Jacques-Émile Blanche… Portraits of a Society…
“Portraits… of a Society”…
Jacques-Émile Blanche…
Known… as the…
“Proust… of Painting”…
Was honoured… with an exhibition at the…
Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent…
“Du côté de chez Jacques-Émile Blanche… Un salon à la Belle Époque“…
Blanche… frequented from a very young age… Parisian artistic circles… becoming French high society’s most prestigious portraitist by the end of the 19th century.
The exhibition of seventy paintings… arranged in a nostaligic turn-of-the-century setting with masterful portraits of many of the major figures of… “La Belle Époque“… the young Proust… Gide… Rodin… Cocteau… Debussy… Stravinsky… Degas… Mallarmé… Louÿs… Claudel… and others… proving the “candid regard of an extraordinary observer of his time“.
A beautiful moment… in time…
La… Belle Époque…
Soon to be blown away… by World War I…
Ah… the sweet mystery of life…
Its… tragedy…
Entering the plush… heavily curtained setting with its velvet embossed burgundy feteuils… I was transported into a salon of…
“Le beau monde“…
I marvelled at the exquisite beauty of the paintings hanging on walls… draped with history… where the painter transformed his subjects with his incredibly brilliant brush…
Into icons… of that hallowed era…
Reminding me so… of my beloved Proust and his… “À la recherche du temps perdu“… (Remembrance of Things Past)… which is not just a chronicle of the society of his time but the depiction of the end of that era… a book which sits next to my bed… for me to read over and over…
Plunging my imagination… into the sumptuous nostalgic setting of the… “Salon Imaginaire“… characters such as Anna de Noailles… the exotic Nijinski… the literary genius Proust… the charming “Frivolous Prince” Cocteau… the enigmatic Gide… the prolific Stravinsky… the dark-haired beauty in grey taffeta…
“Le tout Paris littéraire et artistique“… and a host of remarkable personalities of the time.
Jacques-Émile Blanche commented…
“My articles, my studies, my books are, like my painted work,
only the paragraphs or pages of a little history of my time.’’
Going back to the year… “1900… before the apocalypse of 1914-1918, a world already modern, but not yet contemporary, divided between reckless spontenaety and insecurity, confronting industrial and technological upheaval while nourishing epic creativity“…
That glamorous time in history… from 1879-1914… La Belle Époque… a blissful period… “a time of peace, progress, economic prosperity and artistic breadth.“
Marcel Proust… described Blanche thus…
“The painters, like the writers that he loved, were those destined to one day be great, a day for which he lived in anticipation, so that his judgements might prove true.”
Jean Cocteau… added…
“The only portraitist who bequeaths to us the customs of his age with a sharp, post-impressionist talent.”…
Dreaming… of Proust...
Admiring…
Loving…
Every… minute….
Of the amazing… portraits of…
Wealthy heirs… pillars of high society…
Who inhabited… the great Parisian salons…
The… distinguished…
Portraitist of… “le beau monde“…
Jacques-Émile Blanche…
Depicted…
La Belle Époque…
Elonquently…
a.