Volpini Suite

Volpini Suite
The remnants of my library. after the great crackup, miraculously include several exhibition catalogs.

Pierre Bonnard Observing Nature ........National Gallery Aus Canberra 2003
Post Impressionism .................................Royal Acadamy London 1979
Paris in the late 19th Century ...................National Gallery Australia Canberra 1997
Not such a bad save... catalogues dont get reprinted

So we can ask some questions about the Groupe Impressioniste et Synthétiste exhibition, held during the Exposition Universelle de 1889 on Paris.

8 artists exhibited, including
Anquettin, Bernard, Paul Gauguin, Laval, Schuffenecker
These guys were too far out for the official art hanging, ....
Schuffenecker managed to get space ... within the grounds of the Exposition ... Cafe des Arts of M. Volpini
... located on the terrace of the Palace des Beaux Arts [C.M.]

In 1889 Pierre Bonnard was an attorney, but he had rented his first studio
Paul Sérusier had tutored a small group including PB . The group took on the name 'Nabis'
PS had run into Gauguin in 88 st Pont-Aven. and been amazed so he dregged the Nabis to the "cafe Volpini" show. They were all suitably blown away, although the show wasn't a commercial success.
Bonnard did his first big picture in 89 and never looked back. He died in 1947. With PG's birth in 1848 that brackets the century before me.




bonnard posxter
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Serusier
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Gauguin did an album of lithographs (10 + cover?) on yellow paper for the show.
Now called the "Volpini Suite"
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Oddly, as I wrote this, I discovered there is a current exhibition featuring the Volpini Suite

http://www.clevelandart.org/exhibitions/becominggauguin.aspx

Becoming Gauguin The Volpini Suite, 1889 October 4, 2009—January 17, 2010

This landmark exhibition gathers about 75 paintings, works on paper, woodcarvings, and ceramics by Paul Gauguin and his contemporaries to explore how the artist created his signature style during the year 1889. Co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Becoming Gauguin re-creates on a smaller scale the radical independent exhibition that Gauguin organized with his artistic disciples on the grounds of the 1889 Exhibition Universelle—a display of about 100 paintings now recognized as the first Symbolist exhibition in Paris.

I'm not sure the Synthetistes were the Symbolists
_



Eiffel Tower
M. Volpini's cafe was near the Champs de Mars, hence near the Eiffel Tower.
The 'late C19" saya about the tower:

(of artists) PG was the only one to praise "this gothic piece of Lacework in
iron", he did not one sketch. Seurat and Roussuea did?

Iron, iron and more iron ... its obvius the Exposition represents the
triumph of Iron .. ... Why alongside all these newfangled geometric lines do we have all these
old fashioned baubles. More sombre colours, closer to that of the material itself, and
you'd have something that was imposing, something that was suggestive of metal in
fusion - PG 4 July

maybe the last big iron structure? Steel was new.. but Eiffel trusted puddle iron..

Henri Riviere 36 views of the Eiffel Tower1902
http://antimuseum.online.fr/peintures/riviere/index.html

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Actually PG was interested in the Humaniste show beneath the tower, with copied villages with actual natives
"Malagsasy, Tonkinese, Egyptian, Tunisian, Javanese, Tahitian"

PG to Bernard "You missed something ... on Thursday I have an appointment with a mulatto girl"

CM says that the exhibit included the temple at Angkor, so PG may have had postcards from Cambodia.

A dreamlike Orient had been constructed: the temple from Angkor...

- Caroline Mathau Curator Architectural drawings Museé d'Orsay








Bernard in later times was annoyed how PG got all the credit for the new style.


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Also saved: Gauguin's Skirt 1997 by S F Eisenman , a somewhat tendentious and overheated take on PG & sex in Tahiti

"the posture anda anatomy of Teha'amana , which emphasises her boyishness, is .. from various androgynous and hermaphroditic prototypes , including the famous Louvre
Hermaphrodite [C2 Roman copy of Greek]. The antique marble was quite celebrated in the C18 and C19 ... Lady Townsend famously remarked 'the only happy couple she ever saw'

... like Olympia, she both hides and reveals the phallus - SFE

... the guy does see phalli too much methinks
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nb Bonnard's Siesta 1900 National Gallery Victoria
has also suffered Hermaphrodite comparisons ... it hung in Leo and Gertrude Stein's apartment with works by Picasso. Picassos' disdain for PB is well known.
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SFE tells us that "Audre Chazail, P G's Peruvian Grandfather, has spent 20 years in jail for
shooting and wounding his wife Flora Tristan
"A socialist anarchist bluestocking"
FT 1840

"If you did not force women to submit to the abuses of paternal despotism and the indissolubility of marriage they would not be faced with the only alternative to submit to opression and the infamy .....

A more currently PC view of PG perhaps might be found in
Paul Gauguin: An Erotic Life Nancy Mowll Mathews 2001
http://www.wnyc.org/books/3016
NMM says PG was 1/8th Peruvian, but no Inca blood at all

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When do Bonnard and PG first hang together?
From the excellent PostImp
catalogue, we can say Berlin Spring 1903.
In France October-Dec Salon d'Automn
news of PG's death in May didnt reach Europe until August...