Sand2023

George Sand

The Watercolors of GEORGE SAND (she/her/hers)

Essay by Cora Michael

Jill Newhouse Gallery 4 East 81st Street New York, NY Tel (212) 249-9216 info@jillnewhouse.com www.jillnewhouse.com

This catalogue accompanies an exhibition on view November 2023 Jill Newhouse Gallery 4 East 81st Street New York, NY 10028 Tel (212) 249-9216 info@jillnewhouse.com www.jillnewhouse.com

front cover: Waterfall with Distant Mountains (detail, cat. no. 22) opposite: Composition: Tache en vert (detail, cat. no. 21)

copyright 2023 jill newhouse llc design by lawrence sunden, inc.

JILL NEWHOUSE

Sand’s beautiful, skillful, and idiosyncratic drawings demonstrate what a woman’s creative powers can yield when unbounded by convention and limitless in imagination. — Cora Michael

George Sand (1804–1876)

George Sand, the pen name of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Franceuil, was one of the most important French novelists of the nineteenth century, an equal of her male contemporaries Balzac, Flaubert, and Victor Hugo. Her life dovetailed with a tumultuous period in French history that was bracketed by the Napoleonic Empire and the Third Republic, with revolution, war, and seesawing regimes in between. Her parents were from opposite classes, representing the two poles of French society frequently in conflict during this era. Her father, Maurice Dupin de Francueil, was an aristocrat and a distant relative of the King of Poland, while her mother, Antoinette Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, was the working-class daughter of a billiard hall owner and bird vendor. Though born in Paris, Sand spent much of her childhood at Nohant, the family estate in Berry where she was raised by her paternal grandmother. This house, surrounded by gardens and a woodland park, was enormously important to Sand, serving as a refuge and a source of inspiration for her myriad creative pursuits.

Sand’s extraordinary biography—full of passionate love affairs, adventurous travel, and tireless productivity—reads like the stuff of Romantic novels.

Indeed, her experiences informed many of her most famous literary works, such as Indiana , Lélia, and La Mare au Diable , and provided ample fodder to fill her five-volume autobiography, Histoire de ma vie . Sand’s output is staggering—she wrote seventy novels in addition to numerous novellas, plays, criticism, and travel journals—testifying to her prodigious energy as well as her popularity. She was a friend to almost every important artistic and cultural figure of her day, including Balzac, Liszt, Delacroix, Flaubert, and Saint-Beuve, and a lover to Chopin, Musset, and the stage actress Marie Dorval. In an era when women had very little agency, she possessed remarkable independence and freedom. She actively engaged with current events, lobbying Emperor Louis-Napoléon for leniency toward imprisoned rebels following the 1848 Revolution, though she was fiercely critical of the Commune in 1871, having witnessed too much violence and bloodshed in the streets. Sand’s political pragmatism extended to her personal style, as well, as she donned men’s clothing when riding horses or attending the theater, flouting French sumptuary laws. Most remarkable of all, she obtained a divorce from her husband, Casimir Dudevant, and won a series of legal battles to gain financial autonomy as well as custody of her two children, Maurice and Solange. Though she struggled at times, Sand was able to support her family through her work as a successful novelist. And yet, for all

opposite: Variation on the Theme of Birds, Three Waders (cat. no. 2)

her achievements in the literary, political, and personal realms, her work as a visual artist remains little known.

Like most women of Sand’s class, drawing instruction was a core component of her formative education, along with music and dance. She also learned by copying from the Old Masters, a practice common among professional artists. Indeed, Sand drew consistently throughout her life, experimenting with a range of techniques and subject matter, and she often carried a sketchbook with her on her travels. Sand’s sharp eye for physiognomy and the expression of individual character served her equally well as both a writer and an artist. For instance, a series of early figure studies displays a remarkable facility with capturing likenesses, and she considered a career as a portraitist before her first novel appeared in 1830. During this period Sand also drew numerous flowers, plants, landscapes, and architectural views, the latter sometimes conjured from her imagination. Many of these works were intended as decorations for wooden keepsakes called “Spa boxes” after the Belgian resort town where they originated. These are competent if conventional works in both imagery and technique, though there are several outstanding exceptions such as the charming Rococo head of a woman from a snuff box and the delicate collage of a spiky thistle. (cat. nos. 1, 8) Sand’s attentiveness to the texture and detail

of the world around her—that is, her ability to describe things using formal means of line, color, and shading—parallels her facility with words, phrases, and figurative language in her writing. However, none of the drawings she produced before the 1860s prepares one for the radical inventiveness of her taches and dendrites , for it is these works that reveal the true force and originality of Sand’s gift as an artist. Sand referred to her late watercolor and gouache drawings as “ dendrites ” (the term derived from her study of natural history and refers to mineralogical elements) or “ aquarelles à l’écrasage” (crushed watercolors). She made them by applying dollops of pure pigment to a piece of thick Bristol paper, then pressing a second moistened sheet on top. When the sheet was lifted, a series of abstract, textured zones of color were revealed which she then augmented with watercolor and gouache additions. As Sand wrote, “This crushing produces ridges that are sometimes curious. With the aid of my imagination, I see woods, forests or lakes, and I accentuate these vague forms produced by chance.” The images found in the dendrites are thus a fusion of the real and the imaginary, depicting recognizable motifs such as mountains, grottoes, lakes, and castles which are nonetheless entirely fictional. Other works, which Sand called “ taches ” (stains), retain their initial inchoate forms, and remain

purely abstract. These works seem to have developed in an almost instinctive fashion, though they have something in common with the ink blot drawings of Victor Hugo, another writer-artist hybrid. Sand made these remarkable drawings during the last two decades of her life, but the majority were produced during the 1870s. This was a period of relative calm and stability, as her tumultuous love affairs, her endless toil and productivity as a writer, her at-times disillusioning interventions in the world of politics, and her tragic losses—especially the death of Chopin— were now behind her. Sand spent her days at Nohant, enjoying the company of her grandchildren, puttering in the garden, creating amateur theatrical productions with her son, Maurice, and working on her dendrites and taches . These unsigned drawings were made purely for her own private satisfaction, not for financial gain: unlike her novels she was under no contract or pressure to produce them for a profit. Their small scale allowed her to bind them together in albums for her granddaughters, like precious keepsakes or souvenirs. Indeed, Sand often added the miniscule figures of Aurore and Gabrielle and their beloved dog, Fadet, to her dendrites , usually at the base of the landscape, as if to emphasize the intimate, familial context of their production.

opposite: Wildflowers (detail, cat. no. 9)

What is the significance of Sand’s art for viewers today? Is her gender relevant to our understanding and appreciation of her drawings? Sand was often praised by her contemporaries for the androgynous nature of her talent and personality. Elizabeth Barrett Browning dedicated a sonnet to the “large brained woman and great-hearted man who has given herself the name George Sand.” Flaubert wrote “You had to know her as I knew her to realize how much of the feminine there was in this great man, the immensity of tenderness to be found in this genius.” And Turgenev lauded her by declaring, “What a brave man she was, and what a good woman.” These are obviously outdated modes of acclaim, from a time when the world was stuck in binary ruts of all kinds. Sand’s beautiful, skillful, and idiosyncratic drawings demonstrate what a woman’s creative powers can yield when unbounded by convention and limitless in imagination: she was a true artist, her drawings are worth our attention, hers was an art like no other. Cora Michael, PhD, is an independent art historian who was previously Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum and holds a BA in Art History from Vassar College and a Ph.D From the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU.

Suggested Reading

Christian Bernadac. Dessins et Aquarelle–Les Montagnes Bleues . Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1992. Musée de la Vie Romantique. George Sand, Une Nature d’Artiste–Exposition du Bicentenairede Sa Naissance : June 29–November 28, 2004 . Paris: Paris musées, 2004. Raphael Rosenberg and Max Hollein, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Turner Hugo Moreau: Entdeckung Der Abstraktion : October 6, 2007–January 6, 2008 . Frankfurt München: Schirn Kunsthalle, Hirmer, 2007. Maison de Balzac. Dessins D'écrivains Français Du Xixe Siècle : 25 Novembre 1983–26 Février 1984 . Paris: La Maison, 1983.

Provenance note: Many of the works in this catalogue come from the collection of the French company Aristophil which once owned one of the world’s largest collections of books and manuscripts.

Acknowledgements

It is incredibly rewarding to be able to present this long overdue exhibition of the watercolors of George Sand, the first show of its kind in the United States. Thank you to Christa Savino, Gallery Director, and to Amelia Gorman, Registrar, for organizing it all. Cora Michael's catalogue essay perfectly describes the history and evolution of Sand's artwork, as well as its place in art history in 2023, and Jovana Stokic's writing adeptly links Sand's art to that of artists working today. Both writers helped us to formulate a point of view in this presentation. For photography, thank you to Bill Massey, and for graphic design, thanks as always to Larry Sunden. Thank you to the Art Dealers Association of America for inviting the gallery to preview this exhibition in a venue largely devoted to contemporary art, so that the relevance of George Sand's work to modern aesthetics can be made apparent to a larger audience. My interest in George Sand's watercolors began many years ago when I first started travelling to France in search of inventory for the gallery. I am grateful to my colleagues who first showed me her work, Galerie de Bayser, Galerie Paul Prouté, Benoit Choné, Arturo and Corinne Cuellar, and especially Yvon Bionnier. And thanks to Karen Cohen with whom, in those early days, I shared a passion for Sand's work, intuitively recognizing its femininity before gender identification was considered as important an element in its appreciation as it is today. Jill Newhouse

I love these uncultivated, uninhabited places that belong to no one, that are difficult to get into and seem impossible to get out of. J’aime ces lieux incultes, inhabitables, qui n’appartiennent à personne, que l’on aborde difficilement et d’ou il sembles impossible de sortir.

George Sand, Lettres d’un voyageur, I , 1869

1. Portrait-After a Snuffbox (D’après une tabatière) 1846 Verso: Portrait of a Man Watercolor and pencil on paper 5⅞ x 4⅞ in. (15 x 12.5 cm) Titled and dated on reverse in pencil literature: Bernadac, p. 112, no. 177 (illustrated)

Bernadac suggests that Sand was copying this image from a snuffbox decoration that was done in the style of the 18th portraitist Quentin de la Tour.

verso

2. Variation on the Theme of Birds, Three Waders (Variation sur le thème des oiseaux, trois échassiers) Watercolor on paper 3⅜ x 4⅞ in. (8.6 x 12.4 cm)

literature: Bernadac, p. 119, no. 201 (illustrated)

Sand, an avid naturalist and granddaughter of a bird vendor, did a series of watercolors of birds, depicting their silhouettes in decorative flat patterns of color.

3. Little Bird Dendrite, pen and ink on paper 2¾ x 2 in. (7 x 5.2 cm)

4. Variation on the Theme of Birds, Family of Waders (Variation sur le thème des oiseaux, une famille d'echassiers) c. 1850 Watercolor on paper 211/16 x 37/16 in. (6.8 x 8.7 cm)

literature: Bernadac, p. 118, no. 190 (illustrated)

5. Lake Landscape with Rocks and a Cascade (Paysage lacustre avec rochers et cascade) Pencil on paper 3⅛ x 4¼ in. (8 x 11 cm)

exhibition: Paris, Maison de Balzac. Dessins d’écrivains français du XIXe siècle . November 1983–February 1984, no. 174.

Did you see those jagged rock faces glowing like sapphires, and that livid distance where the peaks of the glaciers rose like great spectres in their shrouds? Did you notice, too, that in the sudden passage of darkness, everything seemed to move and shake, just as these mountains were shaking and collapsing?” (Avez-vous vu ces déchiquetures du rocher rayonner comme des saphirs, et ce lointain livide où les cimes des glaciers se levaient comme de grands spectres dans leurs linceuls? Avez-vous remarque aussi que, dans le brusque passage des ténèbres, tout semblait se mouvoir, s’agiter comme ces monts s’ébranlaient pour s’écrouler.) George Sand, Lavinia , 1833

6. Mountainous Landscape (Paysage montagneux ) c. 1850 Watercolor on paper 5⅛ x 8 in. (13.2 x 20.5 cm)

7. Mountainous Landscape with a Lake (Paysage montagneux et lac) Watercolor on paper 43/16 x 5⅜ in. (10.6 x 13.7 cm)

literature: Bernadac, p. 179, no. 271 (illustrated)

8. Common Thistle (Chardon commun) 1848 Watercolor and collage on paper 7¼ x 4⅜ in. (18.4 x 11.1 cm) Titled and dated 3 août 48

Throughout Sand’s career, she used the techniques of decoupage and collage to depict plant life and to enhance watercolors. She sometimes even attached real plant matter to works on paper (see George Sand, 1804-1876, Leather Bound Album of 17 images, including 8 double-sided works, Watercolor, gouache, and collage, Collection of The Morgan Library and Museum, Gift of Karen B. Cohen in Honor of Charles E. Pierce, Jr., 2022.351:1-9)

9. Wildflowers Collage on paper 611/16 x 4 in. (17 x 10.2 cm)

10. The Walled City (La ville fortifiée) Ink wash on paper 2¼ x 3¼ in. (6 x 8.5 cm)

literature: Bernadac, p. 178, no. 267 (illustrated)

This ink drawing references the style of another writer-draughtsman, Victor Hugo, whose speech calling Sand the “Great woman of the Romantic Age” was read at her funeral on June 12, 1876 by Paul Meurice, a writer and close friend to Hugo. In this century that has as its mission the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of the human revolution, gender equality being part of the equality of men, a great woman was needed. . . . George Sand will be one of the prides of our century and our country.

11. Mountainous Landscape with Lake and Wading Bird

(Paysage de montagne: lac et échasser) Dendrite, watercolor with gouache on paper 6½ x 9¼ in. (16.5 x 23.5 cm)

Inscribed reverse by Aurore Sand (1866-1961) granddaughter of the artist: Je certifie que cette aquarelle est une oeuvre authentique de ma grandmère George Sand. Aurore Sand ( I certify that this watercolor is an authentic work by my grandmother George Sand )

literature: Bernadac, p. 175, no. 258 (illustrated)

exhibitions: Paris, Galerie de l’Echaudé Saint-Germain. Dessins d’écrivans . December 1974–January 1975; Paris, Maison de Balzac. Dessins d’écrivans français du XIXe siècle . November 1983–February 1984, no. 197; Paris, Musée de la Vie Romantique. George Sand. Une nature d’artiste . June 29–November 28, 2004, no. 162 (illustrated).

12. Cottage in the Snow (Chalet dans la neige) Watercolor on paper 3 x 4⅜ in. (7.8 x 11.4 cm) Sand made a small series of watercolors of imaginary snow scenes that included igloos, eskimos and even icebergs. (See Bernadac, pp. 121, 122)

At times, the icebergs cut into angular blocks that projected immense canopies fringed with stalactites over our heads; at other times, their flanks widened and we passed through a forest of squat, splayed pillars, monstrous mushrooms topped by Cycopean-style capitals. (Tantôt les icebergs se decoupaient en blocs anguleux qui projetaient au-dessus de nos têtes d’immenses dais frangés de stalactites, tantôt leurs flancs s’écartaient et nous traversions une forêt de pilliers trapus, évasés, monstrueux champignons surmontés de chapiteaux d’un style cycopéen.) George Sand, Laura—A Journey into the Crystal, 1864

13. Imaginary Ruins (Ruines imaginaires) Watercolor on paper 415/16 x 5⅛ in. (12.5 x 13 cm)

This work is related to a work in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Landscape with a Fantastic Castle, 1865 (2013.179)

14. Landscape with a View of the Sea and a Fort (Paysage avec vue sur la mer et un fort) Watercolor on paper 35/16 x 4⅛ in. (8.4 x 10.5 cm)

literature: Bernadac, p. 178, no. 270 (illustrated)

15. Natural Archway to the Sea (Arche naturelle vers la mer) c. 1850 Watercolor on paper 49/16 x 61/16 in. (11.6 x 15.4 cm)

exhibition: Paris, Musée de la Vie Romantique. George Sand. Une nature d’artiste . June 29–November 28, 2004, no. 160.

16. Study of Ruins (Etude de ruines) 1870–76 Gouache on paper 3½ x 411/16 in. (8.9 x 11.9 cm)

exhibition: Frankfurt, Schrin Kunsthalle. Turner Hugo Moreau: Entdeckung der Abstraktion . October 6, 2007–January 6, 2008, no. 56 (illustrated).

17. Composition (Tache V) c. 1850 Watercolor on paper 47/16 x 57/16 in. (11.3 x 13.8 cm)

literature: Bernadac, p. 177, no. 265 (illustrated)

exhibition: Paris, Musée de la Vie Romantique. George Sand. Une nature d’artiste . June 29–November 28, 2004, no. 166 (illustrated).

18. Landscape with Lake and Mountains (Paysage avec lac et montagnes) Watercolor on paper 49/16 x 6⅛ in. (11.6 x 15.6 cm)

The lake was calm that evening—calm as the last days of autumn, when the winter wind does not yet dare to disturb the mute waves, and the pink gladioli of the shore sleep, cradled by soft ripples . . . then the surface of the lake seemed to become as vast as that of the sea. . . (Le lac était calme ce soir-là, calme comme les derniers jours de l’automne, alors que le vent d’hiver n’ose pas encore troubler les flots muets, et que les glaïeuls roses de la rive dorment, bercés par de molles ondulations . . . alors la surface du lac sembla devenir aussi vaste que celle de la mer . . . ) George Sand, Lélia , 1833

19. Composition (Tache lavender) c. 1870 Watercolor on paper 4½ x 6 in. (11.4 x 15.2 cm)

exhibition: Frankfurt, Schrin Kunsthalle. Turner Hugo Moreau: Entdeckung der Abstraktion . October 6, 2007–January 6, 2008, no. 63 (illustrated).

20. Composition in Green (Etude en vert) 1870–76 Watercolor and gouache on paper 4½ x 6 in. (11.5 x 15.5 cm)

exhibition: Frankfurt, Schrin Kunsthalle. Turner Hugo Moreau: Entdeckung der Abstraktion . October 6, 2007–January 6, 2008, no. 59 (illustrated), counterproof of no. 58 in the catalogue which is in reverse.

21. Composition (Tache en vert) c. 1870 Watercolor on paper 411/16 x 3½ in. (11.9 x 8.9 cm)

exhibition: Frankfurt, Schrin Kunsthalle. Turner Hugo Moreau: Entdeckung der Abstraktion . October 6, 2007–January 6, 2008, no. 57 (illustrated).

22. Waterfall with Distant Mountains (Chute d'eau avec montagnes lointaines) 1875 Dendrite, watercolor and gouache on paper 5⅞ x 9⅜ in. (15 x 24.1 cm)

Inscribed on reverse by Aurore Sand (1866-1961), granddaughter of the artist: Cette aquarelle est de ma grandmère George Sand et a eté peinte en 1879. Aurore Sand ( This watercolor is by my grandmother George Sand and was painted in 1879 )

The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route. (Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué.)

George Sand in a letter to Armand Barbès, 12 May 1867

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