Two lovely and intriguing painting exhibitions ongoing at Musée Maillol and Musée Marmottan Monet offer more than their titles suggest. Les Grands maîtres naïfs: du douanier rousseau à Séraphine at Musée Maillol debunks the notion of “naïf (primitive)” and does a great job of showing color, shape, form in daily life in France 1920-1940 by outsider painters. Mondrian Figuratif at Marmottan Monet uses some lovely figurative painting to anchor a well-made walk-through of Piet Mondrian’s painterly quest for Beauty.
What they see becomes visual lyric: intimate, even indiscrete, warm, colorful. Visitors will enjoy the little irony of tourist-targeted views of Montmartre by these often commercially struggling artists as well bigger and more recondite ironies such as Dominique Peyronnet’s slipping of the iconic La Femme à la Perle into the sharp symmetry of a modern urban landscape.
And there’s plenty more work by these marginal maîtres that just enables the eye to enjoy while the mind wanders: feathery flower bouquets by Séraphine Louis (which put me in mind of Shaker prints, even Jung drawings), Le Douanier Rousseau’s powerfully-imagined “exotic natural” scenes (which put me in mind of William Blake prints), René Rimbert’s bistro-inspired still lifes (which brought Cezanne’s to mind), the graded colors and perspectives of sea- and landscapes by André Bauchant and Ferdinand Desnos, or Camille Bombois’ good-tempered almost-porn.
And if Grands maîtres naïfs puts pay to the notion that modern “primitive” painting is anything more than a nasty little kick against painters of “marginal” social origins, Mondrian Figuratif puts in doubt the “Father of abstraction”’s parental role in that particular style.
Marmottan Monet’s exhibition in fact highlights Mondrian’s personal spiritual quest for beauty. I mean “Beauty”in a Neo-Platonic, 19th-century sense, with a capital B, the one that was supposed to exist with Love and Truth at the core of the universe and Christian society. “Mondrian figuratif”’s walk-through arrangement makes the visual case that painter Mondrian knows in his heart, like poet Keats, that Truth is Beauty and Beauty is Truth. This puts a lot of water between him and a painter like a Picasso, or Jasper John’s who knows who else in the modern era whose search is mostly for new and satisfactory expressive style(s).
In the entry way of the Mondrian Figuratif walk-through sits a ‘still life” of a “naturalist” dead hare in the Dutch Renaissance style, made by a 19-year old Mondrian. Next to it is the painter’s very first “abstract” painting. The hare’s ‘naturalism’ is on its head, subjected to the effect of light on a graded color and texture (the hare’s fur) while this first “abstract” work is clearly a study of the subtle line and color of tar and worn tiles in somebody’s floor.
Turning into the exhibition from there, some wonderful examples of Mondrian’s figurative work greets visitor eyes. But raise them, look right. There at the bottom of the exhibition is Mondrian’s 1921 Composition avec large plan rouge, jaune, noir, gris et bleu, which definitely isn’t somebody’s tile floor! But then, those colors, those lines! Why, of course, it’s the Beauty of all tile floors! Of all windmills! Then, catching their breath and looking back and forth, there certainly seems a relation between the capture of the exact chromatic quality of early moonlight in the 1906 Crépuscule and Large plan, between the swathes of horizontal color and “natural” geometry of the 1908 Moulin dans le crépuscule and Large plan… The walk-through between these paintings is a visual discussion of Mondrian becoming toward Beauty and, maybe, Truth: all we need to know.
Mondrian Figuratif runs at the Musée Marmottan Monet until 26 January 2020.
Les Grands maîtres naïfs: du Douanier Rousseau à Séraphine runs at Musée Maillol until 19 January 2020.