Amde de la Patellire

Les clats de l'OmbreMudo Muse de l'Oise in Beauvais

1 rue du Musee 60000 Beauvais

March 13 June 15th, 2015

Published at Hyperallergic here

http://hyperallergic.com/210598/modern-and-somber-paintings-by-a-veteran-of-the-first-

world-war/

Amde de la Patellire with palette family archives

With spring coming to France, young shoots of artistic discovery make their way towards

the light, but in this case, only after eight decades of dark oblivion. Such are the

melancholy circumstances of artist Amde de la Patellire (1890-1932), an unknown

inter-war independent painter, who died young at age 42. This spring he is having a far-

reaching retrospective in Beauvais at the Mudo Muse de l'Oise.

Born into a family of gentry at Nantes, La Patellire had a full, if short, life, first going to

law school before then moving to Paris. It was there that he first encountered modern art

and the work of Pablo Picasso, his strongest influence. But La Patellire is not considered

part of any modern movement and that's why he has been called an Independent Painter

of Jeune Peinture franaise (literally Young French Painting), much like the artists

Andr Dunoyer de Segonzac and Charles Dufresne.

Using simplified modern visual motifs to paint the forest, farms, landscape, cows and

farmers (with some predisposition for allegory), La Patellires work usually makes use

of a limited and somber palette that looks rather current in its simplicity. Particularly this

is so with the late-20s glum interior La conversation dans l'atelier (1927), with its sense

of cool detachment and unspoken connections.

La conversation dans l'atelier (1927) Oil on canvas, 116 x 142 cm, Collection particulire Alain Leprince

Much like Otto Dix, Fernand Lger and George Braque, La Patellire belonged to the lost

generation, as it was dubbed by Gertrude Stein: the generation of those who grew up in

the muddy trenches of World War I. But La Patellire is unique in that he spent nearly

eight years serving in the French army between 1911 and 1919, from ages 21 to 29. First

he did his military service between 1911 and 1913, and then was mobilized in 1914 until

1919. Wounded twice, he was commended twice for acts of bravery and received the

Military Cross of honor. So he saw fighting and fatality close up and personal. But he

bore witness to this catastrophic war not by depicting the fighting directly, but through

the resulting wounded foliage, for example in his more than capable watercolor Grand

arbre la tte brise par un obus (1917). I find it interesting that he never

straightforwardly represented his battles, only their grim ruins.

Grand arbre la tte brise par un obus (1917) Watercolor, 27 x 21 cm, Photo Alain Leprince

The gallery in which numerous such watercolors were displayed was painted a somehow

appropriate baby blue. This collection of visual pain cooling in that azure setting was

undeniably poignant and full of spiritual fulfillment. La Patellire sketched these images

of disfigured nature while fighting at the front and then finished the work when

convalescing from his wounds or on leave of duty. During this shattering and

excruciating ordeal of war, he also expressed his pained sensitivity through writing two

works that were never published: Le Silence de la guerre et le calme des nuits and

Pomes.

When he returned to civilian life after the war, he was driven by a fervent yearning to

make art, painting between 1921 and his death by natural causes in 1932, an estimated

900 paintings. Much of this work, as influenced by Gustave Courbet, deals with peasant

themes. But La Patellire gives them an unusual sweet softness and peculiar peace, even

when mixing genres by combining country folk themes with mythological tales.

Le repos des paysans (1925) Oil on canvas, 130 x 195 cm, Collection particulire Alain Leprince

During this early productive period La Patellire split his time between Paris and Bois-

Benoit where the close countryside was a persistent source of inspiration. His first mature

paintings on canvas, like Le Repas des paysans Vallet (1923) are obviously

influenced by Cubism, as well. Then the non-Cubist Picassos Sleeping Peasants

(1919) appears to have offered up thematic material for his Le repos des paysans

(1925) where there are also traces evident of the rounded monumental figures of

Picassos neo-Classical period of the early 1920s, such as Picassos breathtaking Two

Women Running on the Beach (1922). This style of work is generally considered a

reaction against the pre-war radicalism of Cubism, and seen as a popular desire in art for

order. But I found that one of the most compelling paintings in the show from that time

was an attractive small, Expressionist-tinged canvas of a brown female nude called Nu

brun (1925) that owes nothing to Picasso.

Nu brun (1925) Oil on canvas, 41 x 33 cm, collection particuliere

Yet La Patellire soon moved towards a less modern but moodier dim chiaroscuro style

evidenced in Le Repos des Moissonneurs (1926) and Le Philosophe la bouteille

(1926), where the wine cellar perched owl, a symbol of death and philosophy, explains

the title of the work. An even darker, otherworldly, blocky style gives La Patellires

L'Enlvement d'Europe au coquillage (1927) a fresh twist to folk myth as he plays on

the power of volume within multiple variations of chiaroscuro.

Le Philosophe la bouteille (1926) Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm, Collection particulire Patrick Berlan

L'Enlvement d'Europe au coquillage (1927) Oil on canvas, 130 x 162 cm Ville de Nantes, Muses des Beaux-arts

P Betton

From 1928 on, La Patellire put aside the black and began to make greater use of pure

color intensity in the unexpected monumental Baigneuses Bandol (1928), a genuinely

pleasurable work of robust figures frolicking in the waves as a storm gathers in the

distance. The artist here takes on the theme of Mediterranean bathers, so dear to Cezanne,

Matisse and Picasso, with a much more vivid color palette than usual. Yet by painting the

sky as obscured by shades of black, he retained an ominous touch that in retrospect can

be seen as a prevision of the next war to come, while also rendering the waves as without

fluid movement. The successive waves seem heavy and frozen, trapping the chunky

bathers between them. Only a tiny radius sun seems to clear a free path on the left, but

time has stopped in this scene. The fun is finishing.

Baigneuses Bandol (1928) Oil on canvas, 114 x 145.8 cm RMN-Grand Palais (MUDO-Muse de lOise) / Adrien

Didierjean

Finally a colorful lyricism blossoms in his late decorative paintings. In December 1928,

Paul Baudouin, La Patellires friend and patron, commissioned him to do a large

pleasing to the eye composition for his dining room that became known as Le Concert

Champtre (1929). The central playful motif is of a woman with violin, bordered by a

bevy of additional women and serene animals that lounge about. La Patellire devoted a

good part of 1929 to it, but it is something of a bombastic overreach that does nothing to

enhance his reputation.

Le Concert Champtre (1929) Oil on canvas, 377 x 202 cm, Collection Larock-Granoff Alain Leprince

In 1930, architect Auguste Perret commissioned a ceiling project from La Patellire

representing the signs of the zodiac. That work was never completed. The grander theme

and scheme of La Patellires existence, his extended fight in the war and his following

artistic flourish, were played out. Those twelve signs, so associated with horoscopic

astrology used to analyze birth charts, had nothing left to tell him. He had passed away.

Joseph Nechvatal