Friday, January 18, 2013

Self-Portrait and Biography

From Wikipedia: Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer

"Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (September 30, 1865 - September 24, 1953) was a French Symbolist/Art Nouveau artist whose works include paintings, drawings, ceramics, furniture and interior design.

"He was born Lucien Lévy to a Jewish family in Algiers. In 1879 he began studying drawing and sculpture in Paris. He first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1882 where he showed a small ceramic plaque. In 1887 Lévy began making his living near Cannes in southern France, overseeing the decoration of ceramics.

"From 1886 to 1895 he worked as a ceramic decorator and then as artistic director of the studio of Clément Massier. Around 1892 he signed his first pieces of ceramics, which were influenced by Islamic Art.

"In 1895 he left for Paris to begin a career in painting; around this time he visited Italy and was further influenced by art of the Renaissance.

"In 1896 he exhibited his first pastels and paintings under the name Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer; he'd added the last two syllables of his mother's maiden name (Goldhurmer), likely to differentiate himself from other people named Lévy. His paintings soon became popular with the public and among fellow artists as well. He earned high praise for the academic attention to detail with which he captured figures lost in a Pre-Raphaelite haze of melancholy, contrasted with bright Impressionist colouration. His portrait of writer Georges Rodenbach is perhaps the most striking example of this strange and extraordinary synergy.

"After 1901 Lévy-Dhurmer moved away from expressly Symbolist content, incorporating more landscapes into his work because of his travels in Europe and North Africa. He continued to draw inspiration from music and attempted to capture works of great composers such as Beethoven in painted form.

In 1914 he married Emmy Fournier, who had been an editor of the early feminist newspaper La Fronde.^"

Between World War I and the 1930s, he was working primarily on landscapes, both oil and pastel, in a style similar to Whistler and Monet.

He died in Le Vésinet in 1953.

The Lost Explorer

The Artist's Wife Reading, 1893

Photograph by Alfred Barthalone
Source: Labrizzi, Jane "Lucien Levy-Dhurmer at the Metropolitan," 27 May 2008.

Jane Labrizzi's weblog "The Blue Lantern: An Archipelago of Arts and Letters" makes an excellent read, and provides some fascinating images and biographical notes.

Portrait of a Lady, 1893

^{Emmy Fournier, the artist's wife (below) served as the model for many of his works.}

Ceramics, Clément Massier Studio, c. 1893

Portrait of a Lady

Profil de Jeune Femme

Silence

Scene a Venise

Grand Canal at Venice, 1895

Portrait of Georges Rodenbach

IN SMALL TOWNS

In small towns, in the languid morn and frail

Chimes the far bell, chimes in the sweetness of

Dawn that regards thee with a sister’s love,

Chimes the far bell – and then its music pale

Falters upon the roofs like flower on flower,

And on the stairs of gables, dark and deep –

Moist blossoms gathered by the winds that sweep.

The morning music flutters from the tower,

From far away in garlands dry and sere,

Like unseen lilies from an hour that’s gone

The petals, cold and pale, drift on and on

As from the dead brow of the perished year

-- Georges Rodenbach

Trans. Lewis Lewisohn, The Poets of Modern France (New York: 1918), pp. 81-82

Georges Rodenbach was born at Tournai in Belgium of a cultivated family of purely Flemish origin. Early, however, his family moved to Ghent where he attended the college of Sainte Barbe and the university, taking, in due time, his doctorate in law. In 1876 he went to Paris, engaged in the life of letters, established himself at the Brussels bar in 1885 but returned definitely to Paris two years later. “He will take his rank,” wrote Verhaeren, “amongst those whose sadness, gentleness, subtle sentiment and talent fed upon memories, tenderness and silence weave a crown of pale violets about the brow of Flanders.”

-- Lewis Lewisohn. The Poets of Modern France (New York: 1918) . pp. 172 – 173.

From Wikipedia: Georges Rodenbach

"Georges Raymond Constantin Rodenbach (16 July 1855 – 25 December 1898) was a Belgian Symbolist poet and novelist.

"He spent the last ten years of his life in Paris as the correspondent of the Journal de Bruxelles, and was an intimate of Edmond de Goncourt. He published eight collections of verse and four novels, as well as short stories, stage works and criticism. He produced some Parisian and purely imitative work; but a major part of his production is the outcome of a passionate idealism of the quiet Flemish towns in which he had passed his childhood and early youth.

"In his best known work, Bruges-la-Morte (1892), he explains that his aim is to evoke the town as a living being, associated with the moods of the spirit, counselling, dissuading from and prompting action. Bruges-la-Morte was used by the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold as the basis for his opera Die Tote Stadt. Albrecht Rodenbach, his cousin, was a poet and novelist as well, and a leader in the revival of Flemish literature of the 19th century. "

References:

Bruges-la-Morte. Wikipedia page. Note: Rodenbach's novel may have influenced the French crime novel D'entre les morts by Boileau-Narcejac, "which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Vertigo in 1958."

Bruges-la-Morte at Internet Archive (downloadable ebooks and audio books).

Photos of Georges Rodenbach's gravestone and quotes from his work Bruges-la-Morte may be found at an interesting Tumblr Page here.

Free, downloadable ebooks of works by Georges Rodenbach may be found at the Archive.org Georges Rodenbach page, here

Criticism and Biography:

Casier, J.: L’Oeuvre poetique de Georges Rodenbach, 1888

Daxhelet, A.: Georges Rodenbach. 1899

Guerin, Charles: Georges Rodenbach. 1894.

Poetical Works:

Le Foyer et les Champs. 1877.

Les Tristesses. 1879.

A La Belgique. 1880

La Mer elegante. 1881.

L’Hiver Mondain. 1884.

La Jeunesse blanche. 1886.

Du Silence. 1888.

La Regne du Silence. 1891.

Les Vies encloses. 1896.

Le Miroir du ciel natal. 1898

Le règne du silence : poème (1905)

Our Lady of Penmarc'h

Breton Schoolgirls

Dusk in Brittany

Salome, 1896

Helene, 1896

Eve, 1896

Portrait of Camille Mauclair, 1896

Kate de Rothschild features this portrait of Camille Mauclair on her "Master Drawings" page, and informs us in the biographical sketch that Mauclair published his Sonatines d'Automne (Autumn Sonatas) in 1894, about the same time that Levy-Dhurmer began his famous series of autumn scenes. One may deduce that the autumn series of 1896-1897 was, in fact, inspired by Mauclair.

From Wikipedia: Camille Mauclair

^"Séverin Faust (December 29, 1872, Paris – April 23, 1945), better known by his pseudonym Camille Mauclair, was a French poet, novelist, biographer, travel writer, and art critic.

"Mauclair was a great admirer of Stéphane Mallarmé, to whom several works were devoted, as well as Maurice Maeterlinck. He was initially a poet and novelist. His poetry attracted some attention, and was set to music by Ernest Bloch, Gustave Charpentier, and Ernest Chausson and Nadia Boulanger.

^"His best-known novel is Le Soleil des morts (1898), a roman à clef containing fictionalized portraits of leading avant-garde writers, artists, and musicians of the 1890s, that has in retrospect been seen as an important historical document of the fin de siècle. He also wrote several non-fiction books about music including Schumann (1906), The Religion of Music (1909), The History of European Music from 1850-1914 (1914) and The Heroes of the Orchestra (1921) which contributed greatly to French awareness of musical trends

References

Mauclair, Camille. Sonatines d'Automne. (Perrin, 1895). Selections published by Claude Torres.
Mauclair, Camille. The French Impressionists (1860 - 1900). Project Gutenberg ebook
Mauclair, Camille. Le Soleil Des Morts. (Slatkine, 1979 edition in French). Google Books.

Two poems by Camille Mauclair at Black Cat Poems
Poem "The Lying Sun" at Forgotten Shelves