De Nerée and Luisa Casati

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Luisa Casati (1922) by Man Ray.

Today’s post is another in the series of irregular art essays by Sander Bink. The subject this time is Luisa Casati (1881–1957), the Italian heiress who burnt through a fortune living extravagantly while being drawn or painted by many of the most notable artists of her time. (I did my own very stylised portrait of the Marchesa for Bruce Sterling’s Pirate Utopia, a novel where Casati briefly appears among the cast of real and fictional characters.) As before with Sander’s posts, Carel de Nerée tot Babberich is one of the artists under discussion. Thanks, Sander!

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Carel de Nerée around 1905.

Many artists have paid homage to the ‘living artwork’ and legendary fashion icon Luisa Casati. Artists such as Man Ray, Paul-César Helleu, Giovanni Boldini, Léon Bakst, Kees van Dongen, Alastair, Romaine Brooks and Giacomo Balla have immortalised her. Legend has it that a certain fascinating Dutch artist should also be added to this list: Carel de Nerée tot Babberich (1880–1909). (Previously: 1 & 2)

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Luisa Casati with Greyhound (1908) by Giovanni Boldini. Private collection.

By 1930, Casati’s decadent and luxurious lifestyle had left her millions in debt. To escape her creditors, she moved to London. In the years before her death in 1957, she was seen scavenging for food in rubbish bins. In these final years, she naturally preferred to look to the past rather than the present, making lists of all those who had portrayed her then fading glory. Remarkably, one of these features De Nerée. Scot D. Ryersson and Michael Yaccarino, in their classic biography Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati, write about this period:

Whereas her evenings were absorbed by occult passions, the Marchesa spent part of her days writing lists. One was an inventory of the renowned personages she had known. There were others cataloguing the many artists, famous and lesser known, who had represented her. The difficulty of creating a comprehensive index of contributors to the ‘Casati Gallery’ is compounded both by Luisa’s incomplete and inaccurate records and by the lack of information concerning the minor portraitists, such as Mrs. Leslie Cotton and Karel de Nerée tot Babberich and those who were simply wealthy dilettantes. Boldini, John, van Dongen, and Epstein are noted alongside Hohenlohe, Nikolai Riabushinsky, theatrical designer Oliver Messel, and Eduardo Chicharro, director of the Spanish Academy of Fine Art in Rome.

The footnote to this paragraph states:

Christophe Henri Karel de Nerée tot Babberich (1880–1909) was a little-known Dutch artist whose pen and ink work is highly reminiscent of Martini and Alastair. Although there is little material documenting Casati’s association with or influence on the artist, many of the highly stylized and bizarre female subjects of his drawings share a more than coincidental resemblance to the Marchesa.

De Nerée did, indeed, draw several dark-eyed female figures in extravagant dresses, all of which could easily pass for a portrait of Casati. In the book The Marchesa Casati: Portraits of a Muse (2009), Ryersson and Yaccarino give an overview of all the works of art based on Casati. A drawing by De Nerée of a very slender figure with dark eyes is identified as a portrait of Casati and dated 1905.

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Het schone beeld (The beautiful image, 1900–01) by Carel de Nerée. Private Collection. Estate of Barry Humphries.

The authors were not 100% sure of this identification, but due to the almost complete lack of documentation on De Nerée’s life and work at the time, they chose this drawing. In an email to me in 2010, the authors withdrew this identification because of this lack of documentation. It is actually a drawing dating from 1900–01, based on a story by Henri Borel. Of course, we immediately set about trying to find out which of De Nerée’s drawings could be a portrait of Casati.

In their email, Ryersson and Yaccarino give some more information:

In the papers left behind by the Marchesa, after her death in 1957, was a list she had made herself of those artists who had done her portraits. Babberich was on that list. His portrait of her, done in pencil, was from around 1905. We do not know how they met, but the Marchesa travelled frequently and extensively and was fond of the work of such symbolist artists as Alberto Martini, Gustav Mossa, and Alastair, so it is not surprising that Babberich caught her attention somehow.

De Nerée and Casati make an excellent match indeed. ‘She was only too pleased to promote artists whose aesthetic she felt an affinity with, and those whose work was so contrary to popular taste’, Ryersson and Yaccarino write in Portraits of a Muse. In 2015, I began working on what has now become the first full-length biography of De Nerée. Research showed that De Nerée actually deregistered from The Hague in October 1905 in order to settle in Rome.

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Rome travel guide with De Nerées’ annotation “Roma, October 1905”. Private collection.

One reason for this was that, from 1905, De Nerée’s life was increasingly set in the aristocratic and very wealthy circles of southern Europe. In 1907, for example, he met Gabriel d’Annunzio, a lover of Casati’s, in Florence. Perhaps he had met him before. And in 1908, for example, he drew a portrait of Baroness Clementine Maria von Reuter (1855–1941), daughter of the wealthy Baron Paul von Reuter (1816–1899), founder of Reuters news agency. (Private collection, Netherlands).

Continue reading “De Nerée and Luisa Casati”

Weekend links 751

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The Treasures of Satan (1895) by Jean Delville.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Là-Bas, the celebrated account of Satanism in fin-de-siècle France by Joris-Karl Huysmans.

• New music: Chronicle by ARC, and The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990 by Sussan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz (linked here before but that was for the pre-release).

Fabulous Animals (1975), a six-part British TV series about cryptozoology presented by David Attenborough (!).

• At Colossal: “Colour and repetition form optical rhythms in Daniel Mullen’s geometric paintings“.

• At Public Domain Review: Anton Seder’s The Animal in Decorative Art (1896) turns up again.

Unseen scenes from Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Roadhouse.

Fanzine covers selected by DJ Food.

Mark Webber’s favourite records.

Satan Side (1972) by Keith Hudson | Satan Is Boring (1986) by Sonic Youth | Sataan Is Real (1991) by Terminal Cheesecake

Félix Vallotton woodcuts

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La Paresse (1896).

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) was a Swiss/French artist often classed among the Symbolists although few of his paintings really suit the label. The closest he comes to Symbolism is in his membership of the Nabis, a small group of artists whose approach to painting was as much concerned with the surface of the picture as with the image that surface represented, something they pursued throughout the 1890s with a revolutionary fervour. Japanese prints were popular among the Nabis, an influence which is evident in Vallotton’s woodcuts although you don’t always seen many of these in Symbolist studies. Vallotton’s paintings are of such a high standard that most of my books favour his canvases over his woodcuts, with the latter appearing, if at all, in the form of the small portraits he made of notable writers. The examples here are from a substantial collection at Wikimedia Commons which include many I haven’t seen before, including the complete set of Intimités (Intimacies), a series which shows encounters between men and women in darkened rooms.

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Le Poker (1896).

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Le Piston (1896).

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Le Piano (1896).

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La Flûte (1896).

Continue reading “Félix Vallotton woodcuts”

Weekend links 720

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The Poet and the Siren (1893) by Gustave Moreau.

• “Some books become talismans. Because they are strange, wildly different to the common run of literature; because they are scarce, and only a few precious copies are known to exist; because, perhaps, they liberate by transgressing the moral limits of the day; because their authors are lonely, elusive visionaries; because, sometimes, there is an inexplicable glamour about the book, so that its readers seem to be lured into a preternatural reverie. This book possesses all those attributes.” Mark Valentine in an introduction he wrote for a 1997 reprint of The Book of Jade (1901) by David Park Barnitz. The book’s author was an American writer who died at the age of 23 after publishing this single volume, a collection of poetry inspired by his favourite Decadent writers. Praise from HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Thomas Ligotti has since helped maintain the book’s reputation. The Book of Jade turned up recently at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts. Also the home of an increasingly eclectic list of publications.

• At n+1: The Dam and the Bomb by Walker Mimms, a fascinating essay about the entangling of Cormac McCarthy’s personal history with his novels which makes a few connections I didn’t expect to see. Also a reminder that I’ve yet to read McCarthy’s last two books. Soon…

• The latest installation from teamLab is Resonating Life which Continues to Stand, an avenue of illuminated eggs on the Hong Kong waterfront.

• At The Wire: Symphony of sirens: an interview with Aura Satz, David Toop, Elaine Mitchener, Evelyn Glennie and Raven Chacon.

• At Unquiet Things: The Art of Darkness presents The Sleeper May Awaken: Stephen Mackey’s Unrestful Realms.

• RIP Marian Zazeela. There’s a page here with a selection of her beautiful calligraphic poster designs.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Tomona Matsukawa’s realistic paintings reconstruct fragments of everyday life.

• At Public Domain Review: Thom Sliwowski on The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997).

Trinity (2024), a short film by Thomas Blanchard. There’s a lot more at his YouTube channel.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Lotte Reiniger’s Day.

Sirens (1984) by Michael Stearns | Sirens (1988) by Daniel Lanois & Brian Eno | Siren Song (2009) by Bat For Lashes

Georges de Feure’s Gate of Dreams

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The gate in question, La Porte des Rêves (1899), is a collection of stories by Symbolist writer Marcel Schwob, illustrated in its first edition by Georges de Feure (1868–1943). The collection is actually a kind of “best of Schwob”, being compiled from stories which had already appeared a few years before in other collections. Both Schwob and de Feure were French, and the artist is one of the few whose work may be found in collections of Symbolist art as well as books about Art Nouveau design; you’d think there’d be many more among the conterminous movements but this isn’t the case.

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Women are a persistent subject in de Feure’s work, especially the sinister variety who were a staple in fin-de-siècle fiction. Some of these may be found in La Porte des Rêves which features a larger quantity of de Feure’s black-and-white drawing than I’ve seen elsewhere. In a reversal of my usual preferences, I prefer de Feure’s colour work, but anything of his is worth seeing. For a taste of Marcel Schwob’s approach to writing, which included textual collage, see this interview with translator Kit Schluter.

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A triple-page spread.

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Continue reading “Georges de Feure’s Gate of Dreams”