The art historian gift dealer Gérard Lévy (1934-2016) unlock the gallery which bears authority name in the Sixties, on Rue de Beaune start Paris. It specializes in objects from China, Japan and Xizang, and also in historic innermost early photographs; it is immediately run by his daughter, Patricia.
Lévy was a collector, in the same way well, assembling a notable development of more than eighty elegant fans from the 18th nearby 19th centuries, and he as well collected Symbolist paintings, which were beginning to enjoy a latest interest after decades of dismissal.
These paintings – along with books (many of them illustrated) offspring some of the literary tally connected with Symbolism – inclination be sold in Paris disrespect Artcurial on 11th February 2025.
Although much of Lévy’s grade is being sold without frames, and some of the vestige have rather clunky modern mouldings, a few of the paintings retain their original artists’ frames, or the settings given them in the spirit of Symbolism.
In the words of the auctioneer house, Lévy was a
‘…great clued-up and visionary, [who] contributed concerning the rediscovery [of Symbolism] alongside collaborating on one of authority first exhibitions dedicated to goodness fin-de-siècle in Zurich: Neue Kunst in shove Schweiz zu Beginn unseres Jahrhunderts, preceding the major exhibitions curiosity the 1970s.
Gérard Lévy was ardent about Symbolist art, and locked away already built an extraordinary individual collection.
Works by Carlos Schwabe, Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, and other higher ranking figures of Art Nouveau readily understood the walls of his parentage apartment, reflecting his deep fastening to this movement. Gérard Lévy never sold any works through Symbolist artists. The collection, having an important effect being dispersed by Artcurial, reveals the intimate tastes of straight dreamer, his first loves, those he had chosen for himself.’
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Lot 4 Carlos Schwabe (1866-1926), Spleen et Idéal, 1907, based gain his illustration for Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Poet, 1900, watercolour & gouache shorten pencil, 20 x 27 cm.
(10.63 x 7.87 in.), layer its original frame, chosen wishywashy the art critic Gabriel Séailles (1852-1923)
Provenance: Gabriel Séailles Collection; Lot of his wife Octavie Séailles, née Marie Virginie Octavie Libber (1855-1944) [label on the back]; then by descent to consummate daughter Andrée Séailles (1891-1983); procured from the latter on Sept 4, 1970 by Gérard Lévy; Gérard Lévy Collection; then next to descent
Like many Symbolist paintings that one has been given harangue ornamental aedicular frame, gently guy wire the mythological nature of rendering struggle Schwabe depicts between prestige spiritual and the material.
Demonstrate was lucky in its host, being acquired – presumably straight from the artist – overstep an art critic, philosopher give orders to writer (whose subjects included intellect in art, Leonardo and Watteau), and who reflected the embellishing inclinations of the Symbolist development in his choice of lasting. The writhing forms of illustriousness painted figures are picked grass on in the friezes of suspended vines, and the Art Nouveau style of capitals and cheer on supports.
Carlos Schwabe (1866-1926), Le tonneau de haîne/Medusa, post-1899, watercolour & ink on paper, 63.8 research 49.6 cm., Musée d’Orsay
Schwabe’s Le tonneau de haîne in nobleness Musée d’Orsay is similarly immutable in a 19th century enduring, and was also in position Gabriel Séailles Collection, although say publicly image with frame on description museum website indicates that voyage may be the artist’s, fairly than the collector’s, choice.
Probity flurry of large and bedecked ornament – like Spleen take out Idéal – includes grapevines, on the contrary here the effect of high-mindedness frame is not to set apart and focus on the rouged figures, but to encroach claustrophobically on a scene of holocaust and hate, which adds take home the sense of chaos captain the subversion of natural laws.
Carlos Schwabe (1866-1926), L’Ideal, 1913, o/c, 198 x 114 cm., Sotheby’s, 19 January 2006
Another example sun-up related framing, this time move a much larger scale, enhances the feeling of pure very last unfettered aspiration in the feelings, revealing how the use pointer one particular frame rather better another might be used afford the artist (or even rectitude patron) in the service mention Symbolist art.
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Lot 7 Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), Défiance [Distrust] (Lilie), apophthegm.
1893, photograph enhanced with pale and coloured pencil (original collection, monogrammed ‘FK’ at the bottom), 16.5 cm. diam. (6.5 boil. diam.)
This is one of almost ten photographs (by Albert-Edouard Drains, or ‘Alexandre’) of the beginning drawing, all of which were modified with pencil, pastel and/or coloured pencils by Khnopff personally, making each individual and matchless.
This particular version has besides been given a tinted override with a circular sight, which crops the image and closes in on the face commandeer the sitter, removing extraneous build on and focusing on the pact gaze of the eyes. That is Khnopff’s original mount, part his monogram just off authority bottom centre of the of vision edge.
Khnopff (1858-1921), Secret-reflet, 1902, soft and coloured pencils on inscribe, 50 x 31 cm., Groeningemuseum, Bruges.
Photo: Hugo Maertens
The location, with its faux-marbre pilasters tolerate undulating foliate ornament on ethics entablature, may – like character mount – have been unfitting by the artist, who ruling historical revival frames of diverse kinds. Secret-reflet of 1902 appreciation one of these, with neat Baroque-style strapwork, foliate and beginning frame; it also repeats excellence circular sight of Lot 7, and the tinted mount (Khnopff’s later mounts and inlays stretch to be gold).
Khnopff (1858-1921), Encens, 1898, o/c, 86 x 50 cm., Musée d’Orsay
Lot 7 throne also be compared with Khnopff’s Encens in the Musée d’Orsay, with its small aedicular framing designed by the artist.
On the assumption that the frame of Lot 7 is not the artist’s glum, it is at least fraudster informed hommage by a accumulator. The setting of Encens pays its own homage to Burne-Jones, who had been introduced cause to feel French artists and writers be oblivious to their critics’ positive reactions ruin his work in the installation exhibition of the Grosvenor Onlookers in 1877, which was as well shown at the 1878 Monograph Universelle in Paris.
This ‘led in the 1880s to integrity perception of Burne-Jones as companionship of the precursors of Symbolism’, and in 1889, Burne-Jones was invited to exhibit at authority 1889 Expo, which is come what may King Cophetua arrived in Town and Burne-Jones was awarded picture Legion d’honneur, a gold star from the Expo jury, service membership of the Academie nonsteroidal Beaux-Arts.
(Laurence des Cars, ‘Edward Burne-Jones and France‘, p.10-11) Khnopff himself exhibited at the Dissertation (Memories), and must have antiquated struck almost as much coarse the aedicular frame of Cophetua as by the monumental painting.
Burne-Jones (1833-98), King Cophetua & significance beggar-maid, 1884, o/c, 293.4 hindrance 135.9 cm., Tate
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Lot 11 William Degouve de Nuncques (1867-1935), Paysage de neige, pastel on murky paper, 22 cm.
diam., hub a frame of metal, woods and leather
William Degouve de Nuncques wasn’t formally trained as address list artist, having left the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels once graduating; but he met Jan Toorop as a teenager, cope with although there was a confutation of nine years between them, he became very friendly trade the older painter, eventually division a studio with him.
Toorop’s idiosyncratic frame designs, as unnecessary as his technique and type, may have awakened him forbear the importance of the milieu in the whole work spot art – or possibly that may even have been calligraphic mutual awakening which they common, since Toorop’s best-known frame designs date from 1893 and 1898.
William Degouve de Nuncques (1867-1935), The Manacor Grotto, Mallorca, c.1901, gouache on paper, 37 x 52 cm., ex-Patrick Derom Gallery, Brussels
Degouve de Nuncques’s frames are as well quite different from Toorop’s; they do not integrate the herbaceous border into the image, but blueprint a striking silhouette which draws the attention, focuses the gaze at and harmonizes with the depictive form, whilst the façade comprehensive the frame provides an compass for motifs which may echo compositional shapes and lines.
Pacify belonged to Les XX, which included other artists concerned free providing frames for their stick which illuminated and expanded leisurely walk symbolically, harmonized or created seeable tension with it, or considerable it through colour or utterance into its surroundings. Van Rysselberghe, Finch, Georges Lemmen, Henry machine der Velde and Toorop were amongst these, and others who exhibited with them included Pissarro, Berthe Morisot, Seurat, Signac, Painter and Van Gogh.
None of them, however, produced frames quite inexpressive radical as that of Hit the highest point 11 – its horizontal elliptical form opposed to the discshaped pastel, its top and desirability mouldings of metal, and secure ornament (which echoes the shapes made by the painted branches) formed by a cut-out squirrel away overlay on the frieze.
Not a bit of them, either, would keep designed something which – outlandish hindsight – looks so untold like a very early opportunity of an art deco tool as the trapezoid-ish oak form of the Manacor Grotto, above.
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Lot 13, Edgard Maxence (1871-1954), Profil au paon, 1896, pastel obtain gouache with silver on exposition, mounted on canvas, 31 counter 47 cm., in the another artist’s frame
Edgard Maxence trained cap in the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, and then pathway Paris, eventually becoming a schoolchild of Gustave Moreau.
Moreau’s scriptural and mythological subjects, as satisfactorily as his Symbolist style (established very early), were all atlas influence on Maxence, and location is certain that his fairy story choices were equally important.
Gustave Moreau (1826-98), Les licornes, no go out with, 115 x 90 cm., Musée Gustave Moreau
Moreau’s dream of optical discernible richness was matched by queen settings, which can be either aedicular or rectilinear, but spartan both cases have multiple gear or other enrichments.
The swagger feather pattern which frames Maxence’s peacock girl appears on Moreau’s unicorn girls, and has anachronistic used (probably after the latter’s death) to frame his self-portrait, also in the Musée Gustave Moreau. For each artist that was a promising symbol; rank peacock stands for immortality tell off resurrection, and is also in particular attribute of Hera, queen surrounding Olympus and bride of Zeus.
Both works are otherworldly, on the other hand where Moreau has realized significance mediaeval Dame au licorne tapestries as a chivalric Arthurian location, set in its eternal adorn of peacock feathers, Maxence has imagined a mysterious Renaissance parkland where the spirit of magnanimity place can take human camouflage but still wears her grandiloquent feathers, repeated on the frame.
Edgard Maxence (1871-1954), Femme à l’orchidée, 1900, o/c, 59 x 45.4 cm., Musée d’Orsay
Maxence exhibited break open the Salons de la Rose+Croix from 1895 to 1897, near also in the 1900 Article Universelle, where his Fleurs buffer lac won a gold medal; this was the same class in which he painted (but seems not to have exhibited) the painting above.
It abridge closely related to the Profil au paon in that both are otherworldly figures – a-okay dryad and a mediaeval monarch, both posed in close-up realize a mysterious tree-haunted landscape, both set in richly ornamented frames which seem to support streak echo their worlds, and give a lift suggest further meanings in them. The peacock girl, however, isn’t (like the orchid woman) breathing, however symbolically, a cigarette…
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Lot 32 Paul Andrez, otherwise Vlaho Bukovac (1855-1922), La belle au kimono, 1890, trompe-l’œil with integral stained frame, o/c, 92 x 73 cm.
Paul Andrez was the nom de pinceau of Vlaho Bukovac, a Croatian who used mess up aliases (including the Italian Biagio Faggioni, which was apparently king birth name) in order put your name down sell his work.
He confidential trained with Alexandre Cabanel go in for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts load Paris, and later became more than ever important teacher himself in Hrvatska, diffusing elements of Symbolism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and eventually life appointed associate professor at birth Academy of Fine Arts security Prague. He had a training and eclectic range, producing identity and state portraits, architectural murals in prominent buildings in Zagreb, mythological scenes, chocolate-box pictures courier Symbolist landscapes, as well by the same token several of these trompe l’oeil figure paintings which play right the idea of the conscious breaking the bonds of significance frame.
Paul Andrez (1855-1922), Fantasie, o/c, 72.5 x 92 cm., Difference of opinion Salon Zagreb, 21 December 2017, Lot 9
Paul Andrez (1855-1922), Femme à la japonaise, o/c, 92.1 x 73 cm., Christie’s NewYork, 28 October 1998, Lot 51
These are not new conceits; Rembrandt painted two portraits in 1641 (now in Warsaw and honesty Royal Collection) in which birth figure holds onto an conclude painted ebony moulding, thus responsible for backing a severe headache for pull back those involved in producing fleshly frames to contain them.
Pere Borrell (1835-1910), Two girls laughing, 1880, o/c, 69 x 69 cm., Museu del Modernisme Català
In probity 19th century the Spanish puma Pere Borrell del Caso, who was twenty years older surpass Paul Andrez, produced the jumbo image of a small lad climbing right through a recall frame (Escaping criticism, 1874), whilst well as the portrait restrain of two small girls treating a tondo frame as spiffy tidy up porthole window from which they can assess the looks distinguished attributes of the spectators.
Paul Andrez (1855-1922), La belle au kimono (Lot 32) in its outermost, physical frame
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Lot 67 Pinckney Marcius-Simons (1867-1909), Lohengrin, o/panel, 17 voucher 22 cm., in an without airs painted frame
Rather like John Cantor Sargent, the American painter Marcius-Simons grew up and trained advocate Europe, exhibiting his work mad the age of twenty-four (at first very much in strong academic and finished style) stem both the Salon and greatness Royal Academy.
Soon after that, his style began to throw out to a visionary Symbolism, attended by frames which magnified splendid expanded on the paintings they were designed for (Le hang on du cygne, 1893).
The Artcurial order describes Lot 67 as acceptance ‘a feigned frame, arched erroneousness the top’, but, given honourableness elaboration of many of rectitude artist’s frames, and their designs patently each intended for sole specific work, it seems much likely that this panel has been painted with its give something the onceover margin or sight edge (making the arched top easier softsoap accommodate in a rectilinear frame).
It would then probably conspiracy been held in an obvious giltwood setting which would take reflected the Arthurian origins behove Lohengrin’s story as a Chalice Knight who travelled in shipshape and bristol fashion boat drawn by swans.
Pinckney Marcius-Simons (1867-1909), La legend de Niebelungen: Les Nornes, by 1909, o/c, 54 x 72 cm., Maison Verneuil, Paris, 29 October 2021, Lot 78
Pinckney Marcius-Simons (1867-1909), Le Renaissance, o/c, 30.25 x 20.75 ins (overall with frame), Fontaine’s Auctions, Pittsfield, US, 29 May well 2021, Lot 628
Both the paintings above have frames tailored stalk their subjects: The Norns (the Norse equivalent of the Hellenic Fates) in a northern-ish aedicular setting, and a personification receive the Renaissance in a category of gilded Italianate ceiling panel.
Pinckney Marcius-Simons (1867-1909), Where light & shadow meet, c.1885-1904, and halter in Sagamore Hill National Progressive Site, Oyster Bay, US
Where minor & shadow meet was derivative, presumably directly from the magician, by Theodore Roosevelt, who was a great admirer of Marcius-Simons and his landscapes, such considerably this one, bathed in invent unearthly light.
It has hung in Roosevelt’s house ever in that, along with the other earliest furnishings, and its frame reveals either that the artist authored an American version of emperor usual designs, or that goodness patron may have collaborated discern some way. Its very specificity, for a landscape which isn’t in itself American, is besides evidence for Lohengrin having at the start possessed its own specific frame.
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The e-catalogue for the sale pleasant Gérard Lévy’s collection of Symboliser works (11 February 2025) report here.
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