The Piazzetta and Doge's palace in the Fog with a Bragazzo(Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer)
LUCIEN LÉVY DHURMER
(Paris1865 1953)
Venice – The Piazzetta and the Doge’s Palace in the Mist
with a Bragozzo under lateen rig, c. 1896
Signed: L. Levy Dhurmer, lower left
Pastel; 84 x 63 cm. (33 x 24 ¾ ins)
PROVENANCE:
Private Collection Belgium.
Purchased by the Grandmother of the present owner; thence by descent
EXHIBITED:
Woluwé Saint-Pierre [Brussels], l’Exposition Universelle Bruxelles-Tervueren, 1897, no. 22, according to a label on the back of the mount.
Brussels, Societé Nationale des Beaux-Arts Bruxelles, ‘Artistes Français’, n.d., no. 23.
Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer first travelled to Venice in 1895, and writers and critics of the artist generally agree that the artists time in Italy was one of the determining influences on his development as a landscape or view painter. His views of Venice have an ethereal, velvety texture with subtle tonal contrasts which heighten their dream-like qualities, but the present pastel differs in many respects from later views he made after his second trip in 1912, and in some ways this can be interpreted as a difference between his visionary symbolism and his more flamboyant, not to say, decadent symbolism. In regards to his pastels, which were the artists favoured medium after around 1898, it has been suggested that Lévy-Dhurmers particular distinction amongst the Symbolists was his ability to reconcile his academic sense of composition and technical precision with his Impressionist vision of the world , and there are clear parallels between the present work and the Venetian views of Henri Le Sidaner and particularly Claude Monet. However, Lévy-Dhurmer is neither aiming for the picturesque, nor the exuberant colourism, which respectively typify Sidaners and Monets Venetian subjects, which in Monets case, were made in 1908. Instead, Lévy-Dhurmer appears to take a very literary approach, creating am evocation of La Serenissima, which could only really exist on a personal, emotional level. His command of optics and formal composition, his ability to depict the mutability of light and spatial perception, and his decision to focus on the exotic boat over the more obvious signifier of the Palazzos façade, gives the view a sense of timelessness and melancholy which, at this time in Lévy-Dhurmers life, must have been completely intentional.
After 1895, when he returned from Italy to Paris in the winter of that year, Lévy-Dhurmer devoted himself to developing as a pastellist. Shortly thereafter in 1896, he met and became close friends with the Belgian Symbolist writer Georges Rodenbach. Rodenbach had achieved great fame a few years earlier with his novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892), a sort of treatise on symbolist philosophy, and elegy to the city in the guise of a roman-a-clef. The writer and artist, who admired each others respective talents, as well as their shared penchant for things mélancolique, collaborated on a Rodenbachs portrait (1896), now in the Musée dOrsay. In the portrait, which is often cited as the masterpiece of symbolist portraiture, Lévy-Dhurmer placed the writer bust-length in an open-necked white shirt, with a stylized, but accurate, view of Bruges wavering delicately behind him. The writer almost merges into the gabled houses, which line the citys iconic canals and there is a definite dream-like quality to the work. The city almost seems to exist only as a projection of the authors mind, much like a thought bubble or a reflection in the water. Lévy-Dhurmer made several similar views of Bruges which date to this period, but in fact never visited the city. Instead, he created his views from photographs given to him by Rodenbach. Barely two years after Lévy-Dhurmer had completed the portrait, Rodenbach was dead, and the artists continued affection and admiration for his friend is evidence by the eighteen colour plates he executed for an illustrated edition of Bruges-la-Morte, which was published in 1930.
Whether the present work precisely dates from slightly before, or during Lévy-Dhurmers relationship, it must date to the very brief period between his return from Italy in late 1895 and the Exposition Universelle in 1897, as evidenced by a label on the back of the original mounting board. It appears that Lévy-Dhurmer had hoped to have the pastel included in the Exposition, but according to the fairs official illustrated guide, only his La borrasque was actually exhibited. Lévy-Dhurmers sketchbook in the Louvre, which included several similar views of Venice and various boats on her canals must date to one of his later trips to Venice as it also contains studies from journeys to Morocco and Turkey, which were made after 1900. Generally, Lévy-Dhurmers later Venetian pastels, such as the spectacular Feu d’artifice à Venise have more of a theatrical quality and bolder colour scheme, and do not appear to have been inspired by the eerie timeless quality of the present work nor share its relatively delicate colour scheme. Instead, the present work is much more similar in technique, composition and sensibility to Lévy-Dhurmers Bruges impressions, which were so inspired by Rodenbachs ideal of la cité morte and his belief that cities such as Bruges and Venice endured long after their mercantile and political death specifically because they both exist as entities and reflect the soul of man. .
Lucien Lévy began his artistic career not as a painter but as a lithographer and decorator, and was the head of a decorative stoneware factory in Golfe-Juan. He trained at the École Supérieure de Dessin et Sculpture in Paris, but exhibited infrequently at the Paris Salons. It was not until 1895, following a visit to Italy, that he began to take up painting, and particularly pastel, seriously. His first exhibition, at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1896, was comprised mainly of pastels and a handful of paintings, whose style and subject matter revealed a mythic and very personal approach to allegory and portraiture. It was also at this time that he decided to adopt the name Lévy-Dhurmer, adding part of his mothers surname to his own. His portrait of Rodenbach and an exhibition of his work in 1899 further added to his reputation, and the following year he won a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle. He soon established himself as fashionable portrait painter. He also specialised in landscapes and decorative mural schemes, as well as, in later years, works inspired by the music of composers such as, Beethoven and Fauré and Debussy, who was a personal friend.
A solitary and peripatetic artist, Lévy Dhurmer found appreciation with a variety of Symbolist artists, artisans, writers and musicians. He was influenced in equal measure by Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau, and Debussy and Fauré. After 1900, he seems to be interested particularly in the emotional and lyrical possibilities of landscape, and atmosphere and began to travel extensively, returning to Italy, as well as visiting Spain, Holland, North Africa and Turkey. In France he worked in Brittany, the Savoie, Alsace, the Vosges and the Côte dAzur, as well as around Versailles.
He was a member of the Société des Pastellistes Français, alongside such artists as Emile Rene Menard, Albert Besnard, Henri Le Sidaner, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret and Edmond Aman-Jean and exhibited at the Société regularly between 1897 and 1913. He exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français, the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and the Salon dAutomne, and enjoyed a number of one-man shows throughout his career. In 1952 a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
Throughout his long career, Lévy Dhurmer constantly experimented with various techniques, each of which appears to have had an impact on the development of the next. He explored and progressed from ceramicist to painter, from painter to pastellist, from pastellist to éboniste, and back again, proving to be one of those rarest of French artists, a true ensemblier, able to design and create entire Symbolist environments, such as his famous Wisteria Dining Room completed just before WWI and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Private Collection Belgium.
Purchased by the Grandmother of the present owner; thence by descent
Woluwé Saint-Pierre [Brussels], l’Exposition Universelle Bruxelles-Tervueren, 1897, no. 22, according to a label on the back of the mount.
Brussels, Societé Nationale des Beaux-Arts Bruxelles, ‘Artistes Français’, n.d., no. 23.