Brioche Paintings

I like brioches.

I like smelling them, I like viewing them, I like gently squeezing them, I like tasting them.

I also like paintings of brioches. I found five plus one of them, by Chardin, Manet and Picasso.

The sequence begins with Chardin and continues with three brioche paintings by Manet. The fifth painting has oysters as its main subject, but there is one brioche on the side, so I included it. The Picasso painting completes the sequence.

La Brioche, Chardin, 1763, Oil on canvas

Dimensions: Height: 0.47 m; Height with frame: 0.58 m; Width: 0.56 m; Width with frame: 0.675 m

Musée du Louvre, Paris

The Brioche, Edouard Manet (French, Paris 1832–1883 Paris)

1870, Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 25 5/8 x 31 7/8 in. (65.1 x 81 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Manet reportedly called still life the “touchstone of the painter.” From 1862 to 1870 he executed several large-scale tabletop scenes of fish and fruit, of which this is the last and most elaborate. It was inspired by the donation to the Louvre of a painting of a brioche by Jean Siméon Chardin, the eighteenth-century French master of still life.

It seems natural that Manet, who lavished attention on the painterly quality of his pictures, should be attracted to the work of Chardin, a master of illusionistic texture. Although Manet made several large-scale still lifes of fruit and fish in the mid-1860s, this work, of 1870, was inspired by the arrival at the Louvre of Chardin’s painting of a brioche.

Like Chardin, Manet surrounded the buttery bread with things to stimulate the senses—a brilliant white napkin, soft peaches, glistening plums, a polished knife, a bright red box—and, in traditional fashion, topped the brioche with a fragrant flower.

Edouard Manet (1832–1883). Nature morte, brioche, fleurs, poires. 1876.

Manet’s brush is liberated from the constraints of the literal reproduction of reality.

Edouard Manet (1832–1883). Nature morte, huîtres, citron, brioche. 1876.

The brioche is on the right side of the picture. As in the previous picture, the artist is now depicting reality with a broader less precise brush.

Title: Still Life with Brioche (Nature morte à la brioche)

Artist: Edouard Manet, French, 1832–1883
Date: 1880
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: Work21 ¾ × 13 ⅞ in 55.24 × 35.24 cm
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Manet was keen on depicting brioches.

On 16 October, 1882, the aspiring young trainee painter Blanche was tasked with the “test ultime pour le peintre” while visiting Manet in his new studio at 77 rue d’Amsterdam, to paint an ordinary bun. “Bring me a brioche, I want to see you paint a brioche, if you can paint a brioche then you can call yourself a painter.”

Pablo Picasso, 1909, La Brioche (Nature morte à la brioche).

Painted in 1909

With Picasso there is not much to say, the world is turned upside down. But it is ok, as long as we can convince ourselves that what we see is a brioche.

Vincent van Gogh: The Potato Eaters

Van Gogh painted the potato eaters in 1885, in Nuenen.

He hoped that the picture would gain him entry into the Parisian art scene.

But the picture was very dark and the human figures suffered from many drawing errors for Vincent’s goal to be achieved.

In 1890 Vincent was interned in a psychiatric asylum in Saint Remy, near Arles.

He decided to rework the potato eaters and started sketching human figures around a table.

He did not manage to paint a new version of the potato eaters.

Four People Sharing a Meal
Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Nuenen, Maart-April 1885

chalk on paper, 20.9 cm x 34.6 cm

Credits (obliged to state): Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Studies of the Interior of a Cottage, and a Sketch of ‘The Potato Eaters’
Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Nuenen, March-April 1885

chalk on paper, 21.3 cm x 34.6 cm

Credits (obliged to state): Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Study for ‘The Potato Eaters’
Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Nuenen, April 1885

oil on canvas, 33.6 cm x 44.5 cm

Credits (obliged to state): Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh with sketch of The Potato Eaters (recto)
Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Nuenen, 9 April 1885

pen and ink on paper, 20.7 cm x 26.4 cm
Credits (obliged to state): Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

The Potato Eaters, Currently on view

Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Nuenen, April-May 1885

oil on canvas, 82 cm x 114 cm

Credits (obliged to state): Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

The Potato Eaters
Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Nuenen, April 1885

lithograph on paper, 31.2 cm x 39.6 cm

Credits (obliged to state): Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Sketches of Figures Seated at a Table
Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, March-April 1890

pencil on paper, 31.9 cm x 23.9 cm

Credits (obliged to state): Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Interior with Two Figures Eating
Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, March-April 1890

pencil on paper, 24.4 cm x 32.0 cm

Credits (obliged to state): Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Three Figures Eating
Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, March-April 1890

pencil on paper, 24.4 cm x 25.3 cm

Credits (obliged to state): Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Vincent van Gogh, ‘Interior with Five Figures Around a Table’, March-April 1890,

pencil on paper, 23.2 x 32 cm,

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Art Institue of Chicago – Modern Art

Today my topic is works of modern art from the Art Institute of Chicago which I last visited in April 2013. I have taken all the photographs.

The following posts are relevant to the Art Institute of Chicago.

Head of a Woman

Woman in a Tub

Jackson Pollock, The Key, 1946. Oil on linen.
Robert Rauschenberg, Short Circuit, 1955, Oil, fabric, notebook paper, postcard, printed reproductions, concert program, and autograph on canvas, wood supports, and cabinets with paintings by Susan Weil and Elaine Sturtevant. View 1
Robert Rauschenberg, Short Circuit – View 2
Robert Rauschenberg, Short Circuit – View 3
Robert Rauschenberg, Short Circuit – View 4
Robert Rauschenberg, Short Circuit – View 5
Jean Dubuffet, Genuflection of the Bishop, 1963. Oil on canvas
Jean Dubuffet, Two nude women, 1942. Gouache, possibly casein, on panel
Davod Hockney, American Collectors, 1968. Acrylic on canvas

Gerhard Richter, Mouth, 1963. Oil on canvas
Alex Katz, Vincent and Tony, 1969. Oil on Canvas
Andy Warhol, Mao, 1972. Acrylic, silkscreen ink, and pencil on linen
Willem de Kooning, Head 3, 1973. Bronze. View 1
Willem de Kooning, Head 3, 1973. Bronze. View 2
Willem de Kooning, Head 3, 1973. Bronze. View 3
Willem de Kooning, Untitled IX, 1975. Oil on linen
Rachel Harrison, Pablo Escobar, 2010. Wood, polystyrene, cement, acrylic, and ceramic peppers
Rachel Harrison, Pablo Escobar, 2010. Wood, polystyrene, cement, acrylic, and ceramic peppers – Detail
John Chamberlain, Toy, 1961. Steel, paint and plastic – View 1
John Chamberlain, Toy, 1961. Steel, paint and plastic – View 2
John Chamberlain, Toy, 1961. Steel, paint and plastic – View 3
Jeff Koons, Woman in a Tub, 1988. Porcelain – View 1
Jeff Koons, Woman in a Tub, 1988. Porcelain – View 2
Jeff Koons, Woman in a Tub, 1988. Porcelain – View 3

Woman Reclining, Sleeping

The topic of this post is the pictorial depiction of the female figure reclining, or sleeping. The time frame is the 20th century.

The historical context is provided by paintings by Titian, Velazquez, Rubens, Goya, Boucher, Fragonard, Ingres, and Manet to name a few.

I borrow the following definition from Emma Wilson:

“I use the English term ‘reclining’, referring both to the classical pose in nude paintings and also, as per the usage of the term beyond the art history context, to other situations of lying down, of being prone. If the term is often used to express relaxation and repose, I stretch its meanings outwards, referring to all manner of situations of horizontality. French, the language of the artworks I discuss, has no direct equivalent to the word ‘reclining’, coming closest to the reclining nude, in the language of painting, in the term nu couché, nude lying down, and nu allongé, nude stretched out, the terms carrying, like reclining, connotations of being in repose, on a sofa, or in bed. Yet French carries too the figure of the nu renversé, the upside-down nude, the nude who has been overturned, knocked over, lain prone, with connotations of disarrangement, of falling away from the vertical.”

I have selected works by the following artists:

The works are presented in chronological order. The first was made in 1901, the last in 1995.

Pablo Picasso, Jeanne (Reclining nude), 1901

oil on canvas
70.5 x 90.2 cm

Henri Matisse, Nude in a Folding Chair
Paris, c. 1906
Brush and black wash on ivory laid paper, pieced

66 × 47 cm (26 × 18 1/4 in.)
Signed: Henri-Matisse (lower right, in pen and black ink)
The Art Institute of Chicago

Walter Sickert, Reclining Nude – Le Lit de Cuivre
About 1906

Oil on canvas

w644 x h541 mm
Provenance: Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter City Council, UK.
Female nude reclining on a bed which has brass bedsteads
Le Lit de Cuivre translates to ‘copper bed’. There are several versions of this painting in existence. Sickert had begun to draw nudes on metal bedsteads in Dieppe in 1902 and on his return from Venice in 1904 he began to paint the subject. He continued to do so in London often working from drawings made in France eg. “Le Lit de Fer”. In many of his post-Venetian paintings of the nude, Sickert broke away from a horizontal planar emphasis by placing the bed in a diagonal recession or even at right angles to the surface. This work shows how Sickert had begun to develop a broken, crusty touch in the paint work.

Walter Sickert, Reclining Nude, 1906

Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery

Walter Richard Sickert was a member of the Camden Town group. Unlike other members he achieved fame within his lifetime. Both a painter and a printmaker he was an important influence on British avant-garde art in the 20th century.

Pablo Picasso, Reclining Nude (Fernande) 1906

Watercolor and gouache with pencil and possibly charcoal on paper

Support: Beige modern laid paper

Sheet: 47.3 x 61.3 cm (18 5/8 x 24 1/8 in.)

This drawing depicts Picasso’s lover Fernande Olivier, with whom he spent the summer of 1906 in the remote Spanish village of Gósol, where he made this sheet. Picasso was engaged in radical experimentation with technique and simplified formal distortions at this time, and this shift in his work can be seen in Fernande’s stylized face and somewhat disjointed gesture, and in the expressive strokes and spotted effects of the gouache.

Henri Matisse, The Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra), 1907

oil on canvas

92 x 140 cm
Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), Baltimore, MD, US
Matisse was working on a sculpture, Reclining Nude I, when he accidentally damaged the piece. Before repairing it, he painted it in blue against a background of palm fronds. The nude is hard and angular, both a tribute to Cézanne and to the sculpture Matisse saw in Algeria. She is also a deliberate response to nudes seen in the Paris Salon – ugly and hard rather than soft and pretty. This was the last Matisse painting bought by Leo and Gertrude Stein.

Gustav Klimt, Danae, 1907

Galerie Würthle, Vienna.

Max Pechstein, Dawn, 1911

Female Nude Lying Facedown on a Table

Henri Matisse, Female Nude Lying Facedown on a Table
Issy-les-Moulineaux, 1911/early 1912
Pen and black ink on tan wove paper, laid down on cream Japanese paper

primary support: 24 × 31.5 cm (9 7/16 × 12 3/8 in.); secondary support: 26.1 × 33.5 cm (10 1/4 × 13 1/4 in.)
Signed: Henri-Matisse (lower left, in pen and black ink)
The Art Institute of Chicago

The following are excerpts form an essay by Stephanie D’Alessandro.

This drawing, made on a page torn from a sketchbook, retains the direct and loose character of a quick study. Henri Matisse used a steel-nib pen to create the fluid lines; the reserve of ink made possible with this tool allowed him to follow the long contours of his model’s body with minimal interruption. In some areas, however, such as the table edge, his intense focus on manually translating the forms he observed prevented him from noting the need to reload his pen. The various zones of marks that make up the composition—from the short horizontals on the left and right, to the alternating floral and hatched lines in the upper middle, to the short verticals in the lower middle, to the zigzags in the right corner—all converge at the center.

There, we see the soft, curvilinear form of a nude female model resting on her stomach with her right arm covering her face and right leg slightly bent, laid out on a stage-like, round tabletop.

To be sure, it is a curious image in Matisse’s output. The location is likely Matisse’s Issy-les-Moulineaux studio, the subject of several large, painted “symphonic interiors” from 1911—The Pink Studio (Pushkin).

Female Nude Lying Facedown on a Table also has an important place in the history of Matisse’s reception in the United States. Alfred Stieglitz, the great gallerist, photographer, and promoter of modern art, was the first owner of the drawing, and he included it in his third solo presentation of Matisse’s work at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (“291”) in March 1912.

More than four thousand people visited An Exhibition of Sculpture—the First in America—and Recent Drawings by Henri Matisse, which received mixed reviews. While most critics were skeptical of the twelve sculptures, they felt the dozen drawings proved Matisse’s “power and individuality . . . as a draftsman.” More noteworthy is the fact that in February 1913 Stieglitz lent the pen-and-ink drawing, along with another now in the Art Institute’s collection, to the landmark International Exhibition of Modern Art, also known as the Armory Show. Since Matisse was one of the first modern artists Stieglitz exhibited in his gallery, the artist’s work was not a surprise to the majority of the New York art community, but it certainly was a shock for other visitors to the Armory Show. Much of the public response consisted of unfavorable commentary about his riotous color and childlike style and what they saw as his threat to “turn . . . Humanity back to its brutish beginnings,” a notion that Robert Winthrop Chanler’s satiric painting Parody of the Fauve Painters (1913; Woodstock Artists Association and Museum Permanent Collection) makes abundantly clear. With its elegant black-and-white design and quiet installation in a discrete gallery dedicated to works on paper, Female Nude Lying Facedown on a Table did not garner much attention at the Armory Show. Stieglitz kept the unusual work in his collection until his death in 1946, when it was bequeathed to the Art Institute with the assistance of his widow, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe.
Female Nude Lying Facedown on a Table also has an important place in the history of Matisse’s reception in the United States. Alfred Stieglitz, the great gallerist, photographer, and promoter of modern art, was the first owner of the drawing, and he included it in his third solo presentation of Matisse’s work at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (“291”) in March 1912.

Nude Reclining on a Banquette

Henri Matisse, Nude Reclining on a Banquette, 1912

India ink on paper

24 × 31.5 cm (9.5 × 12.5 in.)

Private collection.

Nude on a Couch 1915 Auguste Renoir 1841-1919 Bequeathed by Mrs A.F. Kessler 1983 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T03573

Auguste Renoir

Femme nue sur un canapé (Nude on a Couch), 1915

Oil paint on canvas
Support: 544 × 653 mm
frame: 832 × 935 × 118 mm
Tate Gallery, London

The model for this painting was Gabrielle Renard (1878-1959), a cousin of Renoir’s wife who helped in the running of the household. She also was Renoir’s favourite model, her rounded body exemplifying the artist’s ideal of female beauty. The treatment of her breasts and stomach has precedents in classical statuary, while the feathery brushwork recalls the style of such old masters as Rubens, Boucher and Fragonard.

Amedeo Modigliani, Nu couché (Red Nude), 1917

signed ‘modigliani’ (upper right)
oil on canvas
23 5/8 x 36 ¼ in. (59.9 x 92 cm.)

Private Collection

In a 2015 auction by Christie’s, the picture was sold to a Chinese collector for $140,5 million, making it one of the most expensive paintings ever.

Egon Schiele, Female Nude Lying on Her Stomach, 1917

Albertina, Vienna, Austria

Henri Matisse, Reclining Nude, 1920

Graphite, with erasing and touches of stumping, on ivory wove paper; 26.8 × 40.5 cm (10 3/8 × 15 7/8 in.)
Signed: Henri-Matisse (lower right, in graphite)

Art Institute of Chicago

The following is adapted from Brandon Ruud’s entry on the work in Suzanne Folds McCullagh, ed., Drawings in Dialogue: Old Master through Modern; The Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection, exh. cat. (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2006), p. 194.

The climate and luminosity of the Mediterranean coast had attracted Henri Matisse since his sojourn to Saint-Tropez in the summer of 1904. He first visited the nearby city of Nice in 1916 and settled permanently in the city in the fall of 1921. From his apartment on the place Charles-Félix, Matisse could see the water and watch the play of light on the city and sea. Though he certainly drew inspiration from these surroundings, they were not his only artistic preoccupations during the 1920s. During this period, he produced a number of works on the odalisque theme in a variety of media, including drawings, paintings, and prints. In his paintings, the artist explored his interest in vibrant color and decorative pattern; typically, he depicted a nude or partially clothed model reclining on a settee amid an exotic array of ornate cushions and textiles, Moorish furniture, and richly embellished wallpaper. At the close of the 1920s, Matisse explained his attraction to the subject: “I do odalisques in order to do nudes. But how does one do the nude without being artificial? And then, because I know they [odalisques] exist. I was in Morocco. I have seen them . . . and so was able to put them in my pictures back in France without playing make-believe.”

Detail of Matisse’s Reclining Nude (c. 1920) showing how the artist finalized his contours for the proper right arm with a heavy graphite line over searching preliminary marks. The Art Institute of Chicago, 1998.708.

The Art Institute’s Reclining Nude belongs to this series of lounging odalisques. The paper, covered with a minimum of line, forms an integral part of the composition, representing not only the woman’s skin but also the settee on which she rests, her right arm against her head and body turned toward the viewer. Matisse delicately shaded the figure with stumping, which heightens the impression of realism and, as was typical of his drafting methods, he further exposed white areas through erasing. The figure nonetheless appears solid and sculptural. Classicism was a general trend in art during the 1920s—accompanied in Matisse’s case by a movement toward greater naturalism. Though the artist’s choice of subject and style may be a nod to the Neoclassical nudes of one of his favorite nineteenth-century artists, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Matisse’s figure is without affect and fully of the present.

Woman on a Rose Divan

Henri Matisse, Woman on a Rose Divan
Nice, 1921
Oil on linen canvas; 38 × 46 cm (15 1/4 × 18 1/8 in.)
Signed: Henri-Matisse (lower right, in brown paint)
The Art Institute of Chicago

The following essay by Marin Sarvé-Tarr is published in the website of the Art Institute of Chicago.

On April 19, 1921, Henri Matisse sold Woman on a Rose Divan to his dealer, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, along with a group of small-scale works that marked a new direction in his painting (see fig. 33.1 and fig. 33.2). With these canvases, the artist launched his 1920s series of odalisques, which present costumed women relaxing in ornately decorated interior settings. As he pivoted in subject matter, Matisse described his aims in a letter to his wife, Amélie, in January 1921. He wrote, “I’m searching for the density of things—instead of reducing what I see to a silhouette, I’m trying to convey volume and modeling.” In Woman on a Rose Divan, made quickly on a pre-primed canvas with no preliminary sketching, and in related studies, the artist explored interests that would come to dominate his paintings throughout the decade.5 In these works, Matisse experimented with evoking volume within a compressed pictorial space, renewed his fascination with North African textiles and themes, and delicately balanced line and modeling with color and light.

Made while the artist was staying at the Hôtel de la Méditerranée in Nice, the swift execution, intimate format, and immediacy of Woman on a Rose Divan reflect Matisse’s search for a new subject and a fresh approach to painting in the spring of 1921. He had long produced works in series and pairs, experimenting with different treatments of the same subject in esquisses, freely painted, preparatory sketches that did not always lead to a traditional larger tableau, a more finished painting.6 In Woman on a Rose Divan, the size of the canvas and close framing allowed the artist to test different methods as he quickly built up layers of wet-in-wet strokes without significantly altering the composition of the painting. In shading the red, patterned curtain, the artist played with the effects of three different types of brushstrokes. On the left, thick, black-over-brown diagonal marks flatten the contours while a fading succession of mixed black, brown, violet, and orange strokes in the center shadow more gently mold the curtain’s form. On the right, long, heavy, black-over-brown vertical lines sharpen the folds before blending into the dark outline around the edge of the divan. The artist similarly divided his handling of the model’s feet. While the carefully contoured shading of her bent leg defines her ankle and toes, her extended leg is handled so softly that its blurred foot seems to meld into the cushion. By visually connecting the background, body, and decor, Matisse created a fluid balance between the different pictorial elements of his painting.

Henri Matisse drawing a model in his third-floor apartment and studio at 1, place Charles-Félix, Nice, 1927/28. Photographer unknown

Made while the artist was staying at the Hôtel de la Méditerranée in Nice, the swift execution, intimate format, and immediacy of Woman on a Rose Divan reflect Matisse’s search for a new subject and a fresh approach to painting in the spring of 1921. He had long produced works in series and pairs, experimenting with different treatments of the same subject in esquisses, freely painted, preparatory sketches that did not always lead to a traditional larger tableau, a more finished painting.6 In Woman on a Rose Divan, the size of the canvas and close framing allowed the artist to test different methods as he quickly built up layers of wet-in-wet strokes without significantly altering the composition of the painting. In shading the red, patterned curtain, the artist played with the effects of three different types of brushstrokes. On the left, thick, black-over-brown diagonal marks flatten the contours while a fading succession of mixed black, brown, violet, and orange strokes in the center shadow more gently mold the curtain’s form. On the right, long, heavy, black-over-brown vertical lines sharpen the folds before blending into the dark outline around the edge of the divan. The artist similarly divided his handling of the model’s feet. While the carefully contoured shading of her bent leg defines her ankle and toes, her extended leg is handled so softly that its blurred foot seems to meld into the cushion. By visually connecting the background, body, and decor, Matisse created a fluid balance between the different pictorial elements of his painting.

Like many of Matisse’s odalisque paintings, Woman on a Rose Divan demonstrates the artist’s skill in evoking illusionistic depth and volume while drawing attention to the surface of the canvas. Despite sharp, reinforced black contours that accentuate the folds of the model’s burnoose, the thick dabs of yellow-tinged gold stripes sit on top of the picture plane. The artist surrounded the figure with swatches of patterns that similarly denote depth and flatten the pictorial space between the green wall on the left, the red curtain, and the crosshatched floor. He built up the floral pattern by blocking the design in white over a transparent underlayer of orange before filling in the negative space with red tones and adding the green-and-white decoration. The successive application of brushstrokes in the patterns pushes the compressed

closely related group of small-scale studies that includes Woman Reclining (April–May 1921; fig. 33.3) present condensed views of languid models bathed in a bright light that sharpens both the depth of the space and the flatness of the patterned textiles. These works fueled Matisse’s larger experiments, as illustrated by the treatment of space, bodies, and patterns in Odalisque with Red Pants (fall 1921; fig. 33.4).

While Woman on a Rose Divan anticipated the innovations seen in Matisse’s odalisques, it also exemplified his renewed interest in North African themes that had inspired his visual experiments with pictorial space, line, and color earlier in his career. Matisse visited Morocco twice in 1912 and 1913, which had a significant impact on his painting.7 In Woman on a Rose Divan, the model’s sizable costume of a burnoose and gold-trimmed red pants visually centers her figure within the patterned backdrop. After making the Art Institute’s canvas, Matisse’s interest in exotic textiles and staging grew in importance. Studio photographs from the time reveal the carefully constructed environments he made for his paintings.8 In one picture with his model9 (fig. 33.5) and another with the artist Pierre Bonnard (fig. 33.6), we see an elaborate set with a wooden frame used to suspend patterned fabrics, a table adorned with objects, and a daybed covered with decorative textiles, revealing the significance that staging had taken in his pictorial investigations.
While Woman on a Rose Divan anticipated the innovations seen in Matisse’s odalisques, it also exemplified his renewed interest in North African themes that had inspired his visual experiments with pictorial space, line, and color earlier in his career. Matisse visited Morocco twice in 1912 and 1913, which had a significant impact on his painting.7 In Woman on a Rose Divan, the model’s sizable costume of a burnoose and gold-trimmed red pants visually centers her figure within the patterned backdrop. After making the Art Institute’s canvas, Matisse’s interest in exotic textiles and staging grew in importance. Studio photographs from the time reveal the carefully constructed environments he made for his paintings.8 In one picture with his model (fig. 33.5) and another with the artist Pierre Bonnard (fig. 33.6), we see an elaborate set with a wooden frame used to suspend patterned fabrics, a table adorned with objects, and a daybed covered with decorative textiles, revealing the significance that staging had taken in his pictorial investigations.

As Matisse started his series of odalisques, he experimented with the use of direct sunlight to structure his compositions. In retrospect, he identified that “in this ambience of languid relaxation, beneath the sun-drenched torpor that bathes things and people . . . a specifically pictorial tension . . . arises from the interplay and mutual relations of the various elements. In Woman on a Rose Divan, Matisse shifted away from the subject of his early Nice works that depict women in furnished rooms with filtered light from curtained windows framing views onto a waterfront promenade, such as Interior at Nice (1919 or 1920; cat. 30). Instead, the bright light from the upper left corner of the canvas illuminates the top of the model’s burnoose and anchors the pictorial space. Matisse left traces of his minor color adjustments on the left wall and the white shutters where layers of turquoise and blue tones were covered with a pale green and white to brighten the composition. The play between light, shadow, volumetric depth, and abstract flatness in Woman on a Rose Divan helped set the course for the artist’s grander and more complex odalisque statements in the years to come.

Henri Matisse, Nu, 1921

Oil on canvas, 38 x 46 cm

Galerie Interart, Switzerland

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954). Woman Reclining,

Henri Matisse, Woman Reclining, Apr.–May 1921

Oil on canvas

54.6 × 65.4 cm (21 1/2 × 25 3/4 in.)

Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, BF195.

Fernand Leger, Reclining Woman, 1922
Oil on canvas
Inscriptions: Signed, l.r.: “F LEGER/22”
25 1/2 × 36 1/4 in. (64.5 × 92 cm)

Art Institute of Chicago

Fernand Léger first saw the work of the Cubists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso at the Paris gallery of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Around 1909 Léger began to experiment with geometric shapes, complementary colors, and strong outlines, although his paintings remained largely nonrepresentational until after World War I. His involvement in the war had a profound impact on his work. In the years following, he introduced volumetric forms that resembled pistons and pipes into his compositions, joining others in the Parisian vanguard in charting a more sober, conservative course that placed renewed emphasis on objective observation. Substituting hard metallic tubes for pliant flesh and flat patterned disks for soft and dense pillows, the artist updated the classical figure of the odalisque (a female slave or concubine often pictured in the history of art as a reclining nude) with his particular blend of Cubism and machine aesthetics. Reclining Woman demonstrates Léger’s interest in producing “everyday poetic images”: paintings in which the manufactured object is the “principal personage,” shown as precisely as possible to reveal an absolute sculptural value rather than sentimental associations. This work exemplifies the Purist style, a kind of industrial classicism that focused on utilitarian objects. Léger hoped that through such paintings, art would become accessible to the whole of modern society rather than to just a privileged few.

Henri Matisse, Reclining Female Nude with a Raised Knee1
Nice, 1923
Graphite, with erasing, on ivory wove paper discolored to cream; 26.7 × 37.8 cm (10 1/2 × 14 7/8 in.)
Signed: Henri-Matisse (lower right, in graphite)
The Art Institute of Chicago

HENRI MATISSE, ODALISQUE COUCHÉE AUX MAGNOLIAS, 1923

OIL ON CANVAS

The picture was sold to a private collector at an auction in 2018 for $81 million.

Reclining Nude 1924 Henri Matisse 1869-1954 Presented through the Friends of the Tate Gallery, Helena and Kenneth Levy Bequest 1990 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T05756

Henri Matisse, La Couché (Reclining Nude), 1924

Charcoal on paper
Support: 407 × 515 mm
frame: 677 × 789 × 43 mm
Tate Gallery London

The following article is published in Tate’s website.

Reclining Nude 1924 is a charcoal drawing by the French artist Henri Matisse depicting a young nude female figure lying on a striped divan. The figure’s upper torso is propped up by a large dark cushion, while her right arm is folded backwards into the crease of her neck and her left arm is wrapped around the back of her head. Despite the openness of her pose – her body is presented from the front, fully revealed down to the knee – the expression on her face is ambiguous, with eyes cast downward or possibly closed. In the background of the drawing, to the right of the reclining figure, a patterned wall-covering is visible that bears an abstract motif in dark lines that reflect the soft curving shapes of the sitter’s facial features and her figure.

Matisse made this work in his studio at Place Charles-Félix, Nice, in 1924, and the model for the drawing is Henriette Darricarrière, a dancer, pianist and painter who lived nearby. Darricarrière was one of the primary models for the artist’s controversial series of paintings, sculptures and prints made during the period c.1917–39 that are informally entitled the ‘harem views’ or ‘odalisques’, of which this drawing is an example (see also Draped Nude 1936, Tate T00306, and Matisse’s discussion of the odalisques in Flam 1995, pp.275–6). The term ‘odalisque’ originates from the Turkish word Odalik, meaning female harem slave or chambermaid. In order to create the odalisques, Matisse decorated an alcove of his studio to resemble the Moorish interiors he had seen on a trip to Morocco in 1912. An avid collector of what were referred to as ‘Oriental’ objects – African, Eastern and Middle Eastern tapestries, clothing and artefacts – Matisse’s studio was replete with an ever-changing configuration of mirrors, decorative screens, patterned wall-hangings and exotic costumes for his models.

Despite Matisse’s odalisques constituting the mainstay of his artistic output for almost two decades, these works were initially poorly received by his critics. Previous supporters of Matisse’s work of the early 1900s – a period which saw the artist experimenting with abstract planes of colour, unconventional perspectives and angular forms (see, for example, Standing Nude 1907, Tate T00368) – interpreted the return to figuration as seen in Reclining Nude as a form of artistic regression. Furthermore, as a result of their exoticised subject matter, the odalisques were unfavourably identified as part of a voyeuristic tradition of French Orientalist painting established in the early nineteenth century by artists such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix (see, for example, Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque 1814, Musée du Louvre, Paris, and Delacroix’s Odalisque c.1825, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). As the art historian and Matisse biographer Hilary Spurling has observed:

The conventional verdict dismissed him, at the time and afterward, as a kind of twentieth-century Fragonard, turning out sexy pictures for rich men’s Manhattan apartments and villas in the south of France.
(Spurling 2005, accessed 26 February 2015.)

Matisse protested against such interpretations of his works and remained adamant regarding the legitimacy of the odalisque as a creative subject. In an interview with the French writer Jacques Guenne in 1925, Matisse justified his use of this motif by claiming a first-hand knowledge of his subject and emphasising the inevitable artifice that accompanies any attempt to depict the female nude: ‘I do Odalisques in order to do nudes. But, how does one do a nude without being artificial? And then I do them because I know they exist. I was in Morocco, I have seen them’ (quoted in Flam 1995, p.86).

More recently, the negative reception of Matisse’s odalisques has been reassessed by art historians such as Spurling and John Elderfield, who acknowledge a distinct difference between Matisse’s approach to the subject and that of previous generations of French Orientalist painters with whom his works are often compared. For instance, Elderfield argues that the foregrounding of the ornate tapestries in Matisse’s odalisque works detracts from the sexualisation of his female subjects, stating that ‘the decorativeness and the very construction of a costume and of a painting are offered as analogous. What developed were groups of paintings showing his model in similar or different poses, costumes, and settings: a sequence of themes and variations that gained in mystery and intensity as it unfolded’ (Elderfield 1992, p.357).

Further reading
John Elderfield, Henri Matisse: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, New York 1992.
Jack Flam, Matisse on Art, London 1995.
Hilary Spurling, ‘Matisse and his Models’, Smithsonian Magazine, October 2005, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/matisse-and-his-models-70195044/

Judith Wilkinson
February 2015

Suzanne Valadon, Reclining Nude, 1928

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA.

Max Beckmann, Reclining Nude, 1929
Oil on canvas
32 7/8 × 46 13/16 in. (83.4 × 119 cm)

Art Institute of Chicago

Though often associated with the German Expressionist movement, Max Beckmann’s artistic production was highly individualistic and eludes strict categorization. While Beckmann had earlier criticized the French avant-garde, by the mid-1920s, he began to identify with artists working in the Parisian art world. He made frequent visits to the city, and his work began to show stylistic affinities with that by artists like Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Rouault. Reclining Nude recalls the long-standing tradition of associating the female body with the timeless ideals of beauty. The stark nature of the model’s pose and distorted form, however, are more modern updates on this classical idea.

Aristide Maillol, Reclining Nude, c. 1931

Medium: Red Conté crayon, with touches of charcoal and stumping on ivory laid paper
Inscriptions: Signed recto, lower left, in red Conté crayon: “M” (in circle)
538 × 780 mm

Art Institute of Chicago

Pablo Picasso, Femme nue couchée, 1932

oil and Ripolin on canvas

51 ⅛ by 63 ⅝ in. 129.9 by 161.7 cm.

“Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been deceived, but so well deceived that we can scarcely get back even a shadow of the truth. The beauties of the Parthenon, Venuses, myths, Narcissuses, are so many lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs. We love with our desires—although everything has been done to try and apply a canon even to love…. It’s not what an artist does that counts, but what he is.”

PABLO PICASSO

Femme nue couchée is one of Picasso’s most monumental and uninhibited portrayals of his muse Marie-Thérèse Walter. A crowning achievement of painterly verve, energy and manipulation of the human form, the present work succinctly synthesizes the artist’s groundbreaking achievements of the late 1920s and early 1930s into one colorful, dynamic canvas. Here, in the seclusion of his new country home in Boisgeloup, the nude figure of Marie-Thérèse reclines in a highly abstracted space, her biomorphic figure imbued with fertility, sexuality and grace. Never before offered at auction, Femme nue couchée is a tour de force of Picasso’s famed 1932 artistic production.

The first dedicated series of paintings depicting Marie-Thérèse was executed in late December 1931 and January 1932 in anticipation of the major retrospective that Picasso was planning that coming June. It was during these preceding months that he first cast his artistic spotlight on the voluptuous blonde. Up until this point he had only made reference to his extramarital affair with Marie-Thérèse in code, sometimes embedding her symbolically in a composition or rendering her unmistakable profile as a feature of the background. But by the end of 1931, Picasso could no longer repress the creative impulse that his lover inspired, especially as his marriage grew increasingly unbearable. John Richardson explains that while Olga organized large holiday parties that December in an attempt to demonstrate family unity, Picasso was involved in an artistic blood-letting, painting violent or murderous depictions of his wife. The exercise was a catharsis, Richardson claims, that better enabled him to focus on a “languorous, loving painting of a lilac-skinned Marie-Thérèse” (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume III, The Triumphant Years 1917-1932, New York, 2007, p. 466). From December of 1931 through 1932, Picasso turned his obsessive eye towards Marie-Thérèse, creating some of the most hypnotic and alluring images of his career. These thirty paintings of Marie-Thérèse, each measuring over a meter, are as pivotal in Picasso’s work as his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and herald the completely new style that would define his paintings going forward (see below).

Picasso met Marie-Thérèse in 1927; spying her in the streets of Paris, the artist approached her. “I knew nothing—either of life or of Picasso… I had gone to do some shopping at the Galeries Lafayette, and Picasso saw me leaving the Metro. He simply took me by the arm and said, ‘I am Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together’” (Marie-Thérèse quoted in Exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Picasso and the Weeping Women (exhibition catalogue), 1994, p. 143). The summer of 1927, and the following one, were spent at the beach in Cannes and Dinard respectively. These periods were particularly productive for Picasso as the clandestine presence of the young Marie-Thérèse in Picasso’s life added an erotic frisson to seaside activities and a counterpoint to his deteriorating relationship with his wife Olga.

It was during the summer of 1928 in Dinard that Picasso would break down human form to its barest essentials, an amalgamation of shapes which echoed the curves and bones of the human body (see figs. 1 and 2). “The female figures that populate these drawings and oil paintings are depicted in a kind of short-hand, particular emphasis being given to the erogenous parts of the body. We see them engaged in typical beach activities—playing ball, opening a bathing hut or just sprawling on a towel. The background is frequently defined by no more than a few rocky formations or horizontal lines, against which these monstrous creatures become increasingly expansive and libertine. Picasso’s exceptionally flat, almost silhouette like treatment of the figures and objects in these pictures is especially remarkable and seems to anticipate his folded sculptures—or rather his paintings of his folded sculptures—of the fifties and early sixties… The dissociation and deformation of moving bodies these pictures depict is more expressive, more violent, and above all, more ‘significant’ than the classicistic beach paintings, even though in principle they, they are derived from the same observed motif” (J. Richardson in Exh. Cat., New York, William Beadleston Gallery, Through the Eye of Picasso 1928-1934, 1985, pp. 73-74).

In June 1930, after some time covertly shuffling back and forth from an apartment he had arranged for Marie-Thérèse and his official family residence in Paris, Picasso acquired the Château de Boisgeloup. Seventy kilometers from the French capital, the château became a refuge for the artist and his muse. Its stables were converted into a sculpture studio, where Picasso increasingly devoted his time and creative energy to sculpture, including a number of plaster busts and reclining nude portraits of Marie-Thérèse.

The influence of this medium is visible in the present work in the monumental sculptural force with which the female body is portrayed. At the same time, the psychological state of the sleeping woman resonates in the soft modeling of the figure, creating an atmosphere of reverie and carefree abandon. Seeking to convey his erotic desire, Picasso generates morphological permutations and distortions of the female anatomy. Abandoning any attempt at naturalism, he creates a figure composed of biomorphic forms, a technique that developed from his earlier, Surrealist works. While seemingly divorced from any particular setting—whether that of the wooded landscape around the château or in a more constructed interior studio space—a directly related sketch on a scrap of paper shows a figure in a nearly identical pose below an umbrella and in front of a beach hut, a clear reference to the delights of the summer memories he had established with Marie-Thérèse (see fig. 5). Two days after the present work was painted another monumental, serpentine vision of his muse fully reclined appeared. Set in an interior, it is completed by (what some critics have referred to as) a sexually charged still life of fruit at bottom right.

In Elizabeth’s Cowling’s analysis of the present work she points to it and the April 4th painting as a pair: “From an inscription on the back we know that this [the present work] was painted at Boisgeloup on 2 April 1932. Another canvas of the same size with a similar composition was painted two days later, but has an indoor, harem-like setting and is richly colored and highly decorative (see next picture). The canvas exhibited here is, by contrast, extremely austere, and is like a painting of a stone or plaster sculpture. Picasso was fascinated by the intrinsic differences between the two art forms that he was practicing at Boisgeloup, and would often use painting, drawing and printmaking in order to meditate upon those differences. These two pictures were surely conceived of as a pair—the one being about sculpture, the other about painting. The ’sculpture’ in our painting is related to the loose-limbed ‘Reclining Bather’ on a low plinth which Picasso had modeled in plaster in 1931 (S. 109) but she is both more pneumatic and more gravity defying” (Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Picasso: Sculptor/Painter, 1994, p. 272; see fig. 3).

PABLO PICASSO, NU COUCHÉ, 4 APRIL 1932

OIL ON CANVAS

MUSÉE PICASSO, PARIS

Pablo Picasso, Reclining Nude Woman, 1934

Printer: Printed by Jacques Frélaut (French)

Publisher: Published by Galerie Louise Leiris (Paris) , 1981

Date: 1934, printed 1961

Medium: Etching and drypoint

Dimensions: plate: 5 7/16 x 8 3/16 in. (13.8 x 20.8 cm)
sheet: 8 5/16 x 11 3/4 in. (21.1 x 29.8 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Draped Nude 1936 Henri Matisse 1869-1954 Purchased 1959 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00306

Henri Matisse, Femme nue drapée (Draped Nude), 1936
Oil paint on canvas
Support: 457 × 375 mm
Tate Gallery, Liverpool

This is one of a series of four pictures, all the same size, painted in the spring of 1936. In the first the woman’s hands meet in the centre of the picture and the entire lower leg is depicted. This painting, the second in the series, shows Matisse concerned to relate the figure to the edges of the picture: her body fills the space, and the position of her arms, in particular, appears to emphasise the shape of the canvas. The floral patterning of the woman’s gown and the exotic plant behind her serve as quiet reminders of the theme of the harem girl, or odalisque, which was central to Matisse’s work.

George Grosz, Liegender weiblicher Akt (Reclining Female Nude), 1936

stamped Grosz (lower right); stamped with the Nachlass stamp on the verso

watercolour and pen and ink on paper

39.9 by 58.9cm., 15¾ by 23¼in.

Framed: 54.6 by 74cm., 21½ by 29⅛in.

Private Collection

Reclining Nude 1942 Victor Pasmore 1908-1998 Presented by the Contemporary Art Society 1951 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N05975

Victor Pasmore, Reclining Nude, 1942

Oil paint on canvas
Support: 305 × 406 mm
frame: 455 × 535 × 68 mm
Tate Gallery, London

In 1937 Pasmore was instrumental in setting up the Euston Road School of Painting, with two other painters, Claude Rogers and William Coldstream. The purpose of the Euston Road School was to teach traditional disciplines and the adoption of an objective approach to the chosen subject. The School closed in 1939 with the onset of war, but Pasmore continued to paint in the manner of its teachings during the 1940s. He produced a series of small and tender portrait and nude studies of his wife, Wendy, whom he married in June 1940. This is one of them and it presents Wendy Pasmore in a quiet and intimate manner, with the parted curtains adding to the private nature of the scene.

Lucian Freud, Girl in Bed, 1952

Freud’s model was Caroline Blackwood, whom he married in 1953. She was 22 years old when she posed for the picture. Some people believe that Caroline was the most beautiful and enigmatic of all Freud’s muses.

Nude Lying 1963 Adrian Stokes 1902-1972 Purchased 1991 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T06512

Adrian Stokes, Nude Lying, 1963

Oil paint on canvas
Support: 546 × 652 mm
frame: 595 × 704 × 63 mm

Tate Gallery, London

In his ‘Reflections on the Nude’ (1967) Stokes wrote: ‘There is a sense in which all art is of the body’. He explained that, whatever the motif, forms created on a surface can be seen as representing ‘the actualities of the hidden psychic structure made up of evaluations and phantasies with corporeal content’. In his paintings from the model, such as this, Stokes examined the progression of forms revealed in an even light and celebrated the autonomy of the body. Stokes’s figure painting began at the Euston Road School in 1937. His teacher there, William Coldstream, painted many of his late works, including nudes, in Stokes’s house after his death.

Christie’s Sale of Freud and Bacon masterpieces … Francis Bacon’s Female Portrait

Francis Bacon, Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, 1963

oil on canvas
65 x 56in. (165 x 142cm.)

The picture was painted from a photograph by John Deakin (1963) and was sold at an auction by Christies in February 2021 for 21,3 million British Pounds.

What follows is an essay which I found in the Christies’ website.

‘Bacon’s lack of personal erotic interest in naked females did nothing to prevent these paintings from being as passionate as those of the male bodies that obsessed him’

(D. Sylvester, Francis Bacon: The Human Body, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1998, p. 36).

INTRODUCTION
Painted towards the end of 1963, Portrait of Henrietta Moraes is perhaps the most seductive painting of a female figure ever realised by Francis Bacon. Created the year after his breakthrough retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London in 1962, and the same year as his first major American exhibition at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the painting depicts the artist’s close friend and model Henrietta Moraes. For many years, the work formed part of the Schniewind collection of important post-War paintings, the present owner acquiring it from the family in 1983, almost thirty years ago. Portrait of Henrietta Moraes represents part of the pantheon of great paintings by Bacon executed in 1963, the majority of which are now housed in major international museum collections. The turning point came with the artist’s powerful and deeply affective Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962) housed in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Over the preceding four years, Bacon had devoted himself to investigating the properties of paint, technique and undertaking studies of the human nude; a subject that he had rarely dared consider in his early career. In Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, Bacon has perfected the subject’s body, carrying it out with a prodigious use of rapid, impulsive brush marks. Having painstakingly established the stippled, coloured background of his painting, Bacon was taking a calculated risk, confidently establishing the figure as if it were ‘his own nervous system projected onto canvas’ (F. Bacon quoted in L. Gowing, ‘The Irrefutable Image’, Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings, exh. cat., New York, 1968, p. 13). Standing out proudly from a vivid lilac ground, Henrietta lies undressed in all her voluptuous glory on a simple ticking mattress. Her body undulates in a serpentine from the hilt of her ample bosom, past the narrow cinch of her waist to the sensuous curve of her outstretched leg, just like the sumptuous females of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingress Le Bain Turc (1862). Unflinching and brazenly exposed like an odalisque, Moraes exudes a raw sexuality, her naked body dangerously open to the prying eye. For Bacon, this visceral quality and the sheer physicality of his model’s body was a source of constant rapture. Indeed he returned to Moraes as a subject for more than sixteen paintings over the course of his career including Three Studies for the Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1963) held in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

John Deakin, Henerietta Moraes, 1950s

HENRIETTA MORAES
In Portrait of Henrietta Moraes Bacon imbues the painting with a striking passion, as if carried over from the intensity of his own personal life. This was the year that Bacon embarked upon his all-consuming love affair with George Dyer, immortalising his partner in his first painting. Whilst Bacon had often considered the figure of the male nude, his depictions of Moraes were the first to seriously consider the architecture of the female form. The same ardent splendour is present. As David Sylvester once observed: ‘Bacon’s lack of personal erotic interest in naked females did nothing to prevent these paintings from being as passionate as those of the male bodies that obsessed him’ (D. Sylvester, Francis Bacon: The Human Body, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1998, p. 36). Moraes herself was a notorious bonne vivante, denizen of the artist’s favourite haunt, the Colony Room, Soho. The muse to a number of contemporary British artists, she was one-time lover to Lucian Freud and appeared as the sitter in his Girl in a Blanket (1952). During the 1960s she met the young Indian poet Dominic Moraes and married him, adopting his surname as her own. A combination of her hedonistic lifestyle and an unsuccessful attempt at being a cat burglar led to her spending a short stint inside Holloway Prison. With the help of her friend and writer Wyndham Lewis she later penned her memoirs of this frenetic period, coloured with the eccentric characters in her life such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. As she recounted, ‘two people I was determined to make friends with because I felt so drawn to them were Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. They were both young, not particularly well-known painters, but Lucian’s hypnotic eyes and Franciss ebullience and charming habit of buying bottles of champagne proved irresistible’ (H. Moraes, Henrietta, London 1994, p. 30).

JOHN DEAKIN’S PHOTO SHOOT
Bacon only ever depicted friends and never painted his subjects from life, preferring to use photographs instead. As he once explained to David Sylvester, ‘even in the case of friends who will come and pose, I’ve had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from them… I think that, if I have the presence of the image there, I am not able to drift so freely as I am able to through the photographic image… what I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance’ (F. Bacon interview with D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, New York 1990, pp. 39-40).

John Deaking, Henrietta Moraes, 1963

For Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, Bacon commissioned John Deakin, his friend and feted photographer to take a now renowned series of images that he would translate into his paintings. The project did not go smoothly at first, as Moraes was later to recount in her memoirs. The photographs were taken at 9 Apollo Place, Chelsea; the house Moraes had inherited from the artist John Minton, where Bacon himself had once lived for a short time in 1955. Deakin had already used Moraes as a model for a nine-foot blow-up image displayed in Archer’s poetry shop in Greek Street, Soho, but had never taken a picture of her or indeed any woman in the nude before. Bacon had devised his own rigid criteria for each pose, carefully instructing Deakin of how to capture Henrietta on film. ‘He wants them naked and you lying on the bed’ Deakin said to Henrietta, ‘and he’s told me the exact positions you must get into’ (J. Deakin quoted in H. Moraes, Henrietta, London 1994, p. 71). The shoot was a disappointment, Bacon exclaiming, ‘Well, look here, Henrietta – this blithering nitwit has reversed every single shot of you I wanted’ (F. Bacon quoted in H. Moraes, Henrietta, London 1994, p. 71). Bacon demanded that it be restaged, and it was through this subsequent shoot that Deakin produced the well-known contact sheet used as the source image for the present painting.

COLOUR AS MOOD
The resulting work with all its heady sexuality was created on a papal red ground, as if derived from Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X. On top of this smooth, monochrome surface, the artist conjured up the walls of the bedroom with a stippled, lilac layer of paint just as he had done in his Man and Child (1963) held in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk. Together the serene chromatic balance of lilac, white and saturated red recall the bold and emotive fields of colour created by contemporary artists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. As David Sylvester has pointed out, in Bacon’s other notorious painting of Moraes from the same year, Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe (1963), he employed stacked layers of purple, brown and black colour like those of his American colleagues. Yet Bacon was consistently scathing about Abstract Expressionism. For him, abstraction was to be restricted to the backgrounds of paintings, as complements to his figurative images. Notwithstanding, the Tate Gallery’s 1959 exhibition, ‘The New American Painting’ did leave a profound impression on the artist, with certain similarities emerging in his later body of work. As David Sylvester concluded: Bacon, who was famous for enjoying and engendering huge hilarity in his social life, created an art that was always resoundingly solemn. But he was not quite alone in his solemnity; he was in the company of Newman and Rothko and Still and Pollock. Those four contemporaries of his are grouped by Robert Rosenblum as the exponents of ‘The Abstract Sublime’. And Bacon’s role in painting has been that of the one great exponent in our time of the Figurative Sublime’ (D. Sylvester, Francis Bacon: The Human Body, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1998, p. 21).

THE PAINTER OF HUMAN FLESH
In Portrait of Henrietta Moraes a flurry of white brushstrokes combine to suggest a bedspread and pillows, using a technique strikingly similar to Bacon’s salacious and at the time, deeply provocative masterpiece Two Figures (1953), depicting a couple, ostensibly Bacon and Peter Lacy, writhing around on a bed. In the present work, Henrietta’s ripe body lies majestically at the centre of the bedroom. Her figure is remarkable, the swirling contours created with impulsive, cascading marks of the artist’s brush. The muscles in her limbs almost convulse through the effects of Bacon’s confident gestures. As André Breton once famously asserted, ‘beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all’ (A. Breton, Nadja, New York 1960, p. 160) and in Portrait of Henrietta Moraes these words appear to have found their ultimate fulfillment. The figure itself has a carnal quality to it, recalling Bacon’s Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962), which marked a turning point in his practice. From the late 1940s through to the mid-1950s, Bacon’s treatment of flesh had been largely monochromatic. From 1962 onwards however, his technique and use of vibrant colour offered the body a more visceral and graphic effect than ever before. In Three Studies for a Crucifixion, Bacon coupled the human body with a splayed carcass in the right hand panel, recalling the work of Chaim Soutine and Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox (1655), Bacon drew an explicit connection between meat, flesh and sex. In Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, the same link can be made, her body depicted as though the flesh had been turned mysteriously inside-out. As Bryson has suggested, ‘Bacon changes the current entirely, by joining the torsion of muscle, with its erotic charge, to the spasms where the boundaries of the body break open to the outside, where inside and outside flow into each other and the body is opened up (like meat)’ (N. Bryson, ‘Bacon’s Dialogues with the Past’, W. Seipel et al. (eds.), Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna, 2004, p. 54).

THE FIGURE IN THREE DIMENSIONS
Henrietta’s figure is surrounded by a halo of red, radiating like the latent heat from her skin. It is an almost spectral shadow, one of Bacon’s well-known hallmarks. The artist first began engendering this effect in the 1950s in paintings such as Two Figures in a Room (1959) held in the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury collection, University of East Anglia. He had been looking at fragments from books such as J.E. Burns’s, Adventures in Wildest Africa published in 1949 documenting big game hunting with three-dimensional printing. The book shortly predates the public frenzy for 3-D images of the mid 1950s, which clearly informed Bacon’s practice (an interesting parallel given the current, contemporary vogue for 3-D optics). For the artist however, the silhouette was not merely a function of light or optical illusion, but rather a metaphorical tool representing the model’s emotional and physical ’emanation’. As Gamper has elaborated, ‘Bacon’s shadow figures are a projection of a past, undamaged condition, a relic of a time when the body was still intact. The figure always carries within it its archetype, marked by unity and entirety, underlining its own precarious corporeality’ (V. Gamper, ‘The Ambivalent Function of a Shadow’, W. Seipel et al. (eds.), Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna, 2004, p. 301).

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE
Through the centre of Henrietta’s figure, Bacon has also added dark black, curving brush strokes, intimating a sense of movement or rotation of the torso. It is as if he has conflated a series of movements into one image, like an Eadweard Muybridge photograph, so that we simultaneously see Henrietta lying exposed, supine, as well as gently rolling onto her side. Her facial features appear distorted, like an African mask or the angular physiognomy of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso who Bacon greatly admired. She nevertheless offers a potent sense of Henrietta’s character, shining up from the paint surface. As Bacon once explained, ‘I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime’ (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London 2000, p. 56).

THE WOMEN WHO SHAPED BACOND LIFE
Throughout his career Bacon painted intimate and deeply revealing portraits of men, but it was only in the 1960s that he seriously turned to the figures of women. As Martin Harrison has illuminated, these works are equally insightful of Bacon’s character, revealing the depths of his search for self-identity and sexual orientation. Following the death of Peter Lacy in Tangiers in 1962, the same day as Bacon’s major Tate Gallery opening, the artist turned to strong and independent female characters for support and friendship. He forged close relationships with characters such as Muriel Belcher, Isabel Rawsthorne and Henrietta Moraes whom he painted, as well as other women including Joan Leigh Fermor, Nadine Haim, Janetta Parladé, and Sonia Orwell who he credited as being ‘the person most responsible for my success’ (F. Bacon quoted in M. Harrison, In Camera: Francis Bacon, Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, London 2005, p. 224). In paint, he was expressing neither the absentee mother, nor the ‘melting’ submissive woman but, as Harrison has explained, ‘the women with whom he identified-the recipients of male sex. He was as extreme in his sexual proclivities-he wore make-up and women’s underwear and ‘suffered’ physical beatings-as in all aspects of his life and art. He conveyed his inner life without compromise, but in code, in his paintings’ (M. Harrison, In Camera: Francis Bacon, Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, London 2005, p. 230). In this respect, Bacons Portrait of Henrietta Moraes dismisses the supposed duality between the two sexes, presenting the dynamics of desire and delving into the recesses of Bacon’s own restless mind.

Sir William Russell Flint, Reclining Nude III, 1964

signed W RUSSELL FLINT lower right; signed, inscribed and dated W Russell Flint

Painted From Cecilia Dec. 1964 on the reverse

watercolour

Unframed: 40 by 58.5cm., 15¾ by 23in.

Framed: 66.5 by 84cm., 26¼ by 33in.

Private Collection

Published as a popular print, Reclining Nude III is one of the most famous depictions of Flint’s favourite muse Cecilia Green (1931-2003), a beautiful, talented and intelligent young woman who appears in many of the artist’s greatest pictures from 1953 when they first met, in roles as diverse as a Spanish flamenco dancer and a French nun in a convent. For thirteen years Green’s face and physique dominated Flint’s work and with the huge popularity of his prints, she graced the walls of thousands of homes. She became so famous that she was often recognised in the street – much to her embarrassment as complete strangers would introduce themselves to her knowing what she looked like when she was naked.

Cecilia’s parents were clothes makers of Russian Jewish descent (their name was originally Grunvogel) whose ancestors had fled Kiev before the revolution, lived in France and Argentina and finally settled in London. Cecilia grew up in the East End of London, her childhood marred by the war and long periods of ill-health. Malnutrition led to her suffering badly from rickets but despite her childhood frailty she grew into a determined, confident and strikingly handsome young woman who wanted nothing more than to dance professionally. After a period at dance school she became a member of the London Festival Ballet and attended modelling-classes at the London Camera Club. She was destined for greatness on the stage but when she was twenty-one she contracted tuberculosis and spent two years in hospital.

Her dance career was over. Ballet had been her life and since the age of eleven she had known nothing else. It was 1953 and she had no education, no money and very few prospects. The only thing she had was her beauty and she realised that she had learnt how to be graceful and how to withstand the rigours of adopting difficult poses for prolonged periods. She had long legs well-shaped by her dancing training and she knew how beautiful she was. She could be of use to artists.

Cecilia had seen prints of the watercolours of William Russell Flint and decided that she could pose as well as the likes of Moira Shearer (star of The Red Slippers) and Ray Fuller, dancers that he already employed for his pictures. She found his telephone number and address in a copy of Who’s Who in the local library and one wet April day in 1953 put on her raincoat and caught the underground from Hackney to Notting Hill Gate, an area she did not know (she was a Cockney born and bred). In the tube station she found a telephone box, dialed the number and waited for a reply with her coins nervously clutched in her hand.

Nervously she knocked on the door of Flint’s studio-house on the Corner of Peel Street and Campden Hill. When the disgruntled artist opened the door, his face flushed with annoyance, he was greeted by the sight of a woman who was in possession of the type of beauty he had wanted to paint for his entire career and had only now discovered aged 72. Cecilia had a look that was somewhere between the exotic screen-siren beauties Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren with the more demure look of Audrey Hepburn – actresses whose fame made this type of beauty fashionable in the 1960s when Cecilia was posing. Flint later recalled that she was like an ‘apparition’ standing on his doorstep, dripping with rainwater.

Despite his obvious attraction to her, Flint only over-stepped the line once when he proposed marriage in an uncharacteristically passionate outburst. She did not feel the same way but loved him like she would a kindly uncle. Flint’s wife was confined to a nursing home due to her arthritis so Cecilia acted as more than a model; acting as his secretary and accountant and she even took on responsibilities such as cutting his finger-nails. She was also the hostess at the studio when parties were held and it was here that she met celebrities such as Peter Cushing and Peter Sellers. However she wanted more from life than posing for an artist who was three times older than her.

Francis Bacon, Henrietta Moraes, 1966

198 x 147 cm

Reclining Figure I 1966 Frank Auerbach born 1931 Presented by Rose and Chris Prater through the Institute of Contemporary Prints 1975 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P04013

Frank Auerbach, Reclining Figure I, 1966

Screenprint on paper
Image: 574 × 810 mm
Tate Gallery, London

Nude Woman with Necklace 1968 Pablo Picasso 1881-1973 Purchased 1983 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T03670

Pablo Picasso, Nude Woman with Necklace, 1968

Oil paint on canvas
Support: 1135 × 1617 mm
frame: 1181 × 1663 × 62 mm
Tate Gallery, London

Throughout his life, Picasso reworked the theme of the female nude. In his eighties, he revised the traditional ideal of beauty with particular violence, subjecting the body to a repeated assault in paint. Here, a reclining female figure is presented as a raw, sexualised arrangement of orifices, breasts and cumbersome limbs. ‘It’s all there’, Picasso said, ‘I try to do a nude as it is.’ The face is that of his second wife, Jacqueline Roque.

Naked Portrait 1972-3 Lucian Freud 1922-2011 Purchased 1975 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T01972

Lucian Freud, Naked Portrait, 1972–3

Oil paint on canvas
Support: 610 × 610 mm
frame: 728 × 728 × 55 mm

Tate Gallery London

Freud is famous for his supposedly objective images of people, particularly naked women. Here the figure is shown lying awkwardly on a bed, with nothing else visible except the stool. It is as if she is an animal on the dissecting table. This feeling is reinforced by the harsh, artificial lighting. The title suggests that this is a painting of a particular person, setting it apart from anonymous or generalised conventional nudes. But Freud’s inclusion of his tools in the foreground reminds us that we are, in fact, looking at the artificial setting of an artist’s studio.

Reclining Figure 5 1978 Henry Moore OM, CH 1898-1986 Presented by the Henry Moore Foundation 1982 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P02634

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure 5, 1978

PART OF The Reclining Figure
Etching on paper
Image: 229 × 305 mm
Tate Gallery, London

From: The Reclining Figure Album 1977–78

Nine etchings in range 6 × 8–9 × 12 (152 × 203–229 × 305), printed at Lacourière et Frelaut, Paris, published by Ganymed in association with the Louisiana Museum in an edition of 50 (H M 472–9)

Each inscribed ‘Moore’ b.r. and ‘A P 6/15’

Reclining Figure 1979 Henry Moore OM, CH 1898-1986 Presented by the Henry Moore Foundation 1982 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P02701

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure, 1979

Etching on paper
Image: 170 × 220 mm
Tate Gallery, London

Three etchings in range 6 3/4 × 8 1/2–8 1/2 × 11 1/2 (220 × 167–222 × 298), printed at JC Editions, published by Raymond Spencer for the Henry Moore Foundation with Bernard Baer, P02701 and P02702 in editions of 25 and P02703 in an edition of 75 (H M 571–573)
Each inscribed ‘Moore’ b.r. and ‘IV/X’

Girl in a Striped Nightshirt 1983-5 Lucian Freud 1922-2011 Presented by Mercedes and Ian Stoutzker 2013 and forming part of the Mercedes and Ian Stoutzker Gift to Tate http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T13719

Lucian Freud, Girl in a Striped Nightshirt, 1983 – 1985

Oil paint on canvas
Frame: 430 × 380 × 60 mm
support: 305 × 256 × 20 mm

Tate Gallery London

The sitter for this work is the artist Celia Paul (born 1959), who was a student at the Slade School of Art, London in the late 1970s when Freud returned there as a visiting tutor. Paul became Freud’s lover and in 1984 had a son by him. The intimacy that this work conveys, enhanced by its focus on the head and shoulders of the figure and her attire, is not simply due to the personal relationship between artist and subject. It is also a result of the intense scrutiny under which Freud placed his subjects while painting.

Lucian Freud, Annabel Sleeping, 1987

oil on canvas

38.8 x 56 cm

Private Collection

This artwork was painted between 1987 – 1988, when Freud was already an established artist. The portrayed woman is one of his two daughters from his marriage with Kitty Garman (a daughter of a sculptor Jacob Epstein).

What is quite innovative in Freud’s approach to the depicted subject, is the perspective. The artist represents a lying body completely turned away from us, so we cannot see the facial expression – but still, the painting is quite expressive. The body is curled up in the fetal position, which can be interpreted as a reaction to a physical or psychological trauma. Representing his sleeping daughter like this, Freud may be suggesting that he is a helpless observer of her mental and emotional pain. He also is putting the viewer into a position of a voyeur who intrudes a woman’s personal space and gets the insight of how she feels. Besides, this painting could be read in a feminist key – a woman is expressing her trauma only when she is sleeping, only when she is unaware that others are watching.

In his paintings, Freud demonstrates a tangibility of humans – be it their emotional pain and struggle, or be it naturalism in depicting of their bodies. This tangibility of Annabel is shown in a brute physicality of her feet. The artist emphasizes small details, like motion of muscles and texture of the skin. He de-idealizes the human body, breaking with the tradition of representing a female figure as a beautiful and flawless object, and insists on the corporeality of all bodies. This de-idealization reminds us of Caravaggio’s realism, which can be seen in his works such as Madonna of Loreto, Entombment of Christ or Crucifixion of Saint Peter. In a similar manner, Caravaggio’s depiction of saints’ dirty feet highlights the imperfection of the human body and human nature.

Lucian Freud, Woman on a Bed, 1991-1992
Etching on Somerset Satin White paper
17 1/2 × 15 1/2 in
44.5 × 39.4 cm
Edition of 30

Lucian Freud, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995

The painting broke records when it was sold to Roman Abramovich in 2008 for £17 million ($33.6 million).

The model is Sue Tilley, who at the time of the painting was working as a supervisor in a government Jobcentre in London.

Carmen Gaudin

Carmen Gaudin was the favourite model of the French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901). Toulouse-Lautrec met red-haired Carmen Gaudin in the Montmartre district of Paris in 1884, and she soon became his favourite model.

He created fifteen paintings and drawings featuring her.

More than the characters she seems so apt to embody, her person and her wealth of humanity without artifice have obviously fascinated Lautrec for whom contact with life is essential. His painting confirmed this for five years: between 1884 and 1889, Carmen obsessed him, to the point that the artist’s eye enveloped him with a kind of photographic gyration that did not yet have an equivalent among experts in the medium.

Like a filmmaker turning around his character to multiply the angles of shooting, Lautrec represents Carmen from the front, from the back, from the profile, head down, capturing the stubborn and fierce expression of the young woman whose flamboyant and untamed hair seduced him. This repeated and insistent appropriation of the image of a model, in that it is systematic, reflects the concern to identify the figures to better assert their singularity and their aesthetic strength.

Carmen Gaudin

Carmen Gaudin (1884)
Oil on canvas, 53 x 41 cm
Williamstown, The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

The more orthodox and darker oil-painting style, with smoother surface, which can be seen in the portrayal of Lautrec’s models at this time, can be attributed to the influence of Bonnat, Lautrec’s teacher.

Carmen Gaudin 1885

Carmen Gaudin, 1885
23.8 x 14.9 cm
Oil on wood
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

(Albi) Carmen la rousse 1885 Toulouse-Lautrec – MTL.112

Carmen la rousse 1885

Musee Toulouse Lautrec

The Laundress

La blanchisseuse

Stamped with artist’s monogram ‘TL’ (lower left)
oil on canvas
36½ x 29½ in. (93 x 75 cm.)
Painted in 1886-1887

Private Collection. In November 2005 the painting set the auction record for the painter’s work, selling to an anonymous buyer for $22.4m (£13m) at Christie’s in New York.

While Joyant ascribed the date of 1888 to La blanchisseuse, and Dortu placed it in the year after that, Charles F. Stuckey and Naomi E. Maurer have convincingly made the case that Lautrec painted this picture in 1886-1887 (in exh. cat., op. cit., Chicago, 1979, pp. 113-114). The artist was probably not yet 23 years of age when he completed La blanchisseuse. It was his finest painting to date, and indeed, it is arguably his first masterwork. There is no prior picture in his oeuvre in which the young painter had so powerfully and dramatically characterized his subject, or expressed his deepening insight into the world around him with such clarity and certainty in his technical means. Projecting himself into the very soul of this young woman, who may have been no older than himself, Lautrec demonstrated a degree of worldly understanding and compassion well beyond his years. Yet there is nothing sentimental or emotionally extraneous in his depiction of her. Here he made a significant statement of what it was like to live and work in the lowermost rungs of Parisian society at that time; he has utterly transformed the particulars of daily life into the universal image of art. For an adequate comparison, using a similar subject, one has to turn to the mature work of an artist no less in stature than Degas.

Lautrec painted La blanchisseuse during the final years of his enrollment in the atelier of Fernand Cormon, which he entered in 1882. Cormon specialized in an unusual genre, of no interest in itself to Lautrec, in which he painted scenes from prehistory and antiquity that he painstakingly researched using the latest archeological findings. Nonetheless, having chosen to locate his studio in the less academic and déclassé milieu of Montmartre, Cormon proved to be a progressive teacher in other respects. At the conclusion of his morning classes, he urged his pupils to take their sketchbooks out into the streets and draw the people of all stations whom they encountered there. Having led a relatively sheltered life on the provincial estate of an aristocratic family, Lautrec was fascinated by the bustle of the streets and the people who eked out marginal livings in lowly occupations. Older, more experienced friends and fellow students, such as Albert Grenier and Henri Rachou, introduced Lautrec to the seamy pleasures of the demi-monde. In 1886, not long before he painted La blanchisseuse, Lautrec signaled his commitment to a bohemian life-style by renting rooms with a studio at 27 (now 21), rue Caulaincourt in Montmartre, where he stayed until 1898.

The model for this painting was Carmen Gaudin, who in fact made her living as a laundress. François Gauzi, writing much later, related a story in which Lautrec and Rachou spotted Carmen as she was leaving a restaurant sometime in mid-1885. Lautrec was irresistibly attracted to red-headed women, and is supposed to have walked right up to her and examined her closely. He exclaimed to Rachou, “what an air of spoiled meat she has” (in F. Gauzi, Lautrec et son temps, Paris, 1954, p. 129), apparently referring to the fact that like many laundrymaids, she probably worked as a part-time prostitute. Lautrec is supposed to have sought to improve her position by making her his model, but it appears that she had already posed for the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens, and later worked for Cormon as well. In autumn 1885 Lautrec wrote to his mother that he was “painting a woman whose hair is absolute gold,” a clear reference to Carmen. His model turned out to be not quite the wild creature that he first supposed her to be. David Sweetman has described Carmen as “polite, punctual, discreet and eager to please. In fact this passivity was one of her sadder traits–[Lautrec] eventually discovered that she had a lover, or more likely a pimp that beat her up, though she never deserted him.” (in Toulouse-Lautrec and the Fin-de-Siècle, London, 1999, p. 142).

Lautrec made numerous studies of Carmen in 1885 (Dortu, nos. P. 243-247). She is easily identifiable by her russet hair, with a fringe that extends outward like small curving wings from her forehead, a petite upturned nose, and a squarish face (fig. 1). By the titles of these studies we know her as Carmen, La Rousse (the redhead), and in Dortu, no. P. 247, her occupation was identified as that of a blanchisseuse. The first large painting in which Lautrec featured her initially caused some confusion about her identity; it is titled A Montrouge–Rosa la Rouge, which refers to a gritty street song by the cabaret singer Aristide Bruant, in which the hapless working heroine, like Carmen in real life, gets bloodied in the end:

It’s Rosa I don’t know she comes from
She has red hair, a dog’s head
When she passes they say, here comes ‘Red’
At Montrouge.

When she gets a ‘John’ in the corner
Me, I’m right there not far at all
And the next day the cop finds ‘red’ all right,
At Montrouge.
(quoted in ibid., p. 143)

It was through Carmen’s situation that Lautrec first experienced the hellish underside of lower class life in Montmartre. In her presence the characters of Emile Zola’s 1877 novel L’Assommoir seemed to suddenly spring to life; the very subjects and fictional plots of the Naturalist novels that Lautrec had been reading materialized in all their disturbing reality before his eyes. In 1880 Joris-Karl Husymans published his Croquis parisiennes, in which he described the plight of washerwomen:

Oh yes, they have a bad reputation. Oh yes, the old ones prowl around like bitches scoffing and drinking, raging with thirst from the heat of the stoves. Oh yes, the young ones flirt, mad for love, and have a right old time on leaving the washhouse! And what of it? Do you think their lives are easy and that they haven’t the right to bury the dreariness of a long day in the bottom of a wine bottle or a bed? Oh, how they love and how they drink! Because to work standing up, under a rain constantly falling from washing hanging on lines, to feel the water creep over the hairs of your neck and run slowly down the middle of your back, to breathe steam from the laundry in big gulps, to have your loins burnt by the fire of the furnace, to carry cartloads of sheets over your shoulder, to stagger under the weight of an enormous basket, to walk, to run, never to rest such is their terrible job, their terrible life! (trans. Brendan King, Parisian Sketches, London, 2004, pp. 77-78)

The sadness of this dreary life may be seen in Carmen’s downcast and resigned expression in the painting Tête de femme rousse en caraco blanc, which, like the present painting, was probably done in 1886-1887, although Dortu ascribed it to 1889. Maurer has noted that these later paintings of Carmen are “subdued in color yet more subtle and refined than the somewhat crude, raw pictures of 1885. When Lautrec made his initial foray into the seamy world of the Parisian lower classes, he wanted his subjects to embody all its coarseness and brutality. In the years that followed, however, as his sensibilities changed, he considerably modified the quality of the works he produced after his first contact with the Zolaesque demi-monde. His paintings became increasingly elegant and subtle in mood as he sought to endow even the tawdriest subjects with decorative qualities and make them expressive of his own developing psychological insight” (in op. cit., pp. 113-114).

Lautrec captured and crystallized the very essence of Carmen Gaudin in the present painting. This was the largest of his depictions of her to date, and the most penetrating and personal in its projection of her inner life. Lautrec, with his own diminutive stature, viewed her slightly from below, which emphasizes the bottom-heavy, pyramidal mass of her lower body, which is further anchored by her left hand propped firmly on the table. Her figure then rises within the triangular shape of her white blouse and peaks at her neck and head, giving her an imposing, almost towering presence. Wearily, hunched forward by the weight of her chores, she leans forward into the light, sharply observing someone in the room, or perhaps looking expectantly to a window that opens to the world outside. In that moment she suddenly assumes an almost saint-like aura, and appears unbowed and defiant. While her eyes are hidden from view, we sense her indomitable character from her posture, her powerful hand, rubbed raw from her work, and the firmness of her jaw. Maurer has written,

By the size of the figure and the extreme boldness and simplicity of the geometric composition with its powerful light-dark contrasts, Lautrec has endowed La blanchisseuse with a physical monumentality that intensifies her mood of somber reflection and recalls similar works by Vermeer. Body inclined toward the open window and face gently illuminated by its light, the figure of the laundress expresses a quiet sense of yearning. By abruptly cropping the window with its open view and by curtaining the model’s eyes with her hair, Lautrec implies that her vision is directed not outside but inward. The masked eyes protect her from the prying gaze of the spectator as well, isolating her in introspection and suggesting how mysterious and hidden our real selves are from one another. (ibid., p. 114)

Carmen’s left-leaning pose in La blanchisseuse recalls Degas’ painting Répasseuse à contre-jour, one of a series depicting laundresses ironing that he made in 1873, whose realistic, proletarian subject caused a stir when Degas showed them in the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. Douglas W. Druick and Peter Zeghers have called this Degas Répasseuse “the most economical as well as the noblest of Degas’ early depictions of ironers, with a slightly tragic cast mitigated only by the wonderful effect of light” (in Degas, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1988, pp. 223-224). Lautrec was probably aware of this picture, and indeed in his own Blanchisseuse he created a ‘converse’ image of it. The window, table and model are similarly positioned. However, instead of silhouetting his subject against the light, Lautrec spotlights her against the surrounding darkness of the room. While Degas’ model is little more than a dark and anonymous profile, with little detail visible in her figure, Lautrec’s laundress has a strongly individual character. Unlike Degas, who showed the women at work, Lautrec went so far as to dispense with all signs of activity pertinent to Carmen’s occupation, as well as the tools of her trade. He instead proceeded by inference, allowing the title and the dramatic depiction of his subject tell the story in his picture. The novelty of Degas’ subject is less striking now than it was in the late 19th century, and his painting engages us primarily through “its wonderful effects of light.” Lautrec, on the other hand, draws in his viewers, now as then, through the unflinching intensity of his psychological insight, which is far more personal and confrontational than the “slightly tragic cast” of Degas’s painting.

Picasso also featured a laundress ironing in his own Répasseuse, painted near the end of his Blue period in 1904. Picasso was clearly referring to Degas’s paintings on this subject, and while he was a great admirer of Lautrec during his early years in Montmartre, it is perhaps unlikely that he knew Lautrec’s La blanchisseuse. In any case, Picasso’s painting is all about the misery and poverty of living, which he has stylized to such a degree that genuine tragedy has become melodrama. In contrast to both Degas and Picasso, artists who placed other agendas ahead of their engagement with the personality and inner life of their laundress subjects, Lautrec alone directs our attention in his portrait to the fact that this is the story of a real woman, a living, flesh-and-blood person.

Lautrec employed Carmen Gaudin as one of his favorite models into 1889. In the last paintings he made of her he adopted an airier, lighter keyed Impressionist manner, such as in La Rousse au caraco blanc, 1888 (Dortu, no. P.317), Femme rousse en mauve, 1889 (Dortu, no. P. 342) and, finally, Femme rousse assise dans le jardin de M. Forest, 1889 (Dortu, no. P. 343; fig. 6). Lautrec thereafter lost interest in Carmen, partly because of his contacts with other women, but as Lautrec told it, mainly because she stopped dyeing her hair, so that it no longer possessed its magical reddish-gold tone. Now an ordinary, natural brunette, she had, as Lautrec told a friend, “lost her appeal.” But she had initiated Lautrec into a hidden reality that the young painter had known little about, in David Sweetman’s words, “the grey world that lay behind the facade of starched shirts and layered dresses, the world of bourgeois fashion and comfort, whose slaves were the available playthings of the same men who paid so little for their daily luxuries” (op. cit., p. 143). This is the Paris that Lautrec came to know and love best, the nether regions of mixed light and shade, glamour and tawdriness, which would remain his hunting-ground, as well as his playground, for the rest of his life.

A note in Christie’s

“A Montrouge”– Rosa La Rouge, 1886-87

Oil on canvas
Overall: 28 3/8 x 19 1/8 in. (72.1 x 48.6 cm)

Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania, USA

Toulouse-Lautrec sought to show the underbelly of glamorous Parisian society. Here the model Carmen Gaudin poses as the prostitute Rosa La Rouge, a seedy and murderous character popularized by the songs of the cabaret performer Aristide Bruant. This painting once hung in Bruant’s nightclub, Le Mirliton, in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec paints Carmen with flaming red hair covering her face. Her jaw, which juts out, conveys her surly nature.

Red-Headed Woman in the Garden of M. Foret (1887)

Oil on cardboard
28-1/8 x 22-7/8 in. (71.4 x 58.1 cm)
The Norton Simon Foundation

This picture belongs to a small group Toulouse-Lautrec painted outdoors in the garden of a friend during the summer of 1887. Writing to his mother that July, he complained, “The sky is unsettled and is sprinkling us with an unconcern that shows how little feeling the Eternal Father has with regard to outdoor painting.” An irreverent wit, Toulouse-Lautrec is best remembered for his lurid, acidic portrayals of the Parisian demimonde. Here we see a very different side of his production—tender and pensive—capturing the features of his favourite model, Carmen Gaudin. Her flaming hair and pale, sharp features appear again and again in his pictures from the late 1880s.

Carmen Gaudin in the Artist’s Studio 1888

Carmen Gaudin in the Artist’s Studio (1888)

Oil on canvas
55.9 x 46.7 cm (22 x 18 3/8 in.)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gaudin wears the white blouse of a laundress and sits before a studio wall covered with angular canvases. Work-roughened fingers laced in her lap, she stares out at the viewer with a withdrawn, even sullen, expression. The life of a professional model was difficult and fraught with social stigma, her employment dependent on whether her look fit an artist’s vision. When Gaudin changed her locks from red to brown, Toulouse-Lautrec no longer hired her.

La Blanchisseuse, 1888

The Laundress, 1888.

Black and gray wash with white paint, scratched away in places, on gray cardboard prepared with white ground; sheet:

75.9 x 63.1 cm (29 7/8 x 24 13/16 in.).

The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Hanna Fund 1952.113

A prolific illustrator, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec made this drawing as an illustration for an article about “Summer in Paris” published in Paris illustré, a magazine popular among the middle classes. Although the article singled out the laundress as a charming object of the male gaze on the city streets, the stooping posture and dark-circled eyes of the figure seen here give her a worn, tired appearance that invites comparison with the workhorse behind her. The drawing’s sharp receding perspective emphasizes the act of street-level spectatorship and a man’s top hat visible in the coach behind the woman alludes to her subservient social and sexual role.

Toulouse-Lautrec made this drawing as an illustration for an article on “Summer in Paris” published in Paris illustré, a magazine popular among the middle classes. Although the article singled out the laundress as a charming object of the male gaze on the streets of the city, the stooping posture and dark-circled eyes of this figure give her a haggard look that invites comparison with the workhorse behind her. The sharp receding perspective emphasizes the act of street-level spectatorship. A man’s top hat visible in the coach behind the woman alludes to her subservient social and sexual role.

La Rousse in a White Blouse
1889
Oil on canvas. 60.5 x 50.3 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

“His painting should not be viewed merely as a chronicle of the anecdotal but as a quest for timeless values, for as Baudelaire had written, the painter of modern life should capture “the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”

In La Rousse in a White Blouse in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, Lautrec depicts Carmen Gaudin, a girl of working-class origin whom he had discovered in the avenue Clichy in 1884 and with whom he had felt immediately fascinated. With her red hair and white skin, which enhanced her helpless and melancholic appearance, she was exactly the type of young woman he was keen to portray, and she therefore became the subject of several painting executed during those years. These include Carmen Gaudin, Carmen the Redhead, Carmen the Redhead with Lowered Head, The Washerwoman, and Carmen, in which the painter immortalised her likeness in a host of poses and costumes in his characteristic repetitive and insistent manner.

Lautrec, who generally shunned the plein air painting of the Impressionists, executed these works in the studio he shared with Henri Rachou on the rue Ganneron. In the painting in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection the studio background is sketched in order to make it go unnoticed and focus all attention on the sitter. Despite the simple pose in which the sitter is rendered, the melancholic atmosphere conveyed by the composition makes it a masterpiece. The technique of slight touches and very spontaneous brushwork is inherited from Impressionism.With this intentionally crude and unfinished execution the artist succeeds in imbuing with poetry an image that is otherwise very real thanks to his acute powers of observation that are evidenced particularly by the hair, which he paints with extreme care — both the wisps of hair that tumble over the girl’s eyes and those that have fallen out of the untidy chignon gathered at the nape of her neck.

As in other paintings featuring the same sitter, Lautrec achieves a new, modern approach to the art of portraiture that goes beyond a mere naturalistic depiction of the subject. By showing her in half profile with her head tilted and her hair hanging over her forehead partially concealing her face, he omits any reference to her identity and makes her an eternal and imperishable embodiment of the human being.”

Paloma Alarcó – Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Boulevard extérieur (à Montrouge – Rosa La Rouge)

Boulevard extérieur (à Montrouge – Rosa La Rouge), 1889, Paris, private collection

The depiction of the desolation of the street line while waiting for suitors is “résolument modern/decidedly modern”. The model is Carmen Gaudin, who chooses Toulouse-Lautrec for many roles. She is also especially appreciated for her flaming red hair.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Rousse (La toilette)
En 1889
Huile sur carton
H. 67,0 ; L. 54,0 cm.
Legs de Pierre Goujon, 1914
© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt

Toulouse-Lautrec left countless images of women captured in their intimacy, including depicted in their toilet. Here, the female figure occupies the center of the composition and imposes itself in close-up, thus offering the representation of a sculptural back to the viewer. The rattan seats arranged around it suggest that the scene takes place in the painter’s studio, rue Caulaincourt.
If, at the time, the theme of the woman in her toilet was often treated in particular by Mary Cassatt or Bonnard, it is above all the naturalistic influence of Degas that is very present in Lautrec’s painting. Thus, the forgetfulness of the academic pose and the rather unusual accelerated perspective in Lautrec, are like an echo of the series of women at their toilet that Degas presented at the 8th and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886. The framing of the scene and the plunging point of view are indisputably reminiscent of the masterful pastels of Degas to which Lautrec devoted great admiration. In the same way as his elder, Lautrec shows women “without their coquetry” as seen “through the keyhole”. However, he differs from Degas by the humanity with which he looks at them and paints them. This
painting has been the subject of various misunderstandings. It has, in fact, since its origin known several titles and its dating has been modified. It is now established that it was made in 1889 and not in 1896, as it appears in the old catalogues. It is surely this work that Lautrec presented under the name of “Rousse” at the Exposition des XX in Brussels in 1890. This title, wanted by the artist, recalls his predilection for red models, which he represented all his life.

View of the Asylum and the Chapel at Saint Remy de Provence

At the end of the 19th century, the former Augustinian monastery of Saint Paul de Mausole, dating back to the 12th century, had been converted into an asylum for psychiatric patients.

Some eleven years ago, I wrote an article on van Gogh’s stay in the Asylum. Today I revisit the asylum to present the only painting that van Gogh painted from the outside, in plain air, an asylum attendant keeping watch on the artist while he worked [1].

Van Gogh’s statue at the entrance of the Monastery Complex. Photo Credit @ Nikos Moropoulos

The author and journalist Martin Bailey, an expert on Van Gogh’s life, has traced the admissions register and other records from Saint-Paul de Mausole, a small asylum on the outskirts of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, for the period when Van Gogh was admitted as a private patient, a stay paid for by his brother Theo. The register shows Vincent van Gogh, 36, from Arles but born in the Netherlands, was admitted on 8 May 1889. No one visited van Gogh during his stay. Although Arles is only 20 km away from the asylum, none of his friends there made the short journey. His brother Theo, on the other hand, claimed in his letters that his wife was expecting and therefore could not be away from Paris. [2]

Van Gogh was released on 16 May 1890, at his own request. The final medical note described Van Gogh as “cured”. He travelled to northern France to begin again, but after a final burst of creativity, he died within two months – 36 hours after shooting himself in the stomach while out painting in the midsummer fields.[2]

Van Gogh, Vue de l’asile et de la Chapelle de Saint-Rémy. View of the Asylum and the Chapel at Saint Remy. 45.1 x 60.4 cm, 1889. Private Collection.

The painting was the centerpiece of Elizabeth Taylor’s collection. It was sold to a collector at a Christie’s auction in 2012. [1]

The painting’s provenance

December 1889: Vincent dispatches the painting to his brother Theo.

1907: Paul Cassirer, a leading German gallerist, acquires the painting form Theo’s widow.

1963:  The art dealer Francis Taylor purchased the painting at auction in London on behalf of his daughter Elizabeth.

2012: The painting is sold at auction by Christie’s.

Sources

[1] From the outside in: Van Gogh’s Vue de l’asile et de la Chapelle de Saint-Rémy, Christie’s

[2] Van Gogh’s ‘terrifying environment’ of French asylum revealed, The Guardian

Caspar David Friedrich: “the most solitary of the solitary”

First time I saw “The Wanderer”, CD Friedrich’s masterpiece, it was on the front cover of Nietzsche’s book “Thus spoke Zaratustra”. At the time I had no idea who Friedrich was, but the painting inspired me to find out more about it and the painter.

CD Friedrich, Der Regenstein im Harz, um 1800. Pencil, feather and brush on paper. 178 x 261 mm Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett

Not only I got to know more about the painter and the picture, I was also fortunate to visit the Hamburger Kunsthalle and see the painting.

CD Friedrich was born in 1774 in the town of Greifswald on the Baltic Sea in what was at the time Swedish Pomerania.

CD Friedrich, Winter – Klosterruine und Kirchhof am Meer – Monastery Ruins and Church Grounds by the Sea, um 1826.(Sequence: The Seasons, Sheet 5). Pencil and Brush on paper, 192 x 275 mm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett

CD Friedrich is a par excellence romantic painter, quite possibly the most prominent German romantic painter, and it would not be an exaggeration to call him a “landscape painter”.

I would like to explain what I mean by this term.

CD Friedrich, Frühling – Spring (Sequence: The Seasons, Sheet 2), um 1826. Pencil and Brush on paper, 191 x 273 mm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett 

The natural world is preeminent in the romantic school.

Humans are inhabiting the natural world and strive to control it, but this is a futile effort.

CD Friedrich depicted the natural world as such.

Humans are supplementing the image, rather than being in the center of it.

CD Friedrich, Sommer- Summer (Folge: Die Lebensalter, Blatt 3), um 1826.Pencil and Brush on paper, 190 x 271 mm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett 

They are also small, almost miniscule, as can be seen in the drawings, immersed in the vastness of the natural world.

CD Friedrich, Herbst, um 1826 (Sequence: The Seasons, Sheet 4)..Pencil and Brush on paper, 191 x 275 mm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett 

In the most famous of CD Friedrich’s painting, the “Wanderer”, Man is on top of the World, or so he appreas to be. He is alone. In all of CD Friedrich’s “serious” paintings, Man is alone.

The Wanderr’s posture is erect, stable, firm, the world appears to be his to rule. This is a solitary figure though. This man faces greatness alone. The encounter with greatness requires solitude.

But we can only his back. His face is not seen. This creates ambivalence. The picture may not be as straightforward as we thought at the beginning. If we look closely at the area around the neck, there is an angle, the man is looking down. Is it possible that he has reached the top of the world and as he gazes down he is no longer sure that his reaching the top is as important as he initially thought it would be?

CD Friedrich, Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer – The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, um 1817. Oil on canvas. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Dauerleihgabe der Stiftung Hamburger Kunstsammlungen, erworben 1970

In the 1930s the Nazis used CD Friedrich’s work to promote their World View and he, post mortem, was tarred by an association that has nothing to do with his paintings. This had an unintended consequence: bringing together CD Friedrich and Anselm Kiefer (born in 1945) on the theme of the wanderer.

“The Wanderer” came alive in one image, where Anselm Kiefer, one of the most prominent contemporary German figurative artists is photographed from the back against the backdrop of the sea, much like in CD Friedrich’s painting.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to terms with the past”) has been the dominant theme in German intellectual life since the early 1960s.

Anselm Kiefer
Occupations (Besetzungen) 1969
© Anselm Kiefer

In 1969, during a trip through Switzerland, France, and Italy, Kiefer staged a series of photographic self-portraits called Occupations, in which he dressed in paramilitary clothes and struck a pose that imitated Hitler in various natural and monumental settings.

Three histories converge in a single photograph: the early nineteenth century, the 1930s, and the time of the work’s making in the late 1960s. For Kiefer, understanding history begins with its invocation, restaging, or excavation.

CD Friedrich, Der Mönch am Meer – The Monk by the Sea, Oil on Canvas, 110 cm × 171.5 cm, 1808 – 1810. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany

The Wanderer may be the most famous of CD Friedrich’s paintings, but the Monk by the Sea is the one I like the most.

The Monk is but one little dot on the big canvas. He is alone.

The Sea is pitch dark, the sky is dark, grey, hazy, with touches of cyan, the Earth is barren, there is no tree or even a bush to be seen. Contrast this to the drawings of Spring, Summer and Autumn.

By 1820, Friedrich was living as a recluse. His friends called him “the most solitary of the solitary”. He died in relative poverty in Dresden in 1840. He was 66 years old.

Sources

21 Facts about Caspar David Friedrich, By Kira Gurmail-Kaufmann. Sotheby’s 19th Century European Paintings, Nov 21, 2018

Anselm Kiefer (born 1945), By Ian Alteveer, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2008

The Discovery of Matthias Grunewald: a personal journey

Featured Image: Grünewald in a 19th century depiction on the de:Frankoniabrunnen, by Ferdinand von Miller (1824), now in front of the Würzburg Residence.

This is a short recount of how I discovered Matthias Grunewald, the late German Renaissance Master of the Isenheim Altarpiece. It is one of the best journeys of my life.

Updated 14 March 2024

“Mathis der Maler”, a Paul Hindemith Opera

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In 1995 I was living in London and one of my favorite past times was going to the opera. The Royal Opera at Covent Garden in London was the most famous and reputable, but at the same time more conservative compared to other operas in the UK. However, there was the odd occasion when a “radical” production would be staged. One of them was Peter Sellar’s staging of Paul Hindemith’s opera, “Mathis der Maler”. This is how I was introduced to the mystical world of Mathias Grunewald.

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I was one of the lucky ones who got a last minute STB ‘stand-by’ ticket in the orchestra stalls for 20 pounds. These tickets would normally sell for more than 80 pounds. I was seated in row B at the center of the stalls, and could hear the Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen breath as he conducted the orchestra.

The Royal Opera organized on Saturday 11 November 1995 a study day, so that people would learn about the subject of the opera, the painter Mathis, and the people behind the production would present their views and aesthetic ideas.

Luckily I attended and got to meet Peter Sellars, the American theater director of the staging.

He was kind enough to sign the program with the following:

Dear Nick,
So wonderful to meet you.
Thanks for your GENTLE sense of ANARCHY.
Peter Sellars.

But the key person as far as Grunewald was concerned, was the lecture given by Anne Tennant, an art historian, which was the best introduction to the world of Grunewald. From this moment on, I became hooked.

I went to the opera, enjoyed it immensely becasue Hindemith is one of my favorites, but my mind was travelling to Isenheim.

The trip to Colmar, Stuppach and Karlsruhe

I therefore decided that I had to see the Isenheim altarpiece and on April 1996, I embarked on a short trip to visit Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim Alterpiece, the painting of the Madonna in Stuppach, and the Crucifixion in Karlsruhe. I picked the weekend of 13-14 April 1996, which happened to be the Greek Orthodox Easter weekend.

The route

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Fly from London Heathrow to Basel – Mulhouse, rent a car and drive to Colmar.

Then drive to Bad Mergentheim (some 350 km) to spend the night, Stuppach, Karlsruhe and back to the Basel – Mulhouse airport.

Colmar

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A canal in Colmar. Photo: N. Moropoulos
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The center of Colmar is picturesque, with canals and medieval houses and buildings. It is also small and compact, so that you can get around quickly.

The Isenheim Alterpiece

“Beauty is only the beginning of the terrible.” Rainer – Maria Rilke

The Isenheim Alterpiece is exhibited in the Unterlinden Museum, a former Dominican convent, dating back to the 13th century.

The Crucifixion panel is the most horrid depiction of suffering leading to death that I have seen. Being such, nevertheless it captivates the observer, at least the one who has some sort of affinity to Christianity. Its intensity and brutality give new meaning to the Resurrection.

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Matthias Grunewald, The Isenheim Alterpiece, Crucifixion, 1513 – 1515, Museum Unterlinden, Colmar

The French writer and art critic Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote about Grunewald:

“He was the most uncompromising of realists, but his morgue redeemer, his
sewer Deity, let the observer know that realism could be truly transcendent …
Grunewald was the most uncompromising of Idealists… In this canvas was
revealed the masterpiece of an art obeying the unopposable urge to render the
tangible and the invisible, to make manifest the crying impurity of the flesh and
to make the sublime the infinite distress of the soul.”

As I mention in an article I have written on the Isenheim Altarpiece, in a way it is Germany’s Sistine Chapel.

The Madonna in the Rosegarden

A stone’s throw from the Museum is the Dominican Church where I saw the masterpiece of Grunewald’s mentor, Martin Schongauer’s, the “Madonna in the Rosegarden”, painted in 1473.

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Was the Madonna in the Rosegarden related to the Madonna in Stuppach? I would find out the next day.

Bad Mergentheim

I spent the night in Bad Mergentheim, in the Main-Tauber-Kreis district in the German state of Baden-Württemberg.

The room in the ‘Alte Muenze’ Gasthaus was clean and spacious.

The next day, Orthodox Easter Sunday, I had a wonderful walk in the park around the town’s castle, called home and then drove the short distance to Stuppach.

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Bad Mergentheim Castle, Photo: N. Moropoulos

The Stuppacher Madonna

Suppach is a village 2 km south of the town of Bad Mergentheim.

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Suppach – The Vilalge and the Church © ML Preiss, Deutsche Stiftung Denkmalschutz, Bonn

In the chapel of the village church, the visitor can see Matthias Grunewald’s masterpiece “The Stuppacher Madonna”. Having seen the Isenheim Alterpiece, the Stuppach Madonna is a brilliant return to some sort of normal life, where there is beauty, love, happinness.  I could see the influence of Schongauer, even van der Weyden.

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Von Matthias Grünewald – Stuppacher_Madonna – Fokus GmbH Leipzig, via blicklokal.de, Gemeinfrei, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56132209

Ticket to view the Stuppacher Madonna

The Stuppacher Madonna and Christ’s Lamentation in the Collegiate Church of St. Peter and Alexander in Aschaffenburg are the only Grunewald paintings that are not kept in museums today. I have seen a copy of it, but not the original.

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The Karlsruhe Crucifixion

Following my visit to the Stuppacher Madonna, I had time to quickly drive to Karlsruhe and visit the Staatliche Kunsthalle (State Art Gallery), where one of Grunewald’s Crucifixion’s is kept.

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Christ on the Cross between Maria and John (Tauberbischofsheim Altarpiece), 1523 – 1525.  Height: 195.5 cm (76.9 in); Width: 142.5 cm (56.1 in), Staatliche Kunsthalle  Karlsruhe

It has been painted some years after the ISenheim altarpiece, it is even drarker, but not less gruesome.

In the same museum they have a drawing of Christ on the Cross, but it is not exhibited, so I did not get to see it.

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Matthias Grunewald, Christ on the Cross, 1520, 531 x 320 mm, Black chalk on brownish paper, Staatliche Kunsthalle  Karlsruhe

As I was exiting the museum room where the “Crucifixion” painting hangs, I stumbled upon two beautiful etchings of female saints. This is my favorite, because of the hair.

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Matthias Grunewald, 1511/1512, Holy Saint (Bibiana or Lucia?), H 101 cm W 43, Staatliche Kunsthalle  Karlsruhe

The Basel Crucifixion

Some years later, in 2003, I visited the Arts Museum in Basel (Kunstmuseum) to see the Crucifixion. Although painted at about the same time with the Isenheim Altarpiece, it is much softer as far as the depiction of the Holy Drama goes, and it has much more light.

Matthias Grünewald; Die Kreuzigung Christi; um 1515 (?), HxB: 74.9 x 54.4 cm; Mischtechnik auf Lindenholz; Inv. 269, Kunstmuseum Basel

Epilogue

And so I have traced the painter’s personal journey back to its origin.

Up to the Basel Crucifixion, Grunewald was painting like one of late German Renaissance Masters. The Isenheim Altarpiece was his “Turn”.

From the relatively ordinary Basel Crucifixion, the painter enters the world beyond with the Isenheim Alterpiece. And he continues with the Karlsruhe painting.

He is not a man living in a world without beauty, he is a man who can appreciate beauty because he has seen the absolute horror.

Church of Saint Anna, Amorgos, Greece – Αγία Άννα, Αμοργός

This is a painting I finished a few days ago. It depicts the small church of Saint Anna, on the island of Amorgos in Greece.

The barren landscape is in complete harmony with the humble structure, which balances on the edge of a cliff. The blue sea and the sky provide the complement to a background that requires no additional description.

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Saint Anna, Amorgos, Acrylic on canvas, Nikos Moropoulos, August 2019

You can see some of my paintings in this gallery.

 

Edvard Munch: Color in Context, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA, 2017

Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait
Crowds in a Square
Anxiety
Anxiety
Melancholy
The Vampire
Melancholy III
Kiss on the Hair
Head by Head
Man’s Head in Woman’s Hair
Moonlight
Female Nude
Female Nude
Madonna
Girl with the Heart
Encounter in Space
The Sin
Old Man Praying