Out & About: Exhibits: Collections privées

Pissarro - Déchargement de bois, Quai de la Bourse

Paris has 130 museums.  In addition to the permanent collection of each, most also have temporary shows that change two or three times a year.
     So when I’m here, I have a long list of shows I want to see.  This time I have eight or nine to fit into four weeks.  I’ve already done the Ateliers Mythiques at the Musée de Montmartre and Mucha at the Musée du Luxembourg.  Today it’s the turn of the Collections Privées at the Marmottan.  And with an old friend.

Caillebotte - Pont de l'Europe

The Marmottan-Monet Museum is a perfect place for an intimate show.  Originally, it was the large home, quaintly called the “hunting lodge”, of the Duke of Valmy.  (I’m presuming he hunted in the Bois de Boulogne a mere block away.)  The lodge was later purchased by Monsieur Marmottan, whose son then gave it and his art collection to the Paris Academy of Beaux-Arts.  For many years that was the museum’s name, and it housed a lot of Impressionist art, including Monet.  Which is why decades later Claude Monet’s son Michel chose to bequeath his own collection of his father’s works to the museum... and a third M was added to the name.
     The permanent collections rule on the basement and upstairs levels.  The ground floor houses the temporary shows, as well as rooms that have some of the original furniture, period pieces to delight those interested.
     Me, I’ve come for the Collections Privées, Impressionist art owned by private individuals, artworks rarely - if ever - seen outside of these individuals’ four walls.
     Sometimes the owner of the painting was indicated, but usually not.  People don’t always want burglars to know what’s hanging in their homes.  The word “Monaco” arose often, but who knows whether it’s Prince Albert, one of his sisters, or any of the über-rich people who have paid for a residence in that tax-free principality on the Mediterranean.  Two names came up often.  One is American, the son of a grocer who hit it rich in money management:  Scott Black.  (His wife Isabelle was gallantly also named as co-owner.)  The other, Juan Antonio Pérez Simón, is a Spaniard who has lived most of his life in Mexico, made his money in telecommunications, and loves to loan his artworks out, which he’s done here.  French magazine Paris Match says his art collection is the largest in private hands in the world.

Monet - Tuileries, 1876

But on to the works themselves.
     The name Impressionism came from a painting by Monet shown in the first show ever by artists of this genre (in 1874).  Monet called it Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise).  A scoffing art critic picked up on that and said that none of the paintings in the show were real art, but only just impressions. The term stuck.  (That painting is downstairs here at the Marmottan.)
     Impressionism is all about light.  How it refracts.  How it reflects off things.  How it can transform a color.  One of the best demonstrations of this is when the artist represents dappled light, scenes with light and shadow.  One canvas by Caillebotte demonstrated this:  Le Jardin du Petit Gennevilliers.  Obviously not the center feature of the painting, three women sit off in a corner, talking in the sun.  The focus, so to speak, is on the shadows cast by the tall trees and on the walk and flowerbed, and how the fruit tree stands out against the darkness in the background.  The shadow takes up a good third of the canvas, the third that’s front and center.  The year being 1889, the work is still somewhat traditional, as paintings were, pre-photography.  It’s a scene you now might snap with your smartphone, except broken down by... light.

Toulouse-Lautrec - La Blanchisseuse

     Toulouse-Lautrec has a painting in this show that is also photographic, but it’s a portrait rather than a landscape.  He called it La Blanchisseuse (The Laundress).  It’s from the same period as Monet’s garden (1886) and shares some traits.  Here the focus seems to be on the woman’s white shirt, and the shadows its folds cast.  A far cry from Lautrec’s famous posters.  Her dreary room is made even more dreary by the contrast with the scrap of sky out her window.  Lautrec has hidden the woman’s face with a lock of hair that’s fallen over her eyes as she takes a moment out of her drudgery, and there’s the merest shadow of that lock on her cheek.  Again, light.
     Another thing that fascinated the Impressionists, something still fairly new in the world of that time, was the steam engine.  The constant morphing of the rising steam was as challenging to try to capture on canvas as was light.  Which is why so many artists set up their easels near Paris’s Gare St. Lazare train station and on the Pont de l’Europe bridge spanning the tracks.  Pissarro captured it well in another setting:  the docks, where boats wait to be loaded or unloaded.  The river gave him the additional opportunity to interpret light on the water, as well as in the sky.  As it was painted in 1898, Impressionism had already moved on a bit from a softer version of photographic depiction to something more personal, a step or two farther from reality.

Théo van Rysselberghe - Regatta

     Still later came pointillism, where light was broken down even further into dots.  Although Seurat took it to the extreme, others used it more sparingly.  There’s a canvas in this show that exemplifies that well, and it’s by an artist I hadn’t heard of:  Théo van Rysselberghe.  He called it Regatta, and the full sails of the boats embody the wind that also makes the waters choppy.  He uses that same texturing with the rocky cliffs, but in a much more subtle way.  (When I looked up van Rysselberghe, I found out he was from Belgium, and he called his style neo-Impressionism.)

Vlaminck, by Derain

     Fauvism is a school that arose from Impressionism.  That name was given by yet another art critic who focused in on the unnatural colors used by some artists and likened them to fauves (wild beasts).   André Derain painted a portrait of fellow artist Maurice de Vlaminck and the colors he chose fall within this definition, especially as one eye is blue and the other is black.  As far as impressions go, this portrait gives no more than an impression of what Vlaminck actually looked like.  Based on photos of him, it’s about as unreliable a police sketch as it could possibly be.  A mere outline of a face, with a line for a nose and only a patch of hair.  And yet, as a piece of art, it works.

     There were also a few pieces of sculpture in the show.  One was a chillingly striking head of St. John the Baptist by Rodin.  I saw one such head once in a church in Madaba, Jordan.  What’s striking here, in addition to Rodin’s mastery of the chisel, is the coldness of the white marble.  You’re sure he’s well and truly dead.  In contrast to that, there’s a child’s head by Rodin’s student - and paramour - Camille Claudel.  It’s displayed with a mirror behind it so you can stare into the child’s eyes yet see the loosely braided hair flowing down her back.  Head slightly tilted up, she seems to be waiting for something, expecting something.  The artist leaves it to us to imagine what.

There were many more artworks in this show.  But these were the ones that called out to me the most.
     And most of them will never be seen publicly again.  Unless it’s at Sotheby’s or Christie's.

Claude Monet, by Philippe Garel

Collections privées:
A voyage from Impressionist to Fauve

Musée Marmottan Monet
2 rue Louis-Boilly; 16è
Métro:  La Muette

01.44.96.50.33

Until February 10, 2019
T-Sun 10-6 / Th 10-9
Closed Mondays

11 & 7.50 €

Out & About: Exhibits - Alphonse Mucha

Alphonse Mucha

When I was in Prague last fall, I went to the Mucha Museum.  So going to this Mucha exhibit at the Musée du Luxembourg was kind of like visiting an old friend.
     For starters, as of the first room, there was the same photo, taken by Mucha of his good buddy Gauguin, newly arrived back from Polynesia, playing Mucha’s piano dressed in only a mercifully long shirt, his bare feet and legs working the pedals.
     The information gleaned in Prague on the life and works of Alphonse Mucha (gutturally pronounced “moo-ha”) also helped make sense of this Paris exhibit.  For instance, the museum’s second room is set aside for his posters of Sarah Bernhardt, the ultimate theatrical star of the turn of the century.  She liked his first poster of her so much that she proclaimed, in true star fashion, “I love that.  You’re mine from now on.” 

Maude Adams

     Of course, Toulouse-Lautrec had already made posters a new art form, up in Montmartre with La Goulue and Jane Avril.  But Mucha took it even further - and lived longer.  His success was helped along by works for the renowned jeweler Fouquet, and later by an exclusive contract with Parisian printer Champenois.  With that, he could move from his cold Grande Chaumière artist studio in Montparnasse to a quite posh apartment in the toney Val de Grâce neighborhood, a setting suitable to invite all his rich new friends.
     After years of success, Mucha moved back to the now-independent Czechoslovakia, after several trips to the States to find a patron for his masterpiece, The Slav Epic.  (Wealthy Chicago businessman Charles Richard Crane filled the bill.)  For many years Mucha worked fervently on that project to the glory of his Slavic ancestors, culminating in twenty intricate canvases recounting scenes from Czech history as well as that of other Slav nations.
     But in the end, Czechoslovakia savored only twenty years of independence, and when the Nazis marched into Prague in 1939, Mucha was one of the first people rounded up by the Gestapo.  Too famous... and also a Freemason.  He caught pneumonia in prison, whereupon the Nazis freed him, not wanting him to die in their custody.  But die he did anyway only days later, shortly after his 79th birthday.
     Mucha is more than just one of the artists in the dccorative arts movement of the turn of the century.   He came along at the birth of Art Nouveau, with its sinuous forms, floral motifs, ornamental lines and lovely young ladies, all rendered in a subtle palette of pastel colors.  Mucha is the embodiment of the genre.  Alphonse Mucha IS Art Nouveau.

The Slav Epic - Freeing the Serfs

Alphonse Mucha

Musée du Luxembourg
19 rue de Vaugirard; 6è
Métro: St. Sulpice

01.40.13.62.00

Until January 27, 2019
Daily 10:30-7 (to 10 pm on Friday)

13 & 9 € (free under 16 years of age)

www.museeduluxembourg.fr