Exhibition "Fantin Latour. On Skin Deep" at the Luxembourg Museum - Report (09/13/2016)

Henri Fontain-Latour is a singular figure of the 19th century. A specialist in portraiture, dead natures and gender compositions. He made his first steps in Grenoble in 1836. His father is an artist-painter. It is he who will transmit his passion to him. Throughout his life, Fontain will go through the artistic movements. Turn by turn, realistic, impressionist and symbolist. Without really identifying with any of them. Realistic, yes, when he makes gender scenes, when he makes portraits. But also in his dead natures. But not at all impressionist. He is much more symbolist for the works of the end than impressionist. So, he is an indisputable figure who has kept his personality throughout. He will spend only the first five years of his life in Grenoble. A painter from Dauphiné, but known for his living. It is only at his death, thanks to the steps of his wife, also a painter, that his works will find a privileged place in the museum. Vittoria has always painted, and continues to paint alongside her husband. Simply at the death of her husband in 1904, she had the heart to greatly enhance the work of Fontain. She made Fontain known, she solicited several institutions. So she wanted special places to carry the memory of Fontain. And above all, she made this Grézonnet catalogue, which today is still a source of knowledge on Fontain's work, which is irreplaceable. Special places to carry the memory of her husband. Grenoble, the Luxembourg Museum, Orsay and the Louvre, where Fontain will spend a very large part of his life. He trains there by copying the great artists. At just 17, he begins to paint self-portraits and accepts orders to make a living. Very close to Édouard Manet, passionate about German classical music, Fontain is definitely a workshop artist, preferring to work in calm and neutrality. Fontain Latour is someone who doesn't necessarily like to belong to a group, and who is happy only in solitude or in a relationship with few people. And as his career evolves, we see him cut off more or less from a social life and live in harmony with his wife, who is also a painter, and finally have a very small circle of friends with whom he shares a certain form of retired life, of contemplative life, dedicated to art. What you're going to do is remove this paper, which is acidic. This one is acidic too, but it doesn't matter. So you're going to put a piece of paper in its place. Last restoration of the limestone in the reserves of the Grenoble Museum. We're going to try to see how it's going to turn out. If the format is right, it will be very good like this. The paintings have already taken the road to Paris. The National Museums' meeting wished to pay tribute to Fontain Latour. 150 works, paintings, lithographies, drawings and photographs for an exhibition entitled Fontain à fleurs de peau, presented at the Luxembourg Museum and then at the Grenoble Museum. In the Luxembourg gardens, the boxes are unloaded with the utmost caution. Inside, far from the usual silence of museums, about twenty people are working to bring life to the exhibition. The time to set up an exhibition is really the time when all the work of the last few months, or even the last few years, crystallizes. We have the works that arrive. It's a very exciting, very special moment in the life of an exhibition. We open the boxes, we see the works. We look at them, we see how they are, we hang them. And then there's all the work that goes around, that is, the lights, the texts that will accompany each of the works. So it's true that the set-ups always have very rich moments, with a lot of people working in concert, at their best. We spend our days, from one point to another, making decisions, more or less easily. But that's what's part of the charm of these days. And it's both exhilarating and tiring, but I think it's above all a great satisfaction, at the end of each day, to focus on what's left to do. It's not the real size of the painting, but go for it. Put the last one in, and it'll be good. The red has to be a little bit more fishy. You're at 210, you have to get to 50. Go down again. Stop. Go down a little bit more. OK, that's good. The real challenge of light design is that no one sees anything before it's completely finished. It's a bit like cooking, where everyone wants to taste the dish, but if you go into the kitchen and the dish isn't finished, no one can tell you if it's good or not. Do you see the shadow I have here? You have to open the knife a little bit more. My role is to erase as much as possible, while keeping the artist's will on his light. We're balanced here. In a few days, the exhibition is set up, ready to welcome the public in an intimate atmosphere close to that of the painting. A Fleur de Peau is a sub-title that was imposed on us in a fairly obvious way. We started to think about the meaning of the exhibition. We wanted to show that we were dealing with an artist who is extremely sensitive, much more than some of his very austere portraits can make you think. This sensitivity is shuddering, even if it's discreet. And since he painted a lot of dead nature, and in particular a lot of flower paintings, Fleur de Peau created a play on words that seemed to correspond perfectly to his work and to our exhibition. The chronological journey highlights his career over sixty major paintings. The exhibition opens with his works of youth, and in particular, disturbing self-portraits. Self-portraiture is something he practiced mainly at the very beginning of his life, between 1856 and 1861. Why did he say that later? Because self-portraiture is also a subject of study that is convenient for an artist of his time, and especially for a small bourgeois artist who doesn't have the means to offer models. It's a time, in the 1950s, when he hadn't yet managed to affirm a style, intentions. He was torn between the desire to draw from his imagination and, at the same time, his concern to be as close to reality as possible, to nature. And that's what you can feel in his self-portraits, this permanent tension. He started with his own face, then he took his sisters as models, and placed them in genre scenes. So we go from portrait to genre scene, with embroiderers, readers, these women who are always occupied with completely silent activities, who don't look at the painter, who are in their world, and it's always a silent world. Individual portraits, then collective, which remain among the most famous paintings today. Today, we mostly know Fontaine Latour for his group portraits, which appear in many books, very general works, especially for the faces he presents to us, which are those of Baudelaire, Imbeau, Verlaine, Manet, more than the signature of the artist himself. There is probably a misunderstanding about these portraits, which leads us to think that he was close to the impressionists, when in reality he wasn't so much, which leads us to think that he was always surrounded by a lot of people, even though he was rather lonely. But it's true that these very imposing portraits have marked, have set a date in the history of art. They were quite unique, and it was quite unprecedented for a 19th century artist to propose portraits of this magnitude. These group portraits were fundamental for Fontaine Latour. It took a lot of energy, time, research, and even himself, I would say, to consider them as the heart of his career. Two large manifest paintings and dead natures, savagely composed. To this day, many consider him to be the greatest dead nature painter of Western art. The genius of Fontaine is to understand, like the other great figures of painting of this era, like Manet, Degas, Monet, that we can only be equal to the great masters of the past by finding a formula that is proper to its time, modern, contemporary. In this, the dead natures, he will actually compose them in a complex way, like those of the past, create these effects of trompe-l'oeil, show his ability to suggest with the greatest accuracy the depth and articulation between the different elements that are gathered here, but he will also position the dead nature in relation to the real at a time when photography was born and will renew the distance that the artist maintains with the real, all this with his own style, this vaporous light that makes the style of Fontaine. Of the flowers, he will continue to paint until the end of his life, but his greatest pleasure are his works of imagination that, over the years, take on a growing part of his time. Schumann, Wagner, Berlioz, the music that plays a preponderant role. In his works of imagination, music plays a major role because Fontaine-Latour will give himself as a project to find a transcription to the musical works that stir him, and in Fontaine's pantheon, there are in particular the German composers, Schumann and, of course, Wagner, and he will try to represent in painting the great Wagnerian dramas, but he also tries to create the way in which one can celebrate an artist in all dimensions, and this dimension of celebration is unique to the 19th century, and he will look for, after the great portrait groups, which are realistic allegories, to make a real allegory to celebrate Berlioz. When you look at a drawing like this one, where he is brushed with his fingers, where he has erased with the eraser, where we have characters here that are totally evanescent, we are in the imaginary. These are imaginary paintings. We can see that he is not bothered by details, he is not bothered by reality, so really it is free. So we are in a totally free evocation of music. And then, little by little, he also finally frees himself from this musical inspiration to propose works that are purely inspired by his imagination, which are essentially feminine figures. Feminine nudity is something that interests him a lot, and he works a lot around this theme. And so, finally, little by little, he gets rid of all pretexts to show a triumphant and magnificent femininity.