Saturday 9 July 2022

‘Yearning for a more beautiful world’: Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist works from the collection of Isabel Goldsmith

https://www.christies.com/features/pre-raphaelite-works-owned-by-isabel-goldsmith-12365-3.aspx?sc_lang=en&cid=EM_EMLcontent04144C16Section_A_Story_1_0&COSID=43178591&cid=DM479932&bid=318351141

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‘Yearning for a more beautiful world’: Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist works from the collection of Isabel Goldsmith

Paintings and drawings by artists including Burne-Jones, Meteyard and De Morgan explore such themes as dreams, the afterlife and beauty, as well as literary and classical subjects

In 1897 the French artist Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer produced the beguiling pastel La bourrasque (below). Its title means ‘the squall’ or ‘the sudden gust of wind’, and it duly captures a young woman’s flowing red hair being windswept all over her face and head.

That hair also merges with the semi-abstract, crimson scene around her, as if she’s in the midst of being blown into a sprightly otherworld. Not for nothing was Lévy-Dhurmer described by the contemporary critic Gabriel Mourey as ‘the dream painter’.

La bourrasque  is one of 87 works in The Isabel Goldsmith Collection: Selected Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist Art, an online sale being held by Christie’s until 14 July.

Isabel Goldsmith’s collecting journey began several decades ago, and what unites most of the pictures she purchased is a set of core themes: beauty, loss, the mystery of hidden worlds, and the seductive power of death and sleep. These were themes that had been adopted by certain Pre-Raphaelite painters, and numerous Symbolists, around the turn of the 20th century.

Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (1865-1953), La bourrasque, 1897. Pastel on paper. 15 x 17⅜ in (38 x 44 cm). Estimate £100,000-150,000. Offered in The Isabel Goldsmith Collection Selected Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist Art until 14 July 2022 at Christie’s Online

Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (1865-1953), La bourrasque, 1897. Pastel on paper. 15 x 17⅜ in (38 x 44 cm). Estimate: £100,000-150,000. Offered in The Isabel Goldsmith Collection: Selected Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist Art until 14 July 2022 at Christie’s Online

The words of Edward Lucie-Smith in the introduction to his 1972 book, Symbolist Art, could apply to many of the works being offered: ‘Behind the shapes and colours to be found on the picture-surface, there is always something else, another realm, another order of meaning.’

What the viewer sees, in other words, are simply symbols for something more profound.

Where Lévy-Dhurmer was a Symbolist, England’s Sidney Meteyard  the painter of the sale’s top lot, The Return of Orpheus  (below) — worked in a style that might be called late Pre-Raphaelite (more on the connection between the two movements shortly). Like his mentor, Edward Burne-Jones, Meteyard worked as a designer of stained glass in addition to painting.

Sidney Harold Meteyard (1868-1947), The Return of Orpheus. Oil on canvas. 40½ x 18 in (103 x 45.8 cm). Estimate £200,000-300,000. Offered in The Isabel Goldsmith Collection Selected Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist Art until 14 July 2022 at Christie’s Online

Sidney Harold Meteyard (1868-1947), The Return of Orpheus. Oil on canvas. 40½ x 18 in (103 x 45.8 cm). Estimate: £200,000-300,000. Offered in The Isabel Goldsmith Collection: Selected Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist Art until 14 July 2022 at Christie’s Online

Exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1907 (and probably painted earlier that same year), The Return of Orpheus  shows a strength of colour that is on a par with stained glass, above all in its subject’s strikingly blue tunic and sandals.

Orpheus sits on a rock at the entrance to the underworld, wearing a deep and complex expression. The fading leaves on the vegetation around him reflect the fact that he has just failed in a quest to rescue his late wife Eurydice from the world of the dead.

Burne-Jones, who is represented in the sale by seven works, was in many ways the bridge between the Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists. He was the key figure in the former movement’s second generation, making his name in the 1870s, more than two decades after the likes of William Holman HuntJohn Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848.

Where his predecessors had, broadly speaking, sought to emulate the art of medieval times  with its luminous colour, minute attention to detail, and moralising or religious subject matter  Burne-Jones helped take Pre-Raphaelite art in a more romantic direction.

As he said himself, ‘I mean, by a picture, a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, that never will be — in a light better than any light that ever shone, in a land no one can define or remember, only desire.’

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt., A.R.A., R.W.S. (1833-1898), Luna. Coloured chalks and watercolour on blue ground with gold and silver. 12⅝ x 8⅞ in (32.1 x 22.5 cm). Estimate £70,000-100,000. Offered in The Isabel Goldsmith Collection Selected Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist Art until 14 July 2022 at Christie’s Online

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt., A.R.A., R.W.S. (1833-1898), Luna. Coloured chalks and watercolour on blue ground with gold and silver. 12⅝ x 8⅞ in (32.1 x 22.5 cm). Estimate: £70,000-100,000. Offered in The Isabel Goldsmith Collection: Selected Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist Art until 14 July 2022 at Christie’s Online

Burne-Jones drew less on the Bible for inspiration than on Arthurian legend, classical myth and, most crucially, his own imagination. As would be the case with the Symbolists who came after him, his scenes were evocative rather than descriptive, laying importance on symbols rather than representation.

For example, in Burne-Jones’s 1895 drawing Luna (above), the eponymous Roman goddess of the moon is captured guarding the night sky. She soars high above a mountain range, kneeling within a crescent moon whose light serves as a beacon of solace and hope in the darkness.

Starting out in France before spreading through other European countries, the Symbolist movement had numerous roots. These ranged from the poet Charles Baudelaire to the philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. Burne-Jones was another significant influence, particularly in the wake of a successful showing of his work at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, where he won the exhibition’s Légion d’honneur  award.

The Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff was a fan, and he and the Englishman ended up becoming close friends. Khnopff’s repeated engagement with the Greek myth of Medusa is thought to have been inspired by Burne-Jones’s own depiction of it, in his famous but never-completed Perseus cycle.

Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), La Médusa endormie, circa 1896. Pencil and pastel on paper. 11⅝ x 5⅛ in (29.2 x 13 cm). Estimate £200,000-300,000. Offered in The Isabel Goldsmith Collection Selected Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist Art until 14 July 2022 at Christie’s Online

Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), La Médusa endormie, circa 1896. Pencil and pastel on paper. 11⅝ x 5⅛ in (29.2 x 13 cm). Estimate: £200,000-300,000. Offered in The Isabel Goldsmith Collection: Selected Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist Art until 14 July 2022 at Christie’s Online

One of the Belgian’s Medusa works, La Médusa endormie (above), from around 1896, is included in the current sale. It depicts her as a sleeping, birdlike figure, an idiosyncratic composite of the winged Hypnos with the titular gorgon. Given that sleep is the portal to dreams, for the Symbolists it pointed towards another realm, where truer meaning lies.

Born and raised in Paris, Isabel Goldsmith settled in London as a young woman. Part of the allure of England for her was the wealth of Pre-Raphaelite imagery that she could see there. Goldsmith’s choice of pictures from both sides of the English Channel was in keeping with her background.

George Frederic Watts, O.M., R.A. (1817-1904), The Open Door. Oil on canvas. 18 x 10 in (45.7 x 25 cm). Estimate £10,000-15,000. Offered in The Isabel Goldsmith Collection Selected Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist Art until 14 July 2022 at Christie’s Online

George Frederic Watts, O.M., R.A. (1817-1904), The Open Door. Oil on canvas. 18 x 10 in (45.7 x 25 cm). Estimate: £10,000-15,000. Offered in The Isabel Goldsmith Collection: Selected Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist Art until 14 July 2022 at Christie’s Online

It’s sometimes said that the Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists ventured into other worlds pictorially because they disliked the increasingly capitalist and materialist nature of the world they inhabited. (The third and final volume of Marx’s Das Kapital  was published in 1894, a matter of months before many of the images under consideration here were created.)

A discussion of socio-economic context is perhaps one for elsewhere. What can be said, however, from a purely artistic point of view, is that painters from the two movements believed that art should reflect an idea, emotion or quality  rather than represent the world in a quasi-scientific manner, as the Realists, Impressionists and others did.

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A fine manifestation of this is The Open Door, a painting from 1892 by George Frederic Watts. It captures the flight of a butterfly from one room to another  or ‘from the known to the unknown’, as Goldsmith herself puts it. ‘This has special resonance for me,’ she adds, ‘as life is so full of mystery.’

In the surreal world of René Magritte

 https://www.artdependence.com/articles/in-the-surreal-world-of-ren%C3%A9-magritte/?fbclid=IwAR0UDK52PtOoVPostwvzZp45CYVOReorkHwc503gg73QCvCUGtJyM9K5Os0


In the surreal world of René Magritte

By Anna Savitskaya - Thursday, March 12, 2015
In the surreal world of René Magritte

In these times, we see more and more the partnership of technology and art taking ever more creative forms and shapes. In the realm of computer animation, with its ability to create new characters and revive old ones, the attention seems to be turning towards painting techniques and how these might be digitally adopted.

In these times, we see more and more the partnership of technology and art taking ever more creative forms and shapes. In the realm of computer animation, with its ability to create new characters and revive old ones, the attention seems to be turning towards painting techniques and how these might be digitally adopted. Recently we talked with the producer of “Loving Vincent”, Hugh Welchman, whose team is about to finish the first full length animation drawn by painters, following in the style and technique of Vincent van Gogh. Now, another art-animation project is taking shape at the hands of Ali Eslami, who has taken on the similar challenge of giving life to artworks, in this case those of Réne Magritte, by creating a 3D game-like space that is surrounded by works of the artist. It is especially interesting for Ali to show Magritte’s works together, and literally place them on the walls near each other, because of their surreal scenes and brain teasing ideas. Ali Eslami selected the works for his video according to their compatibility and their effect on the viewer, with the aim of  preserving the surreal features of each work, whilst at the same time emphasizing the mysterious atmosphere of each painting. Ali spoke with us about his project, sharing his reasons for choosing Magritte, and some secrets on the process of creation for his video.

Artdependence Magazine: Why did you choose Magritte as your subject?

Ali Eslami: My interest in Pop Art paintings, for their unique atmosphere and colors, led me to recreate them in 3D so that I could have a richer experience of them. Perhaps I do it just to momentarily place myself elsewhere. Time passed and having kept this passion alive, I got into Unreal Engine 4. I found Réne Magritte's paintings ideal for what I meant to do since, while his style shares similarities with Pop Art, it exists in a surreal world.

© Ali Eslami

AD: Do you have any plans to do something similar with other artists?

AE: I haven't decided that yet. Maybe I will develop this project to feature more painters in different levels. Réne Magritte's paintings had the potential to be re-created in 3D, so I should see if any other paintings would fit this kind of work.

AD: How long did it take to complete this project?

AE: It took me about 2 months. 1 month for modeling the Assets in 3D and texturing them, and another month for user interactions and setting up assets in Game engine.

© Ali Eslami

AD: Can you explain exactly how you did this, the techniques that you used?

AE: I just spent some time searching through Magritte's works and choosing the ones that I could relate to and try to design a scene around. That's the point when the assets modeling begins in Cinema 4D and next comes the texturing. I import the assets to UE4 afterwards, and then the lighting process, the most complex part, is carried out. Then I start adding Interactions and sound effects. The workflow is very versatile and as I work alone sometimes it gets tough and even overwhelming to take care of every part of the project. With this project I had a Virtual Reality type of experience in mind. I hope to develop more immersive user experiences to it by facilitating VR Glasses and tracking devices, in addition to adding more scenes that include new sets of paintings.

Re-creation of René Magritte's Paintings (Unreal Engine 4 DEMO)

                 

All images are copyright and courtesy of Ali Eslami.

 

Anna is a graduate of Moscow’s Photo Academy, with a previous background in intellectual property rights. In 2012 she founded the company Perspectiva Art, dealing in art consultancy, curatorship, and the coordination of exhibitions. During the bilateral year between Russia and The Netherlands in 2013, Perspectiva Art organized a tour for a Dutch artist across Russia, as well as putting together several exhibitions in the Netherlands, curated by Anna. Since October 2014, Anna has taken an active role in the development and management of ArtDependence Magazine. Anna interviews curators and artists, in addition to reviewing books and events, and collaborating with museums and art fairs.

‘Yearning for a more beautiful world’: Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist works from the collection of Isabel Goldsmith

https://www.christies.com/features/pre-raphaelite-works-owned-by-isabel-goldsmith-12365-3.aspx?sc_lang=en&cid=EM_EMLcontent04144C16Secti...