Maurice Paul Jean Asselin | |
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![]() Maurice Asselin, Self-portrait, under snow in Neuilly | |
Born | Orléans, France | 24 June 1882
Died | 27 September 1947 Neuilly-sur-Seine, France | (aged 65)
Education | École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris |
Known for | Painting, engraving |
Movement | School of Paris |
Spouse | Paton |
Children | Bernard, Jean, Georges |
Awards | Officier de la Légion d'honneur |
Maurice Paul Jean Asselin (24 June 1882 – 27 September 1947) was a French painter, watercolourist, printmaker, lithographer, engraver and illustrator, associated with the School of Paris. He is best known for still lifes and nudes. Other recurring themes in his work are motherhood, and the landscapes and seascapes of Brittany. He also worked as a book illustrator, particularly in the 1920s. His personal style was characterised by subdued colours, sensitive brushwork and a strong sense of composition and design.
He was awarded the rank of Officier de la Légion d'honneur in 1939.
Maurice Asselin was born on 24 June 1882 in Orléans.[1] His father was a coachman, and his mother ran the tobacco shop La Pipe d'or at the corner of rue Sainte-Catherine and rue Jeanne-d'Arc, before they took over a restaurant called L'Auberge de la rue Sainte-Catherine. After studying design and painting at the Collège Sainte-Croix in Orléans, which ended in his graduating second class, in 1899 he began as an apprentice working with calico in the fabric house Aux Travailleurs at place de la République in Orléans, and then in 1900 in a textile house in the Sentier district of Paris.[2] Described as a half-hearted and "distracted employee",[3] he returned to spend the years 1901–1903 in Orléans, his father having died in 1902. In his sketchbook, from which he was never separated from childhood, he captured views of Orléans, Tigy, Saint-Hilaire-Saint-Mesmin, before returning to Paris where he was a student of Fernand Cormon at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National School of Fine Arts). The academic teaching, which he disliked, was compensated by in-depth observation of Paul Cézanne and the Impressionists at the Musée du Luxembourg and the Louvre. This was interrupted by the onset of tuberculosis, which he probably acquired in the badly heated rooms he occupied in the attics of the 15th arrondissement, leading to his hospitalisation in an Auvergne sanatorium.[2]
Maurice Asselin first visited Brittany in 1905, where he met the painter Jacques Vaillant[Note 1] at Moëlan-sur-Mer. He returned there in 1906 and 1907. After his first showings at Parisian exhibitions (the Salon des indépendants in 1906,[4] and the Salon d'automne in 1907, of which he became a member and member of the jury in 1910[3]), he left for Italy where, from May to October 1908, he bicycled from Rome to Florence, spending time in Anticoli Corrado, Assisi, and Siena.[2] Asselin returned to Italy in 1910 where from Genoa he went to Naples, spent time in Rome, and finally rented a small studio in Anticoli Corrado throughout the summer, where his first works were completed on the theme of the nude.[2]
Asselin first met the writer Pierre Mac Orlan in 1910 in Moëlan-sur-Mer, and this was followed by a long friendship.[5] Mac Orlan wrote in his memoirs of the summer activities of Maurice Asselin and his painter friends Ricardo Florès,[Note 2] Émile Jourdan and Jacques Vaillant in Brigneau-en-Moëlan at La mère Bacon,[6] "a small fishing inn perched on a rock, located at the entrance to the jetty, which it overlooked".[7] "Maurice Asselin brings delicate watercolours back from Concarneau every summer," confirmed another friend of the artist, the novelist Roland Dorgelès.[8]
Returning to Paris, Asselin lived from 1911 at 39, rue Lamarck. Asselin, Mac Orlan, Roland Dorgelès and many other residents of Montmartre including Francis Carco and Maurice Sauvayre[Note 3] enjoyed colourful Sunday outings to the Auberge de l'Œuf dur et du Commerce in Saint-Cyr-sur-Morin.[9]
On 31 July 1914, back in the south of France in Finistère, Asselin, Vaillant and Mac Orlan heard of France's entry into the First World War, heralded by the tocsin bell.[10]
In 1912 the art critic André Salmon described Maurice Asselin as "one of the young painters most likely to succeed."[11] That year also saw the first of the artist's many trips to London, with his first solo exhibition being held there in February 1913. Between 1914 and 1916 he was Walter Sickert’s closest friend, for a time sharing the latter's apartment in Red Lion Square.[12] In the monthly column that Sickert wrote in The Burlington Magazine at the time, in December 1915 he made a comparative study of the paintings of Asselin and Roger Fry,[13] which concluded Asselin's superiority.[12] Each of the two artists painted the portrait of the other; the portrait of Asselin painted in 1915 by Sickert[14] is now in the collections of the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent,[15] while Asselin kept his "Portrait of Walter Sickert"[16] at his home in Montmartre and later in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Asselin also spent time in 1915 in Ashford with another painter friend, Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro.[Note 4] On his return to Paris, he lived from 1916 at 121, rue de Caulaincourt in the 18th arrondissement.
At the instigation of General Niox, director of the Musée de l’Armée in Paris, a decree of 8 November 1916 declared that "the Under-Secretary of State for Fine Arts, with the authorisation of the Minister of War, may entrust to artists assignments with the armies". A committee which included art historian and curator Léonce Bénédite, and art critics François Thiébault-Sisson[Note 5] and Arsène Alexandre was put in charge of selecting artists not mobilised, stipulating that their purpose was "the painting of real history", rather than idealistic, symbolic or patriotic imagery. The "modern" painters thus selected, exhibitors at the Salon d'automne and the Salon des indépendants, ranged from the former nabis (Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton, Maurice Denis) to the "new post-Cézanne landscape painters" who at the time included Maurice Asselin, Louis Charlot,[Note 6] Henri Lebasque, Henri Ottmann, Gaston Prunier,[Note 7] and Jules-Émile Zingg, and were commissioned in this way to document history which was not yet written. The presence of Asselin's work in the collections of the Musée de l’Armée shows his commitment to the "Artists’ Missions to the Armies in 1917".[17]
Maurice Asselin married Paton on 17 September 1919, a marriage which produced three sons, Bernard in 1922, Jean in 1923 and Georges in 1925, and introduced the theme of motherhood into his work.[2] He returned to Brittany in the 1920s and found Pierre Mac Orlan, Jacques Vaillant and Pierre-Eugène Clairin[Note 8] there, with the group taking up residence at the Hôtel de la Poste run by the wife of the painter Ernest Correlleau[Note 9] in Pont-Aven.[18][19] In 1925, in the company of the painter André Fraye,[Note 10] he travelled along the Mediterranean coast (Marseille, Sainte-Maxime, Saint-Tropez), in the Var (Le Luc) and in the Vaucluse (Avignon, Orange).[2] That same year, Asselin left Montmartre to settle at 45–47, rue du Bois-de-Boulogne in Neuilly-sur-Seine,[1] in the residence-workshop whose design and construction he entrusted to the architect and designer Pierre Patout.[20]
Asselin returned to southern France in 1927 with Paton and their three sons. In the 1930s (his mother died in Orléans in 1932) saw him again in Brittany: Concarneau in 1930, Douarnenez in 1931, Beuzec-Conq in 1932, Pont-Aven until 1938, Kerdruc in 1939, all in an entourage made up of painters Pierre-Eugène Clairin, Émile Compard,[Note 11] Ernest Correleau, Fernand Dauchot, Émile Jourdan, Jean Puy, René Thomsen,[Note 12] and with literary friends too: Pierre Mac Orlan, always, but also Max Jacob or Liam O'Flaherty whose portrait Asselin painted.[2] The exoduses of the Second World War led Asselin and his family to Chalonnes-sur-Loire until the armistice of 22 June 1940 between France and Nazi Germany. Both psychological suffering (Asselin resented defeat and the Occupation) and physical pain (osteoarthritis in his hip made walking difficult) are felt in his painting, a period of "red nudes" and small bunches of flowers. "His palette is hardening" noted his son Georges Asselin.[2]
In 1945, he went to Brittany to stay with the Correleaus at the Hôtel de la Poste in Pont-Aven, for the last time. He was admitted to Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris in 1947, was operated on by Professor Bergeret on Monday 22 September and died on Saturday 27 September.[citation needed]
Art historian and critic Bernard Dorival[Note 13] described Maurice Asselin, along with Edmond Ceria,[Note 14] André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Charles Dufresne, Paul-Élie Gernez,[Note 15] Louise Hervieu, Maurice Loutreuil[Note 16] and Henry de Waroquier[Note 17] as painters of the "realist reaction" who "prefer the frank realism of the Impressionists and the sincerity with which they questioned nature" to "the idealism and to the photographic realism" of the academic tradition of the 19th century." “Against the unrealism of the Cubists, they pose as heirs to the independent masters of the third quarter of the 19th century, primarily Gustave Courbet, the spiritual father of their movement". Dorival supported his argument by quoting Asselin: "if you really love painting, you will not only ask it to be a decoration for the walls of your home, but first of all to be food for your interior life.” Asselin continued: “no cerebral combination, no theory can give birth to a work of art… Art springs from the amazed love of life.”[21]
“A beautiful work must, by its arrangement, its rhythm, the choice of the elements which compose it, satisfy the refined man, and, by the impression of life which it releases, move the simplest man." – Maurice Asselin[22]
List is not exhaustive; in alphabetic order of location.