I’ve been looking for an artist I don’t know. I want to be surprised, I want to discover
something new, but that’s not as easy as one could think. The artists with new, bold,
exciting themes, styles or personality are often already known. Trying to find an artist
forgotten by history whose work will still resonate decades, or even centuries, after
its creation is no easy task, but it’s definitely a trilling one.
In this video, I want to share with you an artist who you probably don’t know, or at
least one that I definitely didn’t know about, and I want to make a case as to why
he’s worth rediscovering.
We’re going to take a look at Eugene Carriere’s work.
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Eugene Carriere studied under Alexandre Cabanel, was influenced by both artists from the distant
past such as Rubens, or a couple of decades prior to him such as Turner. He had a hard
time gaining success, being forced to work part-time in a porcelaine factory where he’d
meet his life-long friend Auguste Rodin. Later, in 1884, he would receive an honorable mention
at the Salon and got the important backing of the art critic Roger Marx.
He made both paintings and lithographs, mostly portraits, some posters and advertisement,
and he often depicted motherhood.
However, and you probably noticed already, the strength of his artworks isn’t in the
subjects, or ideas conveyed in his art, though he had strong convictions, either it be about
the importance of education, art, or socialism.
Carrière’s work defines itself with a very particular style, the one you’ve been seeing
since the beginning of this video.
We can start by looking at his 1893 self-portrait. Everything about Carrière’s signature style
is here: the monochromatic brown, the blurriness of both the face and the background conveyed
by loose brush strokes, and the dark eyes, darker than anything else in the frame.
It’s something you see both in his paintings and lithographs.
Here’s a portrait of the poet Paul Verlaine by Frédéric Auguste Cazals. Now here’s
a portrait of the poet Paul Verlaine by Eugène Carrière.
Carrière’s style is elusive, it feels like a dream, there’s a mystery to it, a mystery
which pulls us into the painting and inspires curiosity for the subject. I’ve often talked
about how a painting needs to make us engaged with it to be relevant and inspiring curiosity,
which is a term I’ve used for Cy Twombly as well, does exactly that.
Look at his take on the Crucifixion. It’s dark, it’s hazy, and the lack of detail
pulls you in. It forces you to take a pause in front of this artwork and really look at
it. And it’s by looking at it intently that you realize that Mary is praying in the shadow
of her son.
His portrait of Rodin is also quite extraordinary. The way the face flows and curves with the
same rhythm as the beard, the way the absence of detail unifies the shape of the face into
one form, gives it an almost abstract quality.
And this is the last aspect of Carrière’s work which I believe makes it so appealing.
There’s this abstract quality to his work, which, just like Turner, prefigures the official
introduction of abstraction in art history.
There’s Women in Landscape, which, had we not known that this is supposed to be women
in a landscape, would have immediately been considered an abstract work.
But, to me, the most notable work which tends towards abstraction is this one: Sleep, made
in 1897.
This work, despite being quite uncommon compared to the rest of Carrière’s work, still embodies
its essence the most.
There’s, of course, the absence of colours, the loose brushstrokes, and the fluidity of
the forms, but, to me, the reason why this work embodies the essence of Carrière’s
art is because it depicts someone sleeping, but more importantly perhaps, someone dreaming.
The dreamlike quality displayed in Carrière’s art is a recurring theme in the symbolist
art movement which he was a part of, alongside Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, and Paul Gauguin,
which Carrière made a portrait of.
This is exactly what I love about Carrière’s work. They feel like dreams. He’s able to
capture reality but, instead of making it look like reality, he makes it look faint,
illusive, he makes it look like a dream, without it being one. To me, that’s what makes him
extremely unique, and definitely worth rediscovering.
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