Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer
Encyclopedia
Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer was a French
Symbolist
/Art Nouveau
artist whose works include paintings, drawings, ceramics, furniture and interior design.
. In 1879 he began studying drawing
and sculpture
in Paris
. He first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1882 where he showed a small ceramic plaque. In 1887 Lévy began making his living near Cannes
in southern France, overseeing the decoration of ceramics
. From 1886 to 1895 he worked as a ceramic decorator and then as artistic director of the studio of Clément Massier. Around 1892 he signed his first pieces of ceramics, which were influenced by Islamic Art
. In 1895 he left for Paris to begin a career in painting; around this time he visited Italy
and was further influenced by art of the Renaissance
.
In 1896 he exhibited his first pastel
s and paintings under the name Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer; he'd added the last two syllables of his mother's maiden name (Goldhurmer), likely to differentiate himself from other people named Lévy. His paintings soon became popular with the public and among fellow artists as well. He earned high praise for the academic attention to detail with which he captured figures lost in a Pre-Raphaelite
haze of melancholy
, contrasted with bright Impressionist
colouration. His portrait of writer Georges Rodenbach
is perhaps the most striking example of this strange and extraordinary synergy.
After 1901 Lévy-Dhurmer moved away from expressly Symbolist content, incorporating more landscape
s into his work because of his travels in Europe and North Africa. He continued to draw inspiration from music and attempted to capture works of great composers such as Beethoven
in painted form.
In 1914 he married Emmy Fournier, who had been an editor of the early feminist newspaper La Fronde
. By this time he was working primarily on landscapes, both oil and pastel, in a style similar to Whistler and Monet.
He died in Le Vésinet
in 1953.
Music :
French Art Nouveau interior :
Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer realised the architectural setting of the house of Auguste Rateau (1863-1930) between 1910 and 1914. The entire room Wisteria Dining room is now conserved at the Metropolitan Museum.
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
Symbolist
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
/Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art"...
artist whose works include paintings, drawings, ceramics, furniture and interior design.
Biography
He was born Lucien Lévy to a Jewish family in AlgiersAlgiers
' is the capital and largest city of Algeria. According to the 1998 census, the population of the city proper was 1,519,570 and that of the urban agglomeration was 2,135,630. In 2009, the population was about 3,500,000...
. In 1879 he began studying drawing
Drawing
Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...
and sculpture
Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. He first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1882 where he showed a small ceramic plaque. In 1887 Lévy began making his living near Cannes
Cannes
Cannes is one of the best-known cities of the French Riviera, a busy tourist destination and host of the annual Cannes Film Festival. It is a Commune of France in the Alpes-Maritimes department....
in southern France, overseeing the decoration of ceramics
Ceramics (art)
In art history, ceramics and ceramic art mean art objects such as figures, tiles, and tableware made from clay and other raw materials by the process of pottery. Some ceramic products are regarded as fine art, while others are regarded as decorative, industrial or applied art objects, or as...
. From 1886 to 1895 he worked as a ceramic decorator and then as artistic director of the studio of Clément Massier. Around 1892 he signed his first pieces of ceramics, which were influenced by Islamic Art
Islamic art
Islamic art encompasses the visual arts produced from the 7th century onwards by people who lived within the territory that was inhabited by or ruled by culturally Islamic populations...
. In 1895 he left for Paris to begin a career in painting; around this time he visited Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
and was further influenced by art of the Renaissance
Italian Renaissance
The Italian Renaissance began the opening phase of the Renaissance, a period of great cultural change and achievement in Europe that spanned the period from the end of the 13th century to about 1600, marking the transition between Medieval and Early Modern Europe...
.
In 1896 he exhibited his first pastel
Pastel
Pastel is an art medium in the form of a stick, consisting of pure powdered pigment and a binder. The pigments used in pastels are the same as those used to produce all colored art media, including oil paints; the binder is of a neutral hue and low saturation....
s and paintings under the name Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer; he'd added the last two syllables of his mother's maiden name (Goldhurmer), likely to differentiate himself from other people named Lévy. His paintings soon became popular with the public and among fellow artists as well. He earned high praise for the academic attention to detail with which he captured figures lost in a Pre-Raphaelite
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti...
haze of melancholy
Melancholia
Melancholia , also lugubriousness, from the Latin lugere, to mourn; moroseness, from the Latin morosus, self-willed, fastidious habit; wistfulness, from old English wist: intent, or saturnine, , in contemporary usage, is a mood disorder of non-specific depression,...
, contrasted with bright Impressionist
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
colouration. His portrait of writer Georges Rodenbach
Georges Rodenbach
Georges Raymond Constantin Rodenbach was a Belgian Symbolist poet and novelist.- Biography :Georges Rodenbach was born in Tournai to a French mother and a German father from the Rhineland . He went to school in Ghent at the prestigious Sint-Barbaracollege, where he became friends with the poet...
is perhaps the most striking example of this strange and extraordinary synergy.
After 1901 Lévy-Dhurmer moved away from expressly Symbolist content, incorporating more landscape
Landscape
Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of...
s into his work because of his travels in Europe and North Africa. He continued to draw inspiration from music and attempted to capture works of great composers such as Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...
in painted form.
In 1914 he married Emmy Fournier, who had been an editor of the early feminist newspaper La Fronde
La Fronde
La Fronde was a French feminist newspaper first published in Paris on December 9, 1897 by activist Marguerite Durand . Durand, a well known actress and journalist, used her high-profile image to attract many notable Parisian women to contribute articles to her daily newspaper, which was run and...
. By this time he was working primarily on landscapes, both oil and pastel, in a style similar to Whistler and Monet.
He died in Le Vésinet
Le Vésinet
Le Vésinet is a commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France in north-central France. It is located in the western suburbs of Paris from the center....
in 1953.
Works of Art
- La Sorcière, 1897, pastel on paper, 61 x 46 cm, Paris : Musée d’Orsay.
- Le Silence, 1895, pastel, 54 x 29 cm, Paris : Musée d'Orsay.
- Les aveugles à Tanger, 1901, pastel on paper, 50 x 70 cm, Paris : Musée d’Orsay.
- L’explorateur perdu, 1896, pastel on paper, 59 x 38 cm, Paris : Musée d’Orsay.
- Méduse, 1897, Pastel and charcoal on paper, 59 x 40 cm, Paris : Musée d’Orsay.
- Portrait de Georges RodenbachGeorges RodenbachGeorges Raymond Constantin Rodenbach was a Belgian Symbolist poet and novelist.- Biography :Georges Rodenbach was born in Tournai to a French mother and a German father from the Rhineland . He went to school in Ghent at the prestigious Sint-Barbaracollege, where he became friends with the poet...
, ca. 1895, pastel on paper, 36 x 55 cm, signed : "L. Lévy-Dhurmer", Paris : Musée d'Orsay. - Portrait de Pierre LotiPierre LotiPierre Loti was a French novelist and naval officer.-Biography:Loti's education began in his birthplace, Rochefort, Charente-Maritime. At the age of seventeen he entered the naval school in Brest and studied at Le Borda. He gradually rose in his profession, attaining the rank of captain in 1906...
or Fantôme d'Orient, 1896, pastel, 42,5 x 56,5 cm, Bayonne : Musée basque.
- Feux d'artifice à Venise, s.d., pastel, 87,5 x 53,8 cm, Paris : Musée du Petit Palais
- Torse de femme vue de face, s.d., pastel, 80 x 55 cm, Paris : Musée du Petit Palais.
- Torse de femme vue de dos, s.d., pastel, 80 x 43,5 cm, Paris : Musée du Petit Palais.
- Le Marocain ou Le Fanatique, ca. 1900, oil on canvas, 64,5 x 50 cm, Paris : musée du Quai BranlyMusée du quai Branlythumb|225px|Musée du quai BranlyThe Musée du quai Branly , known in English as the Quai Branly Museum, nicknamed MQB, is a museum in Paris, France that features indigenous art, cultures and civilizations from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. The museum is located at 37, quai Branly -...
,
- Notre Dame de Penmarc'h, 1896, oil on canvas, 41 x 33 cm, signed and dated : "L. Lévy-Dhurmer / 1896", Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper.
- Eve, 1896, pastel and gouache, 49 x 46 cm, private collection.
- Bourrasque, ca. 1896, pastel on paper, 40 x 48 cm, Paris : private collection.
- La mort d'Atala, 1801, porcelain painting, 41 x 60 cm, Maison de Chateaubriand
- Alfred-Philippe Roll (1847-1919), 1913, pastel on paper, 153,4 x 95 cm (1913), Musée de l’Histoire de France (Versailles)
- Les Mères pendant la guerre : douze compositions inédites, Paris : Devambez, 1917, Paris : Musée d’histoire contemporaine.
Music :
- Les roses d'Ispahan, from a melody of Fauré, pastel, private collection.
- L'après-midi d'un faune, pastel, Paris, private collection.
- Triptych, ca. 1906, pastel and pencil, Paris : Musée du Petit Palais : Hymne à la joie, 48 x 63 cm, Beethoven, 63 x 48 cm, L'Appassionata 48 x 63 cm.
French Art Nouveau interior :
Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer realised the architectural setting of the house of Auguste Rateau (1863-1930) between 1910 and 1914. The entire room Wisteria Dining room is now conserved at the Metropolitan Museum.
Primary sources
- Archives of the Family Zagorowsky at la Documentation du Musée d'Orsay.
- Polak, Félix (1896). « Exposition Lévy-Dhurmer », in Art et Chiffons, n°6, 9 février.
- Sorrèze, Jacques (1900). « Artistes contemporains L. Lévy-Dhurmer », in Revue de l'art Ancien et Moderne, 10 avril.
- Thévenin, Léon (1898). La Renaissance Paienne. Paris : L. Vanier.
Secondary sources
- Barbe, Françoise. Duclos, Clarisse (1982). Le portrait chez Lévy-Dhurmer. Paris : Université Paris-Sorbonne.
- Gibson, Michael (1995). "Symbolism". KölnCologneCologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
: Benedikit TaschenTaschenTaschen is an art book publisher founded in 1980 by Benedikt Taschen in Cologne, Germany. It began as Taschen Comics publishing Benedikt's extensive comic collection...
Verlag. ISBN 3-8228-9324-2. - Lacambre, Geneviève (1973). « Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer 1865-1953 », in La Revue du Louvre. Paris, n°1, p. 27-34.
- Peltre, Christine (1997). Les Orientalistes. Paris : Hazan.
- Sage, Deborah (2009-2011), Les voyages de Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (1865-1953) . Paris : Université Paris Ouest-La Défense.
- Thornton, Lynne (1983). Les Orientalistes, peintres voyageurs : 1828-1908. Paris : ACR.
- Autour de Lévy-Dhurmer, Visionnaires et intimistes en 1900 (1973). Catalogue d’exposition, Galerie du Grand Palais, Paris.
External links
- Agence photographique de la RMN
- Some works of art of Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer.
- Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer in le Musée d'Orsay.
- Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer in the Metropolitan Museum de New York.