Life and rhythm

Émile-Jean Sulpis (1856-1943)
Danseuse
Engraving, 1923

As all the arts spring from the same source and discharge into the same ocean, it’s no surprise that visual artists have been entranced by the fluidity, grace, and energy of the dance. Degas was perhaps the first great artist to make dancers and dancing central to his art, but where he led, others quickly followed. The Swedish Impressionist Anders Zorn remains most famous for his portrait of the dancer Rosita Mauri, who was also painted by Degas.


Anders Zorn (1860-1920)
Rosita Mauri
Etching 1891

Paul Renouard also drew many of the same dancers as Degas, who along with Manet was a formative influence on his work. In turn Renouard influenced Vincent Van Gogh, who collected his etchings and drawings, thinking them “beautiful” and “superb”. Born in Cour-Cheverny, Loir-et-Cher, Charles Paul Renouard went to Paris at the age of 14, and worked as a decorator before entering the atelier of Isidore Pils in 1868; with Pils, Renouard decorated the ceiling of the Paris Opera. Renouard first exhibited at the Salon of 1877. He soon worked out that his talent lay in black-and-white, not colour, and devoted himself to printmaking. I almost wonder, in fact, if Renouard may have been at least partly colour-blind. This would explain why such a talented artist has now sunk into such obscurity. It would also explain why his 1892 portfolio La Danse (of which I have copy 216/295) was created in such an intriguing manner. These enchanting colour lithographs were a collaboration between Renouard and the printer Charles Gillot. Renouard provided drawings for La Danse on specially-prepared lithographic transfer paper, which the printer Gillot transferred to zinc plates, adding colour (in consultation with Renouard). These lithographs (or, to be pedantic, because Gillot patented the process, gillotages) are described on the portfolio as "dessins transposés en harmonies de couleurs" - the word harmonies, of course, acknowleges Renouard's debt to Whistler.



Paul Renouard (1854-1924)
Harmonie en chair et améthyste
Lithograph, 1892


Paul Renouard
Harmonie en agua marine, chair, et violet rosé
Lithograph, 1892


Paul Renouard
Harmonie en vermilion et violet
Lithograph, 1892


Paul Renouard
Harmonie en mauve et jaune
Lithograph, 1892

All my other prints by Paul Renouard are black-and-white etchings, drypoints, or lithographs. A number of them also focus on dancers and music hall performers, the subject that made his name. In the etching À Drury Lane: Avant de paraître, the seated figure seen from the back is not a child, but a performer. I believe it to be the diminutive singer May Belfort, who ten years after being painted by Toulouse-Lautrec was still dressing as a child and lisping her way through such innuendo-laden songs as “Daddy wouldn’t buy me a bow-wow”. The same performer is seen from the front in a second etching, Figurante du théatre de Drury Lane.


Paul Renouard
À Drury Lane: Avant de paraître
Etching, 1906


Paul Renouard
Figurante du théatre de Drury Lane, à Londres
Etching, 1905

I have another portfolio of images of ballet dancers, Visions de Danse by Swiss-born Alméry Lobel-Riche (1877-1950), which although not published until 1949 clearly shows the influence of minor Impressionists such as Paul Renouard and Louis Legrand. It is a collection of drypoints (mine is copy 145/210), published alongside an essay by the critic André Billy.


Alméry Lobel-Riche (1877-1950)
Dancer putting on her shoes
Drypoint, 1949

At some point Lobel-Riche will get a full individual treatment on this blog, as his art, with its twin inspirations of Symbolism and Impressionism and its almost classical purity of line, has been undeservedly neglected. What is remarkable in his images of dancers (as in many of his nudes), is the extent to which Lobel-Riche looks beyond the flesh of his figures to reveal the musculature beneath. It is perhaps because of this mastery of anatomy that Lobel-Riche is able to capture such a vivid sense of the energy of dance, and the physical strength of the dancers.


Alméry Lobel-Riche
Female dancer
Drypoint, 1949


Alméry Lobel-Riche
Dancer
Drypoint, 1949


Alméry Lobel-Riche
Pair of dancers
Drypoint, 1949


Alméry Lobel-Riche
Two female dancers
Drypoint, 1949


Alméry Lobel-Riche
Three dancers
Drypoint, 1949

Perhaps the most famous depiction of dance in C20th-century art is Matisse’s La Danse, with its sensuous and exuberant circle of naked dancers. Henri Matisse (1869-1954) painted two versions of this great work, a preliminary study in 1909 that is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1910 the finished version, commissioned by the Russian art collector Sergei Shchukin, which is now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. In 1938 Matisse created a lithograph after La Danse for the art revue Verve – a double page that also has two original linocuts of skaters on the reverse.


Henri Matisse (1869-1954)
La Danse
Lithograph, 1938


Henri Matisse
Le Lance
Linocut, 1938


Henri Matisse
Le Retenu
Linocut, 1938

For Matisse, dance was “life and rhythm”.

Give peace a chance

Sixty years ago, in the spring of 1948, the artist Madeleine Melsonn took a trip to the Holy Land. The drawings she made of the landscape of the Bible and the daily life and environment of Palestinians and Jews became a portfolio of drypoints, Images de Palestine, published in September of the same year. This was a crucial year for the region, for it saw the foundation of the state of Israel on the 14th of May. At this worrying moment, when conflict has once again erupted between the Israelis and the Palestinians, I thought it might be worth taking a look at Madeleine Melsonn’s delicate drypoints, with their beautiful sense of calm, peace, and balance.


Madeleine Melsonn, Jérusalem
Original drypoint, 1948

Madeleine Melsonn was born in 1901 (some sources say 1905), and had a long career as an printmaker, with work in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France dating from 1940 into the 1980s, including a group of 29 prints by Melsonn accessioned by the BN in 1985. She died in 2000. Apparently her real name was Madeleine Suzanne Miellet; some sources refer to her as Miellet-Melsonn.


Madeleine Melsonn, Vieux quartier juif de Jérusalem
Orginal drypoint, 1948

As with so many female artists, Madeleine Melsonn remains a maddeningly obscure figure. From the 35 listings in the BN catalogue one can get a sense of the range of her work, which included an interesting-sounding Suite grecque published in 1954-55, consisting of scenes from Greek mythology; illustrations to the book of Genesis; and a series of prints of insects. In the 1940s and 50s she also illustrated a handful of limited edition books with either copper engravings (Montherlant’s Le plaisir et la peur in 1952) or wood engravings (Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes in 1946, Giraudoux’s Electre in 1950).


Madeleine Melsonn, Bassins de Salomon
Original drypoint, 1948

Images de Palestine was published by the artist herself, in an edition of 150 copies. 100 numbered copies were for sale (mine is no. 3), and 50 copies marked H.C. (hors-commerce) were reserved for the artist. It consists of 20 loose drypoints, with a page of introduction by the artist and a 4-page extract from Chateaubriand’s Voyage à Jérusalem. As is usual with such publications, the loose leaves of text and the prints are protected by a stiff case (“chemise”) and a slipcase (“etui”). The drypoints were printed by the master printer P. Thirot on B.F.K. Rives wove paper. Although a collection of prints with 4 pages of separately printed unrelated text scarcely qualifies as a book, this work is listed in Luc Monod’s great reference work, Manuel de l’amateur de livres illustrés modernes (Monod 2682). Unfortunately the details he gives are completely erroneous, and must relate to some other work entirely.


Madeleine Melsonn, Les Bergers de Bethléem
Original drypoint, 1948

So in the absence of much information about Madeleine Melsonn in reference books or on the internet, one is left face-to-face with the work itself, to stand or fall on its own merits.


Madeleine Melsonn, Béthanie
Original drypoint, 1948

The first thing that strikes me about these Images de Palestine is their sparseness. It’s not just that the landscapes and townscapes seem depopulated, but also that the artist has pared down the details of each scene to the absolute essentials. Take for instance Tombes juives à Siloé (Jewish tombs at Siloe), which is one of my favourites. Each line counts, bringing little details alive – an olive tree here, a tombstone there – but never allowing the detail to override the rhythm and balance of the image as a whole. The large areas of blank space are as important to the composition as any marks made by the drypoint needle.


Madeleine Melsonn, Tombes juives à Siloé
Original drypoint, 1948

There are a few scenes with more bustle and life to them, and of these my favourite is Les Béthlemites, a tenderly-observed view of a group of Arab women preparing food on what appears to be a roof terrace in Bethlehem. I particularly love the washing on the line in the background, with the pair of pantaloons billowing in the wind.


Madeleine Melsonn, Les Béthlemites
Original drypoint, 1948

Prints and drawings - Gustave Assire

Many artists prepare to create a print – be it an etching, engraving, lithograph or whatever – by making a preliminary drawing. In this occasional series, I will juxtapose original drawings with the prints made after them.

My first choice is an obscure artist named Gustave Assire. The pen-and-watercolour drawing below, signed and dated 1926, is a preparatory study for Assire’s classic suite of etchings of the Parisian underworld of brothels and nightclubs, Images Secrètes de Paris, with an accompanying text by Pierre Mac Orlan. This was published by René Kieffer in 1928 in an edition of 550 copies; the etchings were printed by Ducros et Colas. 450 copies were on tinted wove paper, with the definitive state of the etchings. 50 were on tinted wove paper with the etchings in two states. 50 copies were printed on Japan paper, with the 20 etchings in three states (or occasionally in two states plus a different rejected etching) plus an original watercolour study. I have copy 41 of the edition on Japan. There also exist 50 copies of a monochrome suite of reproductions of the 50 watercolours; unfortunately I’ve never seen one of these. They seem to have been sold separately.


Gustave Assire, Le choix
Original watercolour

The watercolour study shows a client making his choice in the salon of a maison close, with the madam at his side and the girls lined up before him. Assire draws it with great humour and verve; his emphasis throughout Images Secrètes is on the liveliness of the scenes he records, rather than on the tawdry side. Assire was not alone in this attitude. In the 1920s, the life of the Paris prostitute supplied much of the subject matter of writers such as Pierre Mac Orlan and Francis Carco. Mac Orlan, by the way, is probably the only writer in the history of literature to reserve his real name – Pierre Dumarchey – for his pornographic works, while publishing all his respectable writings under a pseudonym. This titillating literary output, peppered with street slang and worldly wisdom, was in turn matched by a stream of etchings, lithographs, and drawings revealing the underbelly of Parisian life. It’s a wonder, in fact, that there was any room for clients in the brothels of Paris, such was the stream of writers and artists populating them for purposes of research.


Gustave Assire, Le choix
Original etching, only state

Judging from my copy, the watercolours were studies in their own right rather than simple preparatory sketches for the etchings. Le choix is one of the etchings where Assire had two attempts at the subject – an initial etching, reproduced above, which he then abandoned, and a second revised version. The abandoned etchings were only included in the 50 copies on Japan. Neither the first nor the second versions of the etching Le choix is based directly on the watercolour, although there are evident similarities in the stance of the girls, the bows in their hair, and the decision in all three images to view the scene from behind the line-up, so that we are looking at the client, rather than sharing his vantage-point. Why Assire was dissatisfied with his first attempt isn’t clear, but he may have felt that the composition was too crowded.


Gustave Assire, Le choix
Original etching, first state of two

One of the interesting things about these etchings is the artist’s use of extra drawings or remarques all around the border. Often remarques seem to me a rather tired and irrelevant way of “adding value” to etchings, but Assire’s remarques really do remark on the main image. They’re full of life and interest, and they offer us a series of sideways glimpses away from the central subject into the world surrounding it. Usually remarques are added as an afterthought, but in these etchings by Assire they are integral to the image, and planned as part of the overall composition from the start.


Gustave Assire, Le choix
Original etching, second and final state

Gustave Assire was born in Angers in 1870, and died in 1941. He studied under Gustave Moreau, Jean-Paul Laurens, Jean Benjamin-Constant and Fernand Cormon at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris. In many ways Gustave Assire was the archetypical Montmartre artist in the mould laid down by Toulouse-Lautrec. When not observing Parisian nightlife and low-life, Assire could be found sketching at the Cirque Medrano. Below are a few more of his Images Secrètes, all in the final state.


Gustave Assire, Bar de la Villette
Original etching, third and final state


Gustave Assire, Jazz-Band
Original etching, third and final state


Gustave Assire, Le Moulin Rouge
Original etching, third and final state


Gustave Assire, Le Lapin Agile
Original etching, third and final state


Gustave Assire, Maison close in Place Saint-Georges
Original etching, third and final state


Gustave Assire, Streetwalkers in Les Buttes Chaumont
Original etching, third and final state

Peace and happiness to everyone

In sending everyone who reads this all my best wishes for the holiday season and the year to come, I thought you might like to see a few of the 51 drypoints made by Hermine David for an edition of Sagesse by Paul Verlaine, published in 1943 by Creuzevault, Paris. Apart from the cover, frontispiece, and two full-page images, all of these drypoins were small vignettes in the text; but alongside the total of 450 copies of the book, there were also 100 separate suites of the prints, 50 in black, and 50 printed in colours à la poupée (i.e. the colours hand-applied to the plate for each impression), on thin China paper. The printer was the master taille-doucier Georges Leblanc. My images are from one of the 50 colour suites (I only, in fact, possess the suite, and have never seen the book).



Weirdly, the same publisher issued another copy of the same text, the same year, with completely different illustrations by the same artist, not something I have come across before. The alternative edition was published in 550 copies, illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings.



Hermine David was born in Paris in 1886, and studied at the Académie Julian and at the École des Beaux-Arts. She made her debut at the Salon des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs in 1904, subsequently exhibiting at the Sales des Artistes Français, the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Tuileries.



Hermine David was married to the artist Jules Pascin, and his influence can be seen in her technique. As a printmaker, Hermine David specialised in etching and drypoint. She died in 1971.

Anywhere out of the world

Who on earth was Jean Mohler? Does anyone know?


Jean Mohler, Le Spleen de Paris
Original etching, 1946

Because I collect fine illustrated editions of Baudelaire, I recently acquired a copy of Le Spleen de Paris, illustrated by this obscure artist. I can’t find him listed in any reference book, and know nothing about his dates of birth and death, origins, studies, or mature associations. Yet I think his 16 full-page, hors-texte etchings for Le Spleen de Paris are absolutely brilliant.

Mohler’s etchings are essentially rooted in the freely-drawn, expressive realism of the between-the-wars School of Paris. His work shows the influence of major artist-illustrators of the 20s and 30s such as André Dignimont and Gus Bofa. Both of these would have been a generation older than him, I would guess, for the first evidence of Mohler’s existence I can find is the publication in 1943 of his edition of Sous la lumière froide by Pierre Mac Orlan (an author frequently associated with Dignimont and Bofa). Mohler also illustrated the novel Jésus-la-Caille by Francis Carco, another author often linked with Dignimont and Bofa.


Jean Mohler, Chacun sa chimère
Original etching, 1946

Jean Mohler’s three major livres d’artiste, all illustrated with original etchings, appeared in quick succession. An edition of Ben Jonson’s Volpone was published by Éditions de la Nouvelle France in 1945, under the artistic direction of Hervé Baille, in an edition of 395 copies. It looks as if Baille was trying to marshal talent for Éditions de la Nouvelle France in the 40s rather as Édouard Chimot had for Devambez in the 20s, but the times were far from propitious. So far as I can see the whole project fizzled out after a handful of books, including La Légende de Don Juan by Albert t’Serstevens, illustrated with original lithographs by Gaston de Sainte-Croix in 1944, and the wonderfully titled Les Moments Perdus de John Shag by Gilbert de Voisins, illustrated with copper engravings by Hervé Baille himself in 1945.


Jean Mohler, L'horloge
Original etching, 1946

Mohler’s second important book came the following year, with the edition of Le Spleen de Paris under discussion. A total of 359 copies were published: one on Japan, 3 on Arches, 8 on B.F.K. Rives, 93 on Lana, 245 on vélin pur fil du Marais, and 10 hors-commerce copies on unstated papers. There were no separate suites of the etchings, but the first 32 copies had varying numbers of rejected plates, up to a total of 6 in the unique copy on Japan paper. In this case the art director was Jean Baudet, rather than Hervé Baille. As with Volpone, Mohler’s etchings were printed by the specialist taille-doucier Manuel Robbe.

Mohler’s last major work was an edition of Racine’s Cantiques Spirituels, published in 1947 by Pierre Gaudin, in an edition of just 160 copies. My internet searches have turned up a few further minor contributions to books, up till 1952, and after that, nothing. Mohler seems to emerge from thin air and vanish back into it, after a mere decade of activity.


Jean Mohler, Eros, Plutus et la Gloire
Original etching, 1946

So I’m left wondering what prevented Mohler enjoying a long and distinguished artistic career. His etchings for Baudelaire nod both to Surrealism (in, for instance, Chacun sa chimère), and to Cubism (in the Picasso-esque figure of La Gloire in Eros, Plutus et La Gloire). This shows a keen awareness of the main artistic movements of the day, and along with his technical accomplishment suggests that Jean Mohler had studied at art school. My immediate though was that he probably studied etching under Édouard Goerg at the Beaux-Arts, Paris. Several of his plates, for instance L’horloge and La Belle Dorothée, remind me of Goerg both technically and stylistically. But looking up the dates, it appears Goerg was only made a professor at the Beaux-Arts in 1949. He may have had an atelier at some other institution in the 1930s; further research is needed.


Jean Mohler, La Belle Dorothée
Original etching, 1946

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief account of all the things I don’t know about Jean Mohler – and if anyone could add any further facts or thoughts, I’d be very grateful.

Degenerate art

In 1929, the artist Richard Lindner, whose work can be considered the bridge between Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop Art, was appointed art director of the Munich publishing house of Knorr and Hir. Lindner remembered, "I saw Hitler every day in Munich at the Café Heck, a small café with about ten tables and thirty seats... Hitler used to sit there every day at his usual table. Our table was beside his and we knew each other because we avoided direct contact... He always wanted to be with artists."


The Window, 1958
Original lithograph by Richard Lindner

Adolf Hitler’s thwarted wish to be an artist is more than an historical oddity; it lies at the root of the Nazis vicious persecution of artists and suppression of what they termed “degenerate art”. When the Nazis came to power, Germany was at the centre of the avant-garde, through German Expressionism and the Modernism of the Bauhaus.


Child's Head, 1939
Original lithograph by Paul Klee

Hitler came to power on January 31, 1933. His determination to destroy modern art in Germany was obvious. Many artists simply fled; Lindner, for instance, left for Paris the next day. Others tried to carry on. Rolf Cavael, for instance, went ahead with his first major show – a joint exhibition with Josef Albers – at Schloss Braunschweig (this was in 1933, I don’t know the exact date), but it was shut down on the day it opened. Both artists were banned from exhibiting. Cavael carried on painting abstracts, was denounced to the authorities, and interned in the concentration camp at Dachau for nine months. Cavael was banned from painting, and could only take up art again after WWII.

This story could be repeated many times. Those avant-garde artists who remained in Germany found themselves unable to buy art materials or practice art. Herbert von Arend, for instance, was forbidden to exhibit or even create works of art between 1933 and 1945, and did not restart his artistic career until 1950. Born in Qingdao (Tsingtao), China, von Arend had studied at the Bauhaus from 1928-1932 under Albers, Klee, Kandinsky, and Stözl. In 1973 he returned to one of his earliest loves, textiles. He had studied weaving under Gunta Stözl, and now began to create extraordinary and beautiful tapestries, often drawing on motifs from his Bauhaus days.


Le Jardin d’Amour, 1981
Original silkscreen by Herbert von Arend, a variation on a drawing made at the Bauhaus in 1932

Banning an artist from making art is as ruthlessly effective as it is cruel. The deliberate waste of human creativity upsets me even more, I think, than the Nazis’ destruction of existing works of art – the sculptures of Ernst Barlach, the paintings of Max Liebermann. At least these works – and the thousands of other artworks confiscated from German museums and burned by the Berlin Fire Brigade – once existed. The act of creation cannot be obliterated by simple destruction of the work.


Aus de Walpurgisnacht, 1923
Original woodcut by Ernst Barlach

Of course not all the artistic energy that had been building in Germany was lost. The Bauhaus teachers spread their influence far and wide – in Isokon and the Reiman School in the UK, in the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the New Bauhaus in Chicago, and Black Mountain College in the USA. The work of Bauhaus artists such as Kandinsky, Klee, and Moholy-Nagy may have been mockingly displayed as “degenerate art” by the Nazis, but the artists themselves continued to create and to influence the direction of twentieth-century art.


Woodcut for 10 Origin, 1942
Original woodcut by Wassily Kandinsky

Many lesser-known artists followed a similar trajectory. Boris Herbert Kleint, for instance, who was a pupil of the Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten, fled Germany for Luxembourg in 1936, only returning to his homeland after the war, becoming a professor at the Staatliche Schule für Kunst und Handwerk, Saarbrücken. In 1952 he published the first edition of his influential teaching manual, Bildlehre, which renewed the Bauhaus vision for a new generation.


Untitled, 1979
Original lithograph by Boris Herbert Kleint

Even if the Nazis liked your work, being an artist in Nazi Germany was hardly safe or comfortable. Hermann Goering liked the powerful machine-age art of Lili Réthi so much he “invited” her to create propaganda images. Réthi fled, seeking refuge, like many artistic émigrés, in the USA.


Maschinenwerkstätte, 1921
Original lithograph by Lili Réthi