Louise Abbéma
Louise Abbéma (born October 30, 1853 in Étampes , Département Seine-et-Oise , † July 10, 1927 in Paris ) was a French painter of Impressionism and the Belle Époque . She also worked as a graphic artist, sculptor and writer.
Live and act
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Louise Abbéma was the only child of the Viscount Émile d'Abbéma, station master in Étampes, and his wife Henriette Anne d'Astoin. She was on her mother's side a great-granddaughter of the actress Louise Contat and Count Louis de Narbonne . She was introduced to artistic circles at an early age by her art-loving parents. In 1871 she got to know the actress Sarah Bernhardt , who strongly influenced her and with whom she had a lifelong, well-known friendship. Abbéma, who remained unmarried and also maintained friendships with other women, was generally regarded as a lesbian ; literary allusions to it can be found in a play by Georges Feydeau and a posthumously published satirical poem by Robert de Montesquiou .
Abbéma showed a special talent for painting early on. She went to Paris in 1873 and became a student of Charles Josuah Chaplin , the following year of Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran and later studied with Jean Jacques Henner . At the suggestion of Carolus-Duran, she exhibited her works regularly between 1874 and 1926 at the Paris Salon , where she received an "honorable mention" in 1881. She first showed a picture of her mother in the Paris Salon in 1874. Her life-size portrait of Sarah Bernhardt (now in a Parisian private collection) from 1876 brought the 23-year-old Abbéma first public recognition. In 1878 she exhibited a bronze medal made three years earlier with the profile of her friend - her only known sculpture - in the Paris Salon, for which Bernhardt, who sometimes also worked as a sculptor, returned the favor in 1879 with a marble bust of Abbéma.
Abbéma first had a studio in Paris at 91 rue Blanche; lived and worked with her parents at 47 Rue Lafitte since 1876. Her portraits of famous contemporaries ensured her a successful career. Initially, she mainly portrayed male and female members of the Comédie Française in their costumes, e. B. Jeanne Samary (1879) and Blanche Barretta (1880). Some of her portraits, such as that of Ferdinand de Lesseps (1884), were shown in the annual salons of the Société des Artistes Français , while others were commissioned directly to clients (e.g. portrait of Madame Lucien Guitry, 1876). Other pictures by the artist are only known through contemporary evidence, such as the representations of her teachers Jean Jacques Henner, Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran (1880) and the French architect Charles Garnier . Abbéma also made portraits of Peter II of Brazil , Paul Mantz (1879) and Charles J. Chaplin. Her portrait of Sarah Bernhardt in her studio in Belle-Isle-en-Mer , which she had exhibited at the Société des Artistes Français in 1922 , was unsuccessfully offered to the directors of the Musée du Luxembourg and the Musée de Versailles in 1923 after Bernhardt's death.
Abbéma has specialized in oil and watercolor painting since 1881 and many of her works show the influence of Chinese and Japanese painting ( Chinoiserie , Japonism ) as well as contemporary Impressionist masters such as Édouard Manet . Her fondness for flowers is also expressed in many of her works. She made landscapes and sea representations less often (first in 1874 with Monsieur and Madame de Grièges, Baron de Dourdan and the dog Molda in Tréport ), more often interior views such as the oil painting Déjeuner dans la serre ( lunch in the greenhouse , 1877, today in the Musée des Beaux- Arts in Pau), where actor Emile de Najac, her parents and sisters Jeanne and Sarah Bernhardt are portrayed.
During the construction of the town halls in the 7th, 10th and 20th arrondissements of Paris, Abbéma was commissioned with the execution of decorative wall paintings for these Hôtels de Ville . She also created paintings for other buildings in the French capital, such as Gismonda and the women of Samaria and Magpie (exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1904 and 1907, respectively) for the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt (now Théâtre de la Ville ), allegorical subjects for the Musée de l 'Armée and the hall of the Société Nationale d'Horticulture de France and pictures for the Opéra de Paris . She also made works for houses outside Paris, such as a painting for the Fécamp Abbey and a portrait of Duchess Anne de Bretagne (1911) for the great hall of the town hall of Redon . She contributed a panel painting for the palace of the governor of Dakar in what is now Senegal . Many of Abbéma's etchings, mostly portraits, can be found in the former JJ Meier collection in the Kunsthalle Bremen .
Abbéma's work was exhibited in the Woman's Building at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 , where her bust made by Sarah Bernhardt was also presented. In 1900 she won a bronze medal at the Paris World Exhibition .
Abbema was not only active as a painter and graphic artist, but also as a writer and wrote regularly for the magazines Gazette des Beaux-Arts , L'art and L'art et La Mode . As an illustrator, she carried out the stitches for René Maizeroys La Mer .
While Abbéma's works had received mostly favorable reviews from critics up until the 1880s, after 1900 numerous art journalists wrote increasingly negative reviews. After the First World War she was forgotten and died on July 10, 1927 in Paris. Her studio was closed in 1937. Since the end of the 20th century , when more attention was paid to the works of art by women of past centuries, their work has found renewed popularity .
Pictures of Abbéma hang in the Musée d'Orsay and the Washington Museum of Women in the Arts . Today's market prices are far below those of the better-known Impressionist painters; a picture of her was auctioned for $ 8,377 in 2005.
Works (selection)
Un jeu de croquet , 1872 (private collection)
Sarah Bernhardt , around 1877 (private collection)
Portrait of Jeanne Samary , 1879 ( Musée Carnavalet , Paris)
La dame avec les fleurs , 1883
Flora , 1913 (private collection)
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Honors
literature
- Ludovic Bron: Sarah Bernhardt. Couverture et dessins de Louise Abbéma . Pensée française, Paris 1925.
- Denise Gellini: Louise Abbéma. Peintre in the Belle Epoque . Jardin d'Essai, Paris 2006, ISBN 978-2-911822-49-0 .
- Bernard Gineste (Ed.): Quelques œuvres de Louise Abbéma . In: Corpus Étampois . 2003.
- Caroline Liais: La mer, la forêt, la montagne. Compositions de Louise Abbéma . Delagrave, Paris 1897.
- M. Spiller: Abbéma, Louise . In: General Artist Lexicon . Vol. 1 (1983), pp. 56f.
Web links
- Quelques œuvres de Louise Abbéma (French)
- Louise Abbéma in Artcyclopedia.com (English)
- Art Renewal Center (English)
Remarks
- ↑ Louise Abbéma gave as her year of birth 1858; the actual year of birth comes from the birth register of the city of Étampes, quoted by the local scholar Bernard Gineste: "Quelques oeuvres de Louise Abbéma", online Corpus Etampois .
- ↑ glbtq-arts biography of Louise Abbéma ( memento of the original from January 1, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ↑ Le Ruban (1894), Act II, scenes 7 and 8, online at Corpus Littéraire Étampois
- ↑ Abîme , in: Les quarante bergères: portraits satiriques en vers inédits , Paris 1925, online at Gallica
- ^ Page of the auction house (English) , accessed on December 30, 2010
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Abbéma, Louise |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French impressionist painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 30, 1853 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Etampes |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 10, 1927 |
| Place of death | Paris |