Gaston Goor

Gaston Goor, “Homere et les Bergers (Homer and the Shepherds)”, 1940, Oil on Panel, 81.3 x 119.4 cm, Private Collection

Born in Lunéville, the capital city of Lorraine in October of 1902, Gaston Goor was a highly accomplished, albeit controversial, French illustrator, painter, muralist and sculptor. He is best known for his illustrations in “Amitiés Particulières (Special Friendships)” and other works by French writer and diplomat Roger Peyrefitte, his primary patron.

The son of Auguste Léon Goor and Marie Angèle Berthe Becker, Goor entered the École des Beaux-Arts at the age of seventeen. He left his native province in 1925 to travel to Paris where he worked in the studio of painter and writer Amédée Ozenfant. In 1917, Ozenfant and painter Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, had founded the doctrine of Purism, a style of art in which elements are represented as robust simplified forms with minimal detail. Through his association with Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, Goor was introduced to modern art and prominent artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Jean Lurçat, best known for his tapestries.

During his stay in Versailles, Gaston Goor was introduced by poet André Salmon to author André Gide who guided him to the profession of illustrator. Working with Capitole Editions, Gore became a prominent artist and created illustrations for forty volumes under that title. He created illustrations for Léon Daudet’s “Écrivains et Artistes”, Henry de Montherlant’s “L’Etoile du Soir”, Lucien Daudet’s “Le Voyage de Shakespeare”, and François Mauriac’s “Hommes Devant Dieu”. Goor also provided illustrations for both the Horizons de France and the Trianon editions.

In 1929, Goor was commissioned to produce decorative work for the Colonial Exhibition in Paris. After a study trip to Morocco, he returned Versailles where he worked briefly for its Department of Fine Arts before locating to the resort town of Hyères where his family had settled. Goor’s nude studies of the young model Jean Joerimann caught the attention of writer Jean Renaud Icard who gave him an exhibition in his Lyon gallery. After the exhibition, Goor received a commission to illustrate Icard’s latest book “Mon Page”.

In the 1930s, Gaston Goor received private commissions, both illustrative and decorative, from wealthy clients and art collectors. Among these prominent men was the owner of a large luxury hotel in Hyères, who was the father of Jean Joerimann, the model for the “Mon Page” illustrations and an unreciprocated love interest for Goor. In 1942, he received a commission from architect Maurice Novarina to create murals for the Church of Douvaine in the Auvergne-Rhõne-Alpes regional city of Haute-Savoie.

While in Haute-Savoie, Goor was accused by German police of helping Jewish people to cross the Swiss border; as a result, he was given ‘voluntary worker’ status and sent to the camp near Zittau in Saxony. Noticed for his talents, Goor was employed as an artist; he remained in the camp until February of 1945 when the city of Dresden was destroyed by Allied bombing. After the war, Goor initially returned to Paris before he moved to Cannes for an exhibition of his work.

There is little information available on the remainder of Gaston Goor’s life. This period was marked by several disappointments, including that his other illustrations for the “Satyricon” were not published. It is known that Goor retired and remained in Hyènes until his death from cancer at the French Riviera city of Toulon on the thirteenth of December in 1977.

Note: Gaston Goor’s illustrations for Volume I and Volume II of Roger Peyrefitte’s
“Les Amitiés Particulières” can be found on E. Neagle’s site “Homo Fabula: At the Intersection of Art & Luterature” located at: https://homofabula.blogspot.com/2017/05/front-free-endpaper-gaston-goor.html

Top Insert Image: Gaston Goor, “Mythological Subject”, 1947, Lead Graphite on Paper, 21 x 27 cm, Catherine Gide Collection

Second Insert Image: Gaston Goor, “The Battle of San Romano after Paulo Ucello”, 1970, Oil and Pastel Highlights on Panel, 94 x 121 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Gaston Goor, Mougin Vase, “The Fairy of the Water Lilies”, Height 31 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Gaston Goor, “Eros and Hymenaeus”, 1949, Oil on Canvas, 37 x 45 cm, Private Collection

Piero Fornasetti

The Artwork of Piero Fornasetti

Born in Milan, Italy in November of 1913, Piero Fornasetti was an eclectic artist who was an important figure in the Italian design scene. A prolific creator of designs, he was involved in many aesthetic disciplines including painting, drawing, graphic design, and product design. In the course of his career, Fornasetti created over ten thousand works and was responsible for one of the largest outputs of diverse objects and furniture of the twentieth-century.

The first child of a wealthy family, Fornasetti was already at the age of ten drawing and displaying an innate inclination towards art. In 1932, he enrolled at the Academia di Brera, Milan’s public academy of fine arts; however, two years later he was expelled for insubordination. Although he applied to Milan’s Superior School of Arts Applied to Industry, Fornasetti was unable to adhere to the schools dogma due to his rebellious nature.

Beginning in the early 1930s, Piero Fornasetti began a individual and comprehensive study of engraving and printing techniques. With this knowledge and his developed technical skill, he began to print artist books and lithographs for many of the great artists of the time, including composer and playwright Alberto Savinio, painter Fabrizio Clerici, and painter and writer Giorgio de Chirico. The Fornasetti Art Printshop became the source of quality printing for many artists of his generation. Fornasetti, through his constant experimentation, later developed a printing method for graphic effects on silk; this innovation brought him to the attention of designer and publisher Gio Ponti, with whom Fornasetti would develop a close creative partnership.

From the early 1940s and onward, Fornasetti produced a vast series of limited edition graphic works, which included calendars, holiday gifts, and images for advertising, theater, posters, and publications. He produced sketches and drawings for the Esino Lario School of Tapestry, whose fine silk tapestries were produced by local village girls. In 1940 Fornasetti began to publish his own work in the architectural design magazine Domus, and for two years designed a series of almanacs for Gio Ponti. Taking refuge in Switzerland in 1943 during the war, he continued his graphic work, expanding into watercolors, oil portraits, drawings in ink, and the creation of theatrical sets for Albert Camus’s 1938 “Caligula”.

Upon his return to Milan, Piero Fornasetti and Gio Ponti began a close creative partnership which centered on architectural concepts in design and decoration. With the beginning of the 1950s, they put their theories into practice developing new simple and functional designs for the interiors of homes, apartments, cinemas and even ship cabins. Their initial project, the “Architettura” trumeau, a furniture design concept seen in an image above, was exhibited at the 1951 Triennale IX in Milan. This piece of furniture became an icon of Italian design in the interwar years of economic growth.

Fornasetti is best known for his designs using fanciful motifs such as the moon, sun, playing cards, animals, and other surrealist imagery; most of which were executed in black and white. In 1952, he began work on his iconic and best known series, “Tema a Variazioni (Theme and Variations)”, a facial portrait of opera singer Lina Cavalieri, who was renowned at the time as a true archetype of a classical beauty. This image continues to appear today on a series of everyday objects from porcelain and fabrics to furniture and wall coverings. This portrait series entered into the world of theater as set designs in Fornasetti’s production of Mozart’s two-act opera, “Don Giovanni”. These designs were used in the December 2016 performances at Milan’s Teatro dell’ Arte and in the January 2017 performances at Florence’s Teatro della Pergola.

In 1970, Piero Fornasetti, along with a group of friends, operated the Galleria dei Bibliofili, where he exhibited his own work and the work of other contemporary artists. His paintings at this time contained both layered abstractions, with interacting colors done in various techniques, and figurative works done in a new pictorial style, where bodies and faces were composed of fruits and bottles. After the death of Gio Ponti in 1979 and the opening of London’s “Themes and Variations” design gallery in 1980, Fornasetti’s work and his idealogical concepts of form/function gained new interest both at home and abroad.

Piero Fornasetti died in October of 1988 during a minor operation in hospital. In 2013, Silvana Annicchiarico, the director of the Triennale Design Museum, dedicated a first retrospective of Fornasetti’s work at the museum; this exhibition later went on tour to Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs and Seoul’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza. A 1987 collaboration between Fornasetti and fashion writer and publisher Patrick Mauriés, which became a monograph entitled “Fornasetti: Designer of Dreams”, was published posthumously in 2015 with an introduction by Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass. Piero Fornasetti’s work can be seen in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

Note” An example of the range of Piero Fornasetti’s oeuvre can be found at the online Fornasetti website located at: https://www.fornasetti.com/bd/en/

Robert Winthrop Chanler

Robert Winthrop Charler, “Leopard and Deer”, 1912, Gouache or Tempera on Canvas on Wood, Single Panel Screen, 194.3 x 133.4 cm, Rokeby Collection

Born in February of 1872 into the Astor family, one of America’s oldest and wealthiest, Robert Winthrop Chanler was a largely self-taught decorative artist, designer, and muralist. One of eleven children in the family, he and his siblings became orphans after the death of their mother, Margaret Astor War, in 1875 and their father, John Winthrop Chanler, in 1877, both of whom succumbed to pneumonia. They were raised at their parents’ Rokeby Estate in Barrytown, New York, and amply provided for by their father’s will with twenty-thousand dollars a year for each child, equivalent to approximately four hundred seventy thousand dollars today.

Coming of age, Chanler traveled to Europe, where he stayed in Paris in the 1890s and associated with the artists of the city. His formal training in the arts was done at Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts, where he produced his best known work, the screen “Giraffes”, which was exhibited later at the 1905 Salon d’Autumne and purchased by the French government. Returning to the United States in the early 1900s, he purchased a townhouse in New York City on East 19th Street. This townhouse, decorated with his own works, became a social center for the art community of the city. Whole living in the city, Chanler was a member of the New York State Assembly in 1904 and the sheriff of Dutchess County from 1907 to 1910.

Robert Chanler’s work involved the use of sculpted gesso, gilded finishes, and transparent glazes to produce highly ornamental and decorative designs. His work included paintings, fresco murals, stained glass windows, and architectural interiors whose compositions featured fantastical avian, jungle, and aquatic creatures, many overlaid with iridescent metallic finishes. However, Chanler’s specialty was exotic and brilliantly colored, multi-paneled, lacquered screens.

Chanler painted what interested and entertained him; his work attracted the wealthy Gilded Age patrons, which included Gertrude Vanderbilt and Mai Rogers Coe, and earned him both critical and popular acclaim at many exhibitions. He exhibited his works at the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris; his refined work, with its glazes and lacquered finishes, balanced the salon’s exhibition which was dominated by the bold colors and aggressive brushwork of the Fauvist painters. Chanler exhibited his painted screens, with great success, at the legendary “International Exhibition of Modern Art” in New York City, known as the 1913 Armory Show.

His elaborately painted screens were placed in Gallery A near the entrance of the show, where they immediately captured the attention of the arriving public and critics. Chanler exhibited twenty-five screens during the three weeks of the Manhattan show and at least nine at the show when it relocated to Chicago. Two of these exhibited screens were his five-panel “Hopi Indian Snake Dance”, one of two works that focused on Native American subjects, and the single-panel, oil on wood “Porcupines”, currently in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection.

Robert Winthrop Chanler was a member of the National Society of Mural Painters and a member of the New York Architectural League. Known for both his artistic prominence, bohemian lifestyle, and eccentricity, he was a close friend of novelist and poet Hervey White, who was one of the original founders of the Byrdcliffe Art Colony in Woodstock, New York. Founded in 1902, it is the oldest operating arts and crafts colony in America. Chanler became a member of the colony in the early 1920s and, toward the end of his life, owned a house in Woodstock, where he participated in local exhibitions. Robert Winthrop Chanler died, after having lain in a coma for twelve hours, at the Byrdcliffe Colony on October 24th in 1930.

Top Insert Image: Robert Winthrop Chanler, “Before the Wind”, 1919, Painted Screen, Private Collection

Middle Insert Image: Whitney Cox, “Robert Winthrop Chanler”, circa 1900, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Robert Winthrop Chanler and Hunt Diederich, “Mille Fleurs”, 1919, Painted Screen, Private Collection