Tag: france

Leon Joseph-Florentine Bonnat

Leon Joseph-Florentine Bonnat, “Study for Jacob Wrestling with the Angel”, 1876, Pencil and Black Chalk on Paper, 14 x 20 Inches, Dahesh Museum of Art, New York

This is either a highly finished study for, or a variant after, a painting that Bonnat exhibited at the Salon in 1876, current location unknown. With its emphasis on tensed musculature and the interaction of anatomical forms, this work illustrates perfectly how integral the numerous life drawings of nude male models were to an artist’s formation of fully realized narrative compositions.

As an artist and a teacher, Bonnat was adamant in the fundamental importance of skillful drawing. In a letter translated and published in The American Magazine of Art in 1916, Bonnat declared: “Drawing and form: from those foundations we never stray; we cannot, we ought not to, because they are the conditions absolutely requisite to eternal beauty; and from antique art to contemporary, in passing through all the great epochs…it is by form and drawing alone that the world has been enriched with so many masterpieces.”

Loomis Dean, “Gene Kelly”

Loomis Dean, “Gene Kelly, France”, 1960, Printed in Life Magazine

Loomis Dean was a veteran Life Magazine photographer who had a five-decade long career. He studied photography at the Eastman School of Photography in Rochester, New York. His first photography job was in 1938 working as an advance man and photographer for Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. Dean was an Army Air Force photographer during World War Two.

In 1947, Loomis Dean joined the staff of Life Magazine, shooting images of celebrities, royal weddings, fashion shows, riots, and Mideast wars. He joined Life’s Paris bureau in 1956. This image, taken by Loomis Dean in 1960, shows Gene Kelly at dinner after his triumph performance at the Paris Opera. To his left is seated prima ballerina Claude Bessy, with her chin on her hands.

Eugene Delacroix

Eugene Delacroix, “The Baroque of Dante”, 1822, Oil on Canvas, Louvre, Paris

The “Baroque of Dante”, also known as “Dante and Virgil in Hell”, is the first major painting by French artist Eugene Delacroix, signaling a shift in the character of narrative painting from Neo-Classicism towards the Romantic Movement. It was completed for the opening of the Salon in 1822 and currently hangs for viewing in the Musee du Louvre in Paris.

The arrangement of figures is for the most part compliant with the tenets of the cool, reflective Neo-Classicism that had dominated French painting for nearly four decades. There is a group of central upright figures, and a rational arrangement of subsidiary figures, all in horizontal planes, and observing studied poses.

Although the composition is conventional, the painting in some important respects broke unmistakably free of the French Neo-Classical tradition. The painting explores the psychological states of the individuals it depicts, and uses compact, dramatic contrasts to highlight their different responses to their respective predicaments. There is neither comfort nor a place of refuge in the painting’s world of rage, insanity and despair.

The drops of water running down the bodies of the damned are painted in a manner seldom seen up to and including the early nineteenth century. Four different, unmixed pigments, in discretely applied quantities comprise the image of one drop and its shadow. White is used for highlighting, strokes of yellow and green respectively denote the length of the drop, and the shadow is red.

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet, “Casino la Colle”, November 1955, Oil on Canvas Collage on Canvas, 23 x 28 Inches, Private Collection

Jean Dubuffet was an integral French artist known for his primal paintings and sculptures of vernacular subjects. His adoption of the term Art Brut or raw art, referred to the art of children, prisoners, and the mentally ill, was a reaction to what he called art culturel or refined art. It was his desire to break from tradition by implementing rudimentary mark making and emulsions made from sand, tar, and trash.

“A work of art is only of interest, in my opinion, when it is an immediate and direct projection of what is happening in the depth of a person’s being. It is my belief that only in this Art Brut can we find the natural and normal processes of artistic creation in their pure and elementary state.” – Jean Dubuffet

Jean-Daniel Allanche 

Art Brut: Jean-Daniel Allanche

Born in Tunisia, Jean-Daniel Allanche returned to France for his studies, and ultimately became a professor of physics at the Faculty of Sciences Paris 7. In 1975 he bought an apartment on the Rue des Ciseaux, a small street in Paris’s central area of Saint-Germain.

In the late 1970s Allanche began embellishing his apartment with his paintings. After working for years, ultimately all available surfaces, including the ceilings, floors, cabinet doors, and step treads, along with the walls, were covered with polychrome works featuring whimsical motifs.

There are also occasional texts interspersed with the visuals, offering Allanche’s personal views, and on one of the doors he has painted his surname. The majority of the paintings, however, appear to have a more targeted decorative function; this is in line with a notation in one of his vast collection of notebooks, where he wrote that he believed he had managed to reveal the intimate relationship between musical harmony and colors.

Others of his notebooks included additional texts and aphorisms, but also hundreds of pages with sequences of numbers, referencing Allanche’s passion for gambling and his efforts, as a professor of physics, to model disorder.

Although Allanche’s artistic activity must have played an important role in his life, he was not very talkative about it, so his decorated apartment remained largely unknown. After Allanche died in Paris in August 2015, his heirs decided that they would retain it as a private apartment. Removable frescoed elements such as the doors have been preserved and the remainder of the apartment has been basically restored to its original state.

Odile Decq

Odile Decq, Fangshan Tangshan National Geopark Museum, Nanjing, China

The Fangshan Tangshan National Geopark, near the city of Nanjing, is a geological and paleo-archaeological museum. This geological museum can be found in the beautiful valley between Tangshan and Fangshan, two volcanic mountains. Not only does the museum reveal a 700-million-year slice of earth’s geological history, but the discovery of ancient hominid remains in a cave here in the 1950s sparked worldwide speculation about the early origins of mankind.

The architect of the project was Odile Decq, the founder of Studio Odile Decq. She is an award-winning French architect, urban planner and academic. She graduated in 1978 from Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Architecture de Paris- La Villette with a diploma in Urban Planning. Okile Decq was awarded the Golden Lion of Architecture during the Venice Biennale in 1996.

Since 1992, Odile Decq has been a professor at the Ecole Soeciale d’Architecture in Paris where she was elected head of the Department of Architecture in 2007. She left in 2012, opeining her own school, the Confluence Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Architecture, in Lyon, France. The Institute, cofounded with architect Matteo Cainer, opened in 2014.

Arnald Amar, “Salvacci Denducci Pace”

Armand Amar, “Salvacci Denducci Pace” from the Album “Bab’Aziz”

Armand Amar is a French composer who grew up in Morocco. He plays congas, the tabla and the zarb. His works are focused particularly on Eastern music. He is the author of several ballets and soundtrack films such as “The Trail”, “Days of Glory”, “Earth from Above”, and “Home’. In 1994 he founded the label Long Distance with his partners Alain Weber and Peter Gabriel.

Raymond Voinquel, “The Actor Jean Marais”

Raymond Voinquel, “The Actor Jean Marais”, circa 1939, Silver Gelatin Print

Jean Marais was born Jean Alfred Villain-Marais in Cherboug, France, In 1913. He was a popular French cinema actor and director who played over 100 roles in film and on television. Marais was also known for his many talents as a writer, painter and sculptor.

Source: artfreyparis

Emile Antoine Bourdelle

 

Photographer Unknown, “Emile Antoine Bourdelle and Model for His Bronze Herakles the Archer”, circa 1905, Gelatin Silver Print

Trained first in Montauban and then in Toulouse, Emile Bourdelle started work as an assistant in Rodin’s studio. The two men were bound together by mutual admiration and respect, even if Bourdelle’s desire for synthesis and construction in planes soon opposed him to Rodin’s analytical modelling.

From 1905, Bourdelle sought to simplify his lines: “Contain, maintain and master are the rules of construction,” he told his pupils over and over again. He looked to mythology for many of his subjects such as “Hercules the Archer” which enabled him to experiment on a large scale. In his own terms, Apollo was “undertaken in an attempt to master the purest aspect of my deep vision, going far beyond all past flights, I brought to it – more than human blood, bone, cartilage and muscles – the enveloping structure of its forces.”

Not only the hero’s victory over the monsters, but also Bourdelle’s victory over his own high-spirited inspiration, this work is remarkable both for its tension and for its balanced construction. The dynamics come from the interaction of solids and voids, brutal force and balance. The nude figure denotes power, high-strung energy, pulled taut between the arm bending the bow and the foot braced against the rock. The references to primitive Greek sculpture and Roman art – the almond shaped eyes, the nose extending in a straight line from the forehead, jutting cheekbones and brows – act as catalyst for a modern approach.

The gilded bronze sculpture “Hercules Killing the Birds of Lake Stymphalis” was completed in 1909. It is in the collection of the Musee d’Orsay, France.

Jean-Antoine Watteau

Jean-Antoine Watteau, “Pierrot, dit Autrefois Gilles”, 1718-19, Oil on Canvas, 184.5 × 149.5 cm, Musée du Louvre

Pierrot is  one of the most famous characters in Italian comedy. The theme of this painting could come from the experience of Watteau as a student of Claude Gillot, who painted among others many sets of theater. The current explanation is that the large format of the painting and its painting would have originated from an order intended to be the sign of the coffee of the former actor Belloni.

The decentering of the main character, considered a daring for the time, is in fact not the initial composition of the painting. Observations revealed ancient traces of a frame that almost centered Pierrot’s figure, showing that the canvas was subsequetly cut. His observation in grazing light highlights ancient traces of a frame that was almost in the center of Pierrot’s figure, the painting having subsequently been cut on one side.

Jean-Antoine Watteau was a French painter whose brief career spurred the revival of interest in color and movement, as seen in the tradition of Rubens and Correggio. He revitalized the waning Baroque style, shifting it to the less severe, more naturalistic, less formal classical Rococo. He is credited with inventing the genre of “fetes galantes”, scenes of bucolic and idyllic charm, with a theatrical air. Some of his best know works were drawn from the world of Italian comedy and ballet.

Sickly and physically frail since childhood, Watteau died at the estate of his patron in 1721 from tuberculosis at the eary age of thirty six. His influence on the arts, including costume, music, and decorative arts, was more extensive than that of any other 18th cetury artist.