.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
Henri Hayden’s Joueur de mandoline of 1920 is a large and colorful example of the artist’s distinct form of Synthetic Cubism. Here, planes of color overlap and collide to create a dynamic vision of a mandolin player strumming his instrument. Just as his friends and colleagues, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had done, Hayden has rendered this scene from multiple viewpoints, presenting a vibrant snapshot of his subject. A series of playful visual clues—the musician's costume, his instrument, and the interior in which he stands—allow the viewer to build up a composite image. In Joueur de mandoline, Hayden revels in texture, using a variety of different strokes and methods of paint application to aid in the pictorial construction of the work, including brightly hued ‘confetti’ dots of paint in the harlequin-like collar and finely rendered trompe l’oeil patterning.
Polish-born, Hayden first came to France in 1907, charmed by Paul Gauguin and the Pont-Aven movement. He soon found inspiration in the landscape of his beloved Brittany which he would frequent every summer until 1921. The regular visits produced a series of seascapes at Pouldu conveying his affection for the surrounding nature and the subject. Although Hayden continued to vacation in Brittany, he, like most of his peers at the time, fell under the spell of Paul Cezanne, whose works he would most likely encounter through Ambroise Vollard and at Cezanne’s popular retrospective of 1907. The appreciation Hayden developed for Cezanne’s oeuvre is captured in a 1919 photograph depicting the artist in his studio, with a reproduction of Cezanne’s Le garçon au gilet rouge on the wall.
Hayden first became interested in the artistic possibilities of Cubism during the First World War while living in Montparnasse, inspired by Cezanne, as well as by his contemporaries including Picasso, Braque, Jean Metzinger and Gino Severini. By 1915, the artist had signed a contract with Léonce Rosenberg, the renowned cubist dealer, officially entering the avant-garde Cubist group. Hayden would later refer to this transformative time in his career: “I came to Cubism all by myself […] I only absorbed Cubism in 1915, after having swallowed and digested all of French painting in a few years. This rapid absorption led me to a spirit of synthesis that coincided, without my knowing it” (quoted in S. Beckett, P. Chabert and C. Zagrodzki, Hayden, Paris, 2005, p. 90).
Lovingly held in the collection of Nannette and Herbert Rothschild and their descendants since 1956, Joueur de mandoline was previously in the distinguished collection of Jacques and Colette Ulmann. In her reminiscences, Nannette Rothschild tells of her meeting with the artist in Paris, “Haden was quite weak but was still painting […] We informed him that we had just bought his ‘Mandolin Player’ and this pleased him very much. He told us that one day he had been working on his well-known ‘Three Musicians’ of 1919-20, when Picasso came to visit him. Seeing the painting, Picasso became very excited about it and said, ‘I will do one on the same theme, only mine will be better’ but Hayden explained, ‘I then decided to do my ‘Three Musicians’ over again in three separate panels, and it is one of these panels that you have bought. Picasso was wrong,’ he added, ‘mine is better.’” (op. cit., 1996, pp. 84-85).
Polish-born, Hayden first came to France in 1907, charmed by Paul Gauguin and the Pont-Aven movement. He soon found inspiration in the landscape of his beloved Brittany which he would frequent every summer until 1921. The regular visits produced a series of seascapes at Pouldu conveying his affection for the surrounding nature and the subject. Although Hayden continued to vacation in Brittany, he, like most of his peers at the time, fell under the spell of Paul Cezanne, whose works he would most likely encounter through Ambroise Vollard and at Cezanne’s popular retrospective of 1907. The appreciation Hayden developed for Cezanne’s oeuvre is captured in a 1919 photograph depicting the artist in his studio, with a reproduction of Cezanne’s Le garçon au gilet rouge on the wall.
Hayden first became interested in the artistic possibilities of Cubism during the First World War while living in Montparnasse, inspired by Cezanne, as well as by his contemporaries including Picasso, Braque, Jean Metzinger and Gino Severini. By 1915, the artist had signed a contract with Léonce Rosenberg, the renowned cubist dealer, officially entering the avant-garde Cubist group. Hayden would later refer to this transformative time in his career: “I came to Cubism all by myself […] I only absorbed Cubism in 1915, after having swallowed and digested all of French painting in a few years. This rapid absorption led me to a spirit of synthesis that coincided, without my knowing it” (quoted in S. Beckett, P. Chabert and C. Zagrodzki, Hayden, Paris, 2005, p. 90).
Lovingly held in the collection of Nannette and Herbert Rothschild and their descendants since 1956, Joueur de mandoline was previously in the distinguished collection of Jacques and Colette Ulmann. In her reminiscences, Nannette Rothschild tells of her meeting with the artist in Paris, “Haden was quite weak but was still painting […] We informed him that we had just bought his ‘Mandolin Player’ and this pleased him very much. He told us that one day he had been working on his well-known ‘Three Musicians’ of 1919-20, when Picasso came to visit him. Seeing the painting, Picasso became very excited about it and said, ‘I will do one on the same theme, only mine will be better’ but Hayden explained, ‘I then decided to do my ‘Three Musicians’ over again in three separate panels, and it is one of these panels that you have bought. Picasso was wrong,’ he added, ‘mine is better.’” (op. cit., 1996, pp. 84-85).