Losing Yourself in the Galleries of Toulouse - The Hôtel d'Assézat

When taking in a new gallery, particularly one outside of London, I tend to go with the intention of seeing specifically one or two things.  Yet invariably these destination pieces are usurped by something that you were not expecting to see, something that takes you completely by surprise and holds your gaze and imagination far longer than anticipated.

My first visit to Copenhagen's National Gallery was all about catching their wonderful collection of Matisses.  But I left having fallen in love with the mournful subjects and tones of Vihelm Hammershøi.  A visit to The Alte Pinakothek in Munich was made with the intention of searching out Rembrandt's Descent from the Cross.  Annoyingly, the Rembrandt that I found was not the one that I coveted; what I'd had in mind was the depiction from 1634 that currently lives in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.  No matter, I left Munich with Albrecht Dürer's mesmerising Self Portrait in a Fur Coat fizzing through my consciousness. 

Albrecht Dürer's Self Portrait in a Fur Coat (1500)

Likewise, when flicking through the guidebook to Toulouse on a visit last summer, it was The Hôtel d'Assézat, the home of the Bemberg Foundation and its unparalleled collection of the works of Pierre Bonnard, that intrigued and then reeled me in.  But, predictably, when visiting I came across something quite wonderful that stole my attention.  

First of all, though, some words on the space that is the Hôtel d'Assézat.  You enter through a gateway that suggests treasure, and find yourself in one of those cobbled courtyards that encourages you to linger in its permanent state of half shade and half sunshine.  In the shady half, lazily occupying the loggia, is a delightful looking café.  Such a shame that we had eaten, otherwise we would certainly have whiled away a lunch-hour spooning up Toulouse's most famous dish cassoulet, a rich 'peasant' stew containing various meats and white beans.  Plus looking at art on a full stomach can make you indolent and unappreciative. 

Hôtel d'Assézat

I paid and then descended stone steps into the building's basement with the intention of working upwards and allowing individual paintings to catch my eye.  Apt then, that a painter obsessed with eyes gave me my first pause.  Odilon Redon, that disarming symbolist famed for ocular monstrosities, here chose a different subject, one that – without reading the title – depicted a naked man being spirited away by a pigeon.  A closer look and L'Enlèvement de Ganymède – or the abduction of Ganymede – sent my mind scurrying back to Troy.  Surely Zeus chose an eagle as a disguise rather than a pigeon – it's definitely a pigeon, and not a dove, no doubt about it – to whisk away 'the loveliest of mortals' to serve the drinks in Olympus?  Either way, I definitely enjoyed it and was left pondering Redon's prosaic bird.  Surprising then, that I cannot find anything that states that it is a pigeon, or indeed something other than Zeus's guise of choice, an eagle.

Odilon Redon - L'Enlèvement de Ganymède

Then I met the unsettling gaze of Henri Fantin-Latour, stern and quizzical, in one of his many self-portraits.  He knocked out loads of these - full sensual lips, pasty skin and an auburn flush in the beard – and if you look at them on the internet, all lined up, they bring to mind the modern craze of angled, pouting selfies, trying over and over again to get one that is just right.  He aims for the full-blown Byronic and falls short, ending up at the Raskolnikov end of the Romantic spectrum.  But in doing so he conjures up something far more interesting, with the painter's ego almost floating out of the canvas.

Henry Fantin-Latour - Portrait de l'artiste (1861)

As for the Bonnards, they were quite lovely.  Which is more or less how Les Nabis (the Prophets) strike you these days: their post-impressionistic 'shock of the new' long extinguished and usurped by the Modernist heights which followed a decade or so later.  Le Moulin Rouge ou Place Blanche stood out, a magnificent painting that captures the bustle of Belle Époque Montmartre.  Dropping your gaze from the burning filaments on the sails of the red windmill, your eye settles on the striking hat shooting out of the lady reveller's head.  It's a noisy piece, untypical of Bonnard: full of chatter and booze, all bathed in a sumptuous brown light which gives it a joyous yet paradoxically melancholy glow.  The best party scenes from the past have that quality. 

Pierre Bonnard - Le Moulin Rouge ou Place Blanche (1896)

None of these Bonnards, though, really left me feeling astonishment.  There certainly wasn't anything to compare to Nu aux bas noires, my introduction to the artist, a serendipitous discovery in, of all places, the Graves Gallery in Sheffield.  That painting helped kill an idle hour waiting for a train back to London, and thus ended a malignant chauvinism towards the capital that had begun to suggest that there wasn't any art worth seeing in England if it wasn't contained within the radius of the M25 motorway.

Pierre Bonnard - Nu aux bas noires (1900)

I feel I should write a whole post on this painting, except that its subject might leave me feeling sheepish.  Besides, it's one that is all about sensibility.  Trying to capture its magic with words would be as elusive as trying to conjure up Proust's involuntary memory with one element - say, the tea or the madeleine - missing.

So, the paintings were entertaining and engaging but it was the building that was looking like it was going to linger longer in my memory.  From one gallery to another I meandered, blissfully tracing hands over cold five hundred year old brick, as I ascended and descended dim stone stairways that were suddenly struck by slivers of sunlight glancing through perimeter stained-glass Renaissance windows.

'The sun comprehending glass'

Fitting then that the painting that really caught my eye was a Renaissance one.  Lucas Cranach's Les amoureux grabs your attention the moment that you walk into the saturnine gloom of a gallery on the first floor.  Initially you're struck by the grotesque subject: a younger woman gleefully preys on an older man's vanity, robbing his purse as he leers in towards her.  But that grotesquery is almost entirely erased by the way that the hands and arms are lost in the dance of the composition, whilst the lush orange and the gloomy green complement each other wonderfully.  The man's underbite makes him a figure of fun; the woman's sly stare dares us to criticise.  "So what", she seems to say, "we're both gaining from this exchange."  Her tight bodice, squeezed impossibly at the waist, also heightens sympathy towards her; the man, at ease in that comfortable, almost smock-like, jacket, indicates where the final power dynamic lies.  

Lucas Cranach the Elder - Les amoureux

It's certainly not the usual subject of choice for Cranach (although Jenny Brown-Rigg, the Exhibitions Director at the Glasgow School of Art, has put together a fascinating piece on six of Cranach's paintings on this theme - check out the similarities between the fourth painting she highlights and this one).  Cranach was, indeed, a man who was more noted for staring down Martin Luther, and then later becoming his best man when the latter decided that it was okay for members of the clergy to marry. 

This relatively unregarded Cranach - infuriatingly, it doesn't even warrant a postcard or a print in the gallery shop - drew me towards an artist that I'd never yet found time for.  Strange, as I've always loved the Chaucerian earthiness that you often find in the work of the Northern European masters.  Those southerners get the plaudits - and quite rightly - but idealism and perfection doesn't always bring a smile to my face in the way that a painting like this Cranach does.  It certainly made me regret missing the Royal Academy retrospective in 2008 (not least, because I might have got an earlier glimpse of the orange outfit that our female 'lover' wears in a quite different predicament): 

Lucas Cranach the Elder - St Helena with the True Cross (1525)

The sign that you've had a great trip to a gallery manifests when you step outside. I didn't feel overwhelmed, weighed down by the knowledge that I'd need countless more trips to do a place justice (visit the Louvre or the Hermitage and realise that even if you were a Parisian or a Russian life is far too short to see all that you want to).  Or fuzzily dissatisfied, never finding pieces to sit down in front of, and live with for ten to fifteen minutes, pondering the quiddity that holds you there.  Instead, I was intrigued and full of the spirit of adventure, realising afresh how ignorant I was of so much.  Indeed, it's almost as if you need to lose yourself completely in a space to find something worth taking away. Drift around a place and let your feet and gaze make the decisions, and don't read the title or the blurb until you've appreciated it outside of its context.  The Hôtel d'Assézat certainly vindicates that approach and might well be worth visiting for the Cranach alone.     

Postscript: Odilon Redon's eagle masquerading as a pigeon puts me in mind of the statue atop Eagle House in London.  Gazing down from its lofty grey perch on Jermyn Street, there is no doubt in my mind that it's an owl.  Are eagles that difficult to depict?  

Eagle or owl?