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The
Origins of L'Art Nouveau: The Bing Empire
Edited by Gabriel P. Weisberg, Edwin Becker, and Évelyne
Possémé
Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 2004.
295 pages
298 color illustrations, index, bibliography.
ISBN 90 6153 562 x
Hardcover: $69.95
Exhibition and catalogue:
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 26 November 2004 – 27 February 2005
Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 17 March -31 July 2005
Caixa Forum, Barcelona, September 2005 – January 2006
Musée des Arts décoratifs, Brussels, March – July
2006 |
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This spectacular didactic exhibition
and publication were organized by the Van Gogh Museum and the Musée
des Arts décoratifs, and curated by Gabriel P. Weisberg, Edwin
Becker and Évelyne Possémé, with selections on
Oriental art by Christine Shimizu. My first thought was to entitle
this review of the show at the Van Gogh Museum "Bing's Big Bang
Blossoms at the Van Gogh;" however, after rereading the catalogue,
I decided to call it "Japonisme and Bing Revisited." Indeed,
the very premise of the exhibition is the essential connection that
existed between Japanese art/Japonisme, and the development of Bing's
form of art nouveau. In fact, it was thirty years
ago, in 1975, that the Cleveland Museum, The Walters Art Gallery,
and the Rutgers University Art Gallery [now Zimmerli Art Museum] presented
the exhibition Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on French
Art, 1854–1910, and it was nineteen years ago that the Smithsonian
Institution organized the traveling exhibition in the U. S., Art
Nouveau Bing, Paris Style 1900. Both of these seminal projects
were led by Gabriel Weisberg and assisted, as always, by his partner
in life and in research, Yvonne. It is in great part due to their
scholarship and perseverance that Japonisme, and now Siegfried Bing,
are universally recognized as major factors in not only French art
of the second half of the nineteenth century, but in much of the art
of the rest of Europe and of the United States as well. |
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In 1988,
Paris documented further the great impact that the art of Japan had
on nineteenth-century art in France with the Grand Palais' exhibition,
Le Japonisme, which subsequently traveled to Tokyo.
The current exhibition, The Origins of L'Art Nouveau, The
Bing Empire, finally pays homage in Europe to this important
art dealer, connoisseur and entrepreneur, and in so doing, gives an
abbreviated history of Japonisme while simultaneously documenting
the vital role Bing played in the acquiring, dissemination and codification
of Japanese art. The publication and exhibition are expanded versions
of Weisberg's 1986 Smithsonian Bing project. Weisberg's text reflects
much that he wrote nineteen years earlier: the history of Bing's successful
German, Jewish, merchant family; its establishment of a Paris base
in the 1850s and 1860s with the purchase of porcelain factories; Siegfried's
subsequent control of the family's Paris business after the Franco-Prussian
War; his French citizenship in 1876; his early contact with Japanese
art in the late 1860s; his marketing of it in the 1870s; the opening
of his shop on the rue Chauchut at the time of the 1878 Paris International
Exhibition in which Japan and its art were a major attraction; his
first trip to Japan in 1880 where he acquired antique as well as contemporary
Japanese art; the development of contacts with agents in Japan and
later the establishment of offices in Yokohama and Kobe; the expansion
of his Japanese art sales to museums outside of France; Siegfried's
Japonisme activities in the 1880s which brought him and his Japanese
collection into contact with artists such as Van Gogh, and which culminated
with the publication of his influential, internationally distributed
journal, Le Japon artistique (1888-1891); and his
participation in the organization of the major exhibition of Japanese
prints at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the spring of 1890. Weisberg's
chapters reiterate further: the history of Bing's trip in 1894 to
the United States with his establishment of an in depth and long-term
collaboration with Tiffany and American craftsmen for the production
and selling of decorative arts in Europe, most importantly the stained-glass
windows by members of the Nabis and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; the
history of Bing's Art Nouveau Gallery on the rue de Provence [the
part of his building attached to his Japanese shop around the corner
on the rue Chauchat] which opened in December 1895 for the purpose
of promoting a "new art" by an international coterie of
avant-garde contemporary artists; and finally, the creation of artists/craftsmen
workshops on the premises of the Art Nouveau Gallery, and of the Bing
Pavilion at the 1900 Paris World Fair which promoted a consistent,
decorative form of Art Nouveau dominated by the aesthetics of Eugène
Gaillard, Edward Colonna, and Georges de Feure. |
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Weisberg's chapters are well reinforced
and complemented by those of the other authors. Christine Shimizu
documents the actual kinds of Japanese art that, inspired by the 1867
World's Fair, Bing acquired early on such as bronzes, ceramics and
prints; she also discusses the evolution in France of an accurate
history and knowledge of Japanese art. Philippe Thiébaut puts
the purpose and design of Bing's Art Nouveau Gallery into perspective
with the aesthetic concerns and similar, earlier efforts in Brussels
among members of Les XX and La Libre Esthétique. Thiébaut
discusses the priority of the Maison d'Art de la Toison Gallery in
Brussels and its influence on Bing in the creation of a gallery of
fine and decorative arts which is "the living symbol of the fusion
of all the arts…." Edwin Becker details the interior and
exterior design of Bing's Art Nouveau Gallery as well as the eclectic,
but modernist nature of the exhibitions held there from its opening
in December 1895 until its closing in March 1905. Becker relates that
during the span of ten years, and against a xenophobic tide in France,
Bing sponsored challenging monographic exhibitions of contemporary
international artists such as the Belgian sculptor Constantin Meunier,
the French artists Louis Legrand, Eugène Carrière, and
Charles Cottet, the Norwegian Edvard Munch, the Hungarian Nabi, József
Rippl-Rónai, the Belgian Wiliam Degouve de Nuncques, and the
Spanish Montmartre artist, Santiago Rusiñol. Évelyne
Possémé reviews Bing's representation of furniture and
textiles by British arts and crafts movement designers such as William
Morris, Liberty and Company, and William Benson as well as decorative
weavings by Frank Brangwyn. In her second essay, Possémé
focuses on Bing's 1903 commission for the interior design of three
rooms at the Chateau de Trévarez, owned by James de Kerjégu
near Quimper. With Georges de Feure as his talent, Bing orchestrated
at the Chateau de Trévarez one of the most successful, unified
"total art" environments of its time. Finally, Rüdiger
Joppien sums up Bing's post-1895 activities as a dealer, and as an
exhibitor, in the promotion of "new art" all across Europe
from London, Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin, and Vienna, to Budapest and
beyond. Joppien also discusses the roles played in Bing's career by
his personal and professional contacts in the art field such as Justus
Brinckmann, Director of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg,
and his close friend and advisor, the critic and editor of Pan,
Julius Meier-Graefe who, as Joppien emphasizes, was the primary influence
on Bing's move from antique Japanese art to contemporary western art.
Even if one owns the 1986 Bing publication, which includes many of
the works reproduced in The Origins of L'Art Nouveau, The
Bing Empire, as an expanded and elegantly designed version,
the current catalogue is a must. |
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But what about the exhibition itself?
It documents not a movement, per se, but rather
the evolving taste of a visionary dealer/connoisseur who took chances—financial
and political—and within Third Republic France, went against the
xenophobic grain by promoting essentially his own interpretation of
the "new" which had no national boundaries. As such, the
exhibition in the Van Gogh Museum's two principal temporary exhibition
halls presented a refreshingly different picture of fin-de-siècle
art and culture in Paris. Bing's "new" did not include the
Impressionists, and only occasional examples of pointillism by Théo
van Rysselberghe, Henri Edmond Cross and Henri Martin, while Rodin,
possibly the most renowned artist at the end of the century, is barely
a footnote. Rather, as the exhibition presents, Bing promoted not
only the artists mentioned above in monographic shows, but in his
first and second Salons (1895, 1896) he included an eclectic group
of contemporary painters not so well known at the time, such as symbolists
Paul Sérusier, Fernand Khnoff, and the idiomatic and still
unknown, Thomsa Theodor Heine, whose wonderful, macabre, blood-spurting
depiction of Jealousy was in the second Salon de
L'Art Nouveau. When he selected work by painters who regularly exhibited
at the official annual Salons, such as Albert Besnard and Jacques
Emile-Blanche, he chose ones that were either atypical, such as the
large, decorative three-panel Gauguinesque landscape by Besnard, or
portraits by Blanche depicting Aubrey Beardsley and Fritz Thaulow
and Family. Bing also showed paintings and/or stained glass by the
Nabis: Vuillard, Denis, Vallotton, and Georges Lacombe. |
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Yet, as the exhibition well demonstrates,
Bing was at his best when he concentrated on the decorative arts,
not only in the buying and selling of Japanese wares, but in the selection
of western crafts as he formulated his concept of art nouveau. For
example, his friendship with Frank Brangwyn allowed him to include
two large allegorical kitsch paintings, Dance and Music,
in the opening exhibition of his gallery; the former depicts two academic-style
delineated, topless, full-breasted, smiling young Caucasian women
dancing within a Japanese-inspired decorative landscape while the
latter places Pan-like figures playing their flutes in a similar inappropriate
landscape. However, Brangwyn's 1895 purely decorative stencil design
for the exterior of Bing's Gallery and, at the end of the century,
his designs for wool carpets based on flora motifs, meshed with Bing's
predilection for decorative Japanese motifs refashioned in the work
of American, English, and French designers such as Tiffany, Liberty,
and Georges de Feure. Indeed, the greatest strength of the exhibition
is the selection of decorative arts: ceramics, jewelry and furnishings
by Edward Colonna, Adrien Dalpayrat, Georges de Feure, Eugène
Gaillard, the Rookwood Pottery, the Rörstrand factory, Tiffany,
and the few Bing-related items by Henri van de Velde, all of which
Bing either acquired or commissioned, and then sold to his international
market. |
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At the Van Gogh Museum, the first
exhibition hall was divided physically from left to right [coming
from the entrance and walking to the opposite end] into essentially
three distinct long exhibition areas which served to invoke the look
and feel of Bing's Art Nouveau Galerie and to divide the display into
comprehensible components: all along the left-hand wall were large,
sepia photo-blowups of the exterior and interior of Bing's Galerie;
the long, wide central space contained two horizontal rows of vitrines,
perpendicular to and divided by, a series of temporary walls; the
vitrines contained both, Japanese and western art objects (fig.1).
The long, arched right-hand wall displayed the selection of paintings
shown at the Galerie Art Nouveau, either in one of the Salons or a
monographic exhibition. The viewer was first introduced to select
examples of antique Japanese art (combs, sword guards, silk embroideries,
incense burners, sake bottles, tea bowls, bronze and ceramic vases,
an ink painting by Kitagawa Utamaro, prints by Katsushika Hokusai,
Utagawa Kuniyoshi, and Utagawa Hiroshige,.) and contemporary art (a
Shibata Zeshin ink on silk painting and examples of nineteenth-century
ceramics, lacquerware, etc) which were acquired by Bing, and sold
to many European museums such as the Musée des Arts décoratifs,
Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Museum für Kunst
und Gewerbe, Hamburg. The thee-dimensional objects were displayed
in tall, multi-shelf, rectangular vitrines similar to those used by
Bing at his gallery (fig. 2). These objects, placed into context with
Japoniste advertising etchings by Henri Somm, Jules Adeline's etching
of his Japanese doll, Mikika, and examples of Le Japan artistique,
set the stage for the exhibition's presentation of the Galerie Art
Nouveau and of Bing's emphasis on Japanese aesthetics as the primary
source for a new art in Europe. |
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The second hall, focused on western
decorative art and specifically on the Bing Pavilion (figs. 10,
11) at the 1900 World's Fair (fig. 3, 9). Each vitrine in the central
aisle was dedicated to the display of decorative arts by different
companies or artists: Limoges, Tiffany, Liberty, Morris, van de
Velde. To easily identify what objects belonged to what firm, vertical
name banners hung from the ceiling above each maker's vitrines.
Floating in front of the left-hand wall were banners of large photo
blow-ups of the Bing Pavilion and, for instance, Bing's son Marcel
creating jewelry in the Bing workshop. There was also a continuous-playing
film of the World's Fair. But most dramatic was the display along
this wall of the elaborate furnishings by Colonna, de Feure and
Gaillard—such as Gaillard's extraordinary bedroom suite—all
commissioned by Bing for his Pavilon. It is the work of these three
important artists—which in the case of de Feure also includes
his paintings for the exterior of the Pavilion—with their individual
but related, elegant curvilinear emphasis that best defines the
range of styles of "Art Nouveau" that Siegfried Bing and
his empire ultimately embraced. |
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Phillip Dennis Cate,
Director Emeritus, Supervisor of Curatorial and Academic Activities,
The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum,
Rutgers the State University of New Jersey. |
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© 2005–6 Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide
and Phillip Dennis Cate. All Rights Reserved. |
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