Studio: international art (37.1906)

Modern French Pastellists

of his fantastic symbolisms, and the meaning is "pump out something of your individuality—to
decidedly more degenerate. His paintings and take the life out of you " ; he sees through your
pastels are generally one-figure studies ; but the body into your soul.

significance of each picture is conveyed as much If M. Levy-Dhurmer paints a native of Morocco,
by the background and surroundings as by the of Italy, or of Holland, he is so impressed with
figure itself. The surroundings play a special and the climatic influences on the nature of the indi-
important part in this artist's work, for they are vidual that the work becomes enveloped with the
almost invariably imaginative, or efforts of memory. characteristics of the country. This is exemplified
In other and less able hands such a proceeding in the children's heads in his pastel drawing, Jennes
might affect the earnestness of the work, but that Tunisiens. It is not the colouring of the laughing,
clearness of vision which is one of M. Levy- mischievous little faces, with their tufts of black,
Dhurmer's salient characteristics enables him to frizzy hair upon their little round heads, that makes
reconstitute and reproduce a landscape that has them Tunisian, but an indefinable something in
impressed him. In fact, the painter not only sees the work itself, that leaves no doubt as to the
again the rocks and the trees, the hills and the country in which they were born. A'icha is also
valleys he has admired, but the same sensations a native of Tunis, and her eyes with their brilliant
that moved him at the time are revived in him blackness tell their own tale,
with scarcely any diminution of strength. The portrait of a young lady reproduced on the

In his Portrait of Georges
Rodenbach, at the Luxem-
bourg Galleries—a view of
" Bruges la Morte " con-
stitutes the background —
that city whose pinioned
roofs and associations of
dreamy dulness appealed so
powerfully to the poet—M.
Levy-Dhurmer evokes the
remembrance of the work
that made Rodenbach
famous, and places the bust
in the same atmosphere in
which the poet wrote, like
a monument raised to his
glory. No one can look
upon his portrait without
recalling the talent of the
departed author, and herein
M. Levy-Dhurmer pays a
graceful tribute to his
memory. As a portrait
painter he has the gift of
grasping the character of
the person before him. He
is the painter of the mind
as well as of the flesh. In
this respect he reminds me
of a passage in the "Journal
des Goncourt," where Ed-
mond de Goncourt tells of
the impressions of M. de
Montesquieu, after a seance
with Whistler. M. Levy-
Dhu rmer seems also to "la ville close" by l. levy-dhurmer

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