More photo projects: Contre Jour Figures

 Contre-jour: against the light. One series of our photos explores this effect.  This post first demonstrates some of our sources, then discusses a few photos.

 Jean-François Millet repeated this twilight effect (especially in his drawings), silhouetting peasant bodies against a darkening sky.

At times, figures are just barely seen against the night.  This moody and dark aspect of Millet's work appealed to many later nineteenth century artists, including Georges Seurat, Vincent Van Gogh, and  Symbolists such as Odilon Redon.

Jean-François Millet, Starry Night, ca. 1850-65. Yale University Art Gallery

Millet, Flight into Egypt.

Seurat, Plowing, 1882-3, conté crayon on paper, Musée d'Orsay.

In one unusual drawing of a Gleaner, Millet's horizon is so low that the figure seems to loom against the evening sky like a caryatid. The seventeenth century Le Nain brothers and their followers had used this device in their heroic peasant paintings, and many late nineteenth-century naturalists repeat this monumentalizing formula.

Louis Le Nain,  Landscape with figures, or the Resting Horseman (La Halte du Cavalier)
c. 1640s,  V & A,  London.
 

Master of the Processions (Le Nain Follower) Procession of the Ram. mid 17th-century, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

                                                                                                                                                                        

Francis Tattegrain, Wreck Scavenger, c. 1881, Boulogne sur Mer

Francis Tattegrain's painting of a girl burdened with the picked remains of a shipwreck again uses this low horizon, which serves to monumentalize her form and emphasize her ungainly burden. Like the Guillou painting of the seaweed harvester, this image represents the marginal activities of those who live on and by the Atlantic.

Thinking of what filmmaker Agnes Varda called the "modest gesture of the gleaner" that picks up and revalues the discarded, Toby and I, while at a residency at the Ray Wells Dune Shack in Provincetown, made some images of heroic figures-- some scavengers, some dispossessed, some wayward shepherds on the ridge of a dune.

Millet's contre-jour shepherd, along with his flock, are like  cut out flat ornament or a spine on the edge of a hill.

  This was an effect that we also explored during our residency in 2012.

  

 

Millet's painting of a spinning shepherdess, from a time he spent in the Auvergne in central France, has a wonderful tapestry of color that describes the hill and takes up about two thirds of the canvas.

  

In this earlier photo from 2010 when we had just started thinking about this effect of human scale in the landscape, Toby is at the top of a ridge at Boundbrook, in Wellfleet, with his dog Gracie prancing through the low gorse and hog-cranberry.

In this vein of the figure on the ridge, I encountered a remarkable, small painting at the RISD museum: James Tissot 's Dance of Death, in which a group of festive, medieval dancers frolic downhill at twilight. They are back-lit and silhouetted, an effect that picks out every gesture and each tendril of hair. From a time when the French artist was influenced by British Pre-Raphaelitism, this is an odd image of reckless or even manic joy in the face of death-- unmistakable in the central, fallen figure.

James Tissot, The Dance of Death, 1860, RISD Museum, Providence.

And of course it looks so much like the final image of Ingmar Bergman's iconic film set at the time of the Black Death, The Seventh Seal (1857).

 

Also in our residency, we worked on more images of what Van Gogh called "orphan men."

I will pick up on these images with the next post on our photos.

Danse Macabre

For several years my research has concerned the culture of death in Brittany. I have long been interested in the reception of medieval visual culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This is a video that I edited in 2012 for a session at the Babel Working Group in Boston.

This project assembles bits of video that I have shot over the past three years on short trips to France that address these overlapping concerns.  Throughout the video, I made layers that act as effects from natural phenomena—sparkles of sunlight on a pond, moss on a huge boulder, a poppy waving in the wind, boiling water reflected on the ceiling, a reflection on a stream, a slow pan across a diamond-shaped window with snow outside. Nature dances across stony things that don’t move.


Danse Macabre: a video work in progress from maura coughlin on Vimeo.



 Here are my French sources:

La Martyr: one of the oldest enclos paroissiaux (parish closes) in Finistère (11th-17th cent.): stone steps lead up to the top of the 16th century triumphal gateway. Adam and Eve are on the building’s façade as is a “mermaid” that might signify the pre-CR notion in Brittany that hell is damp and cold.
Kermaria-an-Iskuit: a Breton church in Plouha (Côtes-d'Armor), (13th century) that has one of the most well-preserved Danse Macabre wall paintings with 47 figures (c. 1500) and a prominent 19th century skull box.
The sculpted figure of Ankou (death) at the church of Ploumilliau, (Côtes-d'Armor), 17th century.
Painted Skull Boxes in the Cathedral of St. Pol-de-Léon, Finistère: 32 boxes 17th-19th centuries.
Ossuary (15th century) at the cemetery of Saint-Hilaire Marville, (Lorraine) The Breton practice of preserving individual’s skulls in marked boxes was taken up here, in Northern France in the 19th century. Shot through the metal bars on the ossuary.
Joël Thépault,  Placard Mortuaire (2006-7), a cupboard of skulls and other things carved by hand into the rock face at “Les Lapidiales”: an exhausted limestone quarry that has since 2000 has been an open air, international artist residency program for young sculptors, Port d'Envaux (Charente-Maritime). I found this first by chance by looking for something entirely else.

Images from other places:




a mossy rock in Montague, MA, a sarong blowing in the wind, a poppy, a garage door, a sparkling pond, a reflection on a stream and boiling water in Wellfleet, Provincetown and Eastham MA.

Stone: Hard old granite from Brittany and the soft limestone of the Charente.

Sound sources:

a refrigerator in a 19th-century distillery in Cognac, samples from Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre, ambient sound in Kermaria including the ancient tour guide, bells at La Martyre.

Dead Fish Landscape

 

I can't get over seeing this Matisse painting last winter in New York.  I mentioned it a few posts ago while writing about seaweed.  This is Matisse on the Normandy coast in 1920. I had always associated this period of his career with the Riviera-- especially those beautiful, escapist interiors in Nice, filled with flappers playing odalisque in front of his fantastic collection of textiles, chinoiserie and Moroccan screens ( I was in Nice for a few days when I was traveling by train at age 19, with my slightly punk haircut and my backpack, feeling a bit nefarious in such a glamorous place). But this is Etretat: a Normandy beach almost synonymous with Monet, who repeatedly returned to paint these famous pierced cliffs, especially in the 1880s (this is explored at length in the Met's catalog). 

Monet was not the first-- Courbet was there in the 1860s, joined by his American pal Whistler and his gorgeous Irish girlfriend Joanna Hiffernan.  Matisse had Monet's color and Courbet's sensuality in mind when he painted a series of images of dead fish on the rocky strand.

Looking closely at the image, it's really odd: there is an assemblage of fish and shellfish on a bed of seaweed: a green langoustine and an eel are the easiest to spot. Like most of Monet's later paintings, Matisse's fish painting eschews the messy human uses of the beach, presenting only a fish still life, leaved up out of the water onto a neat mat of seaweed. Part landscape, part still-life, this is an image of the intertidal zone-- where flint rocks, fallen from the limestone cliffs, form the beach, and where the sea rises and falls, leaving seaweed and other deposits on the beach with one tide, and whisking them back with another.

    As Robert Herbert's excellent book on Monet showed, this beach, so often painted as an empty, sublime expanse, was right in front of a busy boardwalk that was up against a town packed with hotels, casinos, summer villas, restaurants and shops. 

Summer tourists, fishermen, boats, laundresses washing tourists' clothing and hotel linens all vied for space on the beach. At this point, as John Gillis points out, the boardwalk divided the people who worked on the beach (and their boats, seaweed, fish, etc) from those who were at the beach. 

But, in this painting, Matisse's beach is covered in fish. The human life is absent.

Thinking about the oddity of dead fish as "actors" in a landscape, or as features of a landscape, I remembered a very strange Dutch painting that I had seen in New Orleans over a year ago. 

This is a collaborative painting (one of many of this type), by Willem Ormea (-1673) and Abraham Willaerts (1577-1664).  Ormea, a still-life painter, did the fish and Willaerts, a marine painter, the landscape.  The Dutch were quite proud of their maritime prowess, as well as their mastery of nature in reclaiming so much of their watery landscape for agriculture. Ormea and Willaerts produced many dead fish landscapes-- a quick search found the examples below.  These paintings all seem to bring together a spectacular harvest of the sea with the industriousness of a worked coastline. Many of the fish poses and types repeat: the contorted bodies, the open mouths, the shiny rigor mortis.  They seem impossibly large, beached and blotting out the beach. Close up and huge they dwarf the human activity in the middle ground and distance.

 

 Of course, there are many examples of fish in still life paintings: Chardin comes to mind in particular, and the many great market paintings of the northern painters like Snyders and Aertsen.

Chardin

Frans Snyders, Fish Market, 1618

Van Valckenborch, Fish Market, early 17the century

Hendrik Potuyl,  Housewife in an inner Courtyard Cleaning Fish, 1639-1649

In the 1860s and 70s, Bazille and Manet produced some of the most seductive images of fish, hearkening back to the Dutch masters: 

 

And Manet also made some lovely sketches of fishermen working on the coast at Boulogne-sur-mer.

 

Van Gogh painted several still lifes of fish and crabs. By chance, I saw both of the crab paintings within a few days of each other on a trip to both London and Amsterdam. 

Van Gogh, Two Crabs, 1889, National Gallery, London

Gauguin, in his Impressionist period, made an awkward  stab at a dead-fish in a landscape painting (pillaging a bit from Courbet, Manet and Cézanne all at once).

Paul Gauguin, Still Life with Jug and Red Mullet, c. 1876

But in spite of this artistic lineage and dialogue, this remains undeniably strange: I cannot but imagine the viscosity, the flies, the temporal presence of the slippery fish, the approaching tide and the brown seaweed.

















Here are some more images from Matisse's 1920 stay in Etretat (he showed 31 paintings from his summer in Etretat in October of 1920, and they sold like hotcakes)