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Jean Francis AUBURTIN (Paris 1866 - Dieppe 1930)
Young girl …
See original version (French)
20
-
Jean Francis AUBURTIN (Paris 1866 - Dieppe 1930)
Young girl …
See original version (French)
Estimate €5,000 - €7,000
Voluntary lot
Description
Jean Francis AUBURTIN (Paris 1866 - Dieppe 1930)
Young girl in a cave
Mixed technique
50 x 73 cm on view
Unsigned
Provenance :
Artist's family
By descent
Private collection
Exhibition :
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, "Le temps des Collection", 5th edition
Born into the whirlwind of the end of the century, Jean-Francis Auburtin combined influences with an independent spirit. Attracted by Impressionism and the Pont-Aven school, he also responded to official academic commissions, while opening up to Orientalism and Symbolism, from which he retained a vocabulary of sirens, fauns, cyclops and centaurs. Through his nymphs and naiads, Auburtin "confronts the eternal struggle between earth and water, spirit and matter, nature and renewal...". As Béatrice de Andia writes, "Jean-Francis Auburtin's delicate, bucolic painting [...] is profound and serene. His half-toned landscapes evoke the golden age of a lost paradise. Discreet, mysterious, in the silence of vaporous contours, he suggests an imprecise mystique...".
While his large-scale mural decorations, inherited from Puvis de Chavannes, were the official side of his work, Auburtin also pursued a more intimate career as a landscape painter. With notebooks in hand, he tracked down motifs and built up a vast formal repertoire. In the South, he exalted colours and contrasts; in Normandy, he favoured subtle gradations; in Brittany and the Pyrenees, he assimilated the lessons of ukiyo-e. Preferring the use of gouache in superimposed layers, textured grey paper, kakemono-like formats, asymmetrical framing, plunging views of Étretat or very high horizons, Auburtin demonstrated his taste for Japonism, particularly between 1894 and 1914, confirmed by the adoption of a monogram, a sign, according to Christian Briend, of a desire to identify with a Japanese artist.
The landscape was also the setting for a modern Arcadia. In these scenes, "where the terrestrial and marine worlds collide, the narrative element remains allusive for the most part, so as to give full resonance to the suspended moments. Calling and listening, which freeze the figures in an attentive, timeless immobility, are the main themes of most of his paintings [...]". Nurtured by his friendship with Guillaume Mallet, a Wagnerian and theosophist, Auburtin's imagination gives the figures an archaic dimension: nymphs and mermaids "do not take part, according to Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond, in an ancient spectacle"; they seem "in Auburtin's vision [...] by their temporal anteriority" to be "the very soul of a nature before humanity, intact and pure". This vision culminates in the Pyrenees series, particularly around the peak of Béhorléguy, whose luminous and seasonal variations exalt the permanence of a sovereign nature.
Jean-Francis Auburtin chose to depict figures directly inspired by mythology. Whether nymphs or centaurs, the artist makes them the main subjects of his paintings, as in Les Nymphes dans la vasque and L'Echo des Nymphes. The aquatic world in particular, with its innumerable mermaids and nymphs, was an ideal breeding ground for the imagination and strange effects in the art of the late nineteenth century. These figures are depicted in places that evoke a certain reality, from the Breton and Normandy coasts to the Pyrenees and Porto, further south. Nevertheless, the treatment reveals a wholly innovative sensibility thanks to the unreal colours tinged with blue, green and pink, suggesting a world and characters that are almost supernatural or immortal, as Pink Tunic perfectly suggests.
For example, in Jeune fille à la grotte and Nu devant le lac, Auburtin creates two dreamlike atmospheres bathed in shades of blue and green. The figures seem to be suspended in majestic landscapes of lakes and mountains, with rivers murmuring in the foreground. In La Jeune fille à la grotte, the artist imagines a woman sitting in the hollow of a rock, her back to the viewer, gazing towards a horizon that eludes us. In Nu devant le lac, Auburtin chose to depict this female figure in the foreground, while the curves of her body mingle with the ground and foliage.
In this way, his heroines embody the elusive rustle of nature, while evading all familiar iconography. By linking the immensity of the landscape to a figure who personifies the "voice" of the river, he affirms, in highly original poetry, his belonging to the Symbolist movement.
Quotes in "Jean-Francis Auburtin, Un âge d'or", Musée de Lodève, Snoeck Gent, 2021, pages 10-12.
See original version (French)
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Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
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