From a secondary character in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, Ophelia has become a myth. Specialist in 19th century French painting, successively curator at the Musée d’Orsay, then at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, and currently at the Château de Versailles (the masterful exhibition on the orientalist painter Horace Vernet which she signed is currently being held there) , Valérie Bajou traces this rich heritage even in our latest video games, clips and cartoons. Because it is indeed the 19th century which, starting with Delacroix, mainly glorified Ophelia, the archetype of the young woman torn to the point of madness and suicide between her father and her beloved. But, just to turn things around, in England, the Pre-Raphaelites quickly recovered their beautiful lady; the Pre-Raphaelites particularly. If we except the role played both by Sarah Bernhardt and, closer to us, by Marianne Faithfull, Millais’ Ophelia is still the most famous representation today (the painting where the young girl floats on the surface of the water between sleep and death is at the Tate Britain). Everyone can project their fantasies there like Khnopff, Jean Delville or Munch who also explored female tragedy. And Valérie Bajou demonstrates that studying Ophélie means first of all understanding the social and political history of the female condition.
Ophélie, Valérie Bajou, Cohen
In 1926 the gallery owner and publisher Ambroise Vollard – the one who, among others, revealed Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso – commissioned illustrations from Marc Chagall for a new edition of Jean de la Fontaine’s Fables. This visionary had immediately sensed a community of spirit between the 17th century French moralist and the 20th century painter, originally from Belarus, to whom he had previously offered to share his vision of Gogol’s Dead Souls. Result of this challenge of having the writings of a Champenois, a genius so specifically Louisquatorzian, interpreted by a foreigner (Chagall, born in 1888, did not arrive from the Russian Empire in Paris until 1911): the sixty gouaches , accompanied for the first time by their transpositions into engravings made between 1928 and 1930, harmonizes perfectly with the poems. Across the centuries and cultures of origin, the same sincerity, the same truths stated, the same dreamlike means of rhetoric such as the use of animals to point out human failings without offending. The kind nature of La Fontaine is matched by the snowy landscapes of Vitebsk. The common sense inherited from that of Aesop and the Roman de Renard is matched by that imbued with the Hasidic traditions of Eastern Europe. This peak in the art of the modern art book was nevertheless received upon its publication by a flood of chauvinist and anti-Semitic critics.
The Fables of La Fontaine illustrated by Chagall, Hazan, 240 p., €60.
Today we first remember the colorist from this late impressionist, from this obsessive Nabi Japonist. And his numerous Mediterranean gardens and interiors vibrating with flaky touches have readily made Pierre Bonnard (1867 – 1947) one of those so-called “happiness” painters among the general public. It’s too short, and particularly false as soon as we approach his female bodies, representations of that of Marthe the depressed wife, almost cadaverous in the cold water of a bathtub, or his hallucinated skinned self-portraits. In the steam that saturates the family bathroom as in the sweltering heat of the park in Le Cannet, a worry emerges. The enchantment of these amniotic atmospheres cannot resist the underlying existential anxiety. An attentive eye, never separating the man and the work, Stéphane Guégan, historian and art critic, specialist in the 19th and 20th centuries, scientific advisor to the presidency of the Musée d’Orsay, invalid numbers of a priori and amalgams in this reference monograph, illustrated with nearly 170 reproductions. Modern or classic? Symbolist heir, late figurative or on the contrary father of abstract expressionism as Jean Clair revived it in 1984? Bonnard was in truth unconcerned with boxes. In a scrupulous step by step, bringing here and there in the chronology new information, Guégan rather grasps his model “at the crossroads of its various temptations and the context which made them possible”. So read before seeing Martin Provost’s film, Bonnard, Pierre et Marthe (released January 10) at the cinema.
Bonnard, Stéphane Guégan, Hazan, 280 p., €110.
Under the direction of two Chinese scholars – Xinmiao Zheng, director of the Forbidden City Museum, and Hongxing Zhang, curator at Victoria
Chinese paintings, Citadels
To see the visual arts in the 20th and 21st centuries only as an exploration of abstraction would be to see only one eye. Identifiable forms, first and foremost the face, still abound – or even more than ever? – in recent creations. Everything happens as if the features or silhouette of contemporary man resist materialist nonsense, modern chaos. Certainly in general they are distorted, fragmented, scratched, ugly, schematized, mocked or devoid of quality as in pop art. Since Cubism, the traditional mirror portrait has been shattered. But at the same time the genre was partially maintained, as if hidden in others. A Giacometti, a Jawlensky, a Dubuffet or currently a Baselitz have proposed other facets. To the point that the modes or variations of more or less illusionistic human representation seem decidedly forever infinite. Even the specters of concentration camps, almost dissolved in the warlike and industrial horror of a Music or a Boltanski, manifest life, even if only implicitly. And it is this spark, sometimes as tenuous as it is refractory, that Itzhak Goldberg, specialist in modern and contemporary art, has endeavored to identify in his latest work. “Trying to make a portrait, my ideal would be to take a handful of paint and throw it on the canvas, with the hope that the portrait would be there,” Francis Bacon dreamed. This fantasy is here, finally.
Facing the face, 20th – 21st century by Itzhak Goldberg, Citadels
Inanimate objects, do you have a soul that is attached to our soul and the strength to love?, asked Lamartine. Of course, the “Watchers” respond. Namely the contemporary image specialist Sam Stourdzé and the curious Jean de Loisy, curator and art historian who in turn worked at the Cartier Foundation, the Center Pompidou, the Palais de Tokyo and who directed the Fine Arts from Paris. Both take stones as an example. They are the most impenetrable realities and their forms are so varied that they have attracted and attract many artists. Without mentioning Caillois who gave them perhaps their finest comments, the work shows and deciphers as examples some of the most “telluric” works of Rodin, Breton, Picasso, Brassaï, Léger, Dubuffet, Brancusi, Perriand, Léger , or even Le Facteur Cheval, not to mention that of a number of contemporary visual artists. The existence of the smallest piece of gravel is much longer than ours, hence the fascination generated, as spontaneous as it is universal. This is evidenced by the lapidary or mineralogy collections, the carvings and sculptures from prehistory to today. And again the “landscape stones” very appreciated by Chinese scholars, the passion for meteorites, the divinizations in ancient Indian, Etruscan, Gallic statuary, the simple interest in their shape and their material, starting with the crystals where the eye and mind have fun finding matches (ah the water of a diamond!). The subject is systematically sifted, until nuggets are produced. Such as this chapter that our two gold diggers devote to “rebellious stones”, these pebbles capable of sometimes breaking the window of conventions or disturbing the pond of appearances. An exhibition is being held on this theme at the Villa Medici in Rome, an institution currently directed by Stourdzé, until January 14.
Stories of stones, Jean de Loisy and Sam Stourdzé, Delpire
Release in France and Japan of one of the four “extraordinary books” of Chinese literature, a fantastic saga in one hundred chapters. These approximately four thousand pages are reproduced in their summarized Japanese version with their 250 xylographed illustrations from the Japanese edition of 1806-1837. This is a work of more than ten years, carried out by the comic book publisher 2024 in collaboration with researchers under the direction of Christophe Marquet, research director at the French School of Advanced Studies. In addition to the translation and comments, it was necessary to restore the wood engravings at the origin of a popular tradition which is found even in the universe of Dragon Ball. The Journey to the West tells the story of the adventures – sometimes picaresque tribulations, sometimes epic battles – of a pilgrim monk, who went to seek, in the company of a rather megalomaniacal monkey, the sacred writings from Buddha in his Western paradise. A synthesis of the immense original oral movement, a first version was recorded in Chinese in 1592. But the comical bestiary deployed by the Japanese engravers of the Edo period, Ohara Toya, Utagawa Toyohiro and Katsushika Taito, one of Hokusai’s disciples, is even more flamboyant.
The Journey to the West, Editions 2024, 836 p., €69.
This selection of masterpieces of animal art opens as it should, with the first true animal portrait in the history of art. This effigy of a pair of hunting dogs, pointers of mannerist nobility visible at the Louvre in the same room and a stone’s throw from the Mona Lisa, was painted by the Venetian Jacopo Bassano in 1548. Followed by a very populated and colorful Arch : Zurbarán’s Agnus Deï, Rubens’s wild beasts, the Duchess of Alba’s bichon by Goya, the prancing horse with panicked eyes of Napoleon crossing the Alps by David, Steinlen’s black cat, the bulls and pigeons by Picasso… Even spiders by Louise Bourgeois. “Animal art is poorly regarded by aesthetes and intellectual elites. It is criticized for being sentimental, bourgeois, anecdotal, ornamental, decorative. Furthermore, we consider it dated, it would be a genre belonging to the past,” writes the author in the preamble. Before engaging in a proper defense and illustration. Because he certainly does not omit the aurochs of Lascaux, the powerful Assyrian lions, the elegant Egyptian bronze cats, the horses of Saint-Marc or even the brilliant Rabbit of Dürer. Asian, Oceanian, African or American bestiaries included.
Beautiful beasts, Thierry Groensteen, Scala, 190 p., €35.
Close-up on the most damaged of geniuses. Pascal Bonnafoux, novelist and essayist, always excels in the exercise of artistic commentary. This time he delivers his meditation on Van Gogh’s self-portraits. A tête-à-tête that is both sensitive and erudite, fascinating since other voices intervene in this dialogue, such as of course that of this other Dutchman who is as introverted as he is expansive: Rembrandt. “I want to make a figure, a figure
Van Gogh, portrait
Storms, eruptions, collapse. And again droughts, famines, epidemics… By their enormity, their force and their sudden nature, natural calamities have always fascinated men. And even more so the artists who, particularly from Romanticism, when the notion of the sublime became cardinal, endeavored to render them on canvas, in marble or bronze. Classified by cataclysms, their works all refer more or less to the biblical Apocalypse. And as the word apocalypse literally means revelation, we can maintain that the selection established by the novelist, ex-history teacher at Paris high school Lous-le-Grand, is one. From the Flood imagined by Gustave Doré to the glowing Great Day in His Anger by the English painter John Martin, Christ in the Storm in the Sea of Galilee, Rembrandt’s only marine and oil missing since its theft in 1990 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (a bounty of 10 million dollars to anyone who can find him) to the Flood at Port-Marly by Sisley: it’s difficult not to have in mind this prediction from Baudelaire: “The world is going to end”.
The Angry Earth, Bernard Chambaz, Seuil, 261 p., €39.
