This biography from the Archives of AskART: A post-impressionist French painter who was one of the revolutionaries of the Nabis movement that paved the way for abstraction, Edouard Vuillard had a long career spanning the late 19th and nearly half of the 20th Century. His work, often with luminosity, became increasingly abstract and colorful, which some art historians link to Henri Matisse and the Fauves. Among his subjects were figures in interiors, landscapes, portraiture and large-scale decorations, and methods included drawings, graphics, folding screen painting, theatre-program designs, ceramics and photographs as well as oil painting. Of his five panel screen, Place Vintimille, he completed in 1911 and that is an elaborate depiction of city life around a park, he wrote: “Voilà: Place Vintimille, so green with spring and full of life! I love this view from my apartment window. Do you see the narrow brown buildings across the park and the double-decker cart in the street below? Look, there is a boy checking his bicycle tire, and nearby, a man sleeping against the fence. Of course, you can always find all sorts of vendors and nannies walking with their little ones. For me, the sidewalk winds around the park like a creamy ribbon, wrapping everything in a package of sparkling color.” (National Gallery of Art)The availability of Kodak cameras and their portability to get lasting images from which to model was a big enhancement to Vuillard and other painters of his era, especially the Nabis that included Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Felix Vallotton. When Vuillard began using the camera frequently at the turn of the century, his output of landscape paintings increased, one of the reasons being that he loved staying in the countryside to take photos.Born in Cuiseaux in Saone-et-Loire with the full name of Jean-Edouard Vuillard, he spent his childhood in Paris and attended the Lycée Condorcet where Maurice Denis was a fellow student. In 1885, when he was seventeen, he joined the studio of Diogene Maillart (1840-1926) and received the basics in art training. At that time he began a pattern of frequently visiting the Louvre and filling his journals with sketches, particularly of the Dutch and Italian Old Master. Unlike most of his male peers who joined the army, he determined to become an artist. He remained unmarried and lived with his mother, a dressmaker, until he was age sixty.He died in La Baule, France in 1940.In January to May, 2003, an exhibition of work by Vuillard opened at the National Gallery in Washington DC and then traveled to collaborating museums: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Réunion des musées nationaux/Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

This work by Henri Matisse is an ink drawing on paper of a still-life of objects by the window. This work is part of the F.A.M of modern masters work on paper.It measures 13.75×17 inches

Henri Matisse was born as the son of a grain merchant in Le Cateau-Cambrésis in northern France where he studied law and worked as a law clerk. In 1889, at the age of 21, while recovering from severe appendicitis, his mother (an amateur painter) bought him an art set. “When I started to paint I felt transported into a kind of paradise” he would later describe it. He abandoned his legal career, to the disappointment of his father, and decided to become an artist. In 1891 he returned to Paris to study art at the Acadamie Julian* where he achieved proficiency in academic painting in the classic reserved style. In 1896, while painting in Brittany, he began to adopt the lighter palette of the Impressionists.

Matisse’s true artistic liberation began about 1899 through the influence of Neo-Impressionist painters Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh, whose works used color to render forms and organize spatial planes. Then, in 1903-1904, Matisse encountered the pointillist painting of Paul Signac and Henri Edmond Cross. Signac and Cross were experimenting with juxtaposing small strokes or dots of pure pigment to create the strongest visual vibration of intense color. The resulting technique was known as Pointillism*. Matisse adopted their technique and modified it repeatedly, using broader strokes.

At the 1905 Salon d’Automne*, Matisse and colleagues Andre Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and Albert Marquet, exhibited a group of paintings they had recently completed while in the south of France. The intensely vibrant and spontaneously painted works were hung in room seven where they were jeered by the public who deemed them exceedingly primitive, brutal and violent. The artists were dubbed “les fauves” (the wild beasts) by art critic Louis Vauxcelles.

The Fauve* artists encouraged viewers to become responsive to the paint, usually applied directly from the tube, as a physical and emotional element of the painting. Brilliant, wide strokes of pure color reinterpreted the shape of objects, skewed the traditional foreground to background depth of field and aroused intense sensations in both the artist and the viewer. Matisse said of his works “When I use green it is not grass, when I use blue it is not sky”.

The American writer Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo were early collectors and supporters of Matisse, as well as, American collector Dr. Albert Barnes who would include the artist’s works in The Barnes Collection-Foundation outside Philadelphia. The Russian merchant Sergei Shchukin purchased more than forty early Matisse paintings and opened his home to the public one day a week—the only place to see European Modern Art in Moscow. These patrons gave Matisse the financial freedom to travel seeing Germany, Morocco, Russia and Spain before WWI. The artist signed up for military service but was rejected as too old at 44. He spent the war years working infrequently and took comfort in music—playing the violin as an accomplished amateur.

Pablo Picasso, who first saw Matisse paintings at the Stein’s apartment, would exchange paintings with the artist in 1907. This was the start of a creative rivalry and association, which would last until Matisse’s death in 1954. “No one has ever looked at Matisse’s painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he,” stated Picasso.

After World War I, Matisse had gained a high reputation and was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 1925. He was an internationally recognized artist by 1930. In 1940 he settled permanently in the South of France to escape the occupation of Paris living mostly in the Hotel Regina in Nice.

In 1941 Matisse had two major operations for duodenal cancer, which had a devastating effect on his health and ability to paint. The surgeries left him unable to stand upright in front of his easel, and he was confined to either a bed or a wheelchair. Undaunted by his immobility, he would ask his assistant to tape a piece of charcoal to a long stick and he would draw on mounted paper or directly onto the walls or ceilings. The ultimate step in the art of Matisse was taken in his papiers découpés, abstract shapes cut from colored paper, executed in the mid-1940s. “The paper cut out” he said “allows me to draw in the color. It is a simplification for me. Instead of drawing the outline and putting the color inside it—the one modifying the other—I draw straight into the color”. These works rank as some of the most joyous works ever created by an artist at an advanced age and Matisse continued creating paper cutout works until the day of his death.

Henri Matisse died on November 3, 1954 in Nice as an innovative artist who explored color and form through his paintings, lithographs*, illustrated books, sculptures and stained glass windows. Pablo Picasso once said about the artist: “All things considered, there is only Matisse”.

Quote:
“What I dream of is an art of balance, purity and serenity devoid of troubling or disturbing subject matter…like a comforting influence, a mental balm—something like a good armchair in which one rests from physical fatigue”.

Select Museum Collections:
Musee Matisse, Nice
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Matisse Museum, Le Cateau
Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Art Institute of Chicago, IL
National Gallery, London
Tate Gallery, London

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Matissehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwH-eDyWm0k

The painting by the French artist A. Masson is oil and sand on canvas, it measures 36.7×20. It is part of the F.A.M.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Masson

SOURCE: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

French painter, draughtsman, printmaker and stage designer. His work played an important role in the development of both Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, although his independence, iconoclasm and abrupt stylistic transitions make him difficult to classify. Masson was admitted to the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts et l’Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Brussels at the age of 11. Through his teacher Constant Montald, he met the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren (1855–1916), who persuaded Masson’s parents to send him to Paris for further training. Masson joined the French infantry in 1915 and fought in the battles of the Somme; he was gravely wounded, and his wartime experiences engendered in him a profound philosophy about human destiny and stimulated his search for a personal imagery of generation, eclosion and metamorphosis.
Masson’s early works, particularly the paintings of 1922 and 1923 on a forest theme (e.g. Forest, 1923; see Leiris and Limbour, p. 93), reflected the influence of André Derain, but by late 1923 he had moved away from Derain towards Analytical Cubism. His first solo exhibition, organized by Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler at the Galerie Simon in Paris (1923), attracted the attention of André Breton, who purchased The Four Elements (1923–4; Paris, priv. col., see 1976 exh. cat., p. 102) and invited Masson to join the Surrealist group.

Influenced by Surrealist ideas, both Masson and Joan Miró began experimenting with automatic drawing (for illustration see Automatism), and the Cubist imagery of Masson’s painting soon resonated with symbolic content. Two drawings were reproduced in the first issue of Révolution surréaliste in December 1924. By late 1929 the Cubist syntax of Masson’s paintings had become more schematic, the compositions more open, and the imagery developed from random ‘automatic’ gestures (see Automatism). By sprinkling coloured sands on canvas, prepared by drawing ‘automatically’ with glue, he was able to retain the spontaneity of the drawings, yet build a complex poetic imagery. One of the first, and most successful, sand paintings is Battle of the Fishes (1927; New York, MOMA), in which a primordial eroticism is revealed through an imagery of conflict and metamorphosis, poetically equating the submarine imagery with its physical substance.

Between 1924 and 1929 (when Breton expelled Masson from the Surrealist group) the biomorphic abstractions of Miró and Masson dominated Surrealist painting. Masson spent much of the period between 1930 and 1937 in the south of France and in Spain. During this period he explored themes and subjects drawn from Greek mythology, Spanish literature and the Spanish Civil War. From 1931 to 1933 the theme of massacres prevailed and led to a series of violent, orgiastic drawings filled with sharp, jagged pen strokes (e.g. Massacre, 1933; ex-artist’s col., see Hahn, p. 15). A group of expressionistic scenes of ritualistic erotic killings based on Greek mythology followed. In 1933 Masson executed the drawings Sacrifices including The Crucified One, Mithra, Osiris and Minotaur (published as etchings, as Sacrifices, Paris, 1936) to accompany a text by Georges Bataille. That same year he completed the first of a group of stage designs and costumes for the ballet Les Présages, choreographed by Léonide Massine for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, followed by designs for Knut Hamsun’s La Faim (1939), the production by Jean-Louis Barrault (b 1910) of Cervantes’s Numance (1937) and Darius Milhaud’s Medea (1940), among others.

Masson’s return to Paris in 1937 and his reconciliation with Breton were marked by a move towards greater representation and deep illusionistic spaces in his art, perhaps influenced by the prominence of Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Yves Tanguy in the Surrealist movement at that time. Images of erotic violence and death mingle with mythological and literary themes drawn from ancient Greece and from Sigmund Freud’s writings on the dream and the unconscious, in Gradiva (1939; Knokke-le-Zoute, Casino Com.), Metamorphoses (1939; Paris, Gal. Ile de France) and other major paintings of these years. The myth of Theseus and the Minotaur provided the theme for numerous paintings and drawings and finally led Masson away from illusionism and back to a form of automatism in which the unity of the human and natural worlds is achieved through the process of drawing itself.

Automatism continued as the basis of Masson’s work during his years in New York during World War II. The series of telluric paintings, rich in the colours of the autumn landscape in Connecticut, where Masson was living at the time, including Meditation on an Oak Leaf (1942; New York, MOMA), Iroquois Landscape (1942; Paris, Simone Collinet priv. col., see 1976 exh. cat., p. 164) and Indian Spring (1942; New York, Mr and Mrs William Mazer priv. col., see 1976 exh. cat., p. 165), reveal a spontaneous and integrated relationship between colour, line and form. Leonardo da Vinci and Isabella d’Este (1942; New York, MOMA) can be cited as an important influence on Arshile Gorky’s move toward biomorphic abstraction in the early 1940s. Although direct influences are more difficult to determine, there are strong affinities with Jackson Pollock’s work of those years, which he may have seen at S. W. Hayter’s Atelier 17 where both artists worked in the 1940s.

Masson returned to France in 1946, settling in Aix-en-Provence until 1955. In 1950 a series of his essays was published as Le Plaisir de plaindre (Nice). A series of trips to Italy from 1951 resulted in the album of colour lithographs Voyage à Venise (1952) and other works on the theme of the Italian landscape. Although Masson did not participate in the last major international exhibition of Surrealism (Paris, 1947), he was cited in the catalogue as one of the ‘Surrealists in spite of themselves’ (also included in this group were Picasso, Dalí and Oscar Domínguez). The paintings of the post-war period, however, reflect Masson’s growing interest in Impressionism, J. M. W. Turner and Zen Buddhism. Combining Impressionist style with Oriental technique and imagery, and drawing on his whole repertory of themes and techniques, as well as branching out into new areas opened up by his study of Zen, Masson abandoned chiaroscuro for all-over luminosity, soft transparent pastels and a personal and gestural calligraphy. A large retrospective exhibition with Alberto Giacometti in Basle in 1950 was followed, five years later, by the Grand Prix National.

Masson’s most important commission was his invitation from André Malraux to paint the ceiling of the Théâtre de l’Odéon in Paris (1965). Masson continued to divide his time between Paris and the south of France. The course of his work was marked less by stylistic unity than by his commitment to art as a poetic, philosophical and psychological exploration. His last work expanded the themes of transformation and metamorphosis that he began in 1922.
Whitney Chadwick
From Grove Art Online
© 2009 Oxford University Press

Raoul Dufy was born on June 3, 1877 in Le Havre, France and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, as well as with Othon Friesz and Lhuillier. Although inspired by Matisse and resembling him in his devotion to rhythmic line, pure color and decorative effects, Dufy was a painter of great independence and originality. During the first half of the 20th century, the Fauves, the Cubists, and the Surrealists dominated the art of France. Throughout all of these developments, Dufy went on painting the most highly civilized subjects he could find, the elegant holiday places and events of the rich.Dufy’s palette and his taste for beauty eventually led him to the world of fashion and fabric design. He formed a close relationship with the couturier Paul Poiret, for whose fashion house he designed a logo; he also designed silk fabrics. This association bought him financial security. He eventually became one of the most sought-after illustrators of his day and designed sets and costumes for the theatre as well as upholstery and wallpaper.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa or simply Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃ʁi də tuluz loˈtʁɛk]) (24 November 1864 – 9 September 1901) was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of fin de siècle Paris yielded an œuvre of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern and sometimes decadent life of those times. Toulouse-Lautrec is known along with Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin as one of the greatest painters of the Post-Impressionist period. In a 2005 auction at Christie’s auction house a new record was set when La blanchisseuse, an early painting of a young laundress, sold for $22.4 million U.S.Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa was born at the chateau de Malromé near Albi, Tarn in the Midi-Pyrénées région of France, the firstborn child of Comte Alphonse de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa and Adèle Tapié de Celeyran. He was therefore a member of an aristocratic family (descendants of the Counts of Toulouse and Lautrec and the Viscounts of Montfa, a village and commune of the Tarn department of southern France). A younger brother was also born to the family on 28 August 1867, but died the following year. After the death of his brother his parents separated and a nanny took care of Henri through this time.[2] At the age of 8, Henri left to live with his mother in Paris. Here he started to draw his first sketches and caricatures in his exercise workbooks. The family quickly came to realise that Henri’s talent lay with drawing and painting, and a friend of his father named Rene Princeteau visited sometimes to give informal lessons. Some of Henri’s early paintings are of horses, a speciality of Princeteau, and something that he would later visit with his ‘Circus Paintings’.[2][3] In 1875 Henri returned to Albi because his mother recognised his health problems. He took thermal baths at Amélie-les-Bains and his mother consulted doctors in the hope of finding a way to improve her son’s growth and development.The Comte and Comtesse themselves were first cousins (Henri’s two grandmothers being sisters[2]) and Henri suffered from a number of congenital health conditions attributed to this tradition of inbreeding. At the age of 13, Henri fractured his right thigh bone, and at 14, the left.[4] The breaks did not heal properly. Modern physicians attribute this to an unknown genetic disorder, possibly pycnodysostosis (also sometimes known as Toulouse-Lautrec Syndrome),[5] or a variant disorder along the lines of osteopetrosis, achondroplasia, or osteogenesis imperfecta.[6] Rickets aggravated with praecox virilism has also been suggested. His legs ceased to grow, so that as an adult he was only 1.54 m (5 ft 1 in) tall,[4][7] having developed an adult-sized torso, while retaining his child-sized legs, which were 0.70 m (27.5 in) long. He is also reported to have had hypertrophied genitals.Physically unable to participate in most of the activities typically enjoyed by men of his age, Toulouse-Lautrec immersed himself in his art. He became an important Post-Impressionist painter, art nouveau illustrator, and lithographer; and recorded in his works many details of the late-19th-century bohemian lifestyle in Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec also contributed a number of illustrations to the magazine Le Rire during the mid-1890s. After initially failing his college entrance exams, Henri passed upon his second attempt and completed his studies. During his stay in Nice, his progress in painting and drawing impressed Princeteau, who persuaded Henri’s parents to let him return to Paris and study under the acclaimed portrait painter Léon Bonnat. Henri’s mother had high ambitions and, with aims of Henri becoming a fashionable and respected painter, she used the family influence to get Henri into Bonnat’s studioParis

Auguste Herbin (1882 – 1960)
The son of a workman, he was born in a small village near the Belgian border on April 29, 1882. This background is reflected in the northern French artist’s painting with its rational approach and explicit working class character.
Before settling in Paris, where he first joined the Impressionists and later the Fauves, Herbin attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Lille from 1900 onwards. His studio was situated directly next to Braque’s and Picasso’s, allowing a close study of Cubism, which resulted in first Cubist paintings in 1913. In 1917 he moved on to an abstract, geometric phase before gradually discovering Constructivism. There was a short interruption in this development in 1922 when the painter briefly returned to figurative painting.
In 1929 Herbin was a co-founder of the ‘Salon des Surindépendants’. Two years later he founded the artist association ‘Abstraction-Création’ together with Vantongerloo with whom he published the group’s Almanach until 1937. After the war the artist was the co-founder and vice president – from 1955 also the president – of the ‘Salon des Réalites Nouvelles’. From 1938 his interest in the Italian Trecento led Herbin to a more concrete, strictly two-dimensional painting style with simple geometric forms. In 1946 he developed the ‘alphabet plastique’, a compositional system based on the structure of letters. He published this compositional system as well as his color theories – partly derived from Goethe’s Farbenlehre – in his L’art non-figuratif non-objectif in 1949.
A lateral paralysis in 1953 forced the artist to learn painting with his left hand. Herbin’s typical architectural approach and his color effects made his pre-war work widely known in the international art world – a success which continued after the war. Herbin exhibited works at the Documenta (Kassel, Germany) in the years 1955 to 1972. There was a large show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1979 and he had works in the exhibition ‘Positionen unabhängiger Kunst in Europa um 1937′ at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf in 1987.
Herbin died in Paris on 31 January 1960. One painting remained unfinished – it was called Fin.

Eugene Delacroix Farhat Art Museum Collection

 Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school. Delacroix’s use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on color and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modeled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic. Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the “forces of the sublime”, of nature in often violent action. However, Delacroix was given neither to sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire, “Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.”

The painting by Leon Bazile Perrault is oil on canvas, it measures 41.5×32.5 inches it is part of the F.A.M collection of European nineteen century genre paintings.

Léon Bazile Perrault
1832-1908

Painter of genre, history, religion and portraits, Leon Perrault stands in peril of not being remembered as distinctively as his successes might merit. For our part, we may narrow this great artist’s claims at once by rejecting his religious painting, and we may be inclined to go on and deny him the title of historical painter, so that, although we shall have paintings of religious subjects and of historical subjects to consider, we shall in truth be considering them as work of a painter of genre and portrait. Assuredly, we are not alone in judging Léon Perrault not to be, in the legitimate sense, a religious painter; but in the matter of history, opinions may be divided. In symbolic genre, on the other hand, he is unmatched, and in portrait so masterly, that his place in those arts is fixed forever.

Léon Jean Bazile Perrault was born in Poitiers, France on June 20, 1832 to a very poor family. As a young boy, he dreamed of ways to produce income to free his family from the pains of poverty. His foolish youthful dreams and impossible schemes to ease and escape the pain would bring young Léon Perrault to make the decision to pursue an artistic career.

At the age of 14, Perrault began taking drawing courses being offered in his hometown. His incredible talent for drawing was eventually spotted by a local painter who would hire this fourteen-year-old boy to help restore the paintings and murals in the churches and the ancient cathedral of Saint Radegonde in the Poitiers.

In 1851, Perrault would take part in a drawing competition and was awarded first place. The drawing was purchased by the state for their collection. Two years later, he would travel to Paris on a 600-franc pension provided by the town of Poitiers. With a letter of introduction, Léon Perrault was welcomed into the home and atelier of Francois Edouard Picot (1786-1868) where he would begin his formal art training. Perrault would continue his studies at the Beaux-Arts Academy, in William A. Bouguereau’s (1825-1905) atelier and at the Académie Julian. The initial years of academic studies and training under the watchful eye of Picot and Bouguereau would profoundly influence Perrault and his interest in allegorical and religious subjects. He would debut in the Paris Salon of 1860 with “Vieillard et les Trois Jeunes Hommes”, inspired by a fable in La Fontaine. The painting now hangs in the Poitiers Museum. Perrault would become an important figure and regular exhibitor at the salons of Paris. He continued to exhibit religious, allegorical, historical military battle scenes. Perrault had enormous success with his “Christ au tombeau” and “la Descente de Croix” at the Salon of 1863 and was awarded metals in 1864, 1876 and 1878.

Of his most successful military scenes, “Le Mobillisé” was an epic scene inspired by the valiant defense of an important episode during the Amérique war. When “Le Mobillisé” was finally exhibited at the Musée Châteaudun, it gave the grandsons of the men who had fought the battle an idea of their bravery. His acceptance as an accomplished military painter would lead to several collaborative works with the studio of Horace Vernet (1789-1863). Most noted of these collaborative efforts done between 1862 and 1864 are; “Attaque de constantine: le colonnes d’assault se mettent en mouvement le 13 octobre 1837 (collab. w/studio, after H. Vernet)”, “Combat de l’habra” (collab. w/studio; after Horace Vernet”, “Siège de constantine: le ennemi repussé des hauteurs de coudat-ati (collab. w/studio; no.262)” and “L’assault final de constantine (collab. w/studio; no. 602.”

We have now discussed his religious and allegorical subjects. We have approached his historical and military paintings. All of these works show extreme brilliants, elegant drawing and grace, which reminds one of Pierre-Paul Prud’hon (1758 – 1823) but few artists have ever challenged his symbolic genre. Léon Basile Perrault, as few artists before him, was able to bring passion, integrity and honesty to his paintings. His own childhood was tethered to the pains of poverty. His children speak through their eyes and whisper from their tender souls of innocence, joy, disparity and warmth. Perrault’s paintings were a brave departure from the doe-eyed peasant children of his friend and teacher, William Adolph Bouguereau. They aren’t expressing sorrow but the reality of life through subtle expressions that gently reveal the subject’s inner thoughts, strength, youthful maturity, hope, dreams, and responsibility toward life and family.

Perrault first began to exhibit his symbolic genre paintings of peasant children at the Salon of 1864. The critics were overwhelmed by the passion, beauty and honesty rarely seen in genre subjects. He would continue to exhibit his popular symbolic genre paintings at the Salons in Paris receiving acclaim for all continents.

In 1868, Léon Basile Perrault would be invited to exhibit ” Give for My Little Chapel” at the Boston Athenaeum and in 1873, he was appointed to represent France as “diplôme d’honneur” to Vienna, Philadelphia (U.S.) and London.

In 1887, he was awarded Frances’s highest honor and knighted as Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. This prestigious honor was followed by a Bronze metal in the 1889 Exhibition Universal and Silver medal at 1900 Exhibition Universal..

Perrault died in Royan, France in 1908, and was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery. After his death, the village of Poitiers commissioned a monument in his honor.

Museums:
Farhat Art Museum. Beirut, Lebanon
Musée de Bordeaux: “Le depart”
Musée St. Croix, Poitiers: “Le vieillard et les trios jeunes hommes”
Portrait: “Mort de Velléda (esquisse)”
La Rochelle: “Saint Jean le précurseur and La Cigale”
Stuttgart Museum: “La petite soeur”
Musée Châteaudun: “Le Mobilisé
Brooklyn Museum, NY: Mirror of Nature”

“Mask of an anguished man”. Measures 14″ x 6.50″ (35.56cm x 16.51cm)
Created: 1905. it was made in Bronze Signed and Dated. The artwork is part of the
farhat art Museum. We are interested in showing this Bronze by Auguste Rodin as a
reminder to the Arabs and to the nations in the Middle East that their countries are replacing their ruling dictators with death and destruction that is created by the west.

Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917)
A Frenchman whose modernist style redefined sculpture in the 19th century, Auguste Rodin moved it from Academic and Neo-Classical to Impressionism and Realism. In fact, he did work that was so life-like, he was accused of making casts from live bodies. He also dealt with erotic and political themes that spoke of contemporary issues eschewed as inapprpriate by fine art academics of his era.

Rodin was raised in a hard working, religious family in Mouffetard, an historic section of Paris. He was born in 1840, shortly after his parents, Marie Cheffer and Jean-Baptiste Rodin, had moved from the countryside to the city, where his father had a job as a clerk in the police department. Rodin had difficulty with school subjects, but from childhood was prolific at drawing. At age 14, his life became focused on his art talent and began a training regime. He enrolled in morning classes in the Petite Ecole, which was a government-sponsored art school; in the afternoons, he went to the Louvre to do drawings; and in the evening, he took a life-drawing class at the Gobelin tapestry works. By age 17, he was winning prizes in clay, and determined to be a sculptor.

However, because his work was not traditional enough, he was rejected three times in his attempts to become a student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. This school was the official French institution for maintaining high fine-art standards, which at that time were based on Classicism and the ‘antique’. Instead he attended the School of Decorative Arts between 1854 and 1857, and was a student of sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875). As a result, he spent the next 20 years doing decorative sculpture for building contractors, decorators and sculptors. This period included six years in Brussels beginning as an assistant to Albert Carrier De Belleuse, his future major rival in France, who had a commission for the “Caryatides” on the opulent new Bourse (stock exchange) in Brussels.

During these years, Rodin read widely, trying to make up for his lack of education. He also had personal trauma in 1862, when his older sister, Maria, died, having suffered much from an unfaithful lover, whom she had met through Rodin. Feeling guilty, he joined a Christian order for a couple of years and turned away from his art. However, encouraged by a priest who saw his talent, he returned to sculpting and took classes from animalist Antoine-Louis Bayre (1796-1875).

In 1864, Rodin began a life-long relationship with Rose Beuret, a seamstress, and in 1866, they had a son, Auguste-Eugene Beuret, which meant he had a family to support but did not have remunerative sales of his work nor high-paying employment. He continued with his own projects, and in 1875 had his first entry accepted in the Paris Salon, The Man with the Broken Nose. Shortly after that success, he went to Italy, where he studied the work of Michelangelo. Then he returned to Belgium, determined to become a full-time sculptor. The influence of Michelangelo apparently was strong as indicated by the comments of a scholar who in 1981 wrote that Rodin’s contemporaries eventually came to regard him as “a mythic, titanic creator, a Michelangelo reincarnated on French soil  a sort of living monument, almost universally recognized as the greatest artist of this era” (Hunisak, 370).

In Belgium, his working relationship with De Belleuse had fallen apart, and he, joined by Rose, turned exclusively to his own work. He began working on a piece, The Age of Bronze, which was a life-size male figure whose model was a Belgian soldier. It took him eighteen months, but it was so life-life that when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon, he was accused of exact copying by casting it from life. These kinds of accusations persisted throughout the remainder of his career.

In 1877, he and Rose returned to Paris and settled on the Left Bank. Exhibition organizers continually rejected his work, and he was 50 years old before he began to earn public acclaim. This recognition occurred after he had exhibited with Monet and other Impressionist painters, who were the avant-garde of their era.

Among Rodin’s works are the Gates of Hell, The Burghers of Calais, Balzac and The Kiss—all controversial because for political and/or sexual connotations. When The Kiss, whose theme was the withholding of sexual love, was brought to the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, it was rejected for being too erotic for public display.

Although his work was revolutionary, Rodin personally was a normal appearing man, courteous, gentlemanly, reserved and modest-seeming. He was only 5 feet 4 inches in height but gave the appearance of being larger because he was stocky, had prominent facial features, full red beard and “undeniable animal magnetism”. (Strickland) Although he lived simply, he spent generously on studios, maintaining several locations, and on models, assistants and art supplies. During the prime of his creativity, he had several models around the studio full time, who posed randomly, and when he saw a pose he liked, he had them retain that position while he made a clay study, usually working very fast and dexterously. Once his maquette was completed, usually one-third the size of the finished piece, a studio assistant enlarged it in exact detail. Inspecting the enlarged piece, Rodin would do retouching, and then turn it over to the stone carvers or bronze casters. He was very selective about patinas on the bronzes.

Of working with the human form, he said: “In front of a model, I work with as great a wish to reproduce that truth as if I were making a portrait. I do not correct nature but incorporate myself in it. It guides me. I can only work with a model. The sight of the human form sustains and stimulates me. I have a boundless admiration for the naked body—I worship it. I tell you flatly, I am totally devoid of ideas when I have nothing to copy, but as soon as I see nature showing me shapes, I find something worth saying. (Cahmpigneulle 104)

In Rodin’s later years, he received numerous honors including from Oxford University and from the French government such as the Grand Officer of the Legion of Merit. Many books were written about him and he became an internationally renowned figure. He worked regularly during most of his life, and died in 1917 at age 77, having been weakened a year earlier by a stroke.

Sources:
Marion Strickland, The Kiss, Docent Research Paper Archives of the Phoenix Art Museum. Her Bibliography includes:
Bernard Champigneulle, Rodin; Harry N. Abrams, 1967
Albert Elsen, Rodin, Museum of Modern Art, 1963
William Harlan Hale, Time-Life Books, The World of Rodin
John Hunisak, “Rodin Rediscovered”, Art Journal, Winter, 1981
John L. Tancock, The Sculpture of Auguste Rodin, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1976