Séraphine Louis
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| Séraphine Louis | |
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| Born | 1864 |
| Died | 1942 |
| Nationality | French |
| Field | painting |
| Training | self-taught |
| Movement | Naïve art |
| Patrons | Wilhelm Uhde |
Séraphine Louis (Séraphine de Senlis) (1864–1942) was a French painter in the naïve style. Self-taught, she was inspired by her religious faith and by stained-glass church windows and other religious art. The intensity of her images, both in color and in replicative design, is sometimes interpreted as a reflection of her own psyche, walking a tightrope between ecstasy and mental illness.
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[edit] Biography
Séraphine Louis was born in Arsy (Oise) on September 3, 1864. Her father was a manual laborer and her mother came from a farmworking background. Séraphine's mother died on her first birthday and her father, who remarried, also died before she was seven; at that point, she came under the charge of her eldest sister. She first began to work as a sheperdess but, by 1881, she became a domestic worker for the sisters in the convent Providence at Clermont (Oise). In 1901, she began to work as a housekeeper instead for middle class families in Senlis.
Alongside her arduous day jobs, Séraphine painted by candlelight and largely in secret isolation, until her considerable body of work was discovered in 1912 by art collector Wilhelm Uhde.[1] While in Senlis, Uhde saw a still-life of apples at his neighbor's house and was astonished to learn that Séraphine, his housecleaner, was the artist.[2] His support had barely begun to lift her horizons when he was obliged to leave France in August, 1914, with war between France and Germany making him an unwelcomed outsider in Senlis, much as Séraphine was, given her eccentric persona. They only reestablished contact in 1927 when Uhde – back in France and living in Chantilly - came to an exhibition of local artistry in Senlis and, seeing Séraphine's work, realized that she had survived and her art had flourished. Under Uhde's patronage, Séraphine expanded her canvas, literally (with an apparent preference for canvases two meters high), and she came to prominence as a naïve painter of her day. In 1929, Uhde organized an exhibition "Painters of the Sacred Heart" that featured Séraphine's art and launched her into a period of financial success she had never known - and was ill prepared to manage. Then, in 1930, the effects of the Great Depression undercut her patronage, as Uhde was obliged to stop buying her paintings. In 1932, she was admitted for "chronic psychosis" to the psychiatric ward of a geriatric hospital at Clermont, where her artistry found no outlet. Although Uhde reported that she had died in 1934, Louis actually survived until 1942, friendless and alone [2] in a hospital annex at Villers-sous-Erquery. (Some exhibitions [1] still suggest she died in 1934.) She was buried in a common grave.
Uhde did continue to exhibit her work: in 1932, at an exhibition "The modern primitives" in Paris; in 1937-38 in an exhibition titled "The popular masters of reality" which showed in Paris, Zurich, and New York (at MOMA); in 1942, at the "Primitives of the 20th century" exhibit in Paris, and finally, in 1945, in a solo exhibition of her work in Paris. Her paintings are housed in the Musée Maillol in Paris, the Musée d'art de Senlis, the Musée d'art naïf in Nice, and the Musée d'Art moderne Lille Métropole in Villeneuve-d'Ascq.
[edit] The art of Séraphine de Senlis
Séraphine's works are of richly fantasized, intensely repeated and embellished floral arrangements. She utilized colors and pigments that she made herself from unusual and exotic ingredients, whose secret composition she never revealed, colors which have stood the test of time for durable vividness. Her surfaces have a matte, sometimes almost waxy appearance. Sometimes her signature (typically "S. Louis") is carved by knife, revealing an undercoat of contrasting color. In some cases, she seems to have signed her paintings before painting them.
The irrepressible urge to create made Séraphine an artist devoured by "this famous internal necessity of which Kandinsky spoke", to quote, in translation, the terms employed by Bertrand Lorquin, conservator of the Musée Maillol, in introducing the exhibition "Séraphine Louis dite Séraphine de Senlis" at the Musée Maillol in Paris (an exhibition which ran from October 1, 2008, to May 18, 2009).[3]
[edit] In film
In 2008, Yolande Moreau starred as Séraphine in the French biographical film Séraphine by director Martin Provost and won a César (the French Oscar) in 2009 for Best Actress for her performance. The film won a total of seven Césars, including Best Film.
[edit] Bibliography
Alain Virdondelet, Séraphine de Senlis, Albin Michel, 1986.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Hamilton, George Heard (1993). Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880-1940. Yale University Press. p. 226. ISBN 0-300-05649-4.
- ^ a b Greer, Germaine (2001). The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work. Tauris Parke Paperbacks. pp. 121–122. ISBN 1-860-64677-8.
- ^ Except as noted elsewhere, all the above information is derived as a translation from the text in the French wikipedia entry for Séraphine at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Séraphine_de_Senlis
[edit] External links
- Musée d'art naïf (M.A.N.) Beraut (near Toulouse) Biography
- Musée d'art de Senlis Reproduction des grandes marguerites
- The Artists Photographie
- Artnet
- [2] Her work at Musée Maillol
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