Dear Fellow Art Lovers,
Here we are – Star and I are finally returning after a couple of months hiatus. We took time away so we could resettle after five months of a long-planned restoration project on our six-hundred-year-old cottage, which finally came to an end in mid-October. We have now returned to our little home, and we have been swimming our way out of rain showers and wading our way through boxes. Not only have we moved back into our refurbished home, but we finally have the promised refurbished website – http://lisasquirrel.com – please have a look. In the not too far future we hope to have more links with notes and descriptions from previous tours.
Speaking of tours…This month’s “word-picture” is a description of a design in oil for a stained glass window that graced Chat Noir, one of Paris’s most famous 19th-century cabarets. I have chosen this piece as a taster for the audio descriptive tour of the Barbican’s “Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs” exhibition. which I will be giving on the evening of November 26th. This exhibition has some fabulous tactile elements, one of the most amazing being a one-to-one recreation of the interior of the Viennese cabaret “Fledermaus,” which has feelable reproductions of the 7,000 tiles that covered the walls and bar of this cafe, many of which have raised pictures, so they are quite intriguing to the touch. The aim of this exhibition is to remove artists from their imagined, solitary garrets, and to place them squarely in the midst of the vibrant social scenes and night-life of cities around the world, at important moments of cultural, social, and economic changes. We are invited through the doors of several colourful, daring, delightful, and sometimes radical cabarets and clubs designed and frequented by painters, poets, composers, dancers, and creative thinkers. Our journey through the exhibition takes us from the perhaps more familiar streets of Montmartre in 1880-90s Paris, through early 20th-century Vienna and Weimar Berlin, to a circus-like tent in post-revolutionary Mexico City, through 1960s Nigeria and Tehran, with stops in Rome, London and Harlem along the way. During my tour, I will focus on six different pieces ranging from a devilish tapestry, to sensitive and witty Mexican wood-cuts, and the highly tactile screens of the Mbari Club in Nigeria. But here, I have chosen to describe an oil painting which appeared on the third floor of the 1885 second incarnation of the Chat Noir, a piece titled “La Vierge verte (The Green Virgin)”.
First let us imagine navigating the narrow, cobbled streets of the “butte” of Montmartre to a three‐floor hôtellerie on the rue Laval (now rue Victor‐Massé), just a few blocks from the original Chat Noir. We find ourselves standing before Rudolph Salis’s elaborate new premises. We are immediately confronted by a yellow and black sign welcoming us with the admonition to ‘be modern’. However, our thoughts do not linger on this for long, since there is so much more to look at, some of it influenced by the medieval or Renaissance, and some things quite modern:
“In addition to a stained glass front window by Adolphe Léon Willette inspired by the biblical episode of the golden calf, the facade [is] elaborately decorated by Eugène Grasset with two fifteenth‐century‐style lanterns and an enormous heraldic bronze black cat surrounded by golden sunbursts. Nearby [hangs] a sign by Willette showing a black cat on a half‐moon, while on the ground floor [is] a large plaster cast of the neoclassical sculptor Jean‐Antoine Houdon’s Diana. On the walls of the stairwells and in rooms throughout the cabaret [are] an assortment of antiques, Japanese masks, caricatures of leading Chat Noir figures by Antonio de la Gándara, and many of the original drawings for the journal Le Chat Noir by Salis, George Auriol, Henri Rivière, Théophile‐Alexandre Steinlen, Henry Somm and numerous other artists. In the third‐floor Salle des Fêtes, which house[s] a shadow theatre and [is] large enough to accommodate 150 guests, [is] a group of 45 drawings, including work by Degas, Monet, Camille and Lucien Pissarro and Henri de Toulouse‐Lautrec. It also contain[s] two of Willette’s designs for the old Chat Noir: Parce Domine, a large painting depicting the death of a Pierrot–an alter‐ego of Willette’s–and an allegory of the loss of innocence; and The Green Virgin…” (“Into The Night” Catalogue p. 30)
Here, perhaps a bit overwhelmed by this “Louvre of Montmartre’, we pause to take a breath and to admire the vibrant colour and stature of this “Virgin” in her green and gold dress, (c. 1881, oil on canvas). This painting is hard to miss at six-and-one-half feet high and four feet eight inches wide. The painting is dominated by the figure of a blonde haired woman in a long dress that is a rich shade of green,, just slightly darker than emeralds. The muted, textural background of the painting is created by short, flat, dark-brown brush strokes fading into, and interspersed with, light golden-tan brush strokes. These intermingled earthy colours seem to capture the energy of the night sky. The woman stretches her arms high above her head. She is holding a very thin black cat. The cat is balanced on her head, it sits on its haunches, and mirrors the woman’s raised arms with its front legs curving over its own head – it has a very thin waist line, and long tail, with jagged fur – it appears very Halloweenish. The cat’s mysterious embodiment of black-magic continues with its slanted yellow eyes, red mouth with white teeth bared, and whiskers which are painted white to stand out against the dark background. Its black triangular ears, with soft strokes of pink to indicate their interiors, almost touch the top of the canvas. In the background, behind the woman’s shoulders, and circling up to behind the cat’s chest, is a large yellow moon outlined with a thin black line. We now focus on the woman. Her hair is golden, with little orange high-lights especially above one ear, creating the impression that she is a strawberry blonde. Her hair is pulled back in a bun, and is parted in the middle. She has light tan eyebrows, and she has blue eyes which gaze upward. This upturned gaze causes her to look slightly surprised and concerned – she may be thinking, “Where exactly did this cat come from, and is it going to stay there?” Her mouth is slightly open and her oval face has a charming dimpled chin. The sleeves of her dress hang at her elbows, and it looks like she is wearing golden gloves. She wears a white bracelet on her right arm. The young woman’s green dress has a high collar with white along the edges. At the base of this collar, she wears a gold choker with a gold disk at its centre. Her dress has a fitted bodice. The dress material looks like it may be a heavy satin, which is patterned all over with rather large golden bees. The dress has a pointed princess waistline with box pleats, and stands away from her body, as though she might be wearing a roll of some sort beneath her skirts. There is a gold ribbon wrapped around her waist, which is tied in a bow directly at the point of the princess waistline. There is an Easter lily tucked into the knot of the bow. The dress is split up the front, and flares out, and folds back on itself revealing a bit of the gold lining of the dress on each side of the elongated triangular split. This split also allows us to see her underskirt, which is made of a black and creamy white, medium sized checkerboard fabric. This underskirt reaches her mid calf. She wears brownish-black stockings decorated with a leafy pattern which starts at the arch of her foot and runs up her inner leg. She stands with her heels together and toes pointed outward. Her delicate slippers are the same gold colour as the lining of her dress, and they each have a bow on them in the same gold colour. She is standing on a stage or pedestal which is decorated, with red flowers and green leaves. This platform is at the bottom of the canvas. Six small white mice scuttle amongst the red flowers, and foliage, and they all face in different directions.
Willette’s oil study for a stained glass window is a perfect embodiment of the proto-Dada and symbolist aesthetics that filled the Chat Noir. All the tropes of innocence, the sweet blond-haired, blue-eyed young woman in her modest high-necked green dress, with its delicate white lily at her waist proclaiming her chastity. However, will all those industrious golden bees, an insect often used to symbolise France, profit from her lily flower? The tints of orange-red in her golden hair, and the flared opening in her skirt revealing a less modest dress, suggest this virgin might be succumbing to the impish lure of the emblem of the Chat Noir the black cat perched on her head.
After we have finished our contemplation of this picture, we might rejoin the laughing, chatting throng of visitors and settle in front of the twelve-foot-long, six-foot high stage to watch a production of one of the 45 plays written for the Chat Noir’s shadow theatre, an a fete of engineering that presaged the moving picture. (Follow this link to learn more about the Chat Noir’s famous productions: https://daratheodoraart.com/20
Star and I hope you can join us on the 26th to experience this fun and thought-provoking exhibition. Visit the Barbican’s tour page for tickets.
Star will post her own blog soon about her trip to The Royal Pavilion at Brighton – a visit she highly recommends for her four-pawed friends – even though all the food in the historic kitchens was sadly not real.
Until next time we hope you stay warm and dry.
Lisa and Star