The Black Band, is a group of five painters claiming the realism of Courbet. Their painting uses dark colors to transcribe the reality of the difficulties of life and the feelings associated with it. As George Desvallières, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Luc-Albert Moreau and Jean-Louis Boussingault share theses ideas. But this austere way has not yet seduced the general public. These three painters exhibit their paintings at the Barbazanges Gallery for a meager success.
Then, it's war. Boussingault will be injured in Belgium, then join Dunoyer de Segonzac at the 3rd Army. From this war he will come out transformed. Added to the experience of a disastrous marriage, this butchery will see him come back mysanthropic, living recluse, totally breaking with his previous life. He does not stop working, though, and maybe he does just that. He makes many drawings of Parisian boulevards, a high quality that places him at the top of the genre. He illustrates books (Lovers, Happy Lovers by Valery Larbaud and Spleen of Paris by Baudelaire) with talent. He becomes of a rare strictness, often unsatisfied he destroys a large number of his paintings. These are ordered, built, browns and ochres dominate in a vaporous atmosphere. He works a lot alongside Dunoyer de Segonzac and participates in the group of Galerie Marseille, painting scenes of ordinary life but felt.
"A recent retrospective of the Museum of Decorative Arts has revealed to the general public the dimensions of Boussingault, removed in full talent by an untimely death. Who would have thought, in fact, as big? His unsociable nature, his disdain of advertising, his remoteness from the exhibitions, his intimate demands, which made him destroy so many canvases, are not the only causes of this lack of knowledge. The habit of language that the names of Segonzac, Luc-Albert Moreau and Boussingault were declined together somehow drowned the figure of the latter in the shadow of those of his friends, especially that of the author of Les Canotiers sur le Morin (Segonzac, NFTG*). Nothing more unjust than this confusion. For if Boussingault shares the neo-realistic convictions of his comrades, everything, within the same aesthetic, separates his work from both theirs: themes, technique and inspiration.
Neither martial like Luc-Albert Moreau, nor peasant like Segonzac, this city-dweller, whose many lithographs celebrate the Boulevards or the Avenue des Champs-Elysées and who left gouaches so just dashed off from London, has never painted landscapes : sometimes a corner of nature and very humanized nature - garden, for example - appears at the bottom of his paintings, but it is to frame, and with what discretion! the flowers, the fruits, the game, the fishes, which constitute the principal motive. Nothing vulgar in the choice of what composes his still lifes: the raves and cabbages, dear to Segonzac, do not stop the eyes of this refined, who, even more than on luxury items, likes to linger on the elegant Parisian women, whose adulterated distinction is often marvelous, and graces often doubtful. Thus lived in the painting of Boussingault, the Boussingault of thirty years ago, the friend of Poiret and Paul Iribe, who had enjoyed, on the eve of the other war, in this "demi-monde" of then, to find there something artificial and false, which sounds more true and more authentically human than many other spectacles, and whose illustration allows to reach a hectic style of a deep and rare resonance.
This Boussingault nervous and tense under the air of frivolous dandy soon realized, in the aftermath of the other war, that the subjects, however suited they are to incline to the style, cannot however impart a perfect one: it springs only from the intrinsic quality of the work. From there, the crisis which he then traversed, destroying many of his works, and sparing only those in which he thought he had attained the object of all his research: the classy deportment - an impeccable, haughty, even haughty classy deportment. It is therefore not surprising that at that time his palette was only sober, a bit austere, ocher and brown ; these colors, a blond gray give them a pearly gloss, and some notes of pink and blue softened relax them. The form, very constructed, affirms its simple masses in a much less enveloping atmosphere than it will be thereafter, and allows itself to be submissively introduced into a set of obvious, insistent, very desired rhythms. The line emphasizes itself with fullness, a flexibility that does not exclude a beautiful dryness, rich in simple cadences, enveloping and jerky all together, reminiscent of those of the Ingresque period of Renoir. The Violinist could mark the climax in this way with her grace so conscious and her style a little tense.
But already a languor, an abundance, a voluptuousness emerge from this figure, which announce that Boussingault goes to other ways - royal roads that led him to the blossoming of fifty. He remains, in his last manner, the powerful and pure draftsman of the preceding epoch; more roundness in the line does not detract from the drawing of its force, and, in the face of such figures made with lead, one cannot help thinking of Maillol's sanguine blood. The light is now also involved in the creation of the hot and muffled light-form, as well as that of an afternoon of August, and that it seems to be sweet and syrupy. It bathes the objects of its thick fluidity, and far from disintegrating them, as the acid and spring day of the Impressionists did, increases its cohesion, consistency, and authenticity. At the same time, she models them with love and sensuality, especially caressing the complexions, which pulsate in this light, a little like those of the Women of Algiers (those of Delacroix, not Picasso NFTG*) in the twilight of the harem - and the object receives all its roundness and all its mass, covered with all its pulp, that also gives it this silky light. Exalting and deafening all the tones, it changed the chromaticism of Boussingault, which rose and identified himself. The colors brought to their saturation, as well as with Gauguin, whose influence is then manifest for the artist, have the opulent and dull brilliance of the juicy fruits to which they make one think. Intense yellows stand next to sunny orange, unless the master prefers to marry sustained greens with crushed strawberry roses. The flavor of its tones greatly contributes to the quality of its dough. Pretty thin in its beginnings, it presents at the end of its life a thickness and a density which however avoid this sluggishness of which Segonzac does not always dodge the dangers. Made of a thousand melted keys, the material, very fat, offers a smooth and smooth surface all together, which, too, evokes a beautiful ripe fruit.
Michel Charzat, "La Jeune Peinture Française, 1910-1940", published by Editions Hazan in 2010 To buy it, click here | Bernard Dorival : Les étapes de la Peinture Française contemporaire (Volume Three) - Depuis le cubisme 1911-1944 - Gallimard, Paris, 1946 |