The
Art of Eugène Galien Laloue [1854-1941]
The
Art of Eugene Galien Laloue [1854-1941]
Only
three or four things in any painting or photograph determine how we feel
about it. For example, there is the choice of subject – such as nudes,
seascapes, still lives, bowls of fruit, street scenes, etc. Then there is
the mix of colours, which the artist prefers, and habitually employs: his
palette. These both become the hallmarks of his art – we see them and
expect them, delight in them and rely on them. They define him. Then there
are the stylistic elements or the level of speed or delicacy, the apparent
roughness or smoothness of texture, and the sharpness or blurredness with
which the picture has been produced and with which it seems suffused. This
includes the tones and shades the artist prefers in executing their work.
Finally, there are the elements of composition or layout – the
draughtsmanship, the sense of likeness and proportions of the contents of
the picture, their harmonies, their balance or symmetry. Do they look real
or attractive? Do the shapes hang together well?
Theatre-Gymnasium
– Paris
Critics
talk endlessly between each other about these four elements in relation to
any artist, comparing their views like flicking rapidly through postcards
in a collection, flashing quickly through their hands as they gabble on.
They compare their views as if laying out these cards, comparing one
artist with another. It is clear that any critic – and we are all critics
– can detail precisely which subjects, which styles, which palettes and
which artists they like the best and why.
Les
Quais du Louvre –
Paris
– Place de la
République – Paris
To
express what I like about Laloue’s art is that I adore his colours, his
composition and the lightness of his touch. These aspects especially stand
out. His pictures have a great lightness and delicacy about them, very
soft colours, a beautiful sense of invading tragic autumn or winter
impermanence: a summer is ending, the crowds are dispersing, the winter is
coming; his pictures show a scene sketched in a few minutes, in a hurry
and just for you. He tears the picture from its pad and with a smile
presses it urgently into your hand, and then he is gone!
Le
marché aux fleurs à la Cité – Paris
His
pictures all have a sense of looseness and naturalness, as if the colours
have just been thrown onto the canvas in a great hurry, but they have
landed beautifully. Such Zen-like perfection, ease and naturalness is very
deceptive – no-one can paint like that; it can only flow from a hand that
has tirelessly painted many lifetimes of pictures. They seem to be thrown
with great speed onto the canvas just like the spidery scribbled notes of
a journalist. They appear hurried. A sense of the tragic autumn or winter
scene adds brilliance and delicacy to his pictures. They are portrayed as
decaying fast, a street that is fading from view, disappearing into a
misty evening, that will soon be empty of people, all blown away like
leaves in the wind and the rain. Only the buildings and the skies appear
vaguely solid or permanent. The trees and people also seem spidery and
only half-real elements in the pictures, compared to the more solid
buildings and roads. The people seem to blow waif-like along the streets
like leaves. The pictures are painted fast and yet never quite capture the
end of a beautiful day or the end of a long hot summer. They are
evanescent. Impermanence shines out of each picture.
–
Ferme en bordure de chemin.
Above
all, his pictures glow with a gorgeous light; light pours out of them;
they are luminous like cathedral windows on a very bright sunny day. The
light is soft, golden, otherworldly. It is an autumnal and evening light,
never a morning or summer light. Compositionally, they are even more
perfect than an actual Parisian street. Every form and shape hangs
together nicely with its neighbours. This delicacy, this luminosity
combines so softly with the compositional perfectness to make them an
utter joy on the eyes. We do not so much look at a Laloue painting, as
enter it. Our eyes are drawn in to embrace a Laloue picture; the eye
weaves pleasantly in and out of the parts of the picture, glides smoothly
over the soft surface, lovingly caresses every detail, every colour, every
tone, savouring every shape, never tiring of the minutest joy and pleasure
this encounter induces.
In
all art, we make assumptions. We assume the artist’s pictures accurately
reflect their own lives. We assume it shows how the artist feels about his
subject, about himself, and about life in general. We therefore make the
assumption that the artist’s pictures reveal his inner world. To some
extent, this must be true. Sombre artists, we assume, paint sombre
pictures by choice, executed in dull, subdued colours, darkened and
diminished deliberately to convey the inner darkness of their darkest
moods. We also assume that bright, agile minds prefer to paint bright and
colourful pictures. Somehow, we feel this is true.
Quais au Châtelet –
Paris
–
L’ancien Trocadéro – Paris
Looking
at Laloue’s fine output, we tap straight into his bright and delicate
mind; his pictures invite us into his world of inner vision. This is the
assumption we make. In which case, his mind must have been light,
delicate, agile, luminous and essentially a bright, optimistic and joyous
place to be; that of a person in love with life, happy with himself and
permeated by a great sense of symmetry, balance and harmony that touches
every particle of his being. Such is the strong impression his pictures
create upon our senses. Such must be the impression he himself would make
on us were we to meet him. It is the quality of his particular soul.
For
his sense of balance and delicacy, he reminds me slightly of Vermeer or
Leonardo, though in a more cavalier, throwaway, amateur way. It is as if
he did not even care about his pictures; as if he just did them for
himself, or for street people; as if they were done in a hurry and then he
moved on, uncaring about them; absorbed in the joy of his being, getting
on with his other life. As if the art was merely an excretion, a pastime,
something he did for others, before dinner, something that he had to do
for cash, but which was not a big deal to him. He seems very relaxed about
his pictures. He is not very serious about them. He does not cling to them
or labour over them because he does not care; he is unconcerned. They are
not precious to him. Unlike so many artists, he has no ego-identification
with his work. That is another beautiful aspect about his art – there is
no sense of ego. He is invisible. Few details about his life are known. In
this, he also resembles Vermeer and Leonardo. He himself is something of a
mystery. All three are hazy and transparent figures whose art reveals very
little about the lives they lived. This borders on innocence and
egolessness. Such are the assumptions we make about him as we try to view
the man through his art.
Arc
de Triomphe –
Paris
Pont sur la Seine avec vue sur l’ancien Trocadero – Paris
His
pictures do not look as though he laboured very long over them; they look
as if they poured out of him very quickly, probably in minutes. They
contain great symmetry, formal or organised lines of the streets and
buildings. We know he originally trained as an architect, but declined to
become an architect because he felt it was too bourgeois. He was
uncomfortable about wealth, preferred to stay poor, and wanted to be with
poor people on the streets. He probably lived rough or in some cheap house
in a rough area of Paris. He probably mixed with very ordinary street
people who cared as little for appearances as he did. My guess is that he
despised pomposity and the rich. It is almost implicit in his art and the
life he led. Perhaps he felt stifled by the stiff formality of it.
La
Bourse du Commerce – Eglise Saint Eustache – Paris
These
are the enduring impressions Laloue fills me with. Such are the
impressions his art has upon me. I find his pictures wonderful,
transporting, an unending delight. They are treasure-troves of visual
beauty. To me, they are some of the finest art my eyes have ever seen. I
love them most dearly and have never tired of gazing at them since I first
discovered them quite by accident some four or five years ago. They are
delightful, pleasing, open and loose. They seem rapturous, lovingly
created and reflecting a kind and humane but humble person, a person who
lived very simply and in spite of his education preferred to live an
uncomplicated life among poor and very ordinary people. The pictures are
fragile and soft, filled brimful with joy and light. They are entrancing,
dream-like visions of Paris as it was in the 1920s. They seem to show a
luminous sense of the divine, of the mystical, even in the most mundane
street scenes. They are also silky smooth composed in pastel shades
dribbled onto the canvas like ice-cream. They are all quick sketches done
in gouache or oil on board or canvas. Their softness, their delicacy and
their naturalness are especially appealing qualities. There is a
timelessness to his work that transcends their actual historical location.
Such is surely the hallmark of artistic greatness, of true genius.
La place St Michel
– L’ancien
Trocadéro – Paris
I
would summarise a number of points about his technique, including :
Quai du Louvre sous la neige.
- his delightful choice
of colours which combines a contrast of dull browns and blues with
very light blues and golds ;
Animation
Place de la Bastille – Paris
–
Place de la Madeleine – Paris.
- that he often employs
a speckling technique that gives a naturalism to vegetation and
stonework;
Notre Dame vue du quai de Bercy – Paris.
- that he uses
techniques that produce soft fuzzy forms [impressionism], but
combined with a graininess that comes from gouache, not
easily achieved with oil paints;
Village
près de Giverny.
– Country House with
Storm Clouds.
- that he likes to
paint mostly in October and November with spindly spiky trees
and many autumn leaves; often windy days; these have the cool feeling
of empty streets and that winter is coming
Village
– Scène.
- the light in his
pictures reveal a love of light and atmosphere very reminiscent of
‘masters of light‘ such as Turner [1775-1851],
Vermeer [1632-75] or Rembrandt [1606-69]; his light is soft,
golden, light and passive, warm – never cold or harsh;
Paysage
animé – Bord de rivière.
Paysage de village en Automne.
- he paints skies with
great effect and sensitivity; the pictures also contain a sense
of mist, fog or smoke hovering in the distances or between buildings;
these give an airiness to his paintings;
Lavoir au bord d’une rivière.
- his technique
achieves a very balanced realism or naturalism as if it is a
real place; there is no element of abstraction in his work, it being
purely representational;
Harbor.
– Retour de pêche
à Dieppe.
- his subjects being
mostly urban scenes [all his later mature work] is reminiscent
of the north British artist, L S Lowry [1887-1976] who also painted
mostly urban scenes;
Trois
mats à quai – Scène de port, animée.
- also like Lowry, his
human figures tend to be anonymous, spindly, skeletal
and elongated – Lowry’s were often called ‘match-stick people’
and Laloue goes in a similar direction. In both cases the artist fills
streets with scurrying insect-like figures that are dwarfed by larger
urban scenes – the streets and buildings;
Boats.
–
Michel.
- in many respects his
art comes close to that of Eugene Boudin [1824-98] and John Constable
[1776-1837] – being in all three cases realistic naturalism
tending towards impressionism.
Near
Brook.
– Promeneurs.
Sous-bois,
Ceuillette de champignons. – Woodcutters in the
forest.