Life is short.
— L. Bloy
I prefer to paint bad pictures and live longer.
— S. Dalí
00. The Fascination of the pond
The summer of 1911 was an especially hot one.
The edge of the pond was covered with so thick a fringe of rushes that their reflections were like a shadow cast across the darkness of very deep water. In the middle, however, was something white. It was the reflection of a white sign, and when the wind blew the sign seemed to flow and ripple like a piece of laundry hung out to dry.
Taking advantage of this fine weather, Roger Fry, commissioned his friends Duncan Grant and Henri Doucet to paint a portrait of his daughter, Pamela, sitting by the pond, in their garden. She sat for what seemed like days and days by the edge of the pond. (fig.1)
My back aches… my legs are so stiff…
–Souris Pamela please !
– ….
–Ah, elle ne sourit plus…elle ne sourit plus…
-But…I’m only nine.
The pond remained dark and mysterious with its flashes of red goldfish swimming beneath the surface and its flat lily-pads basking in the sun.
Two years later, in 1913, Pamela and her brother were taken to London to witness the opening of the Omega Workshops in Fitzroy Square. Henri Doucet was standing at a trestle table with a length of crêpe de chine, which he was painting for a dress ordered by Lady Diana Manners.
What a dress it must have been! Glowing with peacock colors… so many violets, blues and greens, with languid ladies enjoying themselves in idyllic scenery!
I can still see it as if it were right in front of me.
01. Pretty or ugly?
However the future of art might turn out, the gestating seed of that future is not to be found in painting. Painting is an ancient and noble species to be sure; in fact, it is perfect. But this perfection makes it curiously inert. It is an anachronism, like a shark or a cockroach. It is periodically wrenched by internal debates and reorientations, but it always emerges unscathed. The parameters of the medium are wonderfully elastic but ineluctably defined: the work has to exist within the frame and on a flat plane; it has to be hung vertically, and has to consist of mark-making (or the conspicuous absence of mark-making), typically with modulations of color and line situated on a spectrum between representation and abstraction.
How do you paint a meadow full of flowers
when the weather is so nice
and life is so jolly
clear streams
almond blossoms
soft meadows
just joy
02. I want to feed my characters until they explode
Henri Doucet never thought that provocation could be used as a method for art. He was happy with the idea of simplification of form. He devoted himself to express what is most poignant and moving in contemporary life, in the great tradition of the Le Nain brothers (fig.2) :
A modest family is assembled around a table for dinner. The mother, standing on the right, is serving the father, seating in front of us, nearly in the center of the painting. He is bringing a spoon of soup to his mouth. Four kids – two girls and one boy on his right, and a little boy on his left – liven up the scene.
It’s a tranquil composition, calm lines, appeased but singing colors, voluntarily simplified forms mirroring the character’s natures – a very homogenous picture. All looks converge to the main action : the soup’s distribution. But to break up a possible monotony, the youngest girl, on the far left of the canvas, is raising her eyes towards her mother, while the son is questioning his father mischievously.
We have to notice the cramped writing of this big page, reminding us, in this regard, of Manet’s best works. The shades, in a seducing musical harmony, are evolving within Doucet’s fundamental palette colors: blue, green, yellow.
Outside the family home, the sky is pink, the sleepy houses are pink, and pink is the color of the soil in the empty square too, where the tree’s shadows look longer, like night approaching.
Doucet stayed true to his idea that a picture must reflect sentiments but also express them in their most human form—with the imperfect means of painting. He used to say that the human being is the most beautiful landscape there is; the most important to be found in nature.
But where is everybody ?
03. He cannibalized Cézanne
-You have to love life to make great works of art.
-Well, he loved life so much it was disgusting… He painted life’s shades and colors almost obsessively.
Before you know it, you spy a Doucet and declare, “That guy is a total badass.” (Or was it Cézanne who was the badass?)
“Splendid weather—very cold—the countryside is so magnificent—it’s too much. If it was permanent, it would be unbearable. So many colors. The less sensitive would be touched by it.”
But the question remains: what can a generous individual transmit from his world to ours ?
04. Everything is sweet, Everything is sweet
The driving force of Doucet’s body of work is a word that has been difficult to write about a painter ever since society pushed Van Gogh to commit suicide: kindness.
The key-words, the ultimate secrets, are not in our possession; but humanity retains the power to judge and absolve. And that is the deep secret of art, the one that makes it so readily available to propaganda. Someone like Doucet paints an adieu to life with generosity and sympathy. He forgives all his characters, like any authentic artist would do.
“It’s in Ypres that we’ll fight. It’s not better there than the Argonne. I can confess to you that I’m not bothered at all that I have to go. I have a feeling of absolute security (not based on anything real probably), and I don’t think that I will be killed.”
A true artist has no enemies.
05. Henri Doucet (1883-1915)
He was sensible rather than sensual ; his eyes softening or rejoicing in front of aspects, lights, faces; their curiosity rounded with wonder, and mixed with a certain fervor.
He showed the soul of a child
very French
very generous
A cultivated intelligence, imagination – or better, for a painter – some invention; feeling, feelings, but of a higher quality, never coarse nor obvious; with these, fundamental will and tenacity ; a great rectitude, a love of work and overall, this undefinable but clear trait marking all born-artists – a slightly exalted way of creating and being. This pleasant madness was his charm.
06. After all
There is one thing about art which is perhaps one of the reasons why it is a joy for ever, namely, that we can dispute about it endlessly and get a good deal of liveliness from it. It is indeed so exciting and so absorbing, this painter’s world of form and color that once you are at its mercy you are in grave danger of forgetting all other aspects of the material world.
a collage of collective memory, 2022