The art of Eugène Carrière

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Romainville, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, from 15 January to 4 March 2023.

Since mid-January, the Jocelyn Wolff Gallery has been presenting a group of works by Eugène Carrière, some of which are offered for sale, an event that will include a round table on Sunday 26 February and will close its doors on 4 March. So there is still time to go there and we strongly invite the readers of La Tribune de l’Art. If the artist is listed in a large number of French museums and also benefits from the existence of a very active associative museum in Gournay-sur-Marne, his birthplace, which is dedicated to him under the presidency of Sylvie Le Gratiet, any new opportunity to see his works is welcome.

Organised by a contemporary art gallery, and curated by Serge Lemoine, this gathering of works is part of an interesting approach; it is usually contemporary art that "appropriates", according to the fashionable expression, museums of ancient and 19th century art; here, Carrière, master of extreme sensitivity and painter of a quivering end of century, is invited into the universe of the current art world and within an environment that further accentuates the visual confrontation: this district in the midst of transformation in Romainville, where ultramodern buildings, construction sites and urban wasteland rub shoulders, irresistibly reminiscent of Jacques Tati in Mon oncle and Playtime, prepares a contrario the visitor for a break that is all the greater. The "rue de la Commune de Paris", the gallery’s address, might not have completely displeased Carrière, although he was non-violent; close to socialism and concerned by the question of the people and education, dreyfusard, friend of Gustave Geffroy, Roger Marx and Gabriel Séailles, the painter had for example undertaken to write, at the request of the École des hautes études sociales, a text on Art in Democracy, interrupted by his death and finally published in 1907 at the Mercure de France. Excerpts from this study, introduced by Catherine Fraixe, appear in the collective work L’Art social en France, de la Révolution à la Grande Guerre, co-edited by Neil McWilliam, Catherine Méneux and Julie Ramos and published by the PUR in 2017, a publication whose importance cannot be overstated.


1. View of the exhibition
Photo: François Doury
See the image in its page
2. View of the exhibition
Photo: François Doury
See the image in its page

But let’s get back to the exhibition: about fifty works, oils, drawings, lithographs, from private collections and the gallery itself, as well as a few documents lent by the Musée Carrière in Gournay-sur-Marne, allow us to delve into the master’s art. The scenography is museum-like, as the curator intended: coloured walls, labels, comparative images and expanded texts (ill. 1 and 2), contrasting with the usual clinical white of contemporary spaces. The reasons that prompted Jocelyn Wolff and Serge Lemoine to organise this presentation, even if it is a questioning one, cannot escape us. What, at the time of the artist, could intrigue some, or weary them, the monochromy, the dissolution of forms, the repetitive character of the practice, has long since been summoned as an anticipation of certain characteristics of twentieth century art, "at the risk of abstraction" writes Serge Lemoine, who poses the question of Carrière’s place in art history. The fluctuation of the artist’s reception also interests Jocelyn Wolff, and rightly so, since the unpredictability of the future of the works (and of their value), between "the centuries of glory and the millennia of oblivion" according to Marguerite Yourcenar’s formula in Mémoires d’Hadrien, also concerns, and perhaps especially, contemporary art.


3. View of part of the rooms from the mezzanine
Photo: J.-D. Jumeau-Lafond
See the image in its page

As we walk through the rooms of the exhibition, which can also be admired from the mezzanine in an interesting way (ill. 3), we find this Carrière whom we certainly know well but who always surprises. Group or solitary portraits, physiognomies that seem to emerge from nothingness, or ready to return to it, fluid and even elusive forms, a chromatic range that is increasingly restricted: one thinks of a Henner, already so "concentrated", but who would be deprived of red and white, a sort of ultimate renunciation of colour or sun, like a park at nightfall, where only the forms remain, in a gradation of grey, reminding us that colours are like everything else, an "illusion".


4. Eugène Carrière (1849-1906)
Study for Les Passants, c. 1890-1895
Oil on canvas - 38 x 46 cm
Photo: François Doury
See the image in its page

If we must consider Carrière as holding a place of his own in the artistic trajectory of the 19th and 20th centuries, without falling into a questionable teleology (from Courbet to the Impressionists, from the Fauves to abstraction), it is as a figure of the Symbolist movement. For several decades now, well-founded studies have demonstrated the idealist sources of the avant-garde and given back to many artists (Mondrian, Malevitch, Kandinsky, Kupka) the spiritualist and not purely formalist substance that they should never have been denied. Metaphysics, theosophy, the quest for the essential inhabit "modernity" and the symbolist sources of the innovators of the 20th century are no longer debated, except by some critics desperately attached, like shipwrecked men to a raft, to the concept, however outdated, of rupture and so-called pictorial revolution. With Carrière, the plastic approach clearly stems from an anti-naturalist vision and a quest for the profound meaning of things; the master of Gournay is indeed a Schopenhauerian painter. As the works exhibited in Romainville show, he strips the artistic practice of optics in favour of a search beyond the visible, pure "representation" of a mental creation. Elusive forms, ready to dissolve, a glimpse of a moment, "appearances disappearing", according to the formula of Vladimir Jankélévitch about Debussy, the figures of Carrière are indeed the materialization of the idea, dressed "in a sensitive form" as Jean Moréas claims in his manifesto of 1886. Thus the study for Les Passants (ill. 4), a veritable procession of spectres and shadows, that is to say of spirits.


5. View of the exhibition with the painting and lithograph
of Rodin sculpting, and a bronze by Rodin
Photo: François Doury
See the image in its page

6. Eugène Carrière (1849-1906)
Rodin sculpting, 1900
Lithograph on japan - 78.5 x 58 cm
Photo: François Doury
See the image in its page

We remember Degas’s words "Somebody smoked in the children’s room"; despite the anecdote, perhaps not entirely ironic, it is indeed vapours and fluidic movements that constitute the painter’s language at a time when spiritism was flourishing and the poetic and literary world was exploring the unknown through the most diverse experiences and attempts to approach the invisible. Didn’t Jules Bois, a specialist in small religions, evoke the "sketches of the great Carrière" when he contemplated the photographs supposedly fixing human energy taken by the astonishing Dr Hippolyte Baraduc? Contemplating Carrière’s almost mediumistic paintings at the Galerie Jocelyn Wolff reminds us that there is no viable art without spirit, a question that remains relevant today and of which the admirable Rodin sculpting (ill. 5 and 6) may appear as a summary.

Curator: Serge Lemoine.


Practical information: Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, 43 rue de la Commune de Paris 93230 Romainville. Tel: +33 1 42 03 05 65. Free admission.

Gallery website.

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