Becoming an Artist in Paris

It is said that great Frenchmen are born in the provinces and die in Paris. Albert Marquet was no exception. He was born in Bordeaux on the 27th of March 1875, came to the capital as a teenager and never left. In 1890, at the age of fifteen, Albert Marquet left Bordeaux and enrolled at the School of Applied Arts in Paris. To follow him, his mother sold her plot of land and opened a small embroidery shop in Rue Monge in the centre of Paris. She did so despite strong opposition from her husband. It was during the outlook course that Matisse and Marquet met for the first time. The shy Marquet would remain in the shadows if it were not for his strong accent. As his wife said later: “It was not his fault that what was exciting to him was of no interest to others, and that his timidity prevented him from explaining himself.”

Because he never took off his glasses - he was very short-sighted - his classmates called him the Englishman. Through Matisse, Albert Marquet came into contact with Gustave Moreau, a liberal-minded professor who paid attention to the personality of certain rebel painters. On his advice, he would draw from antiquities at the “École des Beaux-Arts” and for a time attended the independent “Académie Carrière”. Matisse and Albert Marquet would soon meet at Moreau’s studio, where Albert Marquet received the city’s teaching certificate.

And so, Albert was not yet sixteen years old when he began his studies in Paris. As the only son of a humble railway clerk, he was, naturally, remote from the professional milieu and, still more, from the knowledge of the latest artistic trends. The 1890s was the time when the closing century met with the one about to begin. The fury of the last Impressionist exhibitions had died away, but Monet, Renoir and Pissarro were at the height of their success. Cézanne, still not fully recognised and known only to a very limited circle, was painting his finest canvases. At exhibitions, works by Bonnard, Signac, Henri Rousseau, Matisse and Gauguin hung side by side.

Public taste was habitually outraged and retained its devotion to traditional visual verisimilitude. Many of the techniques introduced by the Impressionists were already being used by the artists of the Salon, while in the schools of art the greatest respect was reserved for academic principles which dated back almost to the time of Jacques-Louis David. Albert Marquet was lucky. Soon after his arrival, he became acquainted with men who were destined to create the new art.

In this period of instantly forming and just as instantly dissolving artistic groupings, of lively and frequent contacts between many of those active in the arts, at a time when the cafés of Montparnasse became virtually the centres of world art, a time of countless exhibitions and the first appearances of the “classic” avant-garde, Albert Marquet formed his creative personality in near isolation.

At that time he also went to draw at life classes in the so-called Académie Ranson, founded in Paris by the French painter Paul Ranson. He sat for hours at a time on café terraces, engaged in an activity no longer fashionable: making rapid sketches of passers-by, instant street scenes, barely managing to capture with a pencil or pen what his eye seized on edge with exceptional acuity. His drawings were most often done in Indian ink and were drawn with an elliptical and bare brushstroke.

At times the line expresses nothing but motion — the folds of a raincoat blowing about as its owner walks, the tilt of a head. The shape appears only dynamic in the sketches — at rest, it seems not to exist for the artist. In a few strokes of the pen or brush the quintessence of one motion or another appears, purged of the casual and the transient. Drawings of this kind could be given the title Running, Heaviness or Effort. They become a dynamic formula, almost a pictogram. But at times he also produced genre-type sketches, ironical, even sarcastic, capable of competing for the sharpness of characterisation with the drawings of Guys or Daumier himself. And it seems entirely natural that the artist was passionately fond of Chaplin’s films. He loved them at a time when the “Little Tramp” was perceived not so much as a great actor, but simply as an amusing clown.

Albert Marquet’s gift as an impetuous and acute draughtsman revealed itself early on, in 1903, when he produced drawings to illustrate Charles Louis-Philippe’s Bubu de Montparnasse. His line can be crude, retaining the elegance and vitality of improvisation. It perpetuates the movement of his hand; the viewer’s eye unerringly perceives with pleasure the beginning and end of each stroke, where the pen or pencil was put down and where it was picked up. It was in Albert Marquet’s drawings perhaps earlier and more noticeably than in his paintings that the maturity and artistry emerged that only few achieve so young.

Nonetheless, Albert Marquet did not enjoy widespread success or fame until practically the mid-1910s. His works did not begin to sell quickly. It is true that Eugène Drouet, a very well-known dealer at the time who kept a large “salon” on the Avenue Matignon, took his canvases on commission. But, even at the age of fifty, Albert Marquet recalled his younger days without pleasure — they were tainted with poverty.

His professional preferences formed quickly and unerringly — he joined the circle of most talented and independent painters. From his youth, he displayed an inherent accuracy in the choices that he made and an ability both to learn from others without losing his self-reliance and to assimilate the most daring innovations while maintaining his fidelity to tradition. There is no doubt that of all the future Fauves Albert Marquet was the most classical.

Albert Marquet learned the art of painting by copying in oil or pastel Poussin’s Narcissus, Chardin’s Castles of Cards, a portrait by Titian or a landscape by Claude Lorrain. We know the excellent methods of his teacher at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Gustave Moreau, a great educator who respected every individuality and who, faced with the lack of official or private instruction, advised his pupils to turn directly to the masters of the past and freely interpret a favourite masterpiece. In addition, Moreau’s students were able to live for a long time partly from the sale of these works.

Although Albert Marquet visited Moreau’s studio, he worked just as much outside in the street, where he constantly took notes. This was another obedience to Moreau, who was a symbolist artist and faithful follower of the Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix, approved of Lecoq de Boisbaudran’s method and wanted his memory to be upgraded.

Albert Marquet became close to Henri Matisse, studying together with him under Gustave Moreau. Today it seems strange that this celebrated, fashionable and certainly not unpretentious artist was the mentor of Matisse, Rouault and Albert Marquet. Moreau was anything but a technical innovator, and — to present-day eyes — his painting is fairly close to that of the Salon. But for his own time, Moreau was an artist of a new persuasion: one of the Symbolists. His paintings charmed the public not because of their technical boldness, but through their refined artistry, and their charming air of elation. He could create in his works an enigmatic world in which fin de siècle refinement combined naturally with motifs from exotic tales or mediaeval legends. Moreau’s symbolism lay neither in spiritual drama nor in new creative principles as it had done with Baudelaire, Rimbaud or Gauguin. He worked in a wholly academic manner, carefully “crafting” paintings which are so overcharged with meaning that they verge on the banal, while his subtly “eroticised” mysticism remained entirely a product of its time. But, as was the case, for example, with Oscar Wilde, Moreau’s excessive prettiness quite often concealed genuine feeling and subtle thinking. Moreover, he was a true master, a virtuoso adept of great professionalism.

It is well known that Moreau was a sensitive mentor with love and a gift for teaching. While not preaching the principles of the “modern” artists, he held them in respect, and, most importantly, he helped each of his pupils develop his own individuality (or at the very least did not hinder that process). He inculcated the “museum habit” in his pupils and they spent long hours working in the Louvre, copying paintings of Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Watteau and Chardin.

There is no doubt that Moreau’s devotion to symbols, mediaeval tilings and legends were developed — indirectly, yet perceptibly — in the work of his favourite pupil and another future Fauve: Georges Rouault.

In Moreau, Albert Marquet found a mentor from whom he could indeed learn something and an artist with whom he might disagree, but even that disagreement would be productive. Moreau, moreover, for all his outgoing sociability in his mature years when he gave himself wholeheartedly to teaching, displayed a devotion to solitude and concentration when working, which Albert Marquet inevitably found attractive. The pupil was also drawn by his teacher’s mind since Moreau was a widely educated man. Perhaps it was in Moreau’s studio that Albert Marquet acquired a lasting indifference to a meticulous finish and, even more, to the elaborate narrative subjects which characterised his teacher’s work.

It is true that from the very earliest years of his studies Albert Marquet, like the majority of those who were of his age and held similar opinions, rejected narrative painting. In contrast to Matisse, Rouault, Derain and many others, Albert Marquet never invented or composed a picture. He worked from nature. The twentieth century can hardly have seen any other artist of standing who only painted the real world, without constructing a motif or creating some sort of “visual story”. Albert Marquet, like Cézanne, only selected and interpreted. He “gave physical expression to his sensations”.

Surprisingly, Albert Marquet hardly experienced the influence of Impressionism, a trend which had already wholly demonstrated its vitality even in the most stagnant artistic circles and had opened up no small number of genuinely new possibilities for painters. Van Gogh and Cézanne were little known in Paris if indeed they were known at all. Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School were also far from famous.

Yet Albert Marquet, the born empiricist — more capable than any one of delighting in the ephemeral states of nature, the instantaneous effects of lightning which transformed a landscape — and talented colourist, remained, as far as we can judge from his paintings, unaffected by the art of the Impressionists. The art of those who in such an inimitable and innovative way painted Paris, its fleeting effects of colour and light, and who revealed anew its painterly secret seems to have been alien to him. The incidental was not of interest to Albert Marquet. He did not seek to capture with the brush the image imprinted for an instant on the retina. For all the affinity of their motifs, Albert Marquet — like Paul Cézanne — was opposed to Impressionism. It did not “reflect” reality. While remaining a loyal votary to nature, he nevertheless created it anew.

Before his thirties, Marquet in love with the spectacle of modern life is in full possession of his art, which he expresses fully. There is no period in the oeuvre of Albert Marquet, none of those deviations in technique and vision which characterise anxiety. There is only one perfectly homogeneous work which he develops in-depth, in purity and harmony.

Therein lies Albert Marquet’s power to attract — and therein too, if you will, lies one of the paradoxes regarding his art. Impressionism represented simultaneously both the climax and the crisis of the traditional nineteenth-century imitation of life. In the work of the Impressionists precise depiction culminated in something absolute — a portrait of an instant, the stopping of the unstoppable. That route was exhausted, and, moreover, a perception of a fleeting state of nature, passive and precise to the point of extreme concreteness, was already out of tune with the passion for profound cognition, for the creation of a new artistic world, one which would be the goal of the twentieth century.

It was now, when Impressionism was already a spent force, that artists appeared who tried to present not just reality perceived by the sensitive vision of the painter (“Monet is only an eye,” Cézanne said), but reality deeply experienced and represented on canvas in a way, which accorded with the artist’s sense of the world and his own individuality.

Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and all the other artists who have gone down in history under the extremely imprecise term “Post-Impressionists”, painted not so much the world they saw as the world they experienced; a world re-created, suitable for the artist’s “picture gallery of the soul”, to borrow Hermann Hesse’s phrase.

Albert Marquet was not such. He was reticent, his brush restrained. The inner struggles of the soul would scarcely find expression in his work. It is impossible to imagine him depicting physical matter aquiver with pain, as Van Gogh did, or presenting cosmic metamorphoses like those of Cézanne. Motifs drawn from real life always dominate in his paintings. But the austerity of selection, lyrical asceticism, the ability to accentuate the essential and to attain a peculiar sense of stability, not simply to arrest the moment (as the Impressionists did), but to endow it with a kind of permanence, even a sense of eternity — that Albert Marquet did have on a par with the greatest achievements of the twentieth century.

All this appeared fairly early in Albert Marquet’s life. His formation as a painter was almost instantaneous and evolution is barely detectable in his work. One can, of course, trace the development of practical skills, of confidence, of the gradual abandonment of bright colours and the emergence of the large, free brushstroke, but there is little basic change in Albert Marquet’s art. He found his niche almost instantaneously.

In his youth, Albert Marquet became interested in the pointillist idea of obtaining additive mixtures of colour on the retina employing juxtaposed dots (points in French) on the canvas and experienced a short-lived but intense fascination with Pointillism. At the end of the 1890s, he often painted the backgrounds of academic studies in tiny dabs of pure colours. His “pointillist” works are above all impersonal. The artist was concerned with the manner itself, which to a significant extent precluded a personal perception. Albert Marquet’s fascination soon passed, but his adoption of a strictly rational system like Pointillism was significant. The search for logic and simplicity was not a chance occurrence. Nor was it a coincidence that Albert Marquet made so many copies of Poussin (of whom Cézanne, once again, was so fond). Many years later, he spoke of the hours he had spent before that artist’s paintings: “I was certain that they would never bore me.”

Albert Marquet was thirty-two years old when, in a rare excursion into portraiture, he painted The Sergeant of the Colonial Troops (1907; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The austerity of the work is surprising for a beginner; an almost smooth background, no accessories, and a figure with no depth. Space is expressed only by precisely inspired planes of colour. Modelling is reduced to a minimum, with the artist’s brush sharply distinguishing only the deep shadows. The dense materiality and pronounced immobility of the figure cause us to think once again of the principles of Cézanne (Albert Marquet would, of course, have seen the large Cézanne Exhibition at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in 1896).