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Lot Essay
‘The Fauve artist Manguin was a pioneer of conjugal painting, his highly charged vocabulary becomes a love song; his internal monologue transforms into a sweet dialogue between himself and Jeanne and between nature and objects; nudes of Jeanne, Jeanne with an umbrella, Jeanne as a bacchant, Jeanne at her toilette, Jeanne on a blue sofa; the landscapes of the Mediterranean, the harbour of Saint-Tropez…’’
(Pierre Cabanne, November 1979, quoted in M.-C. Sainsaulieu, Henri Manguin, catalogue raisonné, Neuchatel, 1980, p.10).
The most appealing aspect of Manguin's painting lies in his luxuriant sense of colour. Reviewing an exhibition held at Galerie Druet in 1910, Guillaume Apollinaire, the great poet and aficionado of avant-garde painting, declared, 'M. Manguin is a voluptuous painter. Colourist that he is, Manguin confines himself to the expression of contrasts that produce flashes of half-livid, half-flesh-colored light. His wonderstruck landscapes tell of the young glory of natural sites in June, after sunrise' (in L.C. Breunig, ed., Apollinaire on Art, New York, 1972, p. 100).
Glowing with light and warmth, Manguin’s le Golf de Saint-Tropez is a colourist extravaganza, a sumptuous visual hymn to life and beauty. He has created an enticingly paradoxical image, a fashionable scene of bucolic repose from the late 1910s. In it, we see Jeanne Manguin the artist’s wife, laid down secluded and undisturbed, reading a book from a dramatic viewpoint, saturated with the heat and light of the South of France. The deep, rich, blue of the Mediterranean draws the viewer in with its lushness and lapis-like intensity.
Throughout their marriage, Manguin frequently painted Jeanne; she appears in his works in every imaginable setting, from interior scenes, standing nude at the mirror, to exterior scenes bathing blissfully under the shade of trees. Manguin clearly adored his wife, and, perhaps more than any other artist, continued to portray their intimacy throughout his career.
Manguin had already honed his skills as a colourist in different places in France, even before his fascination with the South flowered. Recent scholarship has made much of the contrast that Manguin explored in his paintings between the North and the South, and between realism and idealism. His ever-increasing interest in the South and its seeming timelessness and endurability had even taken a mythological turn in some pictures, recalling Matisse's early masterpiece Le bonheur de vivre in the Barnes Foundation. In Le Golf de Saint-Tropez, we are thus presented with an almost Arcadian theme. In Le Golf de Saint-Tropez Manguin has presented a modern vision of paradise.
The present painting was bought directly from Galerie Druet in Paris in the 1930s and has remained, unseen from the public, in the same Parisian collection ever since.
(Pierre Cabanne, November 1979, quoted in M.-C. Sainsaulieu, Henri Manguin, catalogue raisonné, Neuchatel, 1980, p.10).
The most appealing aspect of Manguin's painting lies in his luxuriant sense of colour. Reviewing an exhibition held at Galerie Druet in 1910, Guillaume Apollinaire, the great poet and aficionado of avant-garde painting, declared, 'M. Manguin is a voluptuous painter. Colourist that he is, Manguin confines himself to the expression of contrasts that produce flashes of half-livid, half-flesh-colored light. His wonderstruck landscapes tell of the young glory of natural sites in June, after sunrise' (in L.C. Breunig, ed., Apollinaire on Art, New York, 1972, p. 100).
Glowing with light and warmth, Manguin’s le Golf de Saint-Tropez is a colourist extravaganza, a sumptuous visual hymn to life and beauty. He has created an enticingly paradoxical image, a fashionable scene of bucolic repose from the late 1910s. In it, we see Jeanne Manguin the artist’s wife, laid down secluded and undisturbed, reading a book from a dramatic viewpoint, saturated with the heat and light of the South of France. The deep, rich, blue of the Mediterranean draws the viewer in with its lushness and lapis-like intensity.
Throughout their marriage, Manguin frequently painted Jeanne; she appears in his works in every imaginable setting, from interior scenes, standing nude at the mirror, to exterior scenes bathing blissfully under the shade of trees. Manguin clearly adored his wife, and, perhaps more than any other artist, continued to portray their intimacy throughout his career.
Manguin had already honed his skills as a colourist in different places in France, even before his fascination with the South flowered. Recent scholarship has made much of the contrast that Manguin explored in his paintings between the North and the South, and between realism and idealism. His ever-increasing interest in the South and its seeming timelessness and endurability had even taken a mythological turn in some pictures, recalling Matisse's early masterpiece Le bonheur de vivre in the Barnes Foundation. In Le Golf de Saint-Tropez, we are thus presented with an almost Arcadian theme. In Le Golf de Saint-Tropez Manguin has presented a modern vision of paradise.
The present painting was bought directly from Galerie Druet in Paris in the 1930s and has remained, unseen from the public, in the same Parisian collection ever since.