Edward Hopper goes Bohemias at the Grand Palais

Charles Amable Lenoir, Rêverie, collection particulière.
Copyright Mille/realis.

I love concept exhibitions. They always bring together the unexpected. A couple of years ago Crime et châtiment at Orsay lined up Degas' dancer sculpture between a guillotine and France's first crime scene photographs. I'm still wondering if that combination wasn't a product of my wildest dreams. And what about Art Nouveau, revival in which Guimard leads to Gaudi leads to Dali leads to ... Grateful Dead concert posters? Surprising, but it WORKS!
I love this kind of exhibition so much that I couldn't contain myself when I saw the metro posters for the Grand Palais' Bohemias. This theme hits home for a lot of us, invoking memories of romantic, adolescent dreams : life as a starving artist in a smarmy Paris hotel room, with a bed, a table, a silk kimono, pen and paper and a bottle of cheap wine. If you are like me, and grew up loving Puccini and Carmen (or in the 90's Rent), don't miss this exhibition that combines the spirit of them all showing the changing perception of the gypsy in art from the Renaissance to Nazi Germany.


Georges de la Tour, The Fortune Teller, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibition is thought provoking. On the ground floor, you observe the figure of the gypsy in art as it transforms through time. Several 17th century paintings of gentlefolk being bamboozled by Gypsies are displayed, the most renowned being Georges de la Tour's The Fortune Teller, on loan from the Met. Her majesty Elizabeth II has sent over a beautiful caricature by Leonardo da Vinci presenting a Roman citizen hounded by gypsies. I was surprised by several paintings of the Virgin in Gypsy garb. In the 16th and 17th centuries gypsies were believed to be from Egypt so certain painters presented Mary with a large round hat that was part of the Gypsy costume in renditions of the Holy Family in Egypt. In the 19th century, the gypsy was adopted as a symbol of artistic rebellion by artists, in particular Courbet. In his 1854 painting, La rencontre, ou Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, the artist presents himself dressed as a travelling man, an image that is all the more poignant as it contrasts with the gentlemanly clothing of the other two men in the painting.

Portrait d'un artiste dans son atelier,
attributed to Théodore Géricault,
Musée du Louvre.

In the second part of the exhibition, the gypsy and the artist have become one : the bohemian is born. This part opens with a portrait of Liszt, who wrote a treaty on Gypsy music, although he never truly adopted the image of the bohemian for himself. With Carmen and La Bohème playing in the background the visitor meanders through portraits of artists, such as this painting by Géricault on loan from the Louvre, or a self-portrait painted by young Delacroix and paintings of groups of artists in their ateliers. The literary world is included: an entire room is dedicated to the correspondence between Verlaine and Rimbaud and citations from Balzac and Baudelaire pop up all along the way. We enjoy a jaunt through a small-scale replica of Montmartre and music is referenced via a portrait of Satie by Ramon Casas dated 1891. In it we are invited to make the connection between the bohemian and the dandy - Satie is wearing a top hat and a monocle, but the background is a windmill on the Montmartre hills.

After a room full of paintings showing the joys, debauchery and solitude of late nineteenth century cafes, the exhibition comes to an abrupt and brutal close with a series of colorful lithographs presenting Tsiganes, signed Otto Mueller and exhibited at the Degenerate Art exhibition organized by the Nazi regime in 1937 in order to further marginalize this artist (amongst others) and his subject.

Edward Hopper is apparently THE exhibition to see this season in Paris. I'll admit that my rebellious side actually cringed at the thought of going to see yet another exhibition cataloguing the works of a very famous artist, but I didn't regret it. And although you might think that Hopper and Bohemias have nothing in common outside of sharing the Grand Palais as a venue this season, I found that seeing Hopper's paintings after thinking about marginalization and gypsies and artists made me understand Edward Hopper in a whole new way.

Let's resume the man's career : he starts out at the New York School of Art with teacher Robert Henri, spends a few years in Paris where he is influenced by the tail-end of impressionism and draws French people on cafe terraces (these drawings are mostly caricatures) he participates in The Eight rebellion/the Ashcan School led by his teacher Robert Henri and works as an illustrator until a successful exhibit of his watercolors gets him sufficient renown to become a full time painter.

Some of my favorite pieces in the first part of the exhibition are engravings on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art: "Night Shadows" and "The Cat Boat" (1921 and 1922). The first has a beautiful, emotional approach through contrasts of light and darkness that create a sensation of loneliness on a dark and deserted street. The second demonstrates Hopper's seemingly effortless mastery of perspective: the sail on the cat boat is designed with photographic realism.

Edward Hopper The Hotel Room, 1931.
Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation, Madrid.

But what about the paintings? My favorite is The Hotel Room an oil on canvas dated 1931 on loan from Madrid. The lines are clean, the colors crisp, the story clear. Hopper paints like a technical writer writes : clear and concise. And the beauty of his painting lies in this simplicity. There are no cheap paintings on the walls of the hotel. The lines of the bed are clean and the sheets are still neat and tidy. All this brings you to the shadowed face of the woman in her underclothes, sitting on the bed staring at a sideways piece of paper - a note that has announced some great deception, and brought on a wave of loneliness that is accentuated by the near emptiness of the room.

Nearly all of Hopper's paintings express a certain loneliness.  There's the farmer and his wife in front of their house in the evening, the wife is looking at her dog in the foreground and the husband is watching his feet, there are the two girls having dinner in a lonely Chinatown restaurant, or the famous Nighthawks with the lady in pink and the man in blue in a nearly empty diner in the middle of the night. Hopper paints people experiencing the loneliness of their individual life journeys. That moment when we feel ourselves to be marginals disconnected with society and joyful human contact. Separation is the common thread between the two exhibitions. The sentiment of marginality inherent in Hopper's paintings and the lifestyles of gypsies and bohemian artists that proudly reside on society's fringes.

Whether or not you consider that my comparison tient la route, both of these exhibitions are excellent sources of intellectual stimulation. After all they are THE exhibitions of the season!

Bonne visite!

CSL

Visit Bohemias through January 14, 2013 and Edward Hopper through January 28, 2013
at the Grand Palais
Link to the Grand Palais website