Jeanne Hébuterne

Jeanne Hebuterne, Self-portrait, ca. 1918 

Probably a self-portrait, ca. 1918
Jeanne Hebuterne

When people speak of Jeanne Hebuterne they talk of tragic, devoted love and a beautiful face. Actually very few people actually do talk of Jeanne Hebuterne even though her face is one of the most famous in all the art world. Jeanne Hebuterne was an artist, but that's almost beside the point. She was young, quiet, gentle, a student at the second-rate Paris art school, Académie Colarossi, founded by the relatively obscure Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi around 1870. His school was mostly known for the fact that it featured nude models of both sexes and allowed equal participation by art students of both sexes (simultaneously, even). Jeanne's older brother, Andre was also a student there. Neither of them were particularly talented.



The lovely Jeanne Hebuterne and the dashing Amedeo Modigliani.

Mostly, Andre and his sister were fleeing the strict, bourgeoisie life and upbringing of their strict, Catholic father, Achille Casimir Hébuterne, an employee of Paris' Bon Marche Department Store. At the Academie Colarossi Andre came to know several of the stereotypical Montparnasse school of starving artists such as Tsuguharu Foujita, Chana Orloff, and Amedeo Modigliani. Though they may have feigned interest in her desire to become a painter, it was likely her great beauty that most intrigued them. She came to pose for each of them as well as others. She was barely nineteen at the time.

 



Jeanne Hebuterne, 1918,
Amedeo Modigliani

Jeanne Hebuterne, 1919,
Amedeo Modigliani

In something of a Romeo and Juliet scenario (Modigliani was, in fact, Italian, and Jewish), Amadeo and Jeanne fell deeply in love. They began sharing an unheated two-room apartment on the West Bank. Unlike Shakespeare's pair, they never bothered to get married, but that's a minor point. Jeanne's parents were unaware of the arrangement for several months, and when they found out, they were, of course, adverse to the situation, if for no other reason than their daughter's bohemian boyfriend was a good fourteen years older than she. Nonetheless, about a year after they met, Jeanne gave birth to a baby girl they named Jeanne Hebuterne (who later took on the name Modigliani after she became an artist herself, and discovered who her parents were).

 

Portrait of Chaim Soutine, 1917,
Jeanne Hebuterne

Portrait of Chaim Soutine, 1917,
Amedeo Modigliani

It would seem the two sometimes painted together. Their individual portraits of the artist, Chaim Soutine (above), are radically different in style. Some might say hers seems to capture more of their friend's character than his. Judging from the hundreds of times Modigliani painted her, one might be tempted to suggest he was simply looking for a convenient live-in model. While there may have been that element in their relationship (at first, anyway), there can be no doubt that the quiet, attractive, under-aged, middle-class, Catholic, Parisian mademoiselle and her handsome, romantic, wild-living, hard-drinking, drug-addicted, Italian, Jew of thirty-four were also very deeply in love. He painted her out of love. She stood by her man out of what turned out to be an even deeper love.

 

Jeanne Hebuterne and Amedeo Modigliani by Alan Kirkland Roath
captures the essence of the couple's tragic love.

Just as Romeo and Juliet did not end well neither did this love story. Amadeo Modigliani died in the dead of winter, January 24, 1920, of tubercular meningitis aggravated by alcoholism and drug abuse. His wife was eight-months pregnant. Though there had been a breach in their relationship for some time, Jeanne Hebuterne's family took her back in the next day. Whether so distraught at her lover's death, or as some say, at his request (so he could be with her in heaven) Jeanne jumped from a fifth-floor window of her parents' home to the street below. The following day, so great was the Paris art community's love and respect for Amedeo Modigliani, he was buried in a large, lavish ceremony in the prestigious Père Lachaise Cemetery, while Jeanne's remains were secretly buried in an early-morning private ceremony at the obscure Cimetière de Bagneux. It wasn't until ten years later that Jeanne Hebuterne's family allowed her remains to be moved to a grave next to Modigliani's.

 



Jeanne Modigliani, author, artist, orphan, ca. 1970

"Modi," by Jeanne Modigliani

The couple's daughter, Jeanne, was adopted by her father's Italian family, growing up in Florence. There, only as a questioning adult, did she discover the tragic circumstances of her parents' lives and love. After several years of research, in 1958, Jeanne publish a definitive biography of her father, Modigliani: Man and Myth. It has since been translated into English and French. She died in 1984 Similarly, it wasn't until after WW II, some thirty years after her death, that Jeanne Hebuterne's family allowed her work to be publicly displayed.


Jeanne Modigliani and her
mother, 1919. The identity of
the older child is unknown.

 

Ruben Belloso Adorna

Adorna gives a whole new slant to "hand-eye coordination."

Although I sometimes make exceptions, I tend not to write about living artist. First of all, I'm not in the business of promoting working artist (except for one). Also, except for extremely old artists, I consider most living artists to be "works in progress," thus anything I write today would have a relatively short "shelf-life" and need to be amended quite often. Likewise, it's not wise to look at art or art history from a mere two inches beyond your nose. Contemporary art and artists alike take at least twenty years to gel into anything even approaching "history." Fifty years is more reasonable. Then there's often the sticky problem of copyrights in featuring living artists. Dead artists tend not to care much about such trivialities (although sometimes their living heirs do).

 

Ruben Belloso Adorna Self-portrait

Today, in looking at Spanish artist, Ruben Belloso Adorna, I'm not so much interested in the man, but the amazing things he can do with a few sticks of that yucky, dirty, dusty, colored-chalky stuff known as pastels. As one might gather, I've used them a few times and I'm not in love with them. More accurately, I've come to hate them. Normally, I'm not even particularly fond of pastel art. It's too delicate, too fragile, and they have to be divorced from artistic reality by the imposition of some transparent form of protective armor. They need literally to be handled with kid (or cotton) gloves. Moreover I prefer the much more stable and quite similar qualities of colored pencils (Prismacolors are my favorite). Yet, I have to admit, in looking at Adorno's work, they do seem to be (in his hands, at least) a little more versatile than colored pencil pigments, even in stick form.

 

The Decline of Venus, in progress, Ruben Belloso Adorno

Adorno's work is termed as "Hyperrealism." So that's what they're calling it this month. For varying lengths of time in the past it's been called Super-realism, Photorealism, and a couple other equally confusing and overlapping terms. I guess Hyperrealism is as good a word as any. Generally, such labels have to do with painting. Adorno draws, even though pastelists have, in the past, referred to what they do as "painting." To me, paint in any workable form is, by definition, at least somewhat wet. Whether wet or dry, Hyper/Super/Photo Realism is usually quite large in format--especially the case when working with such a blunt instrument as a chick of pastels. Adorno's drawings are life-size--meaning his faces are as tall as he is. God only knows how big they'd be if he was doing full-length figures. In any case, even just his exquisitely detailed portrait faces must cost a fortune to frame under glass. Quite apart from museums, do even the rich and famous, who can afford his art, really have empty walls large enough to display them?

 

Not all of Adorna's subjects have wrinkles.
They all do have an amazing range of colors, though.

Despite Adorno's medium of choice, I have to admire his work, if for no other reason than the fact I could never do anything like it (in any media). I once had a college art instructor (Adorno is a college art instructor) who, while admiring my adroit handling of paint, criticized my work as "technique over creativity." I'm not saying he was wrong at the time, but I do have the feeling the same criticism would apply to Adorno. At what point in art (painting, drawing, butter sculpture, whatever), does technical prowess overwhelm creative expression? It's, no doubt, a fine line, and one which varies from artist to artist and viewer to viewer. The question is, has Ruben Belloso Adorno crossed it? Despite my admiration, I tend to think he has.

This Adorna face seems to be lacking something.
(He also paints.)

 

Antoine Auguste Ernest Hebert

La Mal'aria, 1850, Ernest Hebert, an Italian peasant family
fleeing to safety from disease (and apparently mosquitos).

Today, due in large part to the fact that virtually all public schools require a basic exposure to the fine arts, seldom does early, prodigious talent in any area go unrecognized and more importantly, un-encouraged. Music seems to be one of the earliest talents to appear in childhood, sometimes reaching near adult proficiency during preschool years. We've all seen and heard on various social media young children whose talent on the piano is limited only by the span of their tiny hands. The same is true in painting at an only slightly later age, though with paint, sometimes it's difficult to differentiate genius from simple bursts of childhood creativity. Parents of such children very often only respect exceptional eye-hand coordination as evidence of unusual childhood talent, which, by definition, involves replicating the real world with some degree of surprising fidelity. 





Ernest Hebert Self-portrait, 1834
painted at the age of seventeen.
The likeness may be somewhat
idealized--more man than boy.

Ernest Hebert, 1834, Benjamin Roland,
captures very well the adolescent
intensity of his young friend and fellow
student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.

Over the ages nearly all historic artist were child prodigies. Amid the demands for simple survival in past times, only the best of the best were promoted to apprenticeships, later to art academies and universities because of the costs and dedication demanded of such young artists. In most families, pursuing a career as an artist was seen as a sure fire road to poverty. There are still elements of that thinking today (because there's still some truth to it); but seldom do families now actively discourage young artists in the midst. Instead, parents often go so far as to endure substantial sacrifices of time and living standards to push their exceptionally talented progeny to the top (take gymnastics, figure skating, dancing, acting, modeling, etc., for instance).

 

Le Tasse in Prison, 1839, Ernest Hebert. Though only twenty-two, this
young academician was off and running on a career of sixty-eight years. 

In contrast, the much more well-known
Eugene Delacroix's 1839 attempt at the
same subject seems lifeless and dull.
(He would have been about 50 at the time.)

During the early 1830s, in Grenoble, France, one particular teenage boy was seen as a child prodigy in painting. His name was Antoine Auguste Ernest Hebert (the French love their long names). Born in 1817, he was painting very accomplished portraits by the age of seventeen, largely on the strength of limited classes by local artists in the area. A pupil first of David Augers and then Paul Delaroche, the handsome young man won the coveted Grand Prix de Rome at the age of twenty-two, with the early success of his painting, Le Tasse in Prison (above) exhibited in the 1839 Salon.

Ophelia, 1876, Ernest Hebert, bears the
mark of possible influences from the
Pre-Raphaelites across the channel.

Slave Sleeping under the Portico
of a Temple, 1842,
Ernest Hebert

But it was his painting, La Mal'aria (top), based upon a scene Hebert observed while studying in Rome, which brought him fame and is seen as his most important work. It was exhibited in the 1850 Salon. The suffering young mother and child depicted represented a Romantic ideal of the era. Although Hebert was primarily a Classical painter, there is also the element of the Symbolist school, as he struggled during his entire life to conjure up the sylphs, concubines, and Ophelias, of wistful and desperate female figures in a passionately lyrical setting. At the same time we see in his numerous male nudes a dominating, yet relaxed posture, even in works such as his Slave Sleeping under the Portico of a Temple (left) from 1842.





The Antoine Auguste Ernest Hebert Museum, Paris

Ernest Hebert died in 1908 at the age of ninety-one. Though generally classified as a Classical painter, at least insofar as style, there is also a Romantic quality to most of his work. It could be said that there is much more room for him as a Romantic than as a 19th-century Classicist (which are a dime a dozen). Moreover, few artist in the Classic mode have their own museums. Hebert, on the other hand, has two, one in Paris (above), the other (below) in his home town of Grenoble.

The Hebert Museum, Grenoble, (southeastern) France,
--the house in which he was born and the more Romantic of the two.

 

Martin Johnson Heade

Two Fighting Hummingbirds with Two Orchids, 1875, Martin Johnson Heade

 

Martin Johnson Heade

One of the more interesting elements in the history of art is how certain subjects have a way of coming and going in popularity. So-called "fool the eye" still-lifes are an example. Few artists paint them today and fewer still actually sell them. Yet in the late 1800s, they were immensely popular. River steam boats are another example. Once quite popular in their prime, but not a big number on gallery walls after the turn of the century. Sailing ships (not racing yachts) declined in popularity as they were replaced by steam on the high seas. Their steam counterparts never replaced them to any great degree in the work of artist or on the walls of their patrons. During the 19th century, highly detailed paintings of flowers were big sellers, gracing Victorian parlors to the point you could almost smell the roses. The same was true of birds, and exotic tropical landscapes, especially sunsets. Today, you'd be hard-pressed to find any of these subject in any venue other than virtual galleries on the Internet (where everything is available).

 

Seascape, Sunrise, 1860, Martin Johnson Heade.
Any connection to the Hudson River School is more convenient than real.

Martin Johnson Heade, today, would be a starving artist. Heade painted incredibly beautiful exotic flowers, delicate, lovely hummingbirds, and dark, brooding sunsets (or sunrises, depending upon the title). His Two Fighting Hummingbirds with Two Orchids (top) is one of his best. Sometimes he did all of the above in a single painting. Except, perhaps, in a proper period parlor of precious Victorian proprieties, such art would appear quite out of place today. Artists, of course still paint florals, still paint airborne avians, and of course, landscape will never go out of style. But the flowers are light, bright, and sprightly, the birds are usually of the large predatory variety soaring about in magnificent freedom, and the landscapes, if they depict the sun at all, are seldom dark, nor do they do much brooding. All this, in spite of the fact that the broad range of acceptable painting content in our homes today has, in general, expanded during the past century or so.

 

General Samuel Houston, 1846,
Martin Johnson Heade

Rebecca Clark, 1857,
Martin Johnson Heade

Morpho Butterfly c.1864-65
Martin Johnson Heade

Heade was born in 1819. He died in 1904. He came out of Lumberville, Pennsylvania, now an artsy community on the Delaware River along the eastern border of the state. His father was a storekeeping. Heade studied under the self-taught Edward Hicks (of Peaceable Kingdom fame). His first works, dating from the 1840s, were, in fact, reasonably adept portraits (above, a craft he certainly didn't learn from Hicks). There's no evidence he ever got around to doing a self-portrait, though. During his formative years as an artist, Heade traveled broadly in Europe and flirted with the Hudson River School, though there's little such influence in his landscapes of the time (more often in the imaginations of today's art critics). His river art, is mostly tropical in nature originating from forays into the jungles of South and Central America. Relatively late in life, around 1883, Heade married and moved to St. Augustine, Florida, where such tropical delights were nearby and more easily accessible.

 

Sunrise, Florida, ca. 1880s, Martin Johnson Heade

Still Life with Apple Blossoms in a Nautilus Shell,
1870, Martin Johnson Heade

Still later in life, perhaps when he was unable to get out and about to the riverbanks, Heade took to painting flowers (often Magnolias, bottom) laid out on velvet (not velvet paintings). Some have classed Heade in with the Hudson River artists, but his early landscapes are much more in line with those of the Luminists. Though he seems to have made a decent living at his art, Heade was not well known during his lifetime. Only after his death have collectors discovered his work, not because it matches their décor, or that it fits neatly in line with the prevailing styles of his day, but because it doesn't. Martin Johnson Heade's paintings, such as his highly Victorian still-life (right), today can be found in most major museums, and surprisingly, in a few minor garage sales. Study his work carefully, you might get lucky.



Giant Magnolia on Blue Velvet Cloth, 1890, Martin Johnson Heade

 

Lorenzo Ghiberti

The Florence Baptistery with the Duomo in the background.

One of Pisano's panels, The Baptism of Jesus.
The church had discontinued immersion by
that time. This panel is less medieval in style
than many of his others.

Very often art historians, in writing for those whose tolerance for art history can best be described as "limited," tend to discuss periods rather than people (which probably explains the limited tolerance). They discuss Impressionism, but barely get beyond Monet and Renoir. They discuss Abstract Expressionism as if Pollock and de Kooning were the beginning, middle, and the end of the era. And as for the Renaissance, it's the big three, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. That's not to say eras are unimportant. They put art and artists in context. But there are way too many eras, and the more recent the era, the more complexities. Eyes glaze over. Magnificent tomes slip from the knees to the floor; ZZZZs freeze above the heads of readers. Eras are boring. Artists are not. Therefore, study artists first, then categorize them by era. The art is far more interesting and important than the categories to which stuffy old art historians (like myself at times) have relegated them.

 

Andrea Pisano's 1336 baptistery doors.

Lorenzo Ghiberti Self-portrait,
1425-55

Take the Renaissance, for instance; don't start in the middle with the big three but at the beginning with Lorenzo Ghiberti. You may have heard of him. He was a door designer. He won a contest to earn the commission. That was in 1401, the date when everyone pretty much agrees the (Early) Renaissance began. He was twenty-three at the time. The massive bronze doors were for the Florence Baptistery (top) across the street from the cathedral, called the Duomo. They were originally to depict the life of Christ, but later the theme was changed to the life of John the Baptist and other scenes from the New Testament.

For some reason I've never been able to discern, the baptistery was built first (though two earlier, smaller churches date from around the time of its construction, 1059-1128). Next came Giotto's campanile, completed by Andrea Pisano in 1359; followed by the current cathedral (dedicated in 1436, though the façade was not completed until 1887). Pisano, in fact, was responsible for the first set of baptistery doors (the east doors, completed in 1336, later moved to the south side). Stylistically they vary from Medieval to what's been called "Proto-Renaissance" but that's of little importance, adding trivia to the trivial. The important thing is that their Gothic quatrefoil panels (above) dictated the format for Ghiberti, and his nearest rival, Brunelleschi to follow as they competed for the commission to make the north doors. Ghiberti won.

 

Ghiberti's north doors, 1401-25. The Renaissance was off and running.

Everyone liked Ghiberti's north doors so, in 1425, they hired him (and his extensive workshop of future Renaissance greats) to do a set for the east side where Pisano's doors had originally been (below, left). It was here that Ghiberti rose to greatness, jettisoning the highly restrictive quatrefoil format from before in favor of simple squares, ten of them, depicting the original theme of Old Testament scenes. Ghiberti used the newly discovered principles of perspective to give depth to his images. Each panel depicts more than one episode. In The Story of Joseph (below), the narrative scheme includes Joseph being cast by his brothers into the well; his being sold into slavery; his delivery to pharaoh; the interpretation of pharaoh's dream; Jacob sending his sons to Egypt; Joseph recognizing his brothers; and their return home (whew, a whole Sunday school lesson in one panel). According to art historian, Giorgio Vasari, this panel was the most difficult and also the most beautiful. Ghiberti used different sculptural techniques, from incised lines to almost free-standing figure sculpture, further accentuating the sense of space. It took the sculptor and his "door factory" 27 years to complete them all. Vasari called them, "...the finest masterpiece ever created." No less an admirer of Ghiberti than the great Michelangelo dubbed them the "Gates of Paradise" (below, left). The name stuck.

The Story of Joseph, Lorenzo Ghiberti, panel from the east doors, 1427-55--a biblical narrative in bronze, considered Ghiberti's best work.

copyright, Jim Lane

The Gates of Paradise, 1425-53, Lorenzo Ghiberti.

Ghiberti was born in 1378 and died in 1455. That's an exceptionally long life for those living at the time. It was a career that did not end with the "Gates of Paradise" (perhaps at them). Ghiberti also did several free-standing bronze sculptors such as his St. John the Baptist (below, left, 1413), St. Matthew (below, right, 1419-20), and St. Stephen (bottom, 1428). During those years he wrote what is considered the first surviving artist autobiography (for which Vasari was ever grateful). He also trained, or strongly influenced, such Renaissance names as Leonardo da Vinci, Francesco Rustici, Michelangelo, Donatello, Masolino, Michelozzo, Uccello, and Antonio Pollaiuolo. Quite apart from his doors, his bronze statues, even his autobiography, it's the great Renaissance artists who came and went through the doors of his "door factory" over the course of half a century, who are undoubtedly Lorenzo Ghiberti's greatest contribution to the much-touted Italian Renaissance art era.



St. John the Baptist, 1413,
Lorenzo Ghiberti

St. Matthew, 1419-20,
Lorenzo Ghiberti

 

St. Stephen, 1428, Lorenzo Ghiberti

 

Francesco Hayez

Rinaldo and Armida, 1812-13, Francesco Hayez
--Romantic, yes, to the point of erotic, but definitely not French.

 

Francesco Hayez Self-portrait, 1861

When someone uses the word "romantic" the vast majority of people bring to mind hearts and flowers, cute little cupids, pretty ladies, perhaps even pretty gentlemen. Even artist and those having some background in art at some level, if they call up images of the Romantic era in art, invariably think first and foremost, perhaps even exclusively, the images of French artists from that period--Delacroix, Gericault, Cabanel, Delaroche, Prud'hon, and maybe one or two others, though some of those might wince a little at being squeezed into such a tight stylistic mold. Unfortunately, in most artists' minds, it would seem that the Romantic movement in art landed in Paris during the mid-19th century and took up exclusive residence there, never mind the fact that there have been Italian, Spanish, German, even English Romantic artists, though for the English, it was something of a stretch. Perhaps they lived too far from the sunny Mediterranean.

 

Ulysses at the court of Alcinous, 1814, Francesco Hayez.
Roman, if not Romantic in the usual sense.

Portrait of Count Baglioni,
Francesco, Hayez, the Romantic
portrait among the clutter.

Francesco Hayez (pronounced a-JETS) was Italian, born in Venice in 1791, about as close to the Mediterranean as you can get, unless you consider Venice as being on the Adriatic Sea. Though his father was French, his mother was from Murano (a Venetian island). And the fact that Francesco was the youngest of five sons means they were both at least somewhat romantic at times (I couldn't resist that). Something of a child prodigy, the boy went through a variety of local painters (even apprenticed to an art restorer) before landing in the Venice Academy of Fine Art in 1806. There he earned a scholarship to the Academy San Luca in Rome where he studied for a year. From there, Hayez move on to Naples where he began his painting career with a major commission for mythological Ulysses at the court of Alcinous, (above) dating from 1814. In discussing Romantic art, we often fail to recall that Rome is in Italy, thus Italian art has first claim on the name.

Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, 1867, Francesco Hayez--history, religion, violence, heroism, death destruction--Romanticism minus the hearts and flowers.

Ballerina Carlotta Chabert as Venus,
1830, Francesco Hayez
--a mythological portrait.

Romantic art was far more that love, pretty damsels in distress (often slightly, or completely, nude), imaginary landscapes, color over lines, and deteriorating classical architecture. Like its Classical predecessors and Academic descendants, it often embraced history painting, portraits of prettified ladies (left) and heroic men (also sometimes prettified, above, right), violence, action, eroticism, even humor. Hayez's Rinaldo and Armida, 1812-13 (top) embodies many of these traits. Hayez's Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, (above) painted more than fifty years later, is the flip-side of the Romantic era we don't often consider, perhaps because it's far more Italian than French. Almost by definition, Yet, whatever its nationality, Romanticism is fantasy art. Men fantasize as much as women, but about different things. During the Romantic era, however, men painted more than women, thus Romantic art, while often dwelling on women and erotic fantasies, such as Hayez's The New Favorite (Harem Scene) from 1855 (bottom), also broadens the genre to include many other male fantasies besides sex.

The New Favorite, 1866, Francesco Hayez, is an old Romantic favorite.