Paul SERUSIER (1864-1927) "Laveuse au Pouldu" circa 1890, Oil on canvas, studio stamp lower left, 94 x 60 cm
Bibliography:
Boyle-Turner, Caroline, Paul Sérusier, 1983, UMI Research Press, Anne Arbor, Michigan, reproduction of screen fig. 27.
Guicheteau, Marcel, Paul Sérusier, tom I, 1976, Editions Sides, Paris, no. 38 p. 204, reproductions p. 20 and 204.
Provenance: Private Collection
Sale Brest, Thierry-Lannon Associés SVV, May 11, 2003, lot 226.
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"The Dutch painter Jan Verkade, who befriended Paul Sérusier in Paris in 1890 and followed him to Huelgoat, recalls the interest of his fellow members of the Nabis group in the applied arts (D. Willibrord Verkade, Le Tourment de Dieu. Étapes d'un moine peintre, 1923): 'Towards the beginning of 1890, a battle cry was raised from one studio to another: No more easel paintings! Down with useless furniture! Painting must not usurp a freedom that isolates it from the other arts. The painter's work begins where the architect considers his to be finished. Walls, walls to decorate! Down with perspective! The wall must remain a surface, not be pierced by the representation of infinite horizons. There are no paintings, only decorations!
These phases well express the state of mind of Sérusier and his friends Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Ker-Xavier Roussel and Paul Ranson. He showed them Le Talisman (Paris, Musée d'Orsay) brought back from Pont-Aven and told them about the masterly lesson given by Paul Gauguin. They were fascinated by Gauguin's Breton works and eagerly discovered the art of Japanese prints, which were a hundred leagues away from the representational principles of Western painting. From their very first meetings and theoretical reflections, they asserted their desire to break down the boundaries between fine and applied arts, and set about creating wall decorations, screens, book illustrations, theater sets and costumes, posters and stained glass.
Sérusier's Laveuse au Pouldu is a perfect example. It was conceived by the painter as the decoration for one leaf of a four-leaf folding screen, now dismembered (another leaf has been presented for sale by Thierry-Lannon & Associés in Brest on December 9, 2023).
The choice of screen illustrates the painter's interest in Japanese art. He chose an untreated unbleached linen canvas as the colored background for the landscape, and for the sake of simplicity, he used only four colors sparingly arranged on this plain background. White is used to punctually represent the linen in a basket, the washerwoman's headdress and the piece of linen she is waving in the water, but it is also used, in the form of small juxtaposed dots, to improbably evoke the clouds on the horizon. The patches of green, scattered across the dune, correspond to the sparse vegetation that grows there. But the same green is used to represent the sea stretching over the edge of the dune, and even in the water of the washhouse. Sérusier focuses the eye on this subject, isolated in the vast emptiness of the composition. In this uncertain place, between dune and moor, as was the case at Le Pouldu, he imagined a spring and symbolically associated it with a weeping willow. A woman dressed in black with a red apron kneels at the water's edge in a wooden box, the "washerwoman's carriage". In Le Pouldu, there were several washhouses, and Sérusier rubbed shoulders with the women who used them. But he prefers to depict a simple pond where a single washerwoman works, as if there were a link between her solitude and the isolation of the place. This choice is part of an approach that consists in depicting, through symbolic means - theme but also shapes and colors - the relationship between a place and the people who live there. Fleeing the crowds of painters and tourists at Pont-Aven, Gauguin had clearly understood what an isolated place like Le Pouldu could offer him in his process of introspection. Guided by Gauguin, the young Sérusier radically evolved and progressed, in parallel with his formal research, in his reflection on the place of reality in his paintings and on the importance of symbolism in his representations. This Laveuse au Pouldu, with its formal audacity in the service of a banal theme, is one of the milestones in Sérusier's career, which was to unfold at Huelgoat and then at Châteauneuf-du-Faou. André CARIOU
Estim. 80,000 - 100,000 EUR
