A new book on Chas Laborde

I have already posted here about the great between-the-wars etcher and illustrator Chas Laborde. Now Emmanuel Pollaud-Dulian, the man behind the excellent Chas Laborde and Gus Bofa websites, has kindly sent me a copy of his new book, which is a survey and celebration of Chas Laborde's art. The title is Chas Laborde: Un homme dans la foule (Chas Laborde: A man in the crowd), referring to Laborde's keenly observational account of street life not just in Paris but also in London, New York, Moscow, Madrid, and Berlin. Chas Laborde's most important works were the series of etched livres d'artiste he created under the generic title Rues et visages,  beginning with Rues et visages de Paris in 1926.

Emmanuel Pollaud-Dulian, Chas Laborde: Un homme dans la foule

Paris: Michel Lagarde, ISBN 978-2-916421-22-3, €19

Chas Laborde, Rue Ménilmontant

Etching reproduced on p.15, I believe this comes from Rues et visages de Paris

The book is a very handsome production, well illustrated and researched, and modestly priced. It's so easy for an artist such as Chas Laborde to fall from view, and anything that keeps his name alive is very worthwhile. In many ways he was like a French version of George Grosz, if you can imagine a Grosz who observed his subjects with a tender and sympathetic humour, rather than savagery and scorn. There is an exhibition to coincide with the publication of the book, at l'Atelier An. Girard, Paris, from 20 May to 17 July.

Chas Laborde, Henri

Etching for La belle journée, 1925

Chas Laborde, Notre Dame at night

Etching for Juliette au pays des hommes, 1926

Chas Laborde, Fashionable Young Men

Etching for Juliette au pays des hommes, 1926

Chas Laborde, Traffic Jam

Etching for Juliette au pays des hommes, 1926

Seven variations on El Desdichado

Following yesterday's post, Jane Librizzi of The Blue Lantern asked for illumination on the texts incorporated in the engravings by Henri-Georges Adam. They are all from the 1853 sonnet sequence Les Chimères by Gérard de Nerval, the man who used to take his pet lobster for walks on a lead in the gardens of the Palais Royal. These are densely allusive, complex poems, and although it occurred to me to try to translate one, good sense prevailed. But in the spirit of "Be careful what you wish for", here is the original French text of Gérard de Nerval's best-known poem, El Desdichado (famously quoted by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land), plus 7 English versions, the fashioning of which has gently whiled away a summer's morning.... The first version is a bare literal translation, the second an attempt at a rhymed equivalent, and the remainder wander steadily further and further from the source text. I would have just posted Martin Bell's translation, which I remember from 40 years ago, but I couldn't put my hand on the book! And for those of you who come to this blog for prints not poems, there are two further engravings by Henri-Georges Adam.

Henri-Georges Adam, El Desdichado (texte)

Engraving, 1950

EL DESDICHADO

Je suis le ténébreux, - le veuf, - l’inconsolé,

Le prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie:

Ma seule étoile est morte, - et mon luth constellé

Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.

Dans la nuit du tombeau, toi qui m’as consolé,

Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,

La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon coeur désolé,

Et la treille où la pampre à la rose s’allie.

Suis-je Amour ou Phébus? . . . Lusignan ou Biron?

Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine;

J’ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la syrène. .  .

Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron:

Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée

Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fée.

Henri-Georges Adam, El Desdichado

Engraving, 1947

SEVEN VARIATIONS ON EL DESDICHADO BY GÉRARD DE NERVAL

I

EL DESDICHADO (THE DISINHERITED ONE)

I am the shadow man, the widower, the unconsoled,

The Prince of Aquitaine, his tower in ruins:

My only star is dead, and my constellated lute

Bears the Black Sun of Melancholy.

In the darkness of the tomb, you who consoled me,

Restore to me Posilipo and the Italian sea.

The flower that so pleased my desolate heart

And the trellis where the vine twined round the rose.

Am I Love or Phoebus? Lusignan or Biron?

My forehead is still red from the kiss of the queen;

I have dreamed in the cave where the siren swims.

And I have twice victorious crossed the Acheron:

Modulating in turn on the lyre of Orpheus

The sighs of the saint and the cries of the fairy.

II

MAN OF SHADOWS

I am a man of shadows; disinherited.

A prince defeated in a ruined tower.

From the black sun of sadness the light has fled.

My lute is silent; dead my only star.

In the close tomb, the darkness thickens.

Console me with Posilipo and the Italian sea,

The flower that heals a heart so stricken,

With memories of you and me.

Am I Eros or Apollo? Melusine’s husband, or Lord Byron?

My forehead imprinted with a queen’s desire,

I have dreamed of swimming with the siren.

Twice I have crossed the river of death

And all the while Orpheus twanged his lyre

To the sighs of a saint, a fairy’s breath.

III

DISINHERITED

Shadowman. Widower. I am inconsolable.

The lost prince of a burned-out tower.

My guiding light is gone, and my starry lute

resounds to the thud of a sad black sun.

In the blackness of my tomb, you who consoled me,

give me back Posilipo and the bay of Naples—

the flower that restored my desolated heart,

the trellis where the rose and the vine entwine.

Am I Eros or Apollo? . . . a lover or a warrior?

My brow is stamped red by the kiss of a queen—

my head swims with dreams of the siren’s cave.

And I have swum twice across the waters of death—

and at each stroke Orpheus strummed his lyre

to the whimpers of a saint, and a fairy’s cries.

IV

DISPOSSESSED

I lurk in the shadows. Bereft. Inconsolable.

The disenchanted prince of a tower that never was.

My lodestar extinguished, and my star-pocked lute

thrumming to the beat of a sad black sun.

You who comforted me in the darkness of the tomb,

lead me back to Virgil’s cave and the bay of Naples—

garland my shattered heart with flowers,

entwine it with roses and rambling vines.

Am I Eros or Apollo? . . . Roland or Tam Lin?

My brow tattooed by the kiss of a queen—

my head awash with dreams of sirens.

And I have twice tamed the waters of Acheron—

as Orpheus wrung from his rippling lyre

the tears of a saint, and a fairy’s cries.

V

THE LOST DOMAIN

Having lost everything, I live in the shadowland,

a dispossessed prince in his fallen tower.

My star has died, and my lute is branded

with the black sun of everlasting grief.

What consolation is it in the lightless tomb

to recall the bright sun glancing off the sea

to dapple a posy of heartsease

or twine the rose around the vine?

Am I love’s fool? When a queen’s red kiss

Burned onto my brow, my dreams were all

of swimming with the mermaids beneath the waves.

Twice now I have crossed the forbidden river

while Orpheus shaped his melodies

from the moans of a saint, and a fairy’s cries.

VI

DARK STAR

I skulk in the black hole of my imploded dreams,

a prince who can’t accept his tower has fallen down.

The starshine that once fell on my guitar

flattened by the rays of a dead black sun.

In this dark night of my soul, comfort me

with memories of Italy  and the sea,

when you were coming into bloom

and we forgot whose limbs were whose.

Your lipsticked kiss still throbs on my face—

I could have been whoever you wanted me to be

that night we spent in the mermaid’s cave.

Once more I have reached the river of forgetfulness

and the echoes of your cries still fill the air.

I tune my guitar to the sound of your despair.

VII

MUSIC OF THE STARS

I live in the shadows cast

by a blackened sun.

The music of the stars

is the sound of time imploding.

Speak to me of Skenfrith,

give me back the walk along the Isis

The Wind in the Willows

and the first true day of spring.

Neither the heart nor the head can help us now—

the wave is coming

to drag us down to the mermaid’s lair.

How many times have we walked the line

between life and death? The air thrilling

with unearthly yelps and cries.

copyright © Neil Philip 2010

Dynamic forms

Henri-Georges Adam was born in 1904 in Paris, where his father was a jeweller and goldsmith in the Marais district. Adam worked in his father's studio while taking art classes in the evening, before entering the École des Beaux-Arts. 

Henri-Georges Adam, Untitled, 1957

Engraving included in the 500 copies of Adam, Oeuvre Gravé

Initially working as a painter, in the early 1930s, following an accident, Henri-Georges Adam changed direction. He took up engraving (the rudiments of which he had learned from his father), and abandoned painting for sculpture. He also designed monumental tapestries, always in shades of black and white. 

Henri-Georges Adam, Le Christ aux Oliviers

Engraving, 1947

As a printmaker, Henri-Georges Adam also insisted on the purity of black and white, and only used one tool, the engraver's burin. An anarchist and a pacifist, Henri-Georges Adam first distinguished himself as an engraver with a series of prints expressing his outrage at the Spanish Civil War, Désastres de la guerre. 

Henri-Georges Adam, Anteros

Engraving, 1947

In 1936 he joined the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, along with Maurice Estève, Alfred Manessier, Édouard Pignon, and Arpad Szenes. It may have been Pignon who brought Adam to the attention of Picasso, who encouraged him, and after WWII lent him his studio in the rue des Grands-Augustins and a house near Gisors. In 1943 Adam, Pignon, and Manessier were three of the founders of the clandestine Salon de Mai, which was in effect the artistic wing of the French Resistance. 

Henri-Georges Adam, Vers dorés

Engraving, 1947

In 1959 Henri-Georges Adam was appointed Professor of Engraving at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and was later also made Professor of Monumental Sculpture. In 1966 there was a major retrospective of Adam's work at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. The following year, still at the height of his powers and productivity, Henri-Georges Adam died of a sudden heart attack, near Perros-Guirec in Brittany. He is buried in the cemetery of Mont-Saint-Michel. 

Henri-Georges Adam, Artemis

Engraving, 1950

At his death, Henri-Georges Adam left unpublished a major series of engravings, designed to illustrate Les Chimères by Gérard de Nerval. Executed between 1947 and 1950 for a proposed edition to be published by Bordas, this abandoned project was eventually published posthumously in 1971 by Les Bibliophiles de Provence, in an edition of 200 copies plus 40 suites. 

Henri-Georges Adam, Le Christ aux Oliviers V

Engraving on three cut-out plates, 1950

Henri-Georges Adam, Anteros

Engraving on seven cut-out plates, 1950

Some of the plates are pure illustrations, while others brilliantly incorporate the text of Les Chimères as an integral part of the design. For some, Adam has cut the copper plates into significant shapes, and juxtaposed as many as seven plates on the page to make a single image. 

Henri-Georges Adam, Delfica

Engraving, 1947

The dynamic forms and intense cross-hatched blacks of Henri-Georges Adam's nearly-abstract engravings incorporate the lessons of cubism and surrealism seamlessly into the long history of the furrowed line.

Fantastic vision of the Machine Age

The painter, printmaker, sculptor and ceramicist Gio Colucci (sometimes known in France as Géo Colucci) was born in Florence (one source says Cairo) in 1892, and died in Paris in 1974. He studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, after which he went to Egypt to practice as an architect in Cairo. It was in Cairo that he gradually moved over from architecture to fine art. His older brother was the writer and publisher Guido Colucci, born in Naples; Guido and Gio collaborated on a number of books to which Guido furnished the texts and Gio the illustrations.

Gio Colucci, Bonheur du monde I

Etching, 1929

From copy 74/105

Printed by Paul Haasen on Arches wove paper

As a printmaker, Gio Colucci produced both etchings and wood engravings. From 1921 he showed his etchings at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and also showed work at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Surindépendants alongside Gleizes, Herbin, Delaunay, and others. 

Gio Colucci, Bonheur du monde II

Etching, 1929

Gio Colucci's work in the 1920s was in an expressive late-Symbolist style, akin to that of Henry Chapront, who wrote of Colucci in Papyrus, March 1930: Ses eaux-fortes, outrancières et bien mordues, sont parfois surchargées de symbolisme. Ses compositions pour Bonheur du monde de François Turpin, révèlent une vision fantastique du machinisme. "His etchings, daring and deeply bitten, are sometimes laden with symbolism. His compositions for Bonheur du monde by François Turpin reveal a fantastic vision of the Machine Age."

Gio Colucci, Bonheur du monde III

Etching, 1929

I'm not sure if daring is quite the right translation for outrancières in this quote (which I found in Marcus Osterwalder's useful Dictionnaire des illustrateurs) - it means something like extreme or perhaps outrageous. There's certainly a powerful sense of almost Orphist or Futurist energy in the four etchings for Bonheur du monde, especially the last two.

Gio Colucci, Bonheur du monde IV

Etching, 1929

Besides Bonheur du monde, Gio Colucci made memorable series of etchings for works by Barbey d'Aurevilly, Pierre Loti, Maupassant, and Octave Mirbeau. Gio Colucci took up ceramics in 1929, and concentrated on pottery during WWII, which he spent in Provence after being demobilized in 1941. In 1956 Gio Colucci and Gino Severini founded the École d'Art Italien. There was a retrospective of the art of Gio Colucci in New York in 1959, in which year he also exhibited at the Quadriennale in Rome. Despite this success,  he died in poverty. The contents of his atelier were auctioned at Drouot-Richelieu in 1994.

Oriental delights

Hester Sainsbury is yet another of the lost female artists of England between-the-wars. Successful and acclaimed in the 1920s, she vanishes from view following her marriage to the Vorticist painter, architect, and publisher Frederick Etchells in 1932. Writing in the Print Collector's Quarterly in 1934, Douglas Percy Bliss lamented, "Hester Sainsbury, once so clever with the multiple-tool, has disappeared."

Hester Sainsbury, The Prayer of Manasses

Wood engraving, 1929

The multiple tool is described by Joanna Selborne in her British Wood-Engraved Book Illustration 1904-1940 as "like a small chisel with a multi-grooved belly which cuts several parallel lines at a time." Hester Sainsbury used one to create the kneeling figure in her wood engraving The Prayer of Manasses, contributed to the Cresset Press Apocrypha in 1929. She was ahead of her time in her use of a multiple graver, anticipating the style of another important female wood engraver of the period, Mary E. Groom, another contributor to the Apocrypha.

Mary E. Groom, The Lord upon his throne

Wood engraving, 1929

Hester Sainsbury started life as a dancer, and it appears she took up wood engraving because she wanted to catch the essence of dance in engraved line. She is thought to have been informally taught by two of her female friends, Ray Marshall (later Ray Garnett) and Vivien Gribble, who were both pupils of Noel Rooke at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Sainsbury also took up copper engraving, and in my view the delicacy of line that she achieved in this medium is quite remarkable. The rest of the illustrations to this post are all from the series of 24 copper engravings she made between 1927 and 1930 for the 12 volumes of Eastern Love, a collection of texts on love and sex translated by the orientalist and erotic aesthete Edward Powys Mathers.

Hester Sainsbury, E. Powys Mathers

Copper engraving, 1927

Hester Sainsbury had an affinity with oriental culture, shown both in her copper engravings for Eastern Love and her 1928 wood engravings for Paul Morand's Earth Girdled. A true Bohemian, she was the lover of the Japanese dramatist Kori Torahiko from 1917 until his death in 1926. While Mathers' translations in Eastern Love are wearisomely ornate in a manner inherited from Richard Burton, Hester Sainsbury's engravings remain fresh, supple, and irresistibly charming.

Part of the charm derives from the delicate hand-colouring. This was carried out by the printers A. Alexander and Sons, who also printed the plates on a hand press. Presumably a team of young women were set to the task, following prints coloured by the artist herself. My set contains three prints where the attention of the colourists seems to have wavered - in one, the brilliant blue scarf of a hunting prince has smeared across the page; in another (the middle one below), a delicate, barely-visible wash of blue has been applied to the sky but the rest of the image is left uncoloured; in a third, no colour has been added at all. These are the kinds of mistakes that happen in a relatively large print run such as this. 1000 copies of Eastern Love were published by John Rodker for subscribers only, on all rag paper.

Hester Margaret Sainsbury (née Tuke) was born in 1890 and died in 1967. She was a poet and playwright as well as an artist, and is remembered as an innovative dramaturge who combined dance and rhythmic verse in an excitingly Modernist style. With Frederick Etchells, she was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, though she appears to have remained on the fringe of the Bloomsbury artists; I don't think, for instance, that she ever designed for the Omega Workshop.

The textile artist and calligrapher Rosalind Wyatt is married to Hester Sainsbury's grandson, and her exhibition The Stitch Lives of Others at the John Martin Gallery in London included two pieces based on Hester Sainsbury's life. One celebrated her passionate affair with Kori Torahiko, based on his love letters to her and her mementos of their relationship, and the other commemorated her as the mother of her daughter Susan. From the verbal descriptions these sound wonderful works, and I only wish I could have seen them. And now I have found a link them here and they are as beautiful and laden with meaning as they sound.

Election fever

Today is polling day for the UK General Election - one of the more interesting and unpredictable elections of my adult life. Only one thing is certain - the House of Commons is going to need revolving doors to cope with all the disillusioned and worn-out MPs losing their seats, and the fresh intake of naive newcomers replacing them.

Le Parlement de Londres, soleil couchant

Original etching by Gustave Greux after Claude Oscar Monet, 1904

Maurice de Vlaminck: views from a bicycle

To make up for my recent silence, I hope over the next month to complete a series of short posts on Fauve artists as printmakers. For no particular reason, I'll start today with Maurice de Vlaminck. Vlaminck was born in Paris in 1876. His father was Belgian (the name Vlaminck or Wlaminck means “Flemish”); his mother was from Lorraine. Both were musicians.

Maurice de Vlaminck, Beaumont, Oise

Etching, 1927

Despite this artistic background, Vlaminck originally intended to be a professional cyclist, and it has often been noted that his landscapes are like the glimpses of a passing cyclist, crouched low over the handlebars of his bike watching the world rush by.

Maurice de Vlaminck, Nesles la Vallée

Etching, 1927

In 1896 a bout of typhoid fever put paid to Maurice de Vlaminck’s athletic ambition.

Maurice de Vlaminck, Environs de Marines, Oise

Etching, 1927

It was while on leave from his military service, on 18 June 1900, that Vlaminck had a chance encounter with André Derain on a train. The two became firm friends, and when he was demobilized Vlaminck shared Derain’s studio in an abandoned hotel-restaurant on the Île-de-Chatou.

Maurice de Vlaminck, Une église dans le Vexin

Etching, 1927

Derain provided illustrations for Vlaminck’s early semi-autobiographical erotic novels such as D’un lit dans l’autre (From One Bed to Another), and Vlaminck became one of the original Fauve group, alongside Henri Matisse, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Othon Friesz, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, and Charles Camoin. The etchings above were contributed by Vlaminck to one of the earliest monographs on his work, by Georges Duhamel.

Maurice de Vlaminck, Church across a cornfield

Lithograph, 1957

Maurice de Vlaminck continued to write as well as paint, and is one of the few to achieve real distinction in both literature and art. Besides his fellow-Fauves, Vlaminck was deeply influenced by Cézanne and Van Gogh. He went to the 1901 Van Gogh exhibition with Derain, and was overwhelmed by what he saw.

Maurice de Vlaminck, Flowers in a vase III

Lithograph, 1957

Maurice de Vlaminck, Farmhouse in the snow

Lithograph, 1957

While Maurice de Vlaminck’s early prints tend to be monochrome, his later work is filled with colour, as shown in the monochrome etchings in this post, dating from 1927, and the boldly-coloured lithographs from thirty years later.

Maurice de Vlaminck, Flooded water meadow

Lithograph, 1957

The colour lithographs were made for an edition of Images pour un jardin sans murs by Maurice Genevoix; my copy is warmly inscribed by Genevoix to the publisher Henri Flammarion.