émile fabry – ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

The Paintings of Antoine (Anton) Carte

Born at Mons, the provincial capital of Hainaut in December of 1886, Antoine (Anton) Carte was a Belgian painter and lithographer of the Flemish Expressionist movement who initially worked in the Symbolist style of the Sint-Martens-Latem artist colony. Along with painter and engraver Louis Buisseret, he founded the Groupe Nervia which supported new artists in Hainaut and fostered the traditional Gallo-Romance art of the ethnic French-speaking southern region of Belgium.

The son of a woodworker, Anton Carte was an apprentice at the studio of Belgian painter and designer Frantz Depooter for a period of fourteen years. He began his formal training at the Academy of Mons in 1897 and finished his training in 1908 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. It was at the Academy of Mons that Carte met Louis Buisseret, the man who would become his lifelong faithful friend. At the Royal Academy, both men studied under artists of the Symbolist movement: muralist painter Constant Montald, painter and mosaic artist Émile Fabry, and painter Jean Delville, a poet and leading exponent of the Belgian Idealist art movement during the 1890s.

A 1912 scholarship enabled Carte to travel to Paris where he stayed for two years at the studio of set and costume designer Léon Samoylovich Bakst and renowned French organ designer Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. During this period, Carte and Bakst worked for the Ballets Russes founded by Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev. Among other acquaintances in Paris, Carte came in contact with French Symbolist painter and theoretician Maurice Denis and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, a French muralist painter of allegorical and antiquity scenes.

After initially working in the Symbolist style, Anton Carte became a Flemish Expressionist after the First World War. Encouraged by Louis Buisseret, he exhibited a series of illustrations for a work by Belgian poet and playwright Emile Verhaeren at the 1917 Salon de l’Illustration in Brussels. Carte also illustrated editions of Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1895 “Massacre of the Innocents” and Marcel Wolfer’s 1914 “Writings of November”.

Carte exhibited with the Flemish Expressionists at the 1923 Paris Salon d’Automne, an annual multi-disciplinary event. In 1924, he traveled to the United States and, in the following year, had a major retrospective at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute. This show resulted in the sale of all sixty paintings presented at the show; it also ensured Carte’s success with the American public.

Although mostly known for his paintings, Anton Carte designed posters in the 1920s and 1930s which included work for the Aéro Club de Belgique, the 1930 International Exposition at Antwerpen/Anvers, and Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Carte also created stained-glass windows, most notably the 1927 windows for a newly constructed building at the University of Mons-Hainaut in Wallonia, Belgium. Between 1935 and 1940, he undertook numerous commissions with glassmaker F. P. Colpaert for stained-glass windows at the Church of Saint Philippe de Neri at the Abbey of La Cambre and a stained-glass series, “The Way of the Cross”, for the Notre Dame de la Cambre.

Carte, along with Buisseret and Léon Eeckman, founded the Expressionist art association Groupe Nervia in 1928. This group was committed to an intimate human art tinged with Symbolism and Italian art techniques. Carte began teaching in 1929 at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre in Brussels; however, as he did not agree with the first director’s ideas, Carte left in 1932 to become Professor of Decorative and Monumental Art at the Brussels Academy.

During the war years, Anton Carte finished the stained-glass windows he had started with F. P. Colpaert but later withdrew to his house in Wauthier Braine to find some calm. After the war, Carte painted frescoes in the chapel and in the Great Hall of Orval, a community within the French commune of Montigny-Lengrain. At the inauguration of his eight large stained-glass windows at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Koekelberg, Carte entrusted painter Jacques Maes with the completion of his project.

A complete artist throughout his life, Anton Carte produced drawings, engravings, book illustrations, posters, lithographs, banknotes, stamps, fresco designs, sculptures, stained glass windows, theater sets, ceramics and carpets. Tired at the age of sixty-seven, Anton Carte died on the fifteenth of February in 1954 at his home on the Rue de l’Ermitage in Ixelles, Belgium.

Notes: The Anton Carte Foundation has a more extensive biography of Carte’s life as well as an extensive collection of his artwork at their site: https://www.antocarte.art/en

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Anton Carte, L’Art Belge”, June 30 1920, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Anton Carte, “The Carter”, 1925-1930, Oil on Canvas, Anton Carte Foundation, Brussels, Belgium

Third Insert Image: Anton Carte, “Bénédiciié”, 1921, Oil on Canvas, 150 x 178 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Anton Carte, “The Boatman”, circa 1938, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 80 cm, Collection of the Province of Walloon Brabant

Botton Insert Image: Anto Carte, “The Passer (The Effort)”, 1920, Oil on Canvas, 130 x 90 cm, Private Collection

Émile Fabry, “Portrait de Suzanne (Fabry) et de Barthélémy”, 1920, Lithograph Colored with Gouache on Wove Paper, 37.5 x 46 cm, Private Collection, Belgium

Born in Verviers, Belgium in 1865, Émile Fabry was an artist who studied under portrait and landscape painter Jean-François Portaels, who is regarded as the founder of the Belgian Orientalist school. An influential artist of the Symbolist movement in Belgium, Fabry was a member of prominent artist groups such as Pour L’Art (Art for Art’s Sake) and La Rose+Croix, a series of Symbolist art salons hosted in Paris in the 1890s.

With the advent of World War One in continental Europe, Émile Fabry sought refuge in St. Ives, England. The issues of war and peace became recurrent themes in his work, continuing even after the battles had ended. In 1919, Fabry, along with Jean Delville, Albert Ciamberlani and Constant Montald, founded L’Art Monumental, an idealistic artist group which evolved from the Symbolist movement. Using classical forms and iconographic traditions, the group desired to elevate the spirit of the people by a shared sense of beauty in the construction of new monuments and public buildings.

Émile Fabry’s 1920 hand-colored lithograph “Portrait of Suzanne (Fabry) and Barthélémy” is an overlay image of two profiles, one of his son Barthélémy and one of his daughter Suzanne. Illustrative of his creative process, the soldier and young woman are depicted in an idealized way, with the stoic, long gaze reminiscent of the rigidity of a sculpture. Fabry used a indistinct, dotted technique of coloring, combining elements of Pointillism and Symbolism, to give the figures a sense of liveliness.

Émile Fabry regularly used his family members as models for his work. There is an existing photo of Suzanne Fabry posing for this work which shows how Fabry focused his composition on her profile. Drawn to the subject of the war on several occasions, Fabry used his own children as models for this work to create a more personal portrayal of the war.

In addition to his paintings, Émile Fabry did the decorative mosaic work in pavilions of the 1880 National Exhibition at the Cinquanteniare of Brussels and, with Belgian architect Victor Horta, the decorations in the large Art Nouveau townhouse, the Hotel Solvay. In 1932, Émile Fabry was made a Commander in the Order of Leopold, the oldest and highest order in Belgium, founded by King Leopold in 1832. He died in 1966 at the age of one hundred and one years old.

Tope Insert Image: Émile Fabry, “Printemps”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 219 x 130 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Émile Fabry, “The Faun’s Song”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 138.1 x 122.5 cm, Private Collection