Impressionism Exhibit at the Hôtel de Ville

NEWSFLASH!

From now until July 30, a special exhibit of the works of impressionism owed by the Musée D'Orsay will be hanging at Paris' city hall, the Hôtel de Ville.

Since late 2009, the Musée D'Orsay has been undergoing renovations to its upper-most floors, including level 5 where many of the works of impressionism and post-impression are housed. It's still worth the visit to this grand museum; levels 0-4 are open and teeming with visitors, as is the current retropspective on the works of Edouard Manet. But if late impressionism is what you're after, head on over to the Hôtel de Ville. 

The city hall exhibit highlights the development of modern Paris, the Paris we know today, constructed from the time of Napoleon III and Haussmann through the commencement of WWI.

Don't miss this rare opportunity to see the work of some of the most famous impressionists, as well as other great but lesser-known artists, in this smaller, more intimate, but no less dramatic setting.

The best part is: The exhibit is free!

Image: Sarah B. Towle, 2011.



Claude Monet: The Angry Years

 

Paris' current talk-of-the-town exhibit – a 200-piece retrospective of the work of Claude Monet – is now in its final days at the Grand Palais.  I managed to score four tickets to this sold-out show and bundle up the Uber-mensch, the Lucky-one-and-only (Loo), and her beau Beau (le BB) for a fun afternoon of French history and culture. 

Though we are already quite familiar with Monet’s work – being semi-regular visitors to Giverny, where we love to bike to the gardens from the train, as well as to our neighborhood Musée Marmottan Monet, where a younger Loo loved to go after school to make small-scale pastels of Monet’s grand Nympheas – the exhibit was well worth the visit.  It was fascinating, for example, to view the artist’s now far-flung multiple studies of a single subject all hanging side by side.  Examples of this include the Rouen Cathedral series; paintings of London’s Houses of Parliament and Charing Cross Bridge; his poplar trees and Normandy haystacks.

From the very start of his artistic career, Monet’s main subject of painterly interest was light and how it danced upon, stroked and gave character to the objects before him.  His multiple studies express precisely how light, illusive and forever changing, offers us a different impression of life at any one moment on any given day due to atmospheric shifts and their effects on our senses of perception. 

Monet worked quickly, applying paint directly to canvas to record his impression of light's fleeting interaction with nature and object.  He is therefore honored as the Founder of French Impressionism.  Indeed, his 1873 series, Impression, Sunrise, gave the style its name.  He captured scenes with immediacy, before the light and his sensation had a chance to change.  He often worked on several canvasses at a time, moving from one to the other as the light softened or darkened with the time of day or become blotted out all together by cloud or fog or rain.

But as our little group wandered through the exhibit, we were struck by a small collection of paintings completed late in the artist's life: the weeping willows and Japanese bridge of 1918-24.  These were different from the majority of Monet’s other works in their use of bold reds, oranges, and yellows applied in thick paint with aggressive strokes and wild, curvy lines.  These paintings, hot and unrelenting, seemed to vibrate with anger in their frames as if wanting to explode off the wall.

We couldn’t help but wonder at the extraordinary difference between these works versus a lifetime of paintings characterized by rich purples, vibrant greens and soothing blues.  Here’s what I’ve managed to piece together by way of explanation:  

In 1911, Monet lost his second wife, Alice.  Not long after, in 1914, he faced the death of his eldest son, Jean.  Already shattered by these personal loses, Monet was plunged further into depression with the start of the First World War and the destruction and dissolution of life as he knew it.  Additionally, a cataract formed over one of his eyes at that time, causing Monet to cease painting, which could not have helped his depression. Finally, his friend Georges Clemenceau encouraged Monet to paint again as a way to express his mourning.  The weeping willows, painted in homage to the fallen soldiers, may well have been part of this period of therapy. 

Another theory is that the cataracts effected how Monet perceived light, resulting in a general reddish tone in his vision and therefore in his painting.  Indeed, in 1923, the artist underwent two operations to remove his cataracts.  After that, his palette returned to purple, green and blue hues once again, as he was able to ascertain ultraviolet wavelengths he could not see with the cataracts.  Then again, the war now over and the worst of his grieving behind him, perhaps he had learned to cope with the loss of loved ones and a world forever transformed.

In all events, Monet lived a long life and left us with an enduring and important legacy of work.  A prolific and dedicated artist, he was a participant and a leader at a watershed moment of both history and art.  The Grand Palais exhibit reminds us most expertly that Claude Monet will continue to be remembered for decades to come. 

All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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Toulouse-Lautrec Advertises Montmartre Cafés

Yesterday, I joined my friends from Paris Art Studies to view Hommages à Toulouse-Lautrec: a celebration of the artist’s career as a poster artist, now hanging at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs. Among the many posters by contemporary artists honoring the great impressionist master, 26 of Toulouse-Lautrec’s 31 own prints are on exhibit. These images offer iconic souvenirs of the people and places of Lautrec’s Belle Époque. They give us incomparable insights into the world in which Lautrec worked and lived.

Take this poster of Cancan dancer, Louis Weber, who gained the nickname La Goulue, the glutton, from her habit of grabbing patrons’ drinks and downing their contents as she danced about the Moulin Rouge. She danced there with a wine merchant named Jacques Renaudin who took the stage name “Valentin le Désossé” (Valentin the de-boned) because of his sinewy, boneless way of moving. Lautrec features Valentin in the foreground of this advertising poster for the Moulin Rouge, where the artist was a regular customer (he even had a reserved table). He captures Valentin’s rubber band-like motions with a simple, bold brushstroke.

Valentin and La Goulue performed on the dance hall floor, rather than on a stage, as the audience, mostly male, milled about them. Notice how Lautrec pictures La Goulue lifting her leg. It was, indeed, her signature move to tease the spectators by dancing on one foot and swirling her dress until she was ready, with a quick upward flick her foot, to kick off a gentleman’s hat, thus revealing her heart-embroidered panties underneath.

Another favorite Moulin Rouge dancer, and a dear friend of Toulouse-Lautrec was Jane Avril. Jane was the illegitimate daughter of an Italian nobleman and a Paris society girl. Jane was more beautiful and more stylish than La Goulue, the daughter of a laundress who started her career wearing the “borrowed” clothes of her mother’s clients. Jane, on the other hand, dressed the part of a refined lady, though her mother cast her off as a lunatic when Jane was only 16. She perfected a more prudish, yet no less provocative, style of the Cancan than that of La Goulue. Lautrec shows this in his posters depicting her in the plumbed hats that punctuated her costume, exposing only her slender lower leg, and puckering her lips as if ready to offer a kiss.

The men of the Moulin Rouge loved Jane Avril, who was often melancholy and withdrawn even in the constant commotion of the dance hall. Perhaps they were drawn to what they knew they could never have. We see Jane in this picture watching Yvette Guilbert, the Edith Piaf of her day, at the tiny café-concert, the Divan Japonais. Lautrec gives us Guilbert in her trademark blank gloves. And we can see by her pose and her locked arms covering the length of her torso that we will get no glimpse of undergarments from her.

Finally, Lautrec provides us clues into the character of Aristide Bruant, a former railway clerk turned popular singer known for his crude, bawdy songs and his propensity to insult the audience. No matter. They always came back for more.

Bruant started his career at the still celebrated Chat Noir (Black Cat), which later became his own café, the Mirliton, advertised here. Thanks to Lautrec, we know that Bruant held openly revolutionary views, as expressed by his red scarf and wide-brimmed hat; that he identified with the working-man rather than the bourgeoisie, as shown through his rough walking stick in lieu of a polished cane; and that he was a bit of a dandy, as revealed by his draped, black cloak.

Bruant was one of Lautrec’s first friends in Montmarte, where the artist made his Paris home. And Lautrec was the one person whom Bruant refused to insult. Indeed, when Henri Toulouse-Lautrec entered the Mirliton, Bruant would quiet the house and proclaim, “Here comes the great painter Toulouse-Lautrec…”

In his short lifetime of 36 years, and a career spanning less than 20, Toulouse-Lautrec left us 737 canvases, 275 watercolors, 363 prints and posters, 5,084 drawings, ceramic works, stained glass, and an unknown number of lost works. Step into his images for a trip back in time to Paris of the Belle Époque and the age of impressionism.

The exhibit, Hommages à Toulouse-Lautrec, runs through 3 January 2010.

Images:

Moulin Rouge, La Goulue, 1891, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Jane Avril au Jardin de Paris, 1892, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Divan Japonais, 1893, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret, 1892-3, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Sources:

http://www.lautrec.info/La-Goulue.html

Paris Art Studies, http://www.parisartstudies.com/