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Right: Cassigneul, La Plage Aux Hortensias, 1985
[More images after the end of the post]
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Raoul Dufy:
"Mes yeux sont faits pour effacer ce qui est laid"
("My eyes were made to erase what is ugly")
A couple of days ago, I posted some images by Jean Pierre Cassigneul, a painter whose print I have carried around for many years. Yet, I don't know (or didn't bother to know) much about it, or him.
It is Dufy who has always attracted me. From a long time back, I started to study his vivid colors and exotic (French) locales. He painted a variety of subjects, but almost always the same ones. He painted mostly the French coastline, often in southern France in Nice, but sometimes in the north in Deauville and Honfleur. He scatters his scenes with people. His themes include: at the racehorses; sailboats; views of the sea through open widows; bouquets of flowers; musical instruments; and some famous European (mostly French) towns and buildings. He was also a diverse artist and designer, making textile prints, tapestries, murals, furniture, woodcuts, lithography, ceramics and theater sets.
Dufy is certainly the more important painter. Cassigneul never got the similar popularity. I think Cassigneul paints well. His subjects are pleasing and his paintings pretty. But there is a lack of completeness in his paintings, like a slightly blurred photograph, or a painting without the moldings of light and dark (shadow and light) to give them a three dimensional quality.
For all of Dufy's Fauvist "seemingly wild brush work and strident colors...with [his] subject matter [having] a high degree of simplification and abstraction [source]" his paintings are defined and sure, even if they often look like watercolor sketches. Sail boats have clear lines; horses are molded and given rounded bodies through dark and light paint; the sea is differentiated with white paint for crests and dark blue for troughs; the outer and inner colors of petals are given different shades; and he painted portraits of actual, recognizable people, rather than anonymous subjects like Cassigneul.
Cassigneul paintings are pleasantand flattering to the women, who are his central (overwhelming) theme. But they are always anonymous women, and he tells us nothing about their personal backgrounds: no names, titles, positions, or even relations. Many have dark, vacant eyes.
Dufy's subjects look anonymous, but they are seldom alone, and are almost always within a social context of the horse races, at the regattas, or on piers and promenades. We recognize the individuals and groups of individuals through their social and cultural milieu. Where his subjects are alone, they have distinct features. They are almost exclusively women, either painted as portraits or nudes. And in many of his portraits, he gives us the names of these female subjects.
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Right: Cassigneul, Profile, 1982
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Right: Cassigneul, Dans le Train Bleu, Côte d'Azur, 1970
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Right: Cassigneul, Femme au Balcon, Vue de l'Avenue Foch, 1990
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Right: Cassigneul, Longchamp, ca. 1967
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Right: Cassigneul, Dimanche au bois, 2008