Edouard Chimot and the Lost Girls of Montmartre

It’s a while since I posted about the master of the Art Deco nude, Édouard Chimot. Of course if Chimot were simply a depictor of the nude, there wouldn’t be much to say about him—boudoir pictures are boudoir pictures, and that’s it. But Chimot is a much more complex artist than that—one in whom the twin themes of Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death, are inextricably intertwined.

Édouard Chimot, Le café-concert maudit

Colour etching with aquatint for La montée aux enfers, 1920

Of course Love sells better than Death, so sensuous nudes inevitably predominate in Édouard Chimot’s work. But his obsession with prostitutes, drug addicts, and good girls gone bad, means that the spectre of death and destitution hovers behind and around Chimot’s nudes, turning them from decorative erotica into perverse memento mori. They are women “soumises à leurs passions mortelles et délicieuses”, as the critic André Warnod put it.

Édouard Chimot, La Mort

Etching with aquatint for L'enfer, 1921

In my previous post, The fast rise and long slow fall of Édouard Chimot, I mentioned that Chimot had apparently been commissioned in 1903 as architect of the Villa Lysis in Capri, for the dissolute Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen. It seems from the current Wikipedia entry on the Villa Lysis that this is not quite the case, based on a study of Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen’s correspondence with Chimot; Chimot’s role was more likely that of interior decorator. In a comment on my earlier post, Martin Stone notes that “he was also the art director of Fersen's review Akedemos (1909-1910).” The inscription above the door of the Villa Lysis, AMORI ET DOLORI SACRUM, certainly shows that Édouard Chimont and Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen were kindred spirits, for the same words could also be inscribed above Chimot’s work: A Shrine to Love and Sorrow.

Édouard Chimot, L'enfer

Etching with aquatint for L'enfer, 1921

When speaking of the art of Édouard Chimot in the context of this post, I am speaking only of the work created before the Wall Street Crash. Anything published after 1931 (allowing for projects already in the pipeline to emerge) is the work of a lesser, lighter artist. The intensity and complexity of Chimot’s work in the 1920s is completely missing.

Édouard Chimot, Ce sont les autres qui meurent

Etching with aquatint for L'enfer, 1921

All the images in this post are etchings with aquatint published between 1919 and 1922, the years when Chimot exploded onto the Paris art scene. These established him as a central figure in the world of printmaking and fine press publishing. He was the artistic director of the publications of both La Roseraie (the atelier and publishing house of Roger Lacourière) and of Les Éditions d’Art Devambez. In the latter role, especially, Chimot was crucial to the artistic development of many important artists of the twenties.

Édouard Chimot, Les Après-Midi de Montmartre

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

Édouard Chimot, Le rouge et le noir

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

The etchings that made Chimot’s name, published in 1919 as Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, are precious evidence of Chimot’s pre-war work. They were made in 1913, but publication was delayed by the Great War. You can see that the hairstyles and clothes (when worn) are quite different from the 1920s etchings. The difference in style is not huge, but in these early etchings one can still see the influence of Symbolists such as Félicien Rops, Louis Legrand, Armand Rassenfosse, and Henri Thomas. Édouard Chimot was to take the aesthetic of these artists into the twenties, and blend it seamlessly with the glittering curves of Art Deco.

Édouard Chimot, Moulin Rouge

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

Édouard Chimot, La fille et sa mère

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

The Après-Midi de Montmartre etchings were printed on a hand press by Eugène Delâtre, in an edition of 170 copies. I love the connection they make right back from the post-war world into the dying days of the Belle Époque.

Édouard Chimot, Opium

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

Édouard Chimot, Épave

Etching with aquatint for Les Après-Midi de Montmartre, 1919

After the war, Édouard Chimot established himself in an atelier in the rue Amphère in Montmartre. The atmosphere there is well described by Chimot’s close friend, the poet Maurice Magre, in Magre’s introduction to Chimot’s edition of Jean de Tinan’s La Petite Jeanne pâle. Magre writes, “L’atelier de Chimot est un coin de Paris où Montmartre d’aujourd’hui se condence à certaines heures, se cristallise, donne tout son comique, toute sa couleur et parfois toute sa peine. C’est toujours la pensée d’un individu qui crée et qui groupe. C’est la pensée de Chimot, son amour pour cette forme de l’existence parisienne qui a créé le miroir vivant, aux facettes varies, qui donne en tournant ces images qui ne sont jamais banales et qui toutes sont representatives.”

Édouard Chimot, Soirs d'opium

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Édouard Chimot, Est-ce celle que j'aime

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Édouard Chimot, Dans la fumée bleue

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Chimot’s “living mirror” of Bohemian life in Paris is never more truly reflective than in his etchings for Maurice Magre’s 1921 collection of poems, Les soirs d’opium. These colour etchings with aquatint were, like the similar etchings for Magre’s La montée aux enfers a year earlier, printed by Eugène Delâtre with Chimot’s assistance. Édouard Chimot was not by nature a colourist, and the wonderfully subtle tonalities of the etchings for both these projects are probably attributable to Delâtre, a master printer of colour etchings à la poupée. Certainly Chimot never achieved any colour effects like this again.

Édouard Chimot, Volupté

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Édouard Chimot, Rosaire de souvenirs

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Édouard Chimot, À une amie

Colour etching with aquatint for Les soirs d'opium, 1921

Les soirs d’opium was published in an edition of 513 copies by L’Édition (Georges Briffaut); the etchings are printed on wove paper with the watermarks MBM and J. Perrigo.

Édouard Chimot, La petite Jeanne pâle

Colour etching with aquatint for La Petite Jeanne pâle, 1922

Édouard Chimot, Noctambulisme

Etching with aquatint for La Petite Jeanne pâle, 1922

Édouard Chimot, Quatre heures du matin

Etching with aquatint for La Petite Jeanne pâle, 1922

La Petite Jeanne pâle, already mentioned above, was published in 1922 by Éditions Léo Delteil in an edition of 393 copies. The etchings were not printed by Delâtre, but at La Roseraie by Philippe Molinié and Eugène Monnard under the direction of the artist.

Édouard Chimot, Sa mince visage parmi l'ébouriffment des cheveux de soie frisée

Etching with aquatint for La Petite Jeanne pâle, 1922

Édouard Chimot, Les rideaux d'arbres dépouillés rétrécissent doucement l'horizon

Etching with aquatint for La Petite Jeanne pâle, 1922

Édouard Chimot only spent a very few years at peak velocity. His art is at its best in these few years after the Great War. After about 1922, Chimot’s work becomes slowly more facile and crowd-pleasing. He remains a really interesting artist right through the 1920s, with flashes of real brilliance, especially in etchings close to his heart, such as those for Maurice Magre’s Les belles de nuit in 1927. But if you are looking for the purest of the impure, look no further than the art of Édouard Chimot, 1919-1922.

Tears of rage, tears of grief: Käthe Kollwitz and her circle

Käthe Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn-Becker are the two most famous female artists in early twentieth-century Germany, but they were by no means alone: there are plenty of interesting women working alongside them. Gabriele Münter, Jacoba van Heemskerck, and Marianne von Werefkin are just three of the more well-known names. As I've recently acquired two etchings by Kollwitz, I thought I'd post these alongside some work by other female artists of the period with less of a public profile.

Käthe Kollwitz was born Käthe Schmidt in Königsberg in 1867. She made her initial studies at an art school for women in Berlin, where her teacher was Karl Stauffer-Bern; she then went to the Women's Art School in Munich. From 1891 she lived and worked in Berlin, where her husband Karl was a doctor. Kollwitz is widely recognised as one of the most important etchers of her day. Her art expresses a profound sympathy with the lives of the poor, as in her early masterworks for the series The Revolt of the Weavers.

Käthe Kollwitz, Der Sturm (The Riot)

Etching for The Revolt of the Weavers, 1897

Ref: Klipstein 33

Two further themes in the work of Käthe Kollwitz are her loathing of war and the suffering it brings (she herself lost both of her sons to the great conflicts of the twentieth century), and her profound self-questioning, in a sequence of some 50 self-portraits. I can't think of any artist other than Rembrandt who has examined themselves with such unflinching honesty as Käthe Kollwitz. The sense of anguish in the self-portrait below is almost tangible.

Käthe Kollwitz,  Selbstbildnis, mit der Hand an der Stirn (Self-portrait, hand at the forehead)

Etching, 1910

Ref: Klistein 106 iib

Clara Siewert, who was born in 1862, was a close friend of Käthe Kollwitz, with whom she studied under Karl Stauffer-Bern. When Clara Siewert moved to Berlin in 1900 she lived in the same house as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein; she also good friends with Max Slevogt and Lovis Corinth. Clara Siewert was born in Budda, East Prussia, and died in Berlin.

Clara Siewert, Junges Mädchen (Young Girl)

Lithograph, 1908

Although (as with Kollwitz) much of her work was destroyed in WWII when her studio was hit by a bomb, the art of Clara Siewert is being rediscovered today, amid new interest in the work of women artists. There was a retrospective exhibition with catalogue in 2008: "Clara Siewert - zwischen Traum und Wirklichkeit" in the Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, Regensburg. Like Käthe Kollwitz, Clara Siewert died in 1945, having lived through two cataclysmic world wars and endured the miseries of the Third Reich.

Sella Hasse, Kohlenlöschen im Schnee (Unloading Coal in the Snow)

Etching, 1913

The artist Sella Hasse was born in Bitterfeld in 1878, and died in Berlin in 1863. She studied under Walter Leistikow, Franz Skarbina, and Lovis Corinth. Sella Hasse was a socially-committed artist, who became a close friend of Käthe Kollwitz. Her work was declared "degenerate" by the Nazis. There is a collection of her paintings and watercolours in the Wismar Museum.

Erna Frank, Rue Berger in Paris

Lithograph, 1913

The etcher, lithographer and pastellist Erna Frank was born in Cologne in 1881. She studied under Paul Baum, and lived and worked in Berlin. In 1914 Erna Frank won the bronze medal at the international graphics exhibition the Bugra Leipzig. Erna Frank's etchings were published by Hermann Abell, Paul Cassirer, and J. B. Neumann, and in the Leipzig art revue Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst. The cityscape was her favored subject. Erna Frank died in 1931

Marie Gey-Heinze, Frühling (Spring)

Etching with aquatint, 1906

Despite the title of this blog post, I can't be sure that my next two subjects knew Käthe Kollwitz personally, but they would certainly have been aware of her art, as they were working at the same time, and contributing to the same art revues - so in the circle of influence, at least. The painter and printmaker Marie Caroline Gey-Heinze was born in Cologne in 1881. Born Marie Caroline Gey, she studied under Otto Fischer at the Dresden Academy. She married the Leipzig physician Paul Heinze and quickly made a reputation for herself under the name Marie Gey-Heinze with pastels and also with etchings such as Spring and Guinea-pigs (Meerschweinsen) published by Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst.

Marie Gey-Heinze, Meerschweinchen (Guinea-pigs)

Etching, 1908

Sadly, Marie Gey-Heinze's promising career was to come to an end when she shot herself at the age of 26, in her home in Oetzsch. There is a memorial Marie Gey Fountain in Dresden, designed by George Wrba.

Marie Stein, Porträtstudie (Portrait Study)

Etching, 1899

The etcher Marie Stein (Marie Stein-Ranke) was born in Oldenburg in 1873, into a Jewish family. Unable because she was a woman to study at the Düsseldorf Academy, she chose to study in the ateliers of Walter Petersen, Friedrich Fehr, and Paul Nauen. From 1896-1898 she lived and worked in Paris, before returning to Düsseldorf and becoming a successful society portraitist. Her closest artistic friend was the landscapist Georg Müller. In 1904 Marie Stein was awarded third prize in the annual competition of the revue Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst, judged by Klinger, Liebermann, Köpping, Tschudi, Lehrs, and Graul.

Marie Stein, Bildnis (Portrait)

Etching, 1905

In 1906 Marie Stein married the eminent Egyptologist Hermann Ranke. Their life together was happy but blighted by the untimely deaths of their three children, and persecution by the Nazis because of Marie Stein's Jewish background. The bulk of her artist activity appears to date from before her marriage. Marie Stein-Ranke died in Nussloch near Heidelberg in 1964.

Hermann Struck: a German-Jewish etcher

I've just discovered that the house of Hermann Struck in Haifa has this October been turned into the Hermann Struck Museum, with an opening exhibition of his etchings. I'm thrilled to think this brilliant and influential etcher is at last getting his due. So I thought I would share the Hermann Struck etchings I have. Struck was born in Berlin in 1876. His birth name was Chaim Aaron ben David, and his Jewish heritage is central to his work - most of the original works below have Hebrew inscriptions or Stars of David incised in the plate in drypoint. An early Zionist, Hermann Struck settled in Palestine, in what is now Haifa, Israel, in December 1922. All of my works date from before this time (although I give the date of his portrait of Chagall as 1923, that is the date of publication, and presumably the actual work was made in or around 1922). Evidently Struck had an active life as artist, mentor, and teacher in Israel, but I don't have any direct evidence of this to show.

Hermann Struck, Porträt eines alten Mannes

Etching, 1901

Hermann Struck, Canal Grande

Etching, 1903

Hermann Struck, Bildnis R.B.

Etching, 1905

Does anyone know who R.B. was?

Hermann Struck,  Alte Jude aus Jaffa

Etching, 1905

The sitter is Struck's father

(I believe probably the same subject as Porträt eines alten Mannes)

Hermann Struck, Marc Chagall

Etching, published 1923

(probably 1922)

Hermann Struck studied at the Berlin Academy, and learned etching under Hans Meyer. Like many other accomplished etchers, he etched plates after the work of others as well as his own originals.

Hermann Struck after Olof Jernberg, Zur Erntezeit

Etching, 1901

Hermann Struck after Max Liebermann, Bildnis des Baron Berger

Etching, 1906

Hermann Struck died in Haifa in 1944. In his lifetime Hermann Struck was highly respected as an etcher, and taught the craft to other artists, including Marc Chagall, Max Liebermann, and Lovis Corinth. His important book on the art of etching Die kunst des radierens went through several editions, each illustrated with original prints.

Secrets of the absinthe drinker: the life and art of Marcellin Desboutin

You might not recognize the name of Marcellin Desboutin, but you would know him if you saw him in the street. His is the bearded, dishevelled face staring despairingly out at you from a table in the artists' café La Nouvelle Athènes in the painting  L'Absinthe (Dans un Café) by Edgar Degas. The women sitting next to him is the actress Ellen André; like the rest of the Impressionists, Degas preferred to use members of his immediate social circle rather than paid models. Once you have committed Desboutin's face to memory, you will chance upon it again and again in works by Degas and other artists, including Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Falguière; often he is smoking a pipe. His tramp-like appearance made him the ideal sitter if you wanted to paint a down-and-out old drunk.

Marcellin Desboutin, Desboutin dit à la bavette

(aslo known as Desboutin tenant sa pipe de la main gauche, or as L'auteur fumant, à mi-corps)

Drypoint, 1897

Ref: Clément Janin 67

Actually, Marcellin Gilbert Desboutin came from a well-off, cultured background. He was born in Cérilly in 1823. His mother was an aristocrat, and Marcellin was a wealthy young man whose dabblings in literature and art were enthusiastic hobbies rather than career choices. He bought himself a grand villa outside Florence, where he lived from 1854, dealing in old master paintings, gambling, and generally squandering his fortune. During this time, Desboutin maintained contacts with the Paris art world, and was particularly close to Degas. In Florence he met and encouraged the Italian Impressionist Giuseppe de Nittis, with whom he remained on close terms; there exists a drypoint portrait of Degas about which experts remain divided as to whether it is by Desboutin or de Nittis.

Marcellin Desboutin, Femme au toutou, ou au chien

Drypoint, c. 1878

Ref: Clément-Janin 101

Marcellin Desboutin returned to Paris in 1873, at the age of 50, having ruined himself with unwise investments. Here he returned seriously to art, both painting and printmaking. Desboutin specialized in portrait drypoints, often of fellow artists such as his friends Degas, Renoir, Manet, Morisot, Raffaëlli, Goeneutte and Guérard, but also of authors such as Dumas fils, Zola, and Verlaine. Desboutin's technique was to quickly sketch a portrait on copper with a drypoint needle, to catch his subject in as relaxed and lifelike a pose as possible.

Marcellin Desboutin, Norbert Goeneutte

Drypoint, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 111

Marcellin Desboutin, Renoir, les jambes croisées

Drypoint, 1877

Ref: Clément-Janin 208

Marcellin Desboutin, Willette, en Pierrot

Drypoint, 1896

Ref: Clément-Janin 241

One of Desboutin's portraits of artists, that of Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, uses a very interesting mixed technique, invented by Félicien Rops and used infrequently by artists such as Louis Legrand and Desboutin. Based on a painting by Desboutin now in the Musée d'Amiens, this print involved making a héliogravure plate after a painting (as in this case) or an etching that needed to be reduced in size (as in the case of Legrand's La parole divine, my only other example of this process); the artist then worked on top of the heliogravure with a drypoint needle, thus producing a strange hybrid between a reproduction and an original print. The composition in the background is part of Puvis's Bois sacré.

Marcellin Desboutin, Puvis de Chavannes, portrait et composition

Drypoint on héliogravure

Ref: Clément Janin 204

Another artist portrait, that of the etcher Jules Jacquemart, strikes me as possibly originating in a photograph, though Jacquemart was still alive when it was made, so I may be wrong - certainly neither the publisher, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, nor the cataloguer, Clément-Janin, suggest this to be the case.

Marcellin Desboutin, Jules Jacquemart

Drypoint, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 141

It's interesting to compare the vivacity of Desboutin's portraits from life, such as those of Goeneutte and Renoir, with the eight drypoint portraits of singers and dancers for the anonymous work L'Opéra, Eaux-fortes et Quatrains in 1876 (the author was Henry Cohen). Seven of these are drawn after photographs rather than from life, and although they have great charm, they are much stiffer and more conventional than the free depictions of his friends; the exception is the portrait of Léontine Beaugrand. On all eight the printer, Vve Cadart, has misspelled the artist's name as Desboutins.

Marcellin Desboutin, Charles-Amable Bataille

(bass-baritone 1822-1872)

Drypoint after a photograph by Pierre Petit, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 186

Marcellin Desboutin, Mlle Baux
(soprano, dates unknown)

Drypoint after a photograph by Pierre Petit, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 187

Marcellin Desboutin, Léontine Beaugrand, danseuse

(ballerina, 1842-1925)

Drypoint from life, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 188

Marcellin Desboutin, Rosine Bloch

(mezzo-soprano, 1844-1891)

Drypoint after a photograph by Pierre Petit, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 189

Marcellin Desboutin, Auguste-Acanthe Boudouresque

(bass, 1835-1905)

Drypoint after a photograph by Pierre Petit, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 190

Marcellin Desboutin, Eugène-Charles Caron

(baritone 1834-1903)

Drypoint after a photograph by Pierre Petit, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 191

Marcellin Desboutin, Pedro Gailhard

(bass, and future director of the Opéra, 1848-1918)

Drypoint after a photograph by Pierre Petit, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 192

Marcellin Desboutin, Rita Sangalli, danseuse

(ballerina, 1850-1909)

Drypoint after a photograph by Luckhardt, 1876

Ref: Clément-Janin 193

Despite his late start, Desboutin achieved some fame and success as an artist in the Bohemian circle of Manet and Degas; he exhibited six works at the Second Impressionist Exhibition. The catalogue of his works in Clément-Janin's La Curieuse Vie de Marcellin Desboutin lists 246 original prints and 30 "gravures de réproduction" after artists such as Israëls, Fragonard, and Rembrandt; there's also an impressive list of paintings, showing Desboutin to have been hard at work at his art from 1873 to his death.

Marcellin Desboutin, Les travailleurs de la mer (also known as Les amarreurs)

Drypoint after a painting by Jozef Israëls, 1889

Ref: Clément-Janin 1 (gravures de réproduction)

From 1880 Desboutin lived mostly in Nice, where he died in 1901.