Rupert Bunny: the French Years

The exhibition Rupert Bunny: Artist in Paris will continue at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV in Melbourne until 9pm, Saturday 19th June 2010.

Rupert Bunny (1864-1947) was born in Melbourne. After being very interested in music and architecture, in the early 1880s he settled on art at the National Gallery of Victoria School and stayed there from 1881-4. Eugene von Guerard and George Folingsby were some of his first teachers; John Longstaff was one of his friends and colleagues.

He travelled to Europe in 1884, still in his late teens, and studied at the St John's Wood Art School, London. He had only a short stay in England before settling in France and spending almost all the rest of his working career there. During the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s, Bunny was known primarily for his mythological works in oils.

To enjoy the very romantic, very languid painting called Sweet Idleness c1897, see The Monday Issue blog and Felicity Gleeson's blog. But sometimes the languid is too much. Malcolm Clark saw the women in Bunny’s paintings as sensual, yet devoid of sexiness.

Only with the turn of the new century did the ex-pat Australian artist decide to modernise himself. In 1902 Bunny married the French artist model Jeanne Morel, several years after first painting her. Later she appeared in a number of portraits. Genre scenes of Jeanne and other charming young women in flowing white tea gowns played a predominant role in his newest work.

Dame Nellie Melba, c1902

Bunny’s portraits were splendid and romantic. Dame Nellie Melba c1902 hangs on temporary loan from the National Gallery of Victoria in the State Dining Room at Government House. It must have been an important commission for the young artist. But the genre was to be expected. During the early 1900s, the Australians in Europe painted images of women and children, especially Bunny, Phillips Fox and George Lambert. It was a subject that was also popular with other artists at the turn of the century, with the Salon and Royal Academy painters, as well as less established artists.

He joined the New Salon d'Automne which was organised in 1903 by Georges Rouault, André Derain and Henri Matisse to be more radical than the Old Paris Salon. It must have been a delightful shock for Bunny to be exposed to Matisse’s and the Fauvists’ very different use of colour for the first time.

Contemporary critics admired Bunny's handling of light and texture; what they referred to as his simple charm. None of his paintings showed this more clearly than the enormous canvas called A Summer Morning c1908. The elegant and graceful women in their long white dresses and picture hats could have been anywhere; there was nothing particularly Australian about them. If anything, he tapped into Monet’s and Whistler’s subject matter. Life, as he showed it, was comfortable, leisurely and supported by paid staff.

A Garden Bench c1915 was another sensitive, sunny image of women at leisure. But unlike A Summer Morning, the background of Garden Bench consisted of mere colour splashes, filling the canvas with hints of spring bushes. Again the long dresses and straw hats suggested elegance, however in the second painting, his work was more spontaneous, more impressionistic. Girl At a Window by contrast was cool, laid back and very modern. This young lady was supremely comfortable in her clothes, face, hair, seat, demeanour.

Bunny lived mainly in France throughout these decades, making only brief visits to London and to Australia (in 1911 and 1928). He became a member of the Salon Nationale Des Beaux Arts, as did Phillips Fox, Agnes Goodsir and Bessie Davidson. He helped other Australians in Paris whenever he could eg standing up for David Davies when he married at the British Consulate in Paris. And best of all, Bunny had several exhibitions in Paris where he was lucky enough or talented enough to sell some of the paintings to the Musee du Luxembourg. Bunny was one of the few Australian artists of the time to establish an international reputation. In fact the French Government bought 10 of his paintings.

Summer Morning, 1908

I have concentrated on Bunny’s painting of the feminine arcady; women at leisure, in gardens, on beaches and in parks. These much loved works were widely seen as epitomising the charm of France’s belle époque; his subjects were fashionable women who apparently did not have to work for a living. But this leisurely life was abruptly ended once WW1 commenced. Times were tougher, so his images changed, but more of that in a different article. His wife was ill, the money had run out and the art buying public were no longer fascinated with Belle Epoque images. His post-WW1 paintings, often landscapes, will be discussed elsewhere.

Bunny had always been involved in music in his young years and he composed music after his wife died in 1933. Now a lonely widower, he sailed home to Melbourne and spent the first summer painting in the city’s Royal Botanical Gardens. He painted the people of Melbourne walking in the gardens, sitting on the benches and lying on the grass. These paintings were probably intended to make money, and to appeal to Australians who enjoyed for Australian subjects. Not all the critics viewed these paintings well, but Melbourne buyers disagreed with the critics and only a handful were not sold.

Despite his strong reputation in Europe, Bunny was an ex-pat in his own country, not quite a Frenchman and not quite an Australian either. And it took a very long time before he was honoured at home with a retrospective exhibition at the NGV in 1946. But it was all too late. His local reputation was building nicely, just as he died in Melbourne in May 1947.

Tony Curren Gatecrash gave a reason for Bunny’s 2010 exhibition being so pleasant. Inlike so many Australian artists, Bunny pursued his own artistic ambition without over Australianising his work. I agree that Bunny’s art was largely French during the years 1884-1933, a huge chunk of his working life time. So I was somewhat surprised to find that many of his dreamy, symbolist paintings ended up in Australian galleries, now much loved. What appeared to be French fluff before WW1 came to be seen as intimate, sensual and beautifully crafted.

A Lovely Afternoon, c1908

However I am absolutely aware that not everyone loves Bunny’s paintings. Melbourne Art & Culture Critic saw the exhibition and thought its only contribution was to give the viewers an interesting perspective on art history.

Varian Fry: hero and rescuer of thousands

Varian Fry (1907 – 67) was an American journalist. While working as a foreign correspondent for an American paper, Fry visited Berlin in 1935 and was very distressed by Nazi violence against Jewish citizens.

Varian Fry, 1941

Following the occupation of France in August 1940, Fry was still distressed by what he knew what going to happen to the Jews. He went to Marseilles as an agent of the newly formed Emergency Rescue Committee, in an effort to help persons wishing to flee the Nazis. Fry had a rather small pot of money and a short list of refugees under imminent threat of arrest by the Gestapo. Soon anti-Nazi writers, avant-garde artists and musicians were begging for his help.

Despite the pro-Nazi Vichy regime, Fry and his small group of volunteers hid refugees in a safe home until they could be smuggled out. 2,200 people were taken across the border to the safety of neutral Portugal from which they made their way to the USA. Others he helped escape on ships leaving Marseilles for the French colony of Martinique, from which they could go to the USA.

The rescue network was essential to his success. Miriam Davenport, a former art student at the Sorbonne, and Mary Jayne Gold, a wealthy cultured woman who had moved to Paris in the early 1930s were two American women. When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, Gold went to Marseilles to work with Fry and to fund his operation.

Most important was obtaining the visas Fry needed for the artists, writers and academics. He could not have succeeded without Hiram Bingham IV, an American Vice Consul in Marseilles who fought against US State Department anti-Semitism. Like the Japanese consul in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, Bingham was personally responsible for issuing thousands of legal and illegal visas.

An amazing photo survives from those scary and heroic days. The Emergency Rescue Committee office in Marseilles in 1941 shows fine artists who escaped France: (from left to right) Max Ernst, Jacqueline Breton, Andre Masson, Andre Breton and Varian Fry.

Photograph Musee Cantini, Marseilles.

The list of people who escaped Nazi Europe, with the help of Fry and others, is like a roll call of European culture. A handful of famous names will suffice: Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, André Masson, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler Werfel, Jacques Lipchitz, Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Heinrich Mann, Marc Chagall and André Breton.
0es in the USA. He was recalled several times by the American government and ignored every recall. He was finally ousted by the Vichy French government as an undesirable alien, for protecting Jews and anti-Nazis, in September 1941. His activities in France caused the Federal Bureau of Investigation to keep him under surveillance, thus preventing this hero from ever working for the USA government. He wrote and spoke critically against USA immigration policies, particularly relating to the issue of the fate of Jews in Europe. In The New Republic Dec 1942, he wrote an article with dire warnings called "The Massacre of Jews in Europe".

Many artistic émigrés found their way to New York City where Peggy Guggenheim exhibited their work at the Art of this Century gallery, which she opened in 1942. Another amazing photograph was taken during a gathering of these artists at her New York apartment. Guggenheim did not rescue them (apart from Max Ernst) but she helped their survival and integration, once they had safely landed on American soil.

"Artists in Exile", Peggy Guggenheim's apartment, New York, 1942. Front row: Stanley William Hayter, Leonara Carrington, Frederick Kiesler, Kurt Seligmann. Second Row: Max Ernst, Amedee Ozenfant, Andre Breton, Fernand Leger, Berenice Abbott. Third Row: Jimmy Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, John Ferren, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian. Photograph: The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Photograph: Parrish Art Museum, NY.

At least the government of France recognised Fry's heroic efforts with the Legion of Honour in 1967, the only recognition he was alive for. In 1991 and 24 years after his death, Fry received his first official medal from a US agency, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. And in 1995 Varian Fry became the first American citizen to be listed in the Righteous Among the Nations in the national Holocaust Memorial, Jerusalem. What a shame that he died in 1967.

If you think only the USA and French government were right wing, anti-Semitic and anti-refugees, and that their anti refugee policies was only enacted during the chaos of World War Two, consider the plight of refugees today. The few, miserable refugees who escape the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan head for Australia in leaky tug boats. The right wing response in Australia, from 2000 to 2010, has been to imprison the refugees in Pacific island camps behind barbed wire fences and to demonise the rescuers as criminal thugs. We have learned nothing from Varian Fry, Sir Nicholas Winton, Raoul Wallenberg, Chiune Sugihara or Oskar Schindler.

Other blogs have recommended books about Fry:
Isenberg, Sheila A Hero of Our Own, Random House, 2001
Marino, Andy A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry, Macmillan, 2000.
McClafferty, Carla Killough In Defiance of Hitler: The Secret Mission of Varian Fry, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

**

A 2013 international symposium, Varian Fry in Marseilles: The Culture of Europe in Exile 1940-42 revealed the role Marseilles played as the cultural capital of exile during WW2. This conference offered fresh perspectives on the notion of exile of European intellectuals and artists It explored the work of exiles in Provence, their treatment in internment camps, and their efforts to escape to North America. It also raised the question of memory and how today’s generations remember and interact with this chapter in Provençal history. The programme is still available in French.

Canada’s Golgotha sculpture: hidden?

In England in 1887 British artist Francis Derwent Wood entered art school and worked as a modeller. In 1890 he joined the National Art Training School where he studied under Edouard Lanteri, the man who also taught Charles Sargeant Jagger. Quite independently of this particular post, I have written several times about Jagger in the past: Low Reliefs and War and Sex.

From 1918 on, Wood was Prof of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art and one of his commissions was to model the wreaths for Sir Edwin Lutyens' Centotaph.  Lord Beaverbrook decided to document Canada's huge contribution to WW1 by commissioning 116 English and Canadian artists to produce 800 art objects. One of 116 artists was Francis Dervent Wood.

This post is going to concentrate on Canada's Golgotha, a half life-size bronze sculpture by Wood that depicted a crucified WW1 soldier. It illustrated the story of an unknown man from the Battle of Ypres in April 1915. We know only that he was a Canadian (from the maple leaf insignias) and that he was surrounded by jeering Germans as he died on the makeshift cross. You can see the tatty barn door in the background. Appropriately for a war casualty, this young man had baynets in each wrist and ankle, not nails. And he was in heavy army clothing: a great coat and boots, rather than a mere loin cloth.

The sculpture was first displayed in an exhibition for the Canadian War Memorials Fund 1919 at Burlington House, London. But the sculpture was withdrawn after protests. The Allies were disgusted at German barbarity and they were particularly horrified that a Christian symbol be used to kill a young Canadian soldier. The Germans, on the other hand, were outraged that an atrocity story could be publicised without any evidence of it having been historically accurate. They assumed it was more Allied propaganda.

But why was the sculpture, controversial though it might have been in 1919, hidden away for the rest of the century? Whose interests were being served?

Wood, Canadian Golgotha, 1919, 83 cm high x 64 cm wide

After the end of the war, the Germans formally requested the Canadian government provide proof of a crucifixion. But there were two insurmountable problems: the written eyewitness accounts were unclear and contradictory, and no crucified body was ever found.

BEST FREE DOCUMENTARIES described new historical evidence which identified the crucified soldier as Sergeant Harry Band. He was from the Central Ontario Regiment of the Canadian Infantry. Based on letters from other soldiers in Band’s unit to Band's sister Elizabeth Petrie, and her letters back, the family in Canada eventually discovered that the horror stories about a crucified Canadian soldier were true. Like other soldiers without a proper grave, Band was commemorated only on the Menin Gate memorial.

It is interesting to me that when the sculpture was displayed in 2000 at the Canadian Museum of Civilisation, it again provoked controversy. People are still very angry about German atrocities, assuming that crucifixion of the old Canadia soldier was the most barbaric of all atrocities. I, a non-Christian, personally think the massacre of thousands of French and Canadian soldiers in Belgium by poisonous gas to be far more barbaric. But I might be missing the critical symbolism here. In any case, note the name of the 2000 exhibition: "Under the Sign of the Cross: Creative Expressions of Christianity in Canada".

In 1921 the entire War Memorials Collection was donated to the National Gallery in Ottawa, but the Gallery was not in a hurry to display any of these precious art objects. Particularly Canada's Golgotha.

Canadian War Museum, Ottawa

Now at least the sculpture is in its rightful home, the Beaverbrook Collection of War Art in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. Perhaps the 1984 book Art in The Service of War: Canada, Art and The Great War by Maria Tippett will provide some answers.

Lucile Duff-Gordon, couturier extraordinaire

Lucy Sutherland (1863–1935) had a very ordinary childhood, born in London and raised in Ontario, then taken to the Isle of Jersey from 1871 with her younger sister, Elinor. Lucy’s first marriage was a dismal failure that ended in divorce and poverty, but she had to support herself and her little girl, Esme (1885–1973). Thus Lucy began working as a dressmaker from home.

By 1894 Lucy had opened Maison Lucile in Old Burlington St, in London’s West End. Her first client was her younger sister, Elinor Glyn, later totally famous as a novelist and script writer for films. Lucy quickly gained a loyal following of women, which helped her first shop succeed. In 1897 a larger shop was opened at 17 Hanover Square London.

Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon was the 5th baronet of Halkin who enjoyed a family estate near Aberdeen. In 1900 Duff-Gordon married this soon-to-become famous London fashion designer, despite her being a divorcee. Lucy Sutherland became Lady Lucile Duff-Gordon.

By 1900 business was expanding further, all through Lucile’s own hard work and talent. Nonetheless it did not hurt that Sir Cosmo's backed and founded “Lucile Ltd” in 1903, to sell her designs around the world. His noble title also helped Lucile’s acceptance at court.

George St garden, mannequin parade, 1913

The George St London address was lovely. Inside the large 18th century town house were smart rooms for clients, leading to a garden, and airy workrooms for her staff of 400. And she decorated the interiors beautifully, adding antique furniture and paintings to make upper crust customers feel at home.

Presentations to the specially invited audience must have been splendid. Lucile had a stage built so that women could preview the clothes in comfort, and she installed curtains and scenery for added drama. She trained models in deportment and style, and paid them, so that they could do credit to her clothes. Thus the catwalk show, complete with beautiful walking mannequins, was born. Her style shows specialised in tea-time presentations, palm fronds, music from a string quartet and professionally printed programmes. She became most famous for her lingerie, tea gowns and evening wear, with her trademark style, classical draping and pastel colours.

Lucile Ltd served a wealthy clientele including aristocracy, royalty, and theatre stars. Her more noble and royal clientele included the Duchess of York, later Queen Mary and Countess Margot Asquith. Margot’s husband, Herbert Henry Asquith, became British Prime Minister in 1908-1916. Anyhow the business expanded, with branches opening in New York City, Paris and Chicago in 1910, 1911 and 1915 respectively.

Her branches of Lucile Ltd in New York and Paris were risky, because she was moving into these foreign centres of fashion culture, almost as an outsider. But apparently her famous fashion parades did well there too, perhaps wooing wealthy women over with traditional English afternoon teas and palm fronds. Perhaps they simply loved the diaphanous, soft materials, scalloped hemlines, silk sashes and sprays of hand-made flower trimmings. I certainly do!

Lucile's tea gowns, 1912

In 1912, Lucile travelled to America on business in connection with the New York branch of her salon. She and her husband, Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon, booked first class passage on the ocean liner RMS Titanic. I don’t want to discuss the Duff-Gordons experience on the Titanic except to say that during the evacuation, the couple escaped in a less-than-full lifeboat. There was a lot of nasty gossip, but for more detail about the Titanic episode, read Edwardian Promenade.

You might have expected Lucile Ltd to be defeated by World War One. But by 1915 Lucy was spending half the year in the USA where there was no war. The income from her New York shop was so great it apparently helped support the London and Paris branches. And at the very time when Parisian and London couturiers were seeing their businesses collapse, Lucile was reaching her financial and creative peak. She had a staff of over a thousand designers, models, seamstresses and advertising people.

The cleverest of her licensing ventures was a lower-priced, mail-order fashion line for Sears & Roebuck (1916–7), which promoted her clothing in rather lovely catalogues. These ready-to-wear clothes were priced for middle class women who had upper class aspirations.

I haven't space to examine Lucile's important role in exposing lingerie as a luxury item, but people who have an interest in these things should read Cemetarian La Dolce Vintage 's excellent post.

In 1917, Lucile lost a case that had nothing to do with the Titanic. In the New York Court of Appeals case of Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon. It was held that Lucile had a solid contract that assigned the sole right to market her name to her advertising agent, Otis F Wood. She was not bankrupted but her connection with her design empire began to falter, following a restructuring of Lucile Ltd in 1918–9. By Sept 1922 she had ceased designing for the company, and restricted herself to designing for a few individual clients, from private premises.

Lucile had always written a weekly syndicated fashion page for the Hearst newspapers (1910–22), and monthly columns for Harper's Bazaar and Good Housekeeping magazines (1912–22). So she continued as a fashion columnist and critic after her active career ended. Her designs were displayed in Pathé and Gaumont newsreels, and she appeared in the weekly British newsreel Around the Town.

In older age Lucile wrote her best-selling autobiography Discretions and Indiscretions in 1932. Apparently people in the fashion industry in London and Paris were getting their lawyers onto retainers, waiting to see which secrets she exposed. But she was discrete. And she soon died of breast cancer in a London nursing home in 1935, aged 71. She was buried with her husband, who had died in 1931, at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. Lucy’s daughter from her first marriage became the wife of 2nd Earl Halsbury and mother of the 3rd Earl of Halsbury.

Designing the It Girl, FIT

Lucile's trusted assistant, Howard Greer, published memories of his years working with her in the book Designing Male 1950. A biography of Lucile and her sister Elinor Glyn, called The 'It' Girls, by Meredith Etherington-Smith, was published in 1986. As of 2006, the V&A Museum included a permanent Lucile exhibit. And note an exhibition devoted exclusively to Lucile's work by the Fashion Institute of Technology in NY: Designing the It Girl: Lucile and Her Style (2005). The Victoria & Albert Museum in London published Lucile Ltd by Amy de la Haye and Valerie D Mendes just recently. American Beauty by Patricia Mears was recommended by the House of Beauty and Culture.

After I finished this article, I found some beautiful images in the Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon blog.