March 25, 2007
Soehnée
Between May 1818 and May 1819, Charles-Frédéric Soehnée filled three albums with an extraordinary series of watercolour paintings and sketches. These, together with a single lithograph, ‘as far as we know, […] make up the bulk, if not the entirety of Soehnée’s œuvre.’ Some details from these watercolours, scanned from the catalogue of his work published last year, follow below.
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Soehnée had been born in 1789 in the Rhineland town of Landau, which at that time was part of France: his odd-looking surname is the Gallicized equivalent of Söhne. His family moved to Paris before the turn of the nineteenth century. From about 1810, Soehnée was a pupil of the Neoclassical painter and illustrator Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson. The best likeness we have of him is that painted by his friend and fellow-pupil Pierre-Louis de Laval (or Delaval), in 1812.
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Excepting a few conventional landscapes, Soehnée’s paintings are almost entirely devoted to fantastical and grotesque subjects: groups of faceless figures are juxtaposed with variously ratlike and batlike creatures, or skeletal birds; and there is a strange preponderance of stilts, whips and fishing-rods. The titles that Soehnée gave to some of his pictures are further suggestive of a ‘gothic’ sensibility: ‘Journey to Hell;’ ‘Cradle of Death;’ ‘A Place of Silence;’ and ‘The Winds, Grouped around Plague and Death, Cover the Earth with Tombs…’
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At the time these works were executed, it is likely that Soehnee was already engaged in research that would culminate, in 1822, with the publication of a technical treatise in which he disputed the traditional account of Van Eyck’s having invented oil-painting, arguing instead ‘for the existence, since antiquity, of a form of oil painting, or a mixture of encaustic and varnish, which in his view, could be the only explanation for the durability and preservation of ancient paintings.’ Thereafter, Soehnée seems to have abandoned art, and to have ‘become a technician, and a dealer; [and] not content with theorising, he perfected a varnish which was extremely successful—Delacroix mentions it several times in his journal—and which is still in use today.’
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The present images were scanned from Patrick Mauriès’ catalogue Charles-Frédéric Soehnée (1789-1878): Un voyage en Enfer which was published by Le Promeneur in association with the Galerie Jean-Marie Le Fell, to coincide with an exhibition there last summer. Mauriès’ article Soehnée’s Capriccios: The Paradox in Art, (translated into English by Judith Landry), which appeared in issue 17 of FMR magazine, was my source for the information quoted and paraphrased above.
Addendum (02/07/08): the first, second, fourth, seventh and eighth of the images above are reproductions of photographs of Soehnée’s paintings taken by François Doury and copyright © Galerie Jean-Marie Le Fell; the third and sixth of the photos are copyright © Christie’s Images Limited; and the fifth photograph is by Photo RMN, and is copyright © Thierry Le Mage. All of the above images been reproduced here only for as long as no-one objects to their presence on this site.
March 18, 2007
Callot
A few months ago I bought a copy of the 1989 reprint edition (published by Alan Wofsy Fine Arts of San Francisco), of Jules Lieure’s Jacques Callot: Catalogue Raisonné de L’Œuvre Gravé (‘The Complete Etchings and Engravings’). It’s an admirably comprehensive work, which illustrates over 1400 of Callot’s prints; although, while their quantity can hardly be faulted, the quality (of the reproductions) often leaves a good deal to be desired. There follows a tiny sample of some of the clearer images from this book…
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First, above, a pair of details from a series of landscapes collectively entitled Diverse Vedute designate in Fiorenza. These date from ca. 1618, while Callot was employed by the Medici court in Florence to visually document the grand entertainments staged by Duke Cosimo II. Besides large etchings of fairs, festivals, parades and tournaments, Callot etched series of prints illustrating beggars, courtiers, hunchbacks and commedia dell’arte characters, as in the pair of images below.
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Callot had been born in Nancy, in the Duchy of Lorraine, ca. 1592. ‘He came from a prominent family (his father was master of ceremonies at the court of the Duke), and he often describes himself as having noble status in the inscriptions to his prints.’ Legend has it that, in 1604, the aspring artist ‘ran away to Italy in the company of a band of gypsies.’ The images below are from a group of four prints known as Les Bohémiens (‘The Gypsies’).
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Following Cosimo II’s death in 1621, Callot returned to his native Nancy, where, excepting visits to Paris and the Netherlands later in the 1620s, he was to remain for the rest of his life. During his sojourn in Paris, Callot executed several large-scale commissions for Louis XIII, including very large, multi-sheet ‘infographics’ illustrating the sieges of La Rochelle and the Ile de Rè. The following pair of Grandes Vues de Paris presumably also date from this period.
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When French troops besieged Lorraine between 1631 and 1633, in an attempt to annex it, Callot depicted the conflict with what remain his best-known series of prints: Les Misères et Les Malheurs de la Guerre (‘The Miseries and Disasters of War’). These series move from scenes depicting the mobilisation and drilling of troops, through to battles, skirmishes, marauding and petty pillaging, to tableaux of martial torture and executions.
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‘While Callot’s exact intentions are not clear in executing the series, his images do appear to condemn unjust conduct in war through a juxtaposition of honorific and savage actions and his etchings inspired other artists such as Goya and Daumier to use prints as a polemical vehicle to critique the senseless practice of war and military injustice.’
March 11, 2007
Matton
In the mid-1980s, the French painter, sculptor and film-maker Charles Matton decided that he ‘wanted to paint Realist interiors in the manner of the “moderns,” that is, without wasting time on painstaking technical processes.’ He first thought of photographing friends’ and fellow-artists’ apartments and studios, then painting over the resulting cibachrome prints, but at length settled upon an altogether different strategy: in small boxes he constructed detailed models of the interiors he had chosen to depict, and then carefully photographed those, eventually exhibiting the models together with the prints and paintings derived from them. The dolls’-house miniatures attracted such attention, that they soon became and end in themselves, and Matton has continued ‘wasting time’ on the ‘painstaking technical processes’ they require ever since.
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Matton has said ‘…I create two kinds of boxes: those whose purpose is to re-create an atmosphere that has delighted me, a memory whose existence I wish to perpetuate; and the more objective pieces that are the result of a detailed examination of the “realistic truth” of a certain place.’ In the former category are the works depicting deserted hotel-lobbies and empty corridors, or, as in the case of the pair of images below, a Swedish bathroom. In other works the ‘atmosphere’ being reconstructed is a literary one, as in the ‘homages:’ elaborate library-scenes paying tribute to writers such as Perec & Borges (as in the images above); Proust & Joyce.
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The ‘objective pieces’ are often re-creations of the studios or studies of artists or thinkers Matton admires: Francis Bacon’s chaotic South Kensington studio was the subject of one; William S. Burroughs’ squalid room in Tangier another; Sigmund Freud’s Vienna study a third (see the last of the present images, below). Other ‘studio’ boxes are partly or wholly imaginary, for example, the ‘Studio of a Classical Sculptor’ shown in the sixth of these images. Almost all of the elements in the boxes are made of epoxy resin, with marble-powder filler. ‘The objects are then painted, or patinated, to take on the form of gold frames, tubes of paint, parquet floors, brick walls ... marble overmantels, ashtrays, celadon vases and books…’ before being carefully put into position.
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In her essay ‘Charles Matton: Meticulous Illusionist,’ Barbara S. Krulik writes that his work has ‘An antecedent […] in 17th-century Dutch perspective boxes [which] employed linear perspective to create a three-dimensional space in miniature.’ ‘Artists such as Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-78),’ she adds ‘created boxes dealing with characteristic themes of the period including genre scenes and architectural views.’ And one could argue, perhaps, that Joseph Cornell’s boxes are (distantly) akin to Matton’s.
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The images (and much of the information) above were lifted from an article in issue 16 of (the new-format) FMR magazine (‘Charles Matton Encircled’) by the artist’s wife, Sylvie Matton (translated by Judith Landry), and from a small catalogue (‘Charles Matton: Within These Walls’) issued by the Forum Gallery, New York, to coincide with a 2002 exhibition of his drawings, paintings, photographs and mixed-media constructions.
Correction (added 02/07/08): the first, second, third, fourth and sixth of the photographs reproduced above are the work of Sebastian Straessle, and were scanned from issue 16 (Dec./Jan. ’06/’07) of FMR magazine; they are all copyright © Sebastian Straessle; the fifth photograph is by Richard McCabe and the seventh photograph is by Yann Matton, these were scanned from the exhibition catalogue cited above, and are copyright © the Forum Gallery, New York. The original works are copyright © Charles Matton. All the above images have been reproduced here only for as long as no-one objects to their presence on this site.