterpoise, with the weight shifted upon one leg, which allows sculptors to reveal the muscular curvatures of the body.

While classical Greek sculpture tends to focus upon the beauty of the human form, Hellenistic art—the art of the empires founded by Alexander the Great’s followers—places increasing emphasis upon the expression of emotion. The kinds of feelings represented in Hellenistic sculpture, however, are not those of everyday people in ordinary circumstances. Rather, Hellenistic art usually exhibits the emotions of extraordinary individuals engaged in tragic conflicts. To offer one well-known example, the sculpture Laocöon and his sons (175-50 B.C.)—executed by Hagesandros, Anthenodoros and Polydoros of Rhodes–immortalizes the story of a priest who is being punished by the gods for forewarning the Trojans not to accept a giant horse which, as it turns out, carried inside it enemy soldiers.

This sculpture was rediscovered in Rome in 1506 and many art historians believe that what was found was not the original sculpture, but a Roman copy. Whether or not it is the original work, The Laocöon Group made a strong impression upon Italian Renaissance sculptors, especially Michelangelo. Laocoon is frozen in an image of terrible anguish since his punishment consists of having to witness two gigantic snakes emerge from the sea and suffocate with their coils his beloved sons. Hellenistic art, at least in this representative sculpture that would become a favorite during the Renaissance and the Neoclassical periods, privileges the expression of a kind of emotion that is at once mythical and dramatic: mythical in its literary and religious references, dramatic in its depiction of human tragedy.

The painting and sculpture of the Renaissance masters continues to focus upon the expression of emotion on a grand scale and to grapple with the connection—as well as the hiatus–between the human and the divine. Michelangelo’s The Dying Slave (1513), for example, reveals the moment when the slave lets go of earthly life as his soul escapes toward heavenly existence.

Despite the twists and turns of his beautiful, muscular form, the slave’s body reflects the resignation, tranquility and spirituality of the transition from life to death. Emotive expression, Michelangelo shows so well, is not necessarily primarily located in the face. The whole body, every movement and gesture, expresses the feelings and attitudes reflected in the face.

This total, eloquent expressivity of sculpture reaches its apex, many believe, in Lorenzo Bernini’s The ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1645-52). The sculpture represents the sixteenth century mystic in a state of rapture. We witness the moment when the angel of God pierces the young nun with a golden arrow, provoking the paradoxical feelings of pleasure mixed with pain and of sensual abandon mixed with divine illumination. As she swoons, half-closing her eyes and slightly opening her lips with ecstasy, Saint Teresa becomes the very embodiment of religious fervor, spiritual attunement and passion. Even the drapery that enfolds her body swirls and twists around her with the same mixture of passive yet passionate frenzy visible on her face.

But what about the expression of more modest, individuated feelings? In the modern period, few artists were as thoughtful and successful in showing the relation between human form and feeling as Auguste Rodin.

Constantin Brancusi considered Auguste Rodin not only a precursor, but also the first great modern sculptor. “In the nineteenth century,” Brancusi declared, “the situation in sculpture was desperate. Rodin arrived and transformed everything.” In a way, Rodin was fortunate that initially he wasn’t part of the system. Rejected several times by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Rodin was not trained according to the rigid academic standards of the time. Nonetheless, he never gave up and showed great confidence in his talent. In 1865, for example, his sculpture The Man with the Broken Nose (1865 and 1875) was initially rejected by the jury of the Salon, partly because the clay fissured and the sculpture cracked in the back of the head.

Years later, Rodin redid the sculpture, whom he regarded as his “first good sculpture,” and this time it was accepted by the Salon. Rodin would follow his own path, but like the Impressionists, he also sought acceptance and acclaim by the artistic establishment.

After a trip to Italy, the works of Michelangelo served as his main inspiration. Like the Renaissance masters, he studied human anatomy. In fact, his sculptures were so life-like in his sculptures that his first major work, The Age of Bronze (1876), caused a great controversy. Rodin was accused of cheating by making it from a live cast of his model. Rodin protested and put together an impressive dossier defending himself, but to no avail. In Rodin’s defense, his model, Auguste Neyt, recalled “I had to train myself to strike the pose. It was hardly an easy thing to do. Rodin did not want straining muscles; in fact, he loathed the academic ‘pose’… The master wanted ‘natural action taken from real life.” (http://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/resources/chronology-auguste-rodin)

Eventually, however, thanks to recommendations made by influential friends, the French government bought the sculpture in 1880 for the hefty sum of 2000 francs. Henceforth Rodin’s fame would continue to rise.

The charge of the Salon could have been further from the truth. Rodin never worked from live casts. He asked his models, both male and female, to walk around freely in his studio. Often he would follow them around, making rapid sketches of their movements. When he spotted them in a particularly interesting pose or expression, he would try to capture it quickly, modeling in clay. For Rodin, as for Michelangelo, the body itself was expressive of emotion. He stated: “I have always endeavored to express the inner feelings by the mobility of the muscles.” It is said that Rodin’s wife, Rose Beuret, once stormed into his studio in a fit of rage and began screaming at him. She would have had plenty of reasons to be upset with Rodin since he notoriously cheated on her with his young models, most of whom were can-can dancers. Instead of responding in kind, however, Rodin quickly modeled her angry expression in clay, saying “Thank you, my dear. That was excellent.” Nothing was as inspirational for him as visible emotion, read in facial expressions and gestures.

Despite the religious allusions of The Gates of Hell, his chef d’oeuvre, Rodin brings emotion down to earth by materializing a passion that functions not only as a connection between the human and the divine, but also as an intimate and profound connection between earthly lovers. Perhaps no one else has described Rodin’s most sensual and moving sculpture, The Kiss, as eloquently as his friend, the art critic Gustave Geffroy:

“The man’s head is bent, that of the woman is lifted, and their mouths meet in a kiss that seals the intimate union of their two beings. Through the extraordinary magic of art, this kiss, which is scarcely indicated by the meeting of their lips, is clearly visible, not only in their meditative expressions, but still more in the shiver that runs equally through both bodies, from the nape of the neck to the soles of the feet, in every fiber of the man’s back, as it bends, straightens, grows still, where everything adores—bones, muscles, nerves, flesh—in his leg, which seems to twist slowly, as if moving to brush against his lover’s leg; and in the woman’s feet, which hardly touch the ground, uplifted with her whole being as she is swept away with ardor and grace.”

Rodin revealed human love and life as a process of mutual creation between women and men. Passion is not only a union with those we desire and adore, but also an elevation through shared feelings and sensuality which is always in process, never complete. His representations of the fragility of our mutual creation were as inchoate, vulnerable yet compelling as the material shapes that seemed to emerge only part-finished from the bronze or blocks of stone.

We have seen that art can serve many different purposes in different contexts such that it’s impossible to define it in relation to any set of common qualities, including emotion. Yet, as I have also suggested, when emotion is materialized in art, it renders artistic objects all the more poignant, moving and palpable for viewers. The expression of emotion not only touches us, but also enables us to connect to artistic creation in a way that’s unique and irreplaceable.

Auguste Rodin and the Physicality of Emotion

Tags

Auguste Rodin, Auguste Rodin and emotion, Claudia Moscovici, modern sculpture, postromanticism, The Age of Bronze, The Kiss

By Claudia Moscovici

Constantin Brancusi considered Auguste Rodin not only a precursor, but also the first great modern sculptor. “In the nineteenth century,” Brancusi declared, “the situation in sculpture was desperate. Rodin arrived and transformed everything.” In a way, Rodin was fortunate that initially he wasn’t part of the system. Rejected several times by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Rodin was not trained according to the rigid academic standards of the time. Nonetheless, he never gave up and showed great confidence in his talent. In 1865, for example, his sculpture The Man with the Broken Nose (1865 and 1875) was initially rejected by the jury of the Salon, partly because the clay fissured and the sculpture cracked in the back of the head.

Years later, Rodin redid the sculpture, whom he regarded as his “first good sculpture,” and this time it was accepted by the Salon. Rodin would follow his own path, but like the Impressionists, he also sought acceptance and acclaim by the artistic establishment.

After a trip to Italy, the works of Michelangelo served as his main inspiration. Like the Renaissance masters, he studied human anatomy. In fact, his sculptures were so life-like in his sculptures that his first major work, The Age of Bronze (1876), caused a great controversy. Rodin was accused of cheating by making it from a live cast of his model. Rodin protested and put together an impressive dossier defending himself, but to no avail. In Rodin’s defense, his model, Auguste Neyt, recalled “I had to train myself to strike the pose. It was hardly an easy thing to do. Rodin did not want straining muscles; in fact, he loathed the academic ‘pose’… The master wanted ‘natural action taken from real life.” (http://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/resources/chronology-auguste-rodin)

Eventually, however, thanks to recommendations made by influential friends, the French government bought the sculpture in 1880 for the hefty sum of 2000 francs. Henceforth Rodin’s fame would continue to rise.

The charge of the Salon could have been further from the truth. Rodin never worked from live casts. He asked his models, both male and female, to walk around freely in his studio. Often he would follow them around, making rapid sketches of their movements. When he spotted them in a particularly interesting pose or expression, he would try to capture it quickly, modeling in clay. For Rodin, as for Michelangelo, the body itself was expressive of emotion. He stated: “I have always endeavored to express the inner feelings by the mobility of the muscles.” It is said that Rodin’s wife, Rose Beuret, once stormed into his studio in a fit of rage and began screaming at him. She would have had plenty of reasons to be upset with Rodin since he notoriously cheated on her with his young models, most of whom were can-can dancers. Instead of responding in kind, however, Rodin quickly modeled her angry expression in clay, saying “Thank you, my dear. That was excellent.” Nothing was as inspirational for him as visible emotion, read in facial expressions and gestures.

Despite the religious allusions of The Gates of Hell, his chef d’oeuvre, Rodin brings emotion down to earth by materializing a passion that functions not only as a connection between the human and the divine, but also as an intimate and profound connection between earthly lovers. Perhaps no one else has described Rodin’s most sensual and moving sculpture, The Kiss, as eloquently as his friend, the art critic Gustave Geffroy:

“The man’s head is bent, that of the woman is lifted, and their mouths meet in a kiss that seals the intimate union of their two beings. Through the extraordinary magic of art, this kiss, which is scarcely indicated by the meeting of their lips, is clearly visible, not only in their meditative expressions, but still more in the shiver that runs equally through both bodies, from the nape of the neck to the soles of the feet, in every fiber of the man’s back, as it bends, straightens, grows still, where everything adores—bones, muscles, nerves, flesh—in his leg, which seems to twist slowly, as if moving to brush against his lover’s leg; and in the woman’s feet, which hardly touch the ground, uplifted with her whole being as she is swept away with ardor and grace.”

Rodin revealed human love and life as a process of mutual creation between women and men. Passion is not only a union with those we desire and adore, but also an elevation through shared feelings and sensuality which is always in process, never complete. His representations of the fragility of our mutual creation were as inchoate, vulnerable yet compelling as the material shapes that seemed to emerge only part-finished from the bronze or blocks of stone.

Classical Sculpture

Tags

classical sculpture, Claudia Moscovici, Greek and Roman Sculpture, Romanticism and Postromanticism

Classcial Sculpture

by Claudia Moscovici

Greek art was perhaps the first—and certainly the most influential art in the Western tradition–to capture the essence not only of the human spirit, but also of the human form, with all its movement and powers of expression. In Greek art, we feel, even the body seems infused with a soul. Myron’s famous sculpture of the discus thrower, Discobolos (c. 450 B.C), which is of the same era as the better known works of the sculptor Pheidias, displays the beauty, poise, force and movement of a young man’s efforts to launch the discus he holds in his hand. The sculpture is not entirely naturalistic—in the sense that athletes who would try to assume the same position would not be able to throw the discus very far. Nonetheless, it captures the elegance and athleticism of the male body in the first blush of youth. Part of this sculpture’s naturalism lies in the way it conveys movement and emotion through the positioning and poise of the body. This artistic video on classical sculpture by Philip Scott Johnson highlights this phenomenon:

More generally, classical Greek and Hellenistic sculptures rarely look stiff or contrived because of the way in which the human form is balanced: often in a position of counterpoise, with the weight shifted upon one leg, which allows sculptors to reveal the muscular curvatures of the body.

While classical Greek sculpture tends to focus upon the beauty of the human form, Hellenistic art—the art of the empires founded by Alexander the Great’s followers—places increasing emphasis upon the expression of emotion. The kinds of feelings represented in Hellenistic sculpture, however, are not those of everyday people in ordinary circumstances. Rather, Hellenistic art usually exhibits the emotions of extraordinary individuals engaged in tragic conflicts. To offer one well-known example, the sculpture Laocöon and his sons (175-50 B.C.)—executed by Hagesandros, Anthenodoros and Polydoros of Rhodes–immortalizes the story of a priest who is being punished by the gods for forewarning the Trojans not to accept a giant horse which, as it turns out, carried inside it enemy soldiers.

This sculpture was rediscovered in Rome in 1506 and many art historians believe that what was found was not the original sculpture, but a Roman copy. Whether or not it is the original work, The Laocöon Group made a strong impression upon Italian Renaissance sculptors, especially Michelangelo. Laocoon is frozen in an image of terrible anguish since his punishment consists of having to witness two gigantic snakes emerge from the sea and suffocate with their coils his beloved sons. Hellenistic art, at least in this representative sculpture that would become a favorite during the Renaissance and the Neoclassical periods, privileges the expression of a kind of emotion that is at once mythical and dramatic: mythical in its literary and religious references, dramatic in its depiction of human tragedy.

The Classic Style of Patrick Demarchelier

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aesthetics, art, art criticism, Claudia Moscovici, contemporary art, contemporary photography, fashion, fashion photography, fine art, fineartebooks, fineartebooks.com, Patrick Demarchelier, Patrick Demarchelier photography, photography, photography Patrick Demarchelier, Romanticism and Postromanticism, The Classic Style of Patrick Demarchelier

photo by Patrick Demarchelier

Leonardo Da Vinci is quoted as saying that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” I think that this true statement definitely applies to the photography of Patrick Demarchelier. Demarchelier received a camera as a gift on his seventeenth birthday, which is how his passion for this art began.

photo by Patrick Demarchelier

Later, he pursued this interest professionally in Paris, working as a fashion photographer along with (and learning from) legends in the field such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Jacque Guilbert.

photo by Patrick Demarchelier

Over the course of his long and very successful career, Demarchelier has worked for magazines such as Elle, Marie Claire, Mademoiselle and Vogue, creating some of the most memorable and iconic images of celebrities, including Madonna, Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansson and Christy Turlington.

photo by Patrick Demarchelier

What I find most interesting and distinctive about Patrick Demarchelier’s style is that it has a simple and classic feel across its wide range. There’s certainly a vintage feel to much of his photography. Many of Demarchelier’s images are  in black and white and his portraits sometimes resemble Hollywood shots of famous actresses of the 1930’s and 40’s.

photo by Patrick Demarchelier

Yet, somehow, his style isn’t at all retro. In fact, it feels very fresh and contemporary. Stripped down to the basics of form, elegant fashions that reflect an impeccable taste and poses that capture expression more than dramatic movement, Demarchelier’s photographs appear timeless.  

photo by Patrick Demarchelier

This is the case whether a given picture resembles in some respects vintage photographs or whether it features futuristic fashions.  A striking simplicity of content and form defines the sophisticated, classic style of Patrick Demarchelier.

photo by Patrick Demarchelier

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

http://www.amazon.com/Romanticism-Postromanticism-Claudia-Moscovici/dp/0739116754