Patrick Bade
Chana Orloff
Patrick Bade - Chana Orloff
- Welcome everybody to this, actually, it’s a beautiful Sunday, it didn’t start off so beautiful in London, but it’s ended up a beautiful Sunday afternoon and day, and I’m absolutely thrilled to be back and I am so looking forward to this lecture today. Thank you very, very much, Patrick. So over to you. And yes, let’s go. Thank you.
- Thanks, Wendy. Well, as some of you may have heard, I was just saying I had this very moving experience of being taken round Chana Orloff’s studio by her granddaughter a few weeks ago. You can book small private tours through the Jewish Museum in Paris. She was a key figure of the so-called Ecole de Paris. Ecole de Paris in some ways, of course, a great misnomer, because hardly any of the major members of the Ecole de Paris were Parisian or French. They came from all over the world. Many were Jewish, not exclusively though, you know, there were Mexicans and there was one very prominent Japanese artist and so on. But many were Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe, Modigliani of course from Italy. And she was greatly respected in artistic and intellectual circles throughout the interwar period. And you could say that her career peaked in 1939, not the best year to have your career peak, I suppose, because she had a very successful sellout exhibition in New York in that year. And the same year, the French government bought a major work from her. And then of course there was the disaster of 1940. Now she was born, I can already tell that some people will be typing on their keyboards that her name was Hana and not Chana.
She was of course, born Hana Orloff, but when she arrived in France, the immigration authorities in 1910, they couldn’t understand Hana. And so she put a C on the beginning and she called herself Chana. And that’s what she called herself for the rest of her life. And that’s what her granddaughter calls her. So I’m going to call her that too. So she was born in 1888. July, 1888. So, fateful time really for a Jew to be born, ‘cause she’s less than, she was something like nine months older than Hitler. And she was born in a little town called Tsare-Constantinovska in the Ukraine. That its principle feature is the 16th century castle that you can see. It had a population of 20 something thousand, of which roughly a third were Jews. Those that remained in the town, of course were slaughtered. They were massacred, early in the war, in 1941 when the Germans first arrived, they completely massacred the Jewish population before the Holocaust, as such, had really got going. Her family had already suffered from persecution, there was a programme in 1905, and their house was looted and burned. And her father was a pioneer Zionist. And they decided to move to Palestine. They did that in 1905. And her mother came from actually quite a reasonably well-off cultivated bourgeois background. But it gives you some idea of the circumstances of their journey, that the most precious thing that they took with them were some very fine chickens.
So Palestine of 1905 was of course nothing like modern Israel. It was a backwater, and it was very rural. I’m just showing you here two drawings made in Palestine around this time by a French artist called Gabrielle Bellocq. I happened to buy these drawings in the flea market a couple of months ago. You can see the one on the right is a picture of the Port of Jaffa. Very charming little sketches made in the streets that give you a real sense of what life was like in the Middle East at the beginning of the 20th century. So they were very poor. And she contributed to the family finances by as a seamstress and a cutter. And she showed outstanding talents and her brother encouraged her to go to Paris. The idea was that if she went to Paris, she could work for a great couturier. She could gain experience, she could maybe get some qualifications and that she would then come back to Palestine and be able to teach. So, she arrives in Paris. I’m thinking that she would’ve arrived at the Gare de Lyon. If you came from Mediterranean, that’s where you would arrive in Paris, amazing Chateau like station. And I have this fantasy of her arriving on the train, obviously with very, very little money, maybe pressing her nose against the window of the jaw dropping restaurant at the Gare de Lyon, Le Train Bleu, absolutely staggeringly, overwhelmingly blingy restaurant. Of course, she wouldn’t have been able to afford to eat there to begin with. But having lived in rural Ukraine and then what was still a very rural Palestine or Israel, she suddenly found herself in the really, the greatest, most sophisticated metropolis of the world. It must have been an absolutely extraordinary experience. And what a time to arrive at 1910. There was so much going on, it was so exciting.
Here is Picasso on the left, who later became a good friend and she made his portrait. So three years earlier, he had painted, I suppose what you could say was the key work of the early modern period at the beginning of the 20th century, the revolutionary Les Demoiselles d'Avignon that was sitting in his studio. He didn’t actually show it for some time, but, so I mean, within a few years of her arriving, certainly within two or three years, she was on friendly terms with him. And she probably went to his studio, very likely to have seen this revolutionary picture. So as I said, her intention was to enrol with one of the great Paris fashion houses. And she did so. She was taken up by the Mason De Bacon, and fashion too, this was a very exciting moment of revolution in the fashion world. The man who really changes everything is Paul Poiret, who later also became a friend of Chana Orloff. In 1908 he really instituted revolution in fashion. He changed the women, the shape of women. I don’t think there’s any other moment in history where women’s shape changes so radically from one year to the next. sort of 1906, 1907, you’ve still got the turn of the century look, the hourglass look with a pinched in corseted, agonisingly corseted waist, the padded bust and shoulders, the padded hips. That’s what you see on the left-hand side. And then suddenly 1908, this is what you’ve got the Poiret, corsets are out the window, padding is out the window. You’ve got a much more streamlined look. So it’s a great revolution in fashion, also in fashion illustration.
The illustration you see on the right is by an artist called Paul Iribe. And it was a book that was bought, published or sort of some, a magazine I suppose, published by Poiret, called “Le Robes de Paul Poiret”. And this was an entirely new style of fashion illustration. You can see how different it is from the turn of the century image on the left. So many exciting things happening. So that was 1908. 1909, another revolution, really the birth of modern dance. And with the arrival of Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes in Paris in May 1909, took Paris by storm. And that had also its consequences for the arts in general and in particular for fashion. The illustration you can see now is of Leon Bakst’s design for the ballet Scheherazade which was presented by Diaghilev to Paris in 1910, caused an unbelievable sensation. It’s a very sensational story of an orgy and a massacre, in a hareem, so rather these days, rather sort of sexist, outrageous male fantasy, I suppose. But as I said, it took Paris by storm. Every fashionable woman in Paris between 1910 and 1914 wanted to look like an otherly skin harem. She wanted to decorate her salon to make it look like it was a setting for an orientalist orgy.
Here are the gorgeous costumes designed by Bakst for the ballet Scheherazade. And they had a tremendous impact on the fashion industry. Now, it’s questionable whether Chana in 1910, just newly arrived in Paris, would she have had the money or the opportunity to go to the ballet and see Scheherazade? But she certainly must have been very, very aware of all of this because the firm for which she worked, Paquin, immediately responded to the craze for Bakst Scheherazade designs. And here you can, this is from a magazine, it’s actually a theatre magazine, Comoedia of 1910. It says “Robes Style Bakst realisees par Paquin”. So these are dresses in the style of Bakst created by, or realised by, the firm of Paquin. So this was produced just as Chana arrived. As I said, her initial ambition was purely in the fashion business. But she was taken to an artist studio, a sculptor. We don’t know, she doesn’t say which particular sculptor it was. But while she was there, he threw a ball of clay at her and said “do something with it”. And this was a moment of revelation. She was fascinated by this. And she immediately realised this is really what she wanted to do. She didn’t want to stay in the fashion industry. She wanted to be an artist. And she enrolled at a small school in Montparnasse. Montparnasse was of course the new centre of the avant-garde arts in Paris. And the image on the left is of where this took place in Montparnasse. It called itself the Academy Rouge, the Russian Academy.
And it was run by a Russian cubist artist, Marie Vassilieff, who you see on the right-hand side in her studio, sitting in front of one of her paintings. So the real importance of her, of Chana’s time at the academy Rouge was that it immediately brought her in contact with the Parisian artistic avant-garde and all those artists who were gathering at this time in Montparnasse. So this is when she would’ve met Chagall, when she would’ve met Soutine, who became a close friend, Modigliani, Picasso, Apollinaire, all this very, very exciting time. Suddenly she was in the midst of it. And these works that she very, very quickly established a very mature style. So these are 1912, 1913. And the work on the right I think is in bronze. The one on the left is ciment fondu. And she’s believed to be the first artist, first sculptor to actually use this method and this material. 'Cause it looks very much like it’s carved out of stone, but it actually would’ve been modelled rather than carved. Now she’s a very hard artist to pigeonhole. And if you look her up in reference books, they normally refer to her as an Art Deco sculptor. I think this does her an injustice. Much though I love Art Deco, to call somebody an Art Deco sculptor suggests that they’re merely decorative. And she’s so much more than that.
There are Art Deco elements in her work, and there are works like this one of dancers, that do look very deco, although they don’t look deco like say the Chiparus that you see in the middle. They’re not deco in a kind of kitchy decorative way. And you can make parallels between her and other sculptors of the Art Deco period. The top left are relief sculptures by Chana of exotic animals. And on the right is the great relief sculpture on the front of the Palace of Colonies, dating from 1931 by the Art Deco sculptor, Alfred Janniot, also a wonderful sculptor. But to me, to my mind, he’s more, he better fits the description of Art Deco sculptor. 'Cause it is very, very decorative what he does. And I suppose the single most famous, ooh, it’s behind me on the wall, is the pico-relief that he made in 1925 for the Folies Bergere, which is I suppose a very decorative version of the Cubist or Cubo-Futurist style with its suggestion of movement and its sleek stylization. On the left, this is a sculpture, I’m going to come back to it later, by Chana of Ruth and Naomi. So you can see some parallels between the two. But as I said, I don’t think she fits comfortably into any stylistic pigeonhole. There are some Cubist elements in her work. And she certainly mixed with many Cubist artists and knew their work, was very familiar with their work. But the element of expressive distortion and exaggeration that you see in this wonderfully soulful and mournful sculpture on the right-hand side, could be described as expressionist. I think there are expressionist elements in her work.
And here is an expressionist artist, Otto Dix, on the left-hand side with similar kind of exaggeration and distortion. I think one thing you can say about her is that she belongs to a whole generation of artists who were reacting against Rodin. Now in 1900, Rodin was universally accepted as the world’s greatest artist. He had a kind of authority that probably no sculptor had ever had since Michelangelo. Everybody recognised him as a genius with a capital G. But so when Brancusi came to Paris and Rodin saw that he was very talented, he invited him to come and work in his studio. And Brancusi said “no, nothing grows in the shadow of big trees.” So it’s strange that Rodin was so admired, but actually has, if you can say, if he has any kind of influence on the next generation of sculptor, it’s a negative influence that they want to do something very different from Rodin. Works like these. I think one of the problems with these is that, 'cause Rodin was a modeller. He wasn’t a sculptor. Everything is modelled in clay or plaster, then it’s either cast in bronze, like the gates of hell on the left-hand side, or he hands his modello over to a practitioner who actually then carves it in marble from the piece that’s been modelled in clay or plaster. So it’s around this time that the new generation of artists are very keen on the idea of truth to materials, that if you are working in something like marble or wood, you need to work directly in it. You don’t need to, it’s not good to copy, they would see something like the kiss as really being a copy. And so this is perhaps the most, the key figure of this new anti-Rodin generation of sculptors. This is Aristide Maillol, this is his sculpture, La Mediterranee that was shown at the famous Salon d'Automne, the autumn salon of 1905. It’s famous because it’s a salon at which the Fauve group was born. They were exhibiting in a room together, Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck and so on. And they were considered very shocking, very revolutionary, and they were dubbed wild beasts.
They’re really French expressionists. But in the same salon there was this, which in a curious way, actually had a longer lasting influence, I would say, on French art than the Fauve’s did. The Fauve’s was a spectacular thing. Fauvism is really amazing for about two or three years, and then it kind of burns itself out. But with this sculpture, Maillol was really returning to a form of classicism. He too was very, very critical of Rodin. And on one occasion he was looking at a piece of marble sculpture, Greek sculpture, that had been salvaged from the sea. And he said, look at this. This has been at the bottom of the ocean for 2,000 years. Its surface has been eroded, the surface has gone, but the essential form is still there. He said, if you put a Rodin at the bottom of the ocean for 2,000 years and you lost the surface, you’ve lost the sculpture. It’s all about surface, not about essential form. I would say that Chana is very, very much, she’s not about surface either. Her best work, apart from a phase right at the end of her work, she’s not really concerned with surface at all. She is concerned with essential form. Another sculptor just around this time who’s breaking with Rodin and moving into another direction is Antoine Bourdelle. He had actually, that’s Bourdelle, he had actually worked in Rodin’s studio, so he’s a bit of a late developer. And his key anti-Rodin work really is the Hercules the Archer that you see on the left. And that was exhibited and caused great interest and sensation in 1909. And you can see this chunky, chunky monumentalism of his figure of Penelope, which is actually inspired by the great American dancer, Isadora Duncan.
But another artist who actually has a much bigger influence on the sculptors of the early 20th century than Rodin did was Gogin, who of course was essentially a painter, not a sculptor, but he’s the first major artist really, I suppose since the 16th century, who went back to direct carving, that a lot of his got like this. This is a piece that is directly carved in wood. It’s not something where he’s made a clay modello beforehand. And certainly, in fact, of course Chana does both, she does, a lot of her sculptures are modelled, but she also very much enjoyed direct carving. And you can see that she’s carving, it’s actually hard to tell from this photo, whether it’s a block of wood or a piece of stone. But, and you can see again, this is one of her early sculptures on the right-hand side from the time of the First World War, which is directly carved in wood. And, 'cause a little bit younger, just a few years younger.
But on this, on the other, of course I’m in France now, but you know, in England there is Henry Moore who’s also interested in some of these new trends of, you know, essential form and direct carving. So this is a piece by Henry Moore, early for him, 1924 on the left-hand side. And I’ve put for comparison, this Chana is actually several years earlier. It’s a decade earlier actually, on the right-hand side. And I think that’s quite, well I suppose actually Henry Moore by the 30s, he must have known of Chana Orloff. I don’t know whether she would’ve known of him. And I wonder if this could be the piece that Wendy’s bought, on the right-hand side. Wonderful, primitive, chunky piece. Is that yours Wendy? Well, she’ll tell me at the end.
No, that’s not the, hi. No, no, that’s not the one.
All right.
[Wendy] But that is fantastic, I agree.
That is absolutely gorgeous, isn’t it? And, and it’s, oh, and on the left-hand side is Henry Moore for comparison with some of the same kind of chunky monumentalism. Another very big influence on her was a painter sculptor, Modigliani. He was actually quite a close friend of hers in the period leading up to enduring the First World War. Here is the handsome raffish Modigliani on the left-hand side. And this is a little drawing that Modigliani made of Chana, which she kept and which has survived, and which is now in her studio. And she actually played an important role in his life because she introduced Modigliani to the great love of his life. It was a very terrible, tragic, terrible story actually. His love for Jeanne Hebuterne, she was a fellow student with Chana at the Academy Rouge, extraordinarily beautiful woman who’s somehow born to be depicted by Modigliani. She’s by Modigliani on the left, and a sculpture of her by Chana in the middle. So I said Chana introduced them, it was a very passionate, doomed love affair. And the day after he died, she threw herself to her death while pregnant with his second child. And just for comparison, this delightful sculpture by Chana, actually of the daughter of Chagall, this Ida Chagall on the left-hand side, and one of the drawings of caryatids that Modigliani made in the period round about 1910/11 when he was very interested in sculpture, would really, in a way probably have preferred to pursue a career as a sculptor if circumstances in his health had allowed it.
He became very friendly with Brancusi and the two of them would sneak up at night at this period just before the First World War was when the metro line number two was being constructed, which runs immediately, I mean it’s four minutes walk from here, it’s right behind my flat in Paris. And they would go up in the middle of the night and they would steal sleepers and chunks of stone for their work. And here you can see Brancusi with some of the sleepers that they took from the construction site of line number two. And so, Brancusi, again, somebody I think was a major influence on Chana, although she is never, there’s a strong element of abstraction in her work, but she doesn’t take it as to the extreme that he does. So this is Brancusi on the left and Chana on the right, and again, the same point is made by these two images of birds. Chana Orloff on the left and a much more radically abstracted bird by Brancusi on the right. She’s a great, what the French called animalier. This is actually a very much a specialty of French sculpture going back to the 19th century. It was great demand for sculptures of animals. And clearly Chana loved to do this. And there are over 60 sculptures by her of animals, often, sometimes exotic animals, sometimes familiar ones like the little dackel at the bottom here.
And this beautiful fox, this is the photograph I took in her studio on my visit. And these wonderful reliefs of exotic animals that also, this is in her studio in Paris. Now another major theme for Chana is motherhood. She married in 1916 a Polish poet called Ary Justman. And they had a son called Elie. And you can see Chana with Elie on the left-hand side. And in this lovely photograph on the right, that’s, I mean, she doesn’t seem to have aged at all. She looks exactly the same, but on the right she’s with her granddaughter, the lady who took me around her studio. And certainly motherhood is a very important theme to her. Her husband, it was a short lived marriage. They married in 1916. And in 1919, Ary Justman died in the influenza, Spanish flu epidemic. So there are many of these mother and child themes that could be Morkish. But to my mind, in her hands, they’re not at all. I don’t find these sculptures sentimental or over sweet. I find them very, very tender, very beautiful.
Motherhood is a universal theme. It’s certainly a very Jewish theme, but also I think she would’ve been intensely aware of images, Christian images, of the virgin and child. This is Chana on the left, wonderfully, that’s almost Brancusi like in the abstraction of the woman’s face. And on the right is a renaissance relief sculpture. Desiderio da Settignano, I’m quite sure she spent a lot of time at the Louvre, and would’ve been very familiar with images like these. Here is the little Elie again, who obviously modelled for her on many occasions. There they are together. What a lovely picture. I love the expression that’s loving, tender, smiling expression on her face as she’s looking at little Elie. And this is a sculpture she made of him that was looted during the Second World War. If you can read what it says there, you can. And she was looking for it for the rest of her life. And it has actually turned up recently in New York and it’s now the subject of litigation. They want to get it back again. It seems to me actually a very clear cut case where much more so than the woman in gold, the woman in gold was complicated, both morally and legally as Adele Bloch-Bauer had wanted it to be given to the Austrian state. Of course they preempted it by seizing it before the death of her husband.
So that revolved all around that. It’s nothing like that in this case, this was simply stolen from Chana Orloff’s studio. And the fact that her grandchildren wants it back again seems to me, I can’t see that there could be a discussion. It’s obvious that they should have it back. She’s a very prolific portraitist. There are well over 400 portraits by her. And they’re interesting also for the people that she portrayed because it was either people, well it was almost entirely people that she knew very well. And as I said, she was mixing in these intellectual and artistic circles. So there are wonderful portraits of very famous and interesting people in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. Now, for an awful lot of sculptors, portrait busts are a pot boiler, 'cause it’s the one area where a sculptor can be sure to earn a living. But it’s much, much more than that for Chana. I think you can tell she’s very, very engaged with her subjects and that portraiture was something that she loves doing. When you go to the studio and you see these shelves, it’s almost like going to a fabulous party in Montparnasse in the 1920s, all these different characters of the period. You can probably spot Ben-Gurion with folded arms on the left-hand side. That’s one of her later sculptures. And just, I really enjoyed taking these photographs in the studio where you, as I said, you have this, all these different vivid characters.
There’s a caricatural element in some of them, as I said, but I feel it’s much more than caricature. She’s really looking for the essence of the person physically and psychologically. And in many of them, I think she captures it absolutely brilliantly. This guy, now who is this, I’m trying to remember what his name is, but she didn’t actually exhibit this under anybody’s name. It’s exhibited as “The Man with the Pipe”. So I think they’re more, they’re character studies more than just a likeness. This is the Norwegian artist Per Krohg. And as I said, they have a very expressive distortion, is a powerful element in these busts. A comparison here with another great portraitist of the same period, Oscar Nemon And when we had our wonderful talk about Oscar Nemon, Aurelia Young talks so movingly about him in two sessions recently. And Wendy did say to her, did she know whether Oscar knew Chana or not?
And Aurelia wasn’t absolutely sure, but you know, he did spend time in Paris, and he couldn’t have been unaware of her work. And I think it’s quite likely that they would’ve mixed in similar circles and met. And there are some very, very interesting similarities in their use of stylization, but they both come up with rather ingenious solutions here for the tricky thing for a sculpture of depicting somebody who wears glasses. Interesting, unusual format really for a sculpt. These two of which are half length or even slightly over half length format, is the artist Edmond Sigrist on the left-hand side, and Romaine Brooks on the right-hand side. So I think she’s definitely aware of the art of the past. And this is a very famous sculpture by Barroci on the left-hand side, a 15th century sculptor. And I think that must lie behind this very beautiful wooden sculpture made by Chana on the right-hand side. And this is the artist, Reuven Rubin. Reuven Rubin. That’s his self-portrait on the right-hand side. Of course it’s always very interesting to see the same person depicted by different people. A self-portrait compared with, this is how the artist sees himself. He obviously had this very long rather gothic face as he shows himself in his self-portrait. And she has turned it in something very hieratic, sort of, I would say quite Byzantine on the left-hand side. Slightly unusual work for her. This is Anais Nin who was a neighbour. She lived in the same street, Villa Seurat, which I’ll be telling you about in a minute. She was living with Arthur Miller at the time.
This is the illustrator engraver Jean Emile Laboureur self-portrait on the right-hand side and a portrait by Chana on the left. And she was so good at this, that she actually produced a whole series of all the famous artists and artistic figures of Paris in the 1920s. So here you see four of them, it’s Max Jacob top left, then Leger top right, Cocteau bottom left, and Andre Derain bottom right. The Picasso one I find slightly disappointing. I mean, Picasso, I don’t think you get a very strong sense of the intensity of his expression, that you do get of course in Picasso’s self-portrait on the right-hand side. And maybe she was intimidated by Picasso. People said that, you know, that when you met him, his eyes, you know, really bored right through you. Here is Jean Cocteau, the dandyish Jean Cocteau, was a key figure in the arts of Paris in the 1920s and 30s. In the middle by Chana and left and right by Picasso. Here again, Cocteau by Chana in the middle, Romaine Brooks, who rather, I think accentuates his slightly effeminate foppishness, and Cocteau by Modigliani on the right-hand side. Here is Moise Kisling by Chana in the middle, photograph on the left, and Modigliani portrait of Moise Kisling on the right-hand side. Really quite, quite similar, I would say in this case.
Chana and Modigliani’s response to Kisling. Max Jacob, Picasso left, Chana in the middle, and Modigliani Max Jacob on the right-hand side. Now, in 1923, she was commissioned to make a portrait bust by the very successful architect, modernist architect, Auguste Perret. He is, I suppose most celebrated as the first architect to make very daring use of reinforced concrete, as you see in the spectacular staircase on the right-hand side. So this is 19, I think this is 1923. And a couple of years later, she was approached by an architect called Andre Lurcat, who had a scheme to build a small street of artist studios in Montparnasse. And he offered her a plot of land on which to have a custom-built studio. And she, I suppose because she’d already established a friendship, or a mutual admiration with Perret, she commissioned him to make the studio. And this is the studio that I visited. And it’s a fascinating street actually, when you think of all the people who lived on it, Soutine lived on it, Arthur Miller, Anais Nin, many other leading artists and musicians. It’d be amazing to have all those people as your neighbours. This is what it looked like inside. So it’s certainly fashionable. And she commissioned furniture from two of the leading architect designers of the period, Pierre Chareau, and Frantz Jourdain. Frantz Jourdain, who’s in the news because he was the main architect of the great store, La Samaritaine, which after years and years of refurbishment has just had a spectacular opening in Paris, this year actually.
So yes, quite elegant furniture, stylish, you know, you could imagine this being illustrated in a design magazine, but not quite as chic really as the studio of Tamara de Lempicka. So Tamara de Lempicka is actually contemporary artist, not really Ecole de Paris. Well, she was Tamara de Lempicka, who was apparently of Russian Jewish background, but claimed to be a Polish Catholic aristocrat. They run along parallel lines in many ways, as I’m going to explain to you, but also very different. I mean, they both, between them, they depicted the elite of Paris in the jazz age in the 1920s. They were at their peak at the same time. But Chana of course was depicting the serious artists and the intellectuals. And Tamara de Lempicka was depicting the rich and the beautiful people. But she also had a custom design studio by another great modernist architect, Robert Mallet-Stevens. So you’ve got Tamara de Lempicka’s studio on the right-hand side. Lots of chromed metal, lots of sleek, shiny Art Deco furniture. And you’ve got Chana’s on the left. And this, I think this is a wonderful comparison. You can see, I think already tells you a lot about these two women and how different they were, sort of chunky down to earth Chana on the left-hand side, no makeup.
And the impossibly glamorous Tamara de Lempicka, sort of film star looks, on the right-hand side. Here is again Tamara in a self-portrait of Tamara. Tamara of course was a real fantasist in a way that I’m sure Chana wasn’t. I’m sure Chana was very, very straightforward. I think you can tell that from her work. Whereas this self-portrait of Tamara at a green Bugatti, she didn’t have a Bugatti, she had a little Renault, that was already of course quite daring and exciting for a woman to drive in the 1920s. But she, just as she was pretending to be a Polish aristocrat, she’s pretending to be driving a poison green Bugatti. And there she is on the right-hand side painting her faithless, useless husband, her cad of a husband. In fact, he left her while she was painting this. And she then painted the whole thing except his right-hand. She left that unfinished and she exhibited it as “Portrait d'Homme Inachave” which can mean either unfinished portrait of a man or portrait of an unfinished man. But there are interesting similarities, I think in some of their work. This is Chana on the right-hand side, and Tamara on the left-hand side. A portrait of, actually it’s one of her best portraits, I think, of her brother-in-law who was an architect. And another thing, as well as moving in elite circles, I said they’re moving separate, in parallel circles.
And they both very much were moving in the 1930s in the Parisian lesbian world. Paris was the lesbian capital of the world. It was extremely tolerant towards same sex relationships, especially female, same sex relationships. I recommend to you a book and a documentary with the title “Paris was a Woman”, which is all about this, how Paris was attracting very talented women. They had a kind of freedom to be themselves in Paris that they had nowhere else in the world. But again, there’s a difference because you could say that Tamara, she’s painting the lipstick lesbians, the really smart fashionable ones. This is Duchesse de la Salle on the right-hand side. And I suppose the most fashionable lesbian in Paris, the chanteuse Suzy Solidor, wonderful deep voice, try her records, her most famous song is called “Ouvre”, open, and it’s got extremely salacious words. So this is Chana with a sculpture she made of La Amazon. The Amazonian. La Amazon was, it’s a word that was used for masculine, dominant lesbian woman. But it was also the nickname of one of the most celebrated lesbian women in Paris, Natalie Barney, who you see on the right-hand side. She was a great horse woman, that’s why she was called La Amazon. So you’ve got Chana’s portrait of Natalie Barney carved in wood, and you’ve got a portrait of Natalie Barney by her lover, Romaine Brooks on the right-hand side. Here is, again, this is Natalie Barney when young and gorgeous on the left-hand side and somewhat older in a relief portrait by Chana on the right-hand side. And her lover, her long, long-term lover was the American painter, Romaine Brooks.
And that’s Romaine Brooks’ self-portrait on the right-hand side and Chana’s portrait of Romaine Brooks on the left. Now, whether Chana was lesbian or bisexual, I can’t say, and it doesn’t really matter one way or another, I think she was, but I think she felt a great sense of solidarity with other women and that is perhaps best expressed in this very beautiful sculpture of Ruth and Naomi. Somebody quite rightly picked me up at the end of my last talk on biblical women said, “why didn’t you talk about Ruth and Naomi?” I should have done. I think it’s one of the most beautiful stories in the Bible of a friendship between two women. And not only that, a friendship between a woman and her mother-in-law, which is not always the case, as we know. So there are many of these images of women, in a way with synchronised movement, women who are bonding together in the 1920s. This is Tamara again on the left-hand side and the very interesting Berlin artist, Lotte Laserstein on the right-hand side. Now we get to this 1940 and the fall of France and the German occupation. Actually, of course the piece of sculpture, and I asked Wendy if she bought it. No, of course she didn’t buy it. ‘Cause actually the French state bought it, that was bought by the French state in 1939. But she could have bought another version, I suppose. And so immediately Chana had been, she’d just reached this peak and now finds herself in a, like all the other French Jews, in a terrible and very endangered situation. And she and her son Elie, were forced to wear yellow stars.
It got so threatening and dangerous that they decided not to sleep in the same building, to sleep in separate buildings. And she had a very, very narrow escape in 1942 when the roundups, serious roundups, began of the French Jews. She was warned in the nick of time by her Fondeur, her bronze founder, Alexis Rudier, that she was on a list and that she was going to be rounded up the next day. And she immediately went into hiding. And she and her son, after many adventures, they actually escaped across the border into Switzerland. And they spent the rest, from 1942 to 1944 in Switzerland. This is also a very interesting story regarding Alexis Rudier, and I want to tell this because I think it illustrates the incredible moral complexities of the French, of the German occupation of France and of French collaboration. Alexis Rudier, he was the top bronze founder in France. That firm had done all the bronze casting for Rodin and nearly all the leading French artists. When the Germans arrived, they gave him an ultimatum. They said, either you collaborate with us and you work towards the German war effort, or we take over your firm from you. And he decided to collaborate.
And of course that did him great harm at the end of the war. He was accused of very serious collaboration. But I would like to put the other side to this because, what would you do in that situation? He probably had workers who he wanted to protect. The other very interesting thing is that when Chana came back at the end of the war, she found that her studio had been looted and that most of her work in her studio had been destroyed. But Rudier had all the models and the moulds for her work. And he had carefully protected and preserved them. To me, that’s very interesting 'cause that shows that he ultimately thought that the Germans would not win. And this was, I think, a great gesture of faith in the defeat of the Germans and in the art of Chana, and it’s, I mean, it’s thanks to that that now that of course in her studio, we can still see a lot of her work. Now, 1944, she had actually fled with an artist companion called Georges Kars. And they were just about to go back to Paris after the liberation of Paris, the day before he committed suicide by throwing himself from a window after having discovered that most of his family had died in the Holocaust. And so she had survived. That’s him, that’s a self-portrait by him at the top. And she had survived, but it was, you know, must have been a very bitter survival. And this sculpture is called “The Return”, is really about that feeling. And she was interviewed after she went back to Paris, and this is what she said about it. “It’s a disgust, a nothingness that I carry inside me. "Imagine this, to sculpt nothingness.” And that’s what she’s trying to do in this piece. I’m not sure really how successful it was.
And it also marks a departure in her work. Up to this point, as I’ve said, she’s not at all interested in surface texture. She’s an interest in essential form. But in her post-war work, there is much more emphasis on surface texture. You can see it in this too, to a certain extent. So it was kind of like so many Jewish artists, she suffered a double whammy because, you know, having been so successful, then suddenly she’s persecuted, her work is destroyed. Yes, she survives, but after the war she comes back to a world which has changed. And her art is no longer seen as relevant. It’s passe. Same thing happened to composers like Korngold, it’s exactly what happened to him. Suddenly he’s yesterday’s news, nobody’s interested in him. So she continued to, you know, have a modestly successful career, particularly in Israel. She exhibited in Israel, she was commissioned to do this monument to a woman who was killed in the war of liberation. But there is, I think a slightly sad sense that, you know, the post-war period really was a bit of a disappointment. But before I finish, I just want to, as I said, she’s a one-off. You can’t really pigeonhole her.
She didn’t have followers, she didn’t form a school. But I’d like to show you the work of a contemporary artist, Janet Haig, who I’ve known for many years now. I met her at the London Jewish Cultural Centre in the 1990s. And I’m a big fan of her work. In some ways it’s very different because she certainly is somebody who’s very, very interested in surface texture. In fact, you know, as a sort of variation on the Maillol thing, I often feel with her pieces like this one on the left, that it does look like it’s been at the bottom of the sea or buried in the sands of the Sahara for a thousand years and it’s been kind of corroded. So I think there is that thing about essential form that she shares with Chana Orloff. Here are more pieces by Janet. I’m a proud owner of a beautiful torso, which she gave me actually, that’s in my house in London. So now I’m going to finish and see we do have some questions. So let’s see what there is.
Q&A and Comments:
Ariella Brown has two of her works. Lucky you. I’m very, very envious.
No, I’m sorry to say Chana is pronounced sha-na. And I get that from her granddaughter. So I knew somebody was going to say that.
Yeah, right. So, found this quite shocking about Rodin when I heard in the guided tour that he only modelled and didn’t carve. Yes.
Q: Wasn’t Maillol a pupil of Rodin?
A: No, he wasn’t a pupil of Rodin. Maillol started off as a painter, actually, as part of the Nabis group. And he only turned to sculpture when he had problems with his eyesight.
Yeah, I knew there were going to be all these comments about the pronunciation, but I’m going to, as I said, I’m going to stick to my guns on that one. Supported by her granddaughter.
[Wendy] You know what, Patrick, perhaps she couldn’t say the 'ha’, which is guttural.
Well, obviously the French couldn’t say it, that’s why she changed. I’m sure she could, but she was just adapting to her new country.
To her new environment.
Somebody mentioning the Museum of the Pucine, Susan Soloway. Oh, it’s one of my favourite museums in the world. I love the museum. Anybody has a chance to, so easy to get to from London. Maybe Wendy. Let’s do that one day.
Do you know that museum, Wendy?
I do, I do.
Let me see.
Q: Where does English sculptor Barbara Hepworth fit in?
A: She does fit in, in the same way that Henry Moore does. In her early work there are things that they have in common.
Who is the lover of, it’s on the list as usual. Jan, all the names are on the list that you should have been sent.
Q: Did she know Henri Gaudier-Brzeska? ‘Cause he was working in England.
A: I did think of bringing him into this lecture because there are some very, very interesting similarities. I don’t know whether she knew him or not.
Brancusi, again, it’s on the list. B-r-a-n. Yeah, more about, I just knew, Trudy warned me there’d be all this stuff about, if I pronounce the name Chana, but it’s not Hana. It’s, well, she didn’t pronounce it that way.
I think the portrait, the crossed arms in her studio is Hayim Nahman Bialik.
Q: Why is she relatively unknown?
A: I think she needs to be better known. I think she’s wonderful. But you know, you can see, of course, as I said, after the Second World War, that kind of figurative sculpture was totally passe. You know, there was a long period where she would’ve been deeply unfashionable.
Q: Was she sardonic in her attitude?
A: I’m not sure, as I said, there’s a caricatural element, but I never feel it’s bitter. It’s not like, actually I made that comparison with Otto Dix but she’s never kind of harsh and satirical in the way that he is.
Did I say Arthur Miller, not Henry Miller? I meant Henry Miller, if I said Arthur. That was a slip.
Lipschitz, of course, she knew, he was very much part of her circle. No, it wasn’t the city. It’s called Villa Sura, where her studio is. Huge Rodin exhibition at Grand Palais. He influenced including Brancusi, Jacometti.
Yes. I mean he certainly influenced early on, but as I said, I think he influenced them more by their reaction against him rather than a direct influence. Right. Thank you for all your nice comments. Was the, I’m not sure that the Russian Academy was the same as the Grande Chaumiere. I need to check that out.
Q: When did she die?
A: She died in 1968. She actually died in Israel when she was there for an exhibition of her work. And she, I think she’s buried in Israel.
Any other questions I need to answer?
Thank you, I think, for all your questions. I think that’s it.
Thanks Patrick.
The sculpture that was purchased by the state is still in there. There are also, if you want to see sculptures by her, the Museum of the Thirties in Boulogne-Billancourt has a very good collection of her work. So I think that’s everything.
Thanks Patrick. She really is a fabulous, fabulous sculptor. I have to say.
I think so too. Yeah. I want to say congratulations. I’m so happy for you. I think it’s wonderful that you have those two works.
Thank you very much. Well, thank you. Thanks for a brilliant presentation today and I’m looking forward to us meeting up soon in person, hopefully this week.
Yep, that’d be great.
Very good. Thank you everybody for joining us. Take care. Enjoy the rest of your day and evening. Thanks, bye-Bye.