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Monthly Archives: July 2012

Jean-Pierre Redouté :: Artist at Chateau Malmaison

Monday, July 23, 2012

Posted by patwa in Artists in Paris, Artists Near Paris, France Travel, Gardens in France, Paris

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botanical painting, Josephine Bonaparte

Chateau de Malmaison

For Joséphine de Beauharnais Bonaparte, the Chateau de Malmaison —  just outside Paris, with its abundant gardens and enveloping forests — was a cherished retreat, her respite from the demands of Paris and Napoleon’s court life. Today it is a delightful oasis and a museum dedicated to Joséphine and Napoleon.

The Chateau de Malmaison, or “bad house,” as it was called in the Middle Ages when the property was the site of a leper colony, is nestled in a small forest near the Parisian suburb Rueil-Malmaison. When Joséphine bought the house in 1799, it was the centerpiece of a 640-acre estate, which has shrunk to six hectares (14.8 acres). Today, residential apartment buildings sit on land that was once part of the empress’ great park.

The original Malmaison was built in 1622. After the imperial couple completed their renovations, the chateau incorporated elements of the neoclassical Empire style then flourishing. Malmaison is spare and compact, but the use of such details as wide window casements, decorative cornices and molding as well as neutral floor covering and mirrors gives the illusion of spaciousness.

Malmaison had several owners after Joséphine, including Napoleon III, who was Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew and step-grandchild, the son of Josephine’s daughter Hortense de Beauharnais and Napoleon’s brother Louis. The  philanthropist Daniel Osiris bought the house and grounds in 1896, financed restoration and presented Malmaison to France to be used for a Napoleonic museum. Further acquisitions and careful preservation have enhanced the property.

Osiris Pavillion

As one enters the grounds, the surprisingly compact white chateau comes into view, dwarfed by the surrounding woods. In summer the scent of the famous roses planted by the botanist and artist Jean-Pierre Redouté is a pleasant distraction along the gravel paths.

 

The tour begins with the salons, dining room and music room on the ground floor and proceeds at a leisurely pace. Braided satin cords bar traffic from certain precious carpets, but there is ample time to study the antique furniture and accessories.

Library at Malmaison.

Napoleon’s war campaign office is re-created in one ground-floor room. Walls and ceiling are covered with striped cloth; crossed spears are set in the corners of this simulated tent. The general’s portable desk dominates the room and, indeed, Napoleon seems almost present as one stands in the midst of the belongings that he took with him to battle.

 

 

The music room reveals Josephine’s gentler touch. Delicate paintings of flowers by Redouté decorate the corridor leading to the ornate salon where the empress’ harp is displayed.

Four faces of P-J Redouté

An elaborate round table covered with signs of the zodiac and mystical symbols reveals another aspect of Josephine. The guide comments that she regularly had her own and Napoleon’s horoscopes cast and that tarot card readings by fortunetellers were routine entertainments in the household.

Lily painted by P-J Redouté

On the second and third floors, the tour continues along some very narrow passageways and into the family bedrooms and a room filled with memorabilia dating from Napoleon’s exile on St. Helena. The tour group buzzed with whispered comments when we came to the Osiris Pavilion on the second floor to view the death mask molded by the Corsican doctor Francesco Antommarchi who attended Napoleon as he died in 1821 on the remote South Atlantic Island, St. Helena. Also on view are the camp bed on which he died and the cover for the catafalque that carried his remains to the tomb.

Josèphine’s bed.

Some of Josephine’s wardrobe spills out of one of the bedroom closets. Cluttering bedside tables and dresser tops are personal souvenirs and toilette items belonging to Joséphine and Hortense, her daughter.

An avid patron of horticulture, Joséphine also left her mark on the gardens of Malmaison, which she employed Redoute’ to lay out. In early summer they are at their most colorful, when rows upon rows of roses are in bloom.

Rose by J-P Redouté

In addition to his horticultural creativity (he developed many new rose varieties for Joséphine), Redouté was one of the world’s greatest botanical illustrators. His meticulous paintings of the roses at Malmaison are among the treasures of the New York Public Library, and his rose varieties grace gardens all over the world.

A few steps from the chateau, in the former stables, is a display of coaches and carriages, including the one Josephine rode in on the return to Malmaison after her humiliating divorce from Napoleon in 1809. Equally poignant is the carriage used by Princess Marie Antoinette of Austria when she came to France to marry Louis XVI.

Josèphine’s Tomb

Joséphine lived at Malmaison until her death in 1814. Not far from the gardens she presided over, in the church in the center of Rueil-Malmaison, is her white marble tomb.  With her daughter Hortense, the two women, an empress and a queen, mother and daughter, repose together in the silent church, their vivid lives now history.

 

 

Address Book:

Chateau de Malmaison (Avenue du Chateau, Rueil-Malmaison, France). Consult the website for current opening hours, tours and virtual tours.

The museum is open daily, except Tuesdays.  It is closed December 25 and January 1.  The last entry each day is 45 minutes before closing time.  Closing times change depending on the season and are open slightly later on weekends.  Call ahead or check the museum website for specifics.

The chateau is about 12 miles (45 minutes) from Paris by car. Take Rte. N13 west from Neuilly and follow the signs to Rueil-Malmaison and the chateau where there is a free parking lot.

From la Défense metro/RER station: take bus 258 to “Le Chateau” (25 minutes).  Cross the Route Nationale 13 and walk to the chateau about 300 meters.

From Rueil-Malmaison station: take the RER A line  to Rueil-Malmaison, then the “Bus Optile 27” and get off at “Le Château” (8 minutes)

Nearby Attractions of Interest:

On Avenue de l’Imperatrice Josephine, a few minutes’ walk from Malmaison, the Napoleonic pilgrimage continues at Chateau de Bois-Préau, bequeathed to France by Edward Tuck, an American diplomat-banker with a passion for collecting portraits and artifacts of the Napoleonic era. Part of Tuck’s collection is housed in the Petit Palais in Paris.

In nearby St. Germain-en-Laye (also on Rte. N13) is the small Debussy museum, where the composer was born.

A similar version of this article appeared in The Washington Post.

Louise Colet: Rage and Fire

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Posted by patwa in Artists Near Paris, France Travel, Hotels in Paris, Normandy, Paris, Provence, Writers in France, Writers in Italy

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19th century, artist cafes, feminists, poets, writers

Rage and Fire: A Life of Louise Colet

Pioneer Feminist, Literary Star, Flaubert’s Muse.

Francine du Plessix Gray, Simon & Schuster,  1994.

Louise Colet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Colet

Who was Louise Colet?  Close friend, muse and lover of one of France’s greatest novelists — Gustave Flaubert.  But  long before she met Flaubert, she was a highly productive poet and essayist, a feminist dedicated to fighting for equal rights for women and honored by the Académie Française.  She is usually described in the context of her friendship with  Gustave Flaubert and billed as his muse.  Yet, it is important to remember that when the writers met, she was the celebrated one, a 36-year-old self-supporting poet honored by the Académie,  while he was an unpublished 24-year-old aspiring novelist who lived with his mother in the country.

Gustave Flaubert
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki

Louise Colet developed into a scathing political satirist, dedicated to supporting the mid – 19th century drive for liberty and justice.  Decades after the American and French Revolutions which certainly jolted the aristocratic land-owning class, representative governance and human legal equality were still a distant dream for most people.   The “trickle down” factors of economic equity, universal suffrage and political liberty  were  still being hammered out in North America and Europe.  The idea that human rights and political equality and legal independence applied to women was hardly a view shared by men of the era.  In this time period the people of many European countries pushed for democracy, labor and voting rights, legal equity and individual liberty.  And so were Americans seeking civil justice, an end to slavery, voting rights for women and poor people who were excluded from participating in elections.

To follow the footsteps of Louise Colet, go to Provence, to Mouriès, the village near Servanes.  The Hostellerie de Servanes is the ancestral estate where Louise Révoil grew up.  Born in Aix-en-Provence, east of Servanes, Louise’s maternal family were local gentry with generations serving in the Parliament of Provence.  Her father, from the merchant class, was head of the local postal system.  She learned quite naturally to align herself with the people’s causes and in strictly divided class-conscious Aix, Louise’s aristocrat mother  directed her family to walk on the side of the promenade for ordinary people rather than the elite side of the Cours Mirabeau, the “see and be scene” promenade in Aix, even though they were certainly entitled to walk with the local aristocracy.  The Fonds Louise Colet, her papers and other archival material from Louise Colet ‘s life and work,  is housed in the Médiathèque Ceccano section of the Bibliotheque Municipale d’Avignon.

The Musée Calvet in Avignon preserves Colet memorabilia, according to the acknowledgements in du Plessix Gray’s book, but I was not able to successfully search for items related  to Louise Colet using the search function on the museum website.  It’s likely material related to Louise Colet would be in a museum archive or library, rather than part of the collection on view digitally.

During her years in Paris, Colet lived in several different apartments,  as might be expected for a single mother supporting herself with free-lance writing and literary stipends from the government.  Louise Colet lived at 21 rue de Sèvres during the time she hosted her own literary salon, then very much in vogue.  This apartment was not far from  L’Abbaye aux Bois where Madame Récamier conducted her famous artistic and philosophical discussions until 1849.  Colet had a falling out with her friend over the usual miscommunications and misunderstandings. Colet also lived at 21 rue Neuve Fontaine Saint-Georges  (rue Fromentin).  It was in this lodging  in Montmartre where she decided to separate in 1842 after living briefly with her spouse, the musician Hippolyte Colet.

Louise Colet died March 8, 1876 in her daughter’s apartment, in the rue des Ecoles in Paris, although some books report that Colet died in a small hotel on that street.  During the previous summer in Paris, Colet’s letters of the period were written from the Hotel d’ Angleterre, Rue Jacob and the Hotel du Palais-Royal, Rue de Rivoli. Contrary to her wishes, she was buried with the Catholic Church’s ceremonial pomp that she despised, in daughter Henriette Colet Bissieu’s husband’s family plot in the municipal cemetery in Verneuil, Normandy.  The Bissieu family estate was named “Fryleuse” and is located in or near Verneuil. It is likely that  the town “Verneuil” refers to  Verneuil-sur-Avre which is in Normandy.

Beyond her writing, fired-up feminist rhetoric and long friendship with Gustave Flaubert, Louise Colet took on the Vatican and launched a public relations campaign on behalf of the mid-19th century freedom fighters Garibaldi and Cavour.

During her months in Italy, Louise Colet followed the footsteps of writers she admired, frequenting Caffe Florian in Piazza San Marco, Venice and searching for the exact rooms in the Hotel Nani (later, the Hotel Danieli) where writer George Sand and her lover Alfred Musset lived and worked decades earlier in 1833-1834.

But Colet’s main mission was to shine a light on the efforts of Cavour and Garibaldi to create a unified Italy.  Their efforts to unify the fiefdoms and city-states of the Italian peninsula challenged the temporal power of the Vatican. Papal States scattered throughout the peninsula we now call Italy were gradually being brought under the unifying rule of Victor Emanuel; democratic government would follow unification.  Colet  used her considerable literary fame to seek meetings with key members of the Vatican government.

Francine du Plessix Gray writes:

“In February of 1861, after visits to Sicily that inspired many more pages of art history, Louise Colet left Naples for Rome.  Victor Emmanuel had vastly diminished the Papal States the previous autumn when he occupied the Marches and Umbria, as Garibaldi had wished to do.  The papal territory was reduced to the city of Rome, where the entrenched conservative factions had grown more bitter.  The city was rife with secret police that kept watch on antipapist elements; one of its targets, in the first months of 1861, was Louise Colet.  As soon as she had settled at the Hôtel Inghilterra – a lovely hostelry still standing today on the Via Bocca del Leone, two blocks from the Spanish Steps – she was warned by one of her compatriots, a bookstore owner, that she was under police surveillance.

The warning left her undaunted  She was determined to remain in Rome = whose antiquities thrilled her as its religious artifacts horrified her = to continue her campaign against the Catholic clergy, which she considered to be the principal enemy of human progress.

Louise’s anticlericalism was fanned by a pope who was one of the more repressive Catholic leaders of the post-Reformation era and whose pontificate was the longest in the history of the papacy  (1846 – 1878).  Although he had begun as a fairly liberal reformist, Pius IX became an arch conservative in the 1850s, when Cavour attempted to limit his temporal power.  He militantly opposed every goal of the Risorgimento, and his reign was defined by two of the most regressive encyclicals of papal history, those that set forth the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and the doctrine of Papal Infallibility.

When she arrived in Rome, Louise immediately set off to visit the Vatican, where she assisted at a Mass officiated by Pius IX in the Sistine Chapel.  She describes the obese little Pope, his thick head doddering over a swollen neck, his muddy eyes and weak lips, his blotched red face and powdered hair, the archaic pomp with which his chair is carried into the church by fourteen papal guards.  She considered the basilica of Saint Peter a site “of glacial pomp … totally devoid of any mysticism or mystery.”  With the exception of the Pietà of Michelangelo, who “would have been a far greater artist if he had fawned less upon illiterate pontiffs,” the basilica’s “overabundance of riches” was a “a monument to hypocrisy … catering to the taste of parvenus and bankers.”

Louise was particularly disgusted with the opulent tomb of Queen Christina of Sweden – “a ruler more pagan in her mores than those of pre-Christian times” – whose recently published letters had revealed her to be “a thief, a violent, insolent and debauched strumpet.”  In the middle of Saint Peter’s, Louise shouted, “I protest this sanctification of Christina of Sweden!  As a saint,as one of the truly just, I far prefer Garibaldi!”  Her outburst terrified a priest, who took to his heels and rushed back into the depths of the basilica.

Later that month, she wrote a burlesque of a Holy Week Mass at Saint Peter’s, which re-created the Last Supper:  The Holy Father himself served food to the thirteen beggars who were seated at the table as stand-ins for Christ and his apostles.  At the end of the liturgy, a few seconds after the Pope had left the church, a group of fat monks rushed to the altar, chased out the beggars, and stuffed the food and wine into large baskets for their own use (Louise’s description of Rome’s decadent religious mores occasionally strain the imagination).

Visiting the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, Louise was prompted to make her own profession of faith, in which she revels a nonsectarian piety.  She was, in fact, a Diest:  She believed in a Supreme Being but maintained that the truths of this “Implacable Unknown” could not be incarnated in any temporal sect or power.  Her credo was a blend of the ideologies that had influenced her since youth – her maternal grandfather’s Voltarian skepticism, Victor Cousin’s eclectic mysticism, Alfred de Vigny’s Stoicism, Victor Hugo’s catchall pantheism.

“Although I long ago left the Catholic faith [she wrote in the fourth and final volume of L’Italie des Italiens’, I enjoy meditating whenever I can in a great empty basilica.  I do not feel as much communion with  infinity there as I do when gazing on a beautiful starry night or the immensity of the ocean; but I cannot enter into one of these temples which a succession of religious sects erected to their gods without feeling a sorrowful compassion concerning our finitude.

… In our time the human soul is stifled by Catholicism, an antihuman doctrine whose architects suppressed all air and light … Liberty, Justice, Charity, Science, and Chastity have been no more than ringing words in the mouthpiece of the Church. … and  at this very hour, the forces of liberty and justice shout out against the Church through all the voices of the Italian fatherland: “Why do you deny our liberation?” ”

These are the opinions with which Louise assaulted Cardinal Antonelli, Prime Minister of the Papal States, one of the Church’s highest-ranking prelates, when she cornered him at the Vatican in an attempt to obtain an audience with the Pope.  It was a few days before her return to France, and Louise had a grand purpose in desiring to talk with the Holy Father.  She wished to convert Pius IX to the cause of Italian liberation, to the side of Garibaldi and Cavour!

Sitting so close to her that his frock touched her dress, the cardinal, who wore immense rings of square-cut emeralds, addressed Louise as “cara mia” and heard her out but was not in the least swayed.  “The Church,” he told her, “cannot recognize the people’s novel claim to emancipation, which of course is no more than the right to rape and murder.  The meaningless concepts of ‘patriotism,’ ‘liberty,’ or ‘universal suffrage’ can only be brought about by violence.”  Nor did the prelate rush to get Louise an audience with Pius.  She had given him three days to arrange the meeting, and the cardinal explained that the Holy Father did not accept ultimatums.  Thus were we deprived of a colorful episode – Louise Colet preaching revolution to the most reactionary Pope of modern times.

Louise left Rome for Paris in the spring of 1861, after a year and eight months in Italy.  She would soon grieve over Camillo Cavour, who died suddenly, at fifty-one, a few weeks after she returned to France.  But the revolutionary goals Cavour pursued had been fulfilled.  All of the Italian peninsula, with the exclusion of Rome, had voted to be annexed to Victor Emmanuel’s kingdom.  In March, at a parliamentary session in Turin, Victor Emmanuel II proclaimed the birth of a united kingdom of Italy.  …

The venom in Louise’s pen, and the biting social satire that Flaubert considered to be her greatest literary talent, increased in her later years.  “Please accept the assurance of my most perfect disdain,” she signed letters to some of her antagonists.

Source:  Gray, Francine du Plessix. (1994) Rage & Fire : A Life of Louise Colet.  New York: Simon & Schuster, pp 307-310.

Footsteps of the Artists :: Kandinsky

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Posted by patwa in Artists in Paris, Artists' Graves, Paris, Study Art in France

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art history, bohemia, design, painting

Vassily Kandinsky

Born in Moscow in 1866,  Vassilly Kandinsky  (also spelled Wassilly) was raised in comfort and educated to be a lawyer. After practicing law for a few years, Kandinsky started painting at age 30 and pursued art as his passion thereafter.

In Russia up until death of Lenin, artists enjoyed favored status. Creativity was encouraged. Artists produced and their ranks multiplied. Kandinsky’s wild images were strange and wondrous, pushing the use of color to expand consciousness. Much beloved by those who knew him during his lifetime, Kandinsky was a  visionary artist with a global audience for his paintings which are in museum and private collections around the world.

Kandinsky read the occult teachers popular in the early 20th century.  He synthesized evolving precepts of anti-materialism and creativity into his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art published in 1910.

Concerning the Spiritual in Art
by V. Kandinsky

Vassily Kandinsky and his wife Nina moved to Paris in 1933, he came as an exile who’d lost his professorship in Munich after the Nazis closed the school.  They also revoked his German citizenship acquired in 1927.

 

 

 

Vassilly and Nina Kandinsky settled in suburban Neuilly-sur-Seine on the sixth floor of a building overlooking the river.

Early 20th c. view of Paris
Neuilly-sur-Seine in distance

This was the era when Paris warmly welcomed refugees from other parts of Europe and beyond. Foreign artists included: Miro,  Mondrian, Max Ernst, Brancusi, Rivera and many others.

 

 

They lived near the Bois de Boulogne with a view of Mont Valerien. After Liberation Day in 1945, the Mont Valerien property became a monument to those who were executed for work in the French underground resistance to Nazi occupation.

– Bois de Boulogne, Paris 1925

The Russian-French designer Sonia Delaunay and her husband Charles Delaunay were friendly colleagues of the Kandinskys.  Fernand Leger and Jean Arp were also part of their circle, though Leger spent the World War II years teaching at Yale. Kandinsky liked to vacation at Cauterets in the Hautes-Pyrenees.

Kandinsky Color Study

For Kandinsky, the stateless citizen who fled to Paris, success and appreciation came during his lifetime.  There were exhibitions in 1936, 1939, and 1942 at the Gallery Jeanne Bucher.  Nina Kandinsky dubbed 1934-1944 “the years of synthesis”.

The artist became a French citizen in 1939 and died in 1944.  A school in Neuilly-sur-Seine bears his name.  Kandinsky is buried at New Communal Cemetery, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.
References

* Hilton Kramer on Kandinsky in Paris, The New Criterion, April 1985.

* Francois Le Targat,  Kandinsky, Rizzoli, 1987.

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