Once upon a time...

Macke, Street's view, 1914, watercolor

three friendly painters decided to look for light and color in Tunisia. Their names were Paul Klee, August Macke and Louis Moilliet.

The bond among the three was Moilliet. Klee had met him during school and never lost contact ever after. Macke’s wife had been Moilliet’s mother’s assistant and, in occasion of their honeymoon, the just married couple visits them, introducing the both painters to each other. Klee meets Macke in Moilliet’s house.

Same and opposite

Friendship between Matisse and Picasso

Matisse, Stil life with oranges, 1912

Both of them changed the history of Painting, each one in their own way. They had two really different personalities, but at the same time similar.

They met each other in 1905 at Stein’s house. By that time, Matisse already had a family and had already shaken the Parisian artistic panorama in the Salon d’Automne with his strident colors. Picasso lived a bohemian and poor life, and was making himself a name in Paris with his paintings of harlequines and saltimbanques and he still had not reached cubism. Matisse was 12 years older.

It was a friendship in which affection, envy, formality, respect, admiration, suspicion and competition were mixed.

Friendship for convenience?

In the Café, 1878

Fantin-Latour, Manet, 1867

Year 1866: Édouard Manet, 34 years old, part of a bourgeois family, used to dress always elegantly. He was affable, really social and had an ironical humor. His father prepared him for Laws, but Édouard dedicated his life to painting. Every year he presented his works in the Salon: some were straightly turned down, but others would be accepted. He was already known for his scandal with his “Le Déjeneur sur l'herbe” and his “Olympia”. For his economical situation, he never really needed to sell and this gave him more freedom: he did not care about creating polemic or transgressing.

Manet, Portrait of Émil Zola, 1868

Émile Zola: 26 years old, born in Paris, but raised in the province, in Aix-en-Provence, was Cézanne’s childhood friend. When his mother widowed, they return to Paris and suffer several economical shortages. By this time, he had already quit his job in Hachette and taken up literature. He was columnist at L’Évenement (which would later be known as Le Figaro), where he would write articles supporting new ways of painting, impressionism and being against the jury of the official Salon. Cézanne connected him with the group: they would meet in Café Guerbois with Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Fantin-Latour, Whistler, Bazille, Monet…

Long time ago

São Paulo Museum of Art

(Image: Wikipedia)

I’m about to tell you something that happened a long time ago. I had to travel with Teresa to an Art Fair in. She’d exhibit her ceramics and I would do the same with my oil paintings. Those 3 days were some busy ones, and even if we had no time at all, we wouldn’t waste the chance to visit some museums there.

São Paulo is huge, chaotic and has some hellish traffic… and weather is too hot. In fact, everything is huge there.Yet, we could visit the Pinacoteca do Estado and, the day after, we escaped during the noon to the Museum of Art in the Paulista Avenue. We had just an hour and half. An almost impossible task: the collection is fabulous, it’s impossible to admire all of it, and even more, in such a little time. We split in order to look what each one of us was really interested in.

Cézanne, Mme. Cézanne
in red, 1890

I didn’t need much to think what I wanted: Renoir, Manet, Renoir, Manet, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Monet, Constable, Matisse… I stayed long enough in front of the Degas's dancers, trying to discover what makes those oils seem pastels. But soon after, I was attracted by Cézanne, and his characteristic brushstroke. Constable with his Salisbury Cathedral and an unfinished Van Gogh, where you could totally admire the way he used to cope with his work, were just breath-taking.

Botticelli, Virgin and Child with
John the Baptist, 1490 (Wikipedia)

I felt a bit guilty, and passed by Raphael and Botticelli: I wasn’t really impressed by them, maybe I didn’t spend enough time to admire them completely. I had to take a look at Velázquez, Titian and Tintoretto… I would have never forgiven myself otherwise. I took a glimpse of Picasso, Modigliani, Turner and Goya, since there was not much time left: I had to meet Teresa at the Museum’s shop. 

But something attracted like a magnet just right before the end: a beautiful painting by Chardin. Intimate, tiny, without stridencies, every brushstroke was part of a deep feeling: a kid playing with a spinning top, the Auguste Gabriel Godefroy Portrait. His books, his quill by his side, like if the kid was procrastinating, and leaving his school tasks for later. It’s curious: who would have said I was going to stay still there contemplating a painting from the epoch of white braids and wigs? However, it captivated me, and I still remember it until today.

Chardin, Portrait of Auguste Gabriel Godefroy, 1741

As you’ve seen probably from the list of artists I mentioned, this Museum has a really important collection, maybe the one with the most quality in whole South America… even if I still didn’t mention all the Pre-Columbian works, the Latin American art, or the Asiatic and African art pieces…

Van Gogh, Twilight Walk,
1889 (MASP)

It was founded in 1947, impulsed by Assis Chateaubriand, a press entrepeneur, which is why the Museum bears his name nowadays. The base of the collections are purchases carried out by when prices collapsed after WWII. The Italian critic Pietro María Bardi was in charge of them and added his own collection. The current building was built in 1968 and is an architectural wonder. If you travel to São Paulo, it’s not to be missed.

Constable, Salisbury's
Cathedral, 1821 (Wikipedia)

I still wanted more...enjoy every artwork, spend more time every in hall… and I still couldn’t come back there. Maybe life will take me to other places and other museums, making have to be satisfied with my memories of those 3 days in which we had to struggle against the heat and the hellish traffic in order to be on time for everything.

I never knew about Teresa again.

 web São Paulo Museum of Art

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Chez Carmen

Chez Carmen

My friend Carmen is keen on philosophy and is always looking forward to learning and understanding. Since it’s never enough with reading books, she tends to get some expert to talk to her about a definite interesting topic. She’d also invite some friends who share that interest with her and offering also a delicious dinner as icing on the cake.

I attended one of these some days ago, which was hosted by Asunción Domeño, who would talk about Picasso.

Picasso, The accordionist, 1911

It seems impossible to reduce Picasso’s whole career in 400 words, but I’ll try.

Asun focused on Picasso’s evolution towards cubism, or , in other words, how he started from a traditional style and ended up destroying the academical painting’s fundaments and refounded it through cubism: from the whole shape to tearing it apart in a thousand facets and presenting in a two-dimensional planes, through simultaneous perspectives or multiperspectivism, four whole dimensions: width, height, depth and temporal course of the painting’s contemplation.

He wasn’t the first one chasing this, actually Cézanne was the one… And Picasso’s fascination for  Iberic and African sculptures shouldn’t be forgotten: there are references of them in every other of his paintings (for example: "Les demoiselles d'Avignon")

Neither should be his interest in bullfighting… Nor his epoque in Barcelona where he was quite influenced by modernism. Nor his early days in the “Bateau-Lavoir” nor his friendship with Matisse…

Picasso, Au bon marché, 1913

He and Braque invented a new way of painting: both of them started doing research on their own, but always keeping hold of each other through correspondence. The more the shape was broken, the less recognisable the object was, but it wasn’t their intention to leave reality aside or reach a kind of abstraction. That’s why they both start trying with pieces of that elusive reality: the “papier collés” or collages.

“Guernica” is his masterpiece: it was commissioned by the republican Goverment for the Spanish contribution for the Universal Exhibition in Paris (1937). He painted in 3 months (not such an easy task regarding the dimensions: 7’77 x 3’5 meters),in grisaille way, with no color and using around 45 previous sketches.

Picasso, Las Meninas, 1957

In his last years, his will to experiment led him close to surrealism, where figures are recognisable and volumes are found. He also starts remaking emblematic paintings like Velázquez’ ”Las Meninas”.

And to conclude, his last painting, his self-portrait: this how he looked like being 92 years old.

Picasso, Self-portrait, 1972

 And to our dear teacher, thanks for your exposition! Also to Carmen for having an actually cosy home, and for always treating us with lots of love. And of course, Resu’s work deserves to be remarked, for such a great dinner!

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Monet: a gourmet

In his first years as a rejected painter by the critics and the public, in which he could barely sell any paintings, Monet was economically helped by his friends, reaching such a point in which Renoir took the leftovers out of his parents’ home to eat. By then, they would get satisfied in taverns with a simple soup, meat, salad, cheese as dessert and bread and wine. But the more famous he got all over the world, the higher his culinary standards were. He turned into a great gourmet and a lover of good cooking, either French or international. He asked for recipes everywhere so that his wife Alice and his loyal cooker Marguerite would cook them for him at home, for example, the Yorkshire Pudding in Savoy Hotel (London) or the Tarte Tatin! Cézanne, Renoir and Millet also helped with their recipes.

They had a familiar cookbook, which is still entered and that shows us how the Monet family used to eat (and they had a lot of children…) and how they received their guests, which were also plenty. Monet was very social and he loved to invite impressionist friends, like Sisley, Renoir, Pissarro, Sargent and Cézanne to have lunch with him (never dinner because he had to wake up quite early to paint), but also politicians like Clemenceau and poets such as Mallarmé and Valéry, Rodin... he tended to offer some homemade cherry liquor, cider or Calvados afterwards. And for tea time, he would aso serve some English scones or Chocolate Cake with cream.

His Giverny home had everything needed to receive his guests: a small grove, poultry, a river to which his children went to fish… Everything was homemade. In their kitchen they had the most advanced gadgets: fridge, a mincer machine and the first ice cream machine! He liked banana ice cream with cream as special Christmas dessert, bananas used to be an exotic fruit only used in special occasions!

The lunch, 1868

He used to wake up every day at 5 am, check if the weather would allow him to paint outside, take a bath and, at 5:30 am, have breakfast. Marguerite served tea, sausages, eggs, bacon, toasts with homemade orange jam and butter, Gouda (especially because he had lived in Le Havre when little) or Stilton (which he discovered while in London) cheese.

His favourite salad was the one with endibias with garlic, croutones, dandelion and bacon. He would always use a lot of black pepper on it.

And from all their recipes, I choose to show you this one:

cristinadelrosso.com // cristinadelrosso.artproject@gmail.com

Sources: Todd, P. The impressionists at home. Londres, Thames & Hudson, 2005

http://www.monetspalate.com/index.html

Joyes, C. Monet’s table. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1989

Recipe: Joyes, page 179

Translation: Lorenzo Vigo

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