Claude-Emile Schuffenecker

Atelier stamp bg (lotus avec les initiales de l’artiste, créé en 1890)

Pastel on paper

630 x 785 mm (23 3/4 x 30 7/8 in.)

Provenance

Private collection, Belgium

"Il découvre que le pastel est un moyen idéal de notation. Dans cet art, il se montre un maître exquis, tendre, nuancé. Sa peinture ne connaît pas toujours la spontanéité heureuse, la fraîcheur de ses pastels, mais devant ceux-ci s’inclinent des maîtres aussi difficiles, aussi connaisseurs en la matière qu’un Odilon Redon et un Degas."[1]

Showing an early interest in and gift for draughtsmanship, the young Schuffenecker received first prize for drawing in an 1868 competition organized by the city of Paris, studying art with Carolus Duran and Paul Baudry in the following years. His style gradually evolved from academic to impressionistic and tachiste, tending finally towards a mystical symbolism. Between 1890 and 1896, Schuffenecker experimented with sinuous lines and increasingly vaporous forms, creating a veiled atmosphere, at once ethereal and natural. It is that "special ethereal aspect" described by Antoine de La Rochefoucauld, that was most evident in Schuffenecker's pastels.

The suitability of this medium to his vision reflected the velvet softness Huysmans had identified as the property unique to pastel, creating its luminosity and evanescence.

"Nulle part les pouvoirs de la peinture ne sont sans doute plus évidents chez cet artiste que dans ses pastels. Nulle part non plus les moyens mis en jeu ne sont plus économes, plus adroits. Rien que des touches légères, qui souvent ne font qu’effleurer la feuille comme au vol, des teintes allusives, diaphanes et fluides."[2]

Schuffenecker's pastels have a shimmering quality when color is applied in parallel strokes, with tonal harmonies progressing across the picture plane.[3] This rhythm and musicality unifies the diverse elements of the composition: forest, sky, field, meadow. Schuffenecker regarded musicality, a kind of internal resonance, as indispensable in a work of art. The dramatic broad horizontal band of yellow at the center of this composition is a daringly assertive statement by the artist whose nuanced tones are usually more muted. The viewer is struck by this intense color-field that functions at two levels: realistic (the wheat) and stylistic (the luminosity pulling the eye into the very heart of the scene). This golden strip shows up in only two or three other works which are harvest scenes.[4] In the closest version to this pastel, the Helsinki oil, a series of orange-roofed houses show a female figure in front of them, carrying bundled wheat or hay over her head and shoulders. In this pastel, the perspective shifts to the right, introducing a narrow fence bordering the cultivated field on both sides. It reveals Schuffenecker's freer use of complementary color masses in keeping with Gauguin's admonition not to paint directly from Nature. The assertive, dark teal and green masses of rock in the foreground, highlighted by mauve and pale rose, ground the drawing.

Most likely done during Schuffenecker's excursions into the countryside near Meudon, Clamart, Pantin, Chars-en-Vexin, and the Chevreuse valley, this pastel was one of the plein air landscapes that the artist frequently brought back from Meudon: "Il n’a jamais peint ou pastellisé que sous la voûte du ciel, environné de clartés et des colorations vraies de la nature, mais qu’il choisissait en harmonie avec l’état de son propre cœur."[5] Leaving from the 14e arrondissement was easy: Schuffenecker's own studio was in on the rue Paturle, a small street opened in 1861 when the first railroad tracks were laid near Denfert, and the artist delighted in taking the train southwest of Paris as often as possible.

Jill-Elyse Grossvogel