EUGÈNE CARRIÈRE
(Gournay-sur-Marne 1849-1906 Paris)
La Vallée (Magny-les-Hameaux), c. 1901
Oil on canvas, 33 x 41 cm
signed lower left: Eugene Carriere
Provenance:
Estate of the artist;
private collection, Paris.
Exhibited:
Exposition de l’œuvre de Eugène Carrière, Paris, École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, May-June 1907, no. 226.
Literature:
Jean-Paul Dubray, Eugène Carrière Essai critique, Paris, 1931, fig. face. p. VI;
Véronique Nora-Milin, Eugène Carrière, catalogue raisonnée de l’oeuvre peint, 2008, no. 1118.
(SOLD)
No one knows the landscapes of Carrière, and already they are imitated.‘ Paul Gauguin in 1895.
Eugène Carrière’s landscapes have been unknown to the general public until the retrospective shows after his death. Most of his landscapes do not show a specific site. They are the artist’s expression of his experience of being in nature an experience that inspired Carrière to question man’s place in the universe.
“I immerse myself in this intoxicating atmosphere of serene logic: these lovely undulations of the earth, these beautiful trees which weave arabesques against the shifting skies, the pretty carpet rippling with deep muted green, the noise of streams… as if we ourselves had come and disappeared, leaving the same traces for those who will come next”.
Carrière transformed reality into a quasi-abstract two-dimensional system of broad planes differentiated by changes in the density of his brushstrokes. The absence of a proper foreground in La Vallée is remarkable and yet typical of Carrière’s landscapes. A foreground provides a painter with a means to create depth. Carrière was not so much interested in suggesting depth, but was inspired by nature’s forms which appear to be more clearly discernible in a two-dimensional realm.
His individual manner of painting has become one of Carrière’s trademarks. He applied the medium thinly in sweeping washes, reduced the color to a muted palette of browns and creams, and simplified the forms to shapes which seem to flow from one into the next. Carrière was trained as a printmaker and excelled in this medium. Printmaking made him familiar with the opportunities and strengths of monochrome images. He translated this acquired knowledge into the medium of painting, with stunning results as can be seen in the landscape in question. At the height of his career Carrière had become one of the most celebrated artists in France. The young Pablo Picasso, who had just moved to Paris, was inspired by Carrière’s paintings during what we now refer to as his blue period.
Eugène Carrière was born in Gournay, France, in 1849. He attended the municipal drawing school in Strasbourg’s Palais de Rohan until 1864, and subsequently began training as a lithographer. In 1870 he moved to Paris in order to study painting at the École des Beaux-Arts. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 Carrière was taken a prisoner of war and transported to Dresden, where he was allowed to visit the art collections. After his return he became a pupil of one of the leading academic painters, Alexandre Cabanel, and subsequently designed decors at the porcelain manufactory in Sèvres. There he met Auguste Rodin. Together with Rodin, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Félix Bracquemond, he founded the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1890. In 1898 he opened the École Carrière. Carrière showed his work at the Vienna Secession and elsewhere, and undertook journeys to Rome, Florence and Venice. Carrière died in Paris in 1906.