Pierre Dubreuil and Hans Gött: two pupils of Henri Matisse

While most of Henri Matisse's close relationships with other artists were as friend and colleague, sharing ideas and going on joint painting expeditions (for instance in Collioure with Derain in 1906, in Tangier with Marquet and Camoin in 1912, in La Goulette with Étienne Bouchaud in 1926), he also had various formal and informal master-pupil relationships. Most notably, between 1908 and 1912 he ran the Académie Matisse. Many of the students there were Scandinavian, of whom the stars were Sigrid Hjertén, Isaac Grünewald and Per Krohg, but there were also Americans (Max Weber, Alfred Maurer), Germans (Hans Purrmann) and even Britons (Matthew Smith). At this time Matisse had much more respect internationally than he commanded at home, and there was a notable lack of French students at the Académie Matisse. One young French artist who did attend was Pierre Dubreuil. I'm prompted to write about him because of the almost simultaneous acquisition of his engraving Sarah la baigneuse, and the etching Schlafendes Mädchen by Hans Gött. Two sensuous reclining nudes, both resonating with Matisse's vision of an art of luxe, calme, et volupté. Gött was not a student at the Académie Matisse, but instead benefited from informal lessons in Matisse's atelier in 1919.

Pierre Dubreuil, Sarah la baigneuse

Engraving, 1930

Pierre Dubreuil was born in Quimper, Brittany, in 1891. After initial studies in Vannes, and three months at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Dubreuil entered the Académie Matisse in 1908, and remained there until Matisse dissolved the school in spring 1912. His artistic career was stalled by World War One. First military service and then war mobilization stole seven years from his artistic development. Dubreuil did not exhibit until 1921, after which he was a regular at the Salons des Artistes Indépendants, d'Automne, and des Tuileries. As a printmaker, his preferred medium was the copper engraving, though he also produced drypoints, etchings, and wood engravings. He was president of the Société des Peintres-Graveurs Français, and a member of the Peintres-Graveurs Indépendants.

Pierre Dubreuil, On n'est pas heureux qu'avec une bonne femme 

Engraving, 1930

As well as painting and printmaking, Pierre Dubreuil painted murals and designed tapestries, and illustrated a number of books, including works by Restif de la Bretonne, Paul Valéry, Hugues Rebell, and Henri de Regnier. Alongside Matisse, he contributed original prints to the two great collaborative livres d'artiste of the 1930s and 40s, Paris 1937 and Alternance.

Pierre Dubreuil, La Double Maîtresse

Wood engraving, 1930

In 1944 Dubreuil illustrated La Nichina, a novel by the dissolute Hugues Rebell about a sixteenth-century Venetian courtisan, with numerous engravings. The book was published in a fairly large edition of 970 copies, of which 930 were on vélin de Rives, and 40 on vergé de Hollande. The 40 on Hollande laid paper also had a supplementary suite of the engravings, printed in sanguine on china paper. The engravings were printed by Paul Haasen.

Pierre Dubreuil, La Nichina (reclining)

Engraving, 1944

Examples in sanguine on chine and in black on vergé de Hollande

Pierre Dubreuil, Venice, Campanile di San Marco

Engraving, 1944

Pierre Dubreuil, Venice

Engraving, 1944

Pierre Dubreuil, Au soleil levant

Engraving, 1944

Pierre Dubreuil, Filles déguisées en page

Engraving, 1944

Pierre Dubreuil died in Paris in 1970. In 1991 J.-P. Zingg published the first monograph on his work, Pierre Dubreuil. Female bathers were one of his most consistent themes, culminating in a series of paintings between 1941 and 1957 of nude bathers discreetly shadowed beneath trees.

Hans Gött, Schlafendes Mädchen

Etching, 1924

Hans Gött (sometimes spelled Hanns Gött) was born in 1883. He is known as a painter of women, especially nudes and intimate portraits in domestic settings. This is not surprising as, after studying at the Munich Academy, Hans Gött went to Paris in 1919 to study in the atelier of Henri Matisse, whose work remained a strong influence on Gött's art.

Hans Gött, Ars Amatoria I (Romulus with a Sabine woman)

Lithograph, 1920

Hans Gött, Ars Amatoria II (Pasiphae and the bull)

Lithograph, 1920

Hans Gött, Ars Amatoria IV (Daedalus and Icarus)

Lithograph, 1920

Hans Gött, Ars Amatoria VII (Lovers)

Lithograph, 1920

Hans Gött, Remedia Amoris II (Phyllis)

Lithograph, 1920

As a printmaker, Hans Gött worked in both etching and lithography. Among his lithographs are ten made for an edition of Ovid's Ars Amatoria published in 1920; on the title page the artist is credited as Hanns Gött. These witty lithographs show the influence of Matisse's line, though in my view they are too much in thrall to line, and make poor use of lithography's tonal effects. It's as if the artist was expecting to illustrate the text in etching. Hans Gött lived and worked in Munich, and died in 1973.

Biffins de la zone

Noël Bureau, Les Athlètes
Original wood engraving, 1933

Just to cheer us all up after that last post, I thought I’d write something about the artist who provided the opening image, the modernist poet Noël Bureau.


Marcel Gromaire, Portrait of Noël Bureau
Original etching, 1930

Bureau was a quintessential dilettante – a poet, essayist, art critic, and composer of music. He moved in artistic circles in the Bohemian Montmartre that he loved, and was friends with many artists of the between-the-wars School of Paris, notably Marcel Gromaire, Tadé Makowski, Pierre Dubreuil, Édouard Goerg, Alexandre Ralli, Per Krohg, and Jean-Gabriel Daragnès. Daragnès provided a Cubist-inspired etched frontispiece for Bureau’s 1945 collection Rigeurs, the title sequence of which is dedicated to Janine and Jean-Gabriel Daragnès.


Jean-Gabriel Daragnès, Rigeurs
Original etching, 1945

Which of these artist friends taught Noël Bureau to make wood engravings is uncertain, but it was likely Gromaire, who made his own first wood engravings for Bureau's 1925 collection of prose poems, Ruptures, and also etched a portrait of the poet. One of Gromaire’s cuts for Ruptures shows a juggler, and foreshadows the subject that Bureau would make his own, the circus.


Marcel Gromaire, Juggler
Original wood engraving, 1925

The circus had, of course, been a popular subject for art since the days of Toulouse-Lautrec and Ibels. Montmartre artists such as Gustave Assire had the Cirque Medrano on their doorstep, and circus acts also featured in the shows at nightclubs such as the Folies Bergère, as this copper engraving by Hervé Baille shows.


Hervé Baille, Clowns at the Folies Bergère
Original copper engraving, 1945

Another inspiration for Bureau's naïvely exuberant wood engravings of the circus was the work of the self-taught artist Camille Bombois. Bombois was an ex-circus strongman and wrestler, who worked in a printing factory at night and painted by day, mainly circus motifs. In 1922 Noël Bureau spotted his work hanging on the railings in the Place du Tertre and championed him as a master of naïve art, an opinion which holds good today. Bombois contributed a sketch to Bureau’s Chapeau chinois in 1929. It was no doubt partly his admiration for the self-taught Bombois that gave Bureau the courage to try his own hand at the graphic arts.


Noël Bureau, Cirque
Original wood engraving, 1933

Bureau’s collection of woodcuts and prose poems, Cirque, was printed in 1933 by Marcel Seheur in an edition of 90 copies, published by Éditions de la Girafe. My copy has a warm gift inscription from Noël Bureau dated 1957, so I think one can confidently say it was not an immediate sell-out. But I think it’s great – robust and funny and full of verve.


Noël Bureau, Éléphant musicien
Original wood engraving, 1933

I have not been able to find dates of either birth or death for Bureau. The first publication I can find trace of is Projections impulsives in 1916; the last, Au profit du silence, in 1947. He certainly lived until 1957, as the inscription in my copy of Cirque attests. As a writer, he seems to have been completely forgotten. My own feeling is that he probably had private means, allowing him to behave in all the arts as an elegant amateur – for instance, he privately published his own chamber music, with a preface by Max Jacob, and I think one can assume that he also financed the publication of Cirque.


Noël Bureau, Joueur de jazz
Original wood engraving, 1933

Besides Cirque, Ruptures, and Rigeurs, I have one further book by Noël Bureau, this one published as well as printed by Marcel Seheur. The title is Marché aux puces: poèmes en prose accompagnés de 6 eaux-fortes originales. This book has one of my favourite dedications of all time. It reads: À mes collaborateurs: peintres-graveurs, imprimeurs et biffins de la zone. A biffin is a rag-and-bone man. The etchings in this book are by Gromaire, Goerg, Makowski, Dubreuil, Ralli, and Krohg. I have already reproduced Gromaire’s frontispiece portrait above (I have no idea, by the way, why Gromaire has etched the number 97 next to his initial in the plate; it’s certainly not the date). So here are the others, with no further ado.


Édouard Goerg, Marché aux puces
Original etching, 1930


Tadé Makowski, Marché aux puces
Original etching, 1930


Pierre Dubreuil, Marché aux puces
Original etching, 1930


Alexandre Ralli, Marché aux puces
Original etching, 1930


Per Krohg, Marché aux puces
Original etching, 1930