Fancy Ball, by Rodolpho Chambelland: The
figuration of frenzy
Arthur Valle
VALLE,
Arthur. Fancy Ball, by
Rodolpho Chambelland: The figuration of frenzy. 19&20, Rio de Janeiro, v. III, issue 4, oct. 2008. https://www.doi.org/10.52913/19e20.III4.14b [Português]
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Rodolpho Chambelland
(1879-1967), Fancy Ball, 1913
Oil on Canvas, 149 x
209 cm.
Rio de Janeiro, National Museum of Fine Arts
1. In the Modern and Contemporary Brazilian Art Gallery
of Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum of Fine Arts (NMFA/RJ), it is presently in
exhibition a painting with which even the less initiated art connoisseur cannot
avoid to be impressed. Getting closer to such a work of remarkable dimensions
(149 x 209 cm), a supposed visitor would perceive, in a first moment and with
growing clearness, the figures of fancied dancers that, alone or in pairs, seem
to agitate frenetically in their eternal immobility. However, when such same
visitor narrow sufficiently his distance from the work, the figures would start
to dissolve in front of his eyes and would frankly exhibit that with which they
are built on: aspersed, sprinkled and scattered paint, thickened with bold
strokes of brush and palette knife. In this proximity, our visitor could then
read the painting’s tag: it is inscribed on it its title - Fancy Ball [Baile
à fantasia - Figure 1] -, as also the name of its author - the painter, decorator and teacher Rodolpho Chambelland (1879-1967).
2. When he painted Fancy Ball, in 1913, Rodolpho - brother of another talented artist native of Rio de
Janeiro, Carlos Chambelland -,
although was still considered by many critics as a ‘young’ artist, was not,
anyhow, a beginner. Former free student of the National School of Fine Arts
(NSFA), he conquered, in the 1905’s General Exhibition of Fine Arts, the
highest reward that an artist could yearn for in the artistic milieu of Rio de
Janeiro - the Voyage Prize to a Foreign Country -, which gave to him a two
years stay in Europe, especially in Paris. In 1911, Rodolpho came back to the
Old World, as a member of the team of decorators of the Brazilian Pavilion in
the Universal Exhibition of Turin, starting, this way, a well-succeeded career as
a painter of public decorations. In the General Exhibition of 1912, he won the
Gold Medal, with a portrait figuring José Mariano Filho.[1] Lastly, as a corollary of his consecration in the
official artistic milieus of the First Republic, Chambelland started to occupy,
after a contest made in 1916, the chair of Nude Model Drawing of the NSFA. To
win this last Office - in which he substituted his ancient master Zeferino da Costa and which he
occupied until his retirement, in 1946 -, certainly contributed the great
success that Chambelland acquired with the Fancy Ball, when the painting
was exhibited in the General Exhibition of 1913.
3. On the other side the painting that gave to him the
refereed Voyage Prize in 1905, entitled Feasting Bacchantes [Bachantes
em festa - Figure 2], had not small affinities with Fancy Ball. A
work in which Gonzaga Duque, in a
praising critic, saw “much talent and
not a little quantity of skill,”[2] Feasting Bacchantes, as the name itself tells, portrays a group of
worshippers of the Greek god Dionysius, called Bacchus by the
ancient Romans, dancing in the midst of a sunny landscape. In the time it was
made, the work was linked to the already well established genre of
‘neo-Pompeian’ paintings
and, simultaneously, seems to dialogue with a perceptible tendency in the
panorama of Brazilian letters that was defined by the reference to ancient
Greece and to paganism as a privileged field for the exhibition of the ideals
of moral liberality, perceptible in the writings of authors like Martins Fontes,
Raul de Leoni and Alvaro Moreyra.[3] Feasting Bacchantes was anticipating then, eight years before, some
of the traces that can be verified in Fancy Ball, either in terms of
content, as in terms of composition: it is, for instance, in the characters of Feasting
Bacchantes that we shall seek for the precedents of the young girl with the
tambourine, which is figured in the extreme left of the Ball.
4. Based on my investigations, it seems that Fancy
Ball was not exhibited before the referred General Exhibition of 1913;
besides that, the painting does not seem to be the result of any commission. It
is probable, therefore, that it was thought of, since the beginning, as a piece
that would figurate with distinction in the environment of the ‘Salon’. The
Exhibition of 1913’s vernissage occurred in August 30, and it was open
to the public in the first of September, with great pomposity, including the
presence of the then President of the Republic, the Marshal Hermes da Fonseca.
Besides the Fancy Ball, which figured under the number 56 in the
exhibition’s catalog, Chambelland exhibited there more two other works, the Portrait
of the Doctor A. P. [Retrato do doutor A. P.] (n.57)
and the Portrait of the Doctor A. B. [Retrato da
doutora A. B.] (n.58). From the beginning, these works, especially the Ball,
have mobilized the critic’s attention, as one can easily realize by consulting
the periodicals of the time.
5. On the next day after the vernissage, an
anonymous commentator of the newspaper The Press [A Imprensa]
highlighted the Ball among the paintings of the competition most “worthy of attention.” [4] In September 5, the columnist of the
section “Art Notes” of the Business Newspaper [Jornal do
Commercio] - much
probably Carlos Américo do Santos
- called the attention, right in the
beginning of his series of reviews dedicated to the exhibition of 1913, to
Chambelland’s
painting, focusing on his technical bravery and the essential Brazilian
character of his subject:
6.
Undoubtedly, the
painting that more readily strikes and thrills the attention is the so-called
“Fancy Ball”, by the young artist Rodolpho Chambelland. It is a powerful note
of color, a magnificent specimen of colorist technique made with singular taste
and ability.
7.
The subject of
this painting has great local character, and adapts completely to the treatment
that the artist gave to it, who knew how to interpret with so much happiness
its popular spirit. It even does not lack the lovely expression and the
somewhat erotic feeling of dance.[5]
8. The notorious critic Gonçalo Alves also initiated his
series of notes about the ‘Salon’ of 1913 by the paintings of Rodolpho
Chambelland. Specifically in relation to the Ball, he wrote the
following lines:
9.
The third
painting (56) is a tumultuous [...] Fancy Ball. It seems that the
artist, tired of the tranquility of his models, suffered the impetus of an
intimate revolt, and guided himself his brushes’ rebellion. It is a
hallucinating canvas. Serpentines, velvets, ermines and confetti, agitate and
whirl about. The maxixe drag the pairs to the stage. There is a kind of
[unreadable] to the front ground that brings the face triumphantly nude. The
rest are under the cares of the precautions of style...
10.
[...] Rod. Chambelland gave another
interesting document of his great progress. I confess that he pleases me less
than any one of the portraits, despite of recognizing the flagrant with which
the artist reached the movement of some of the characters of his composition.
11.
Rod. Chambelland
conquered evidently the empathy of the public with the works exhibited in the
present “Salon”. It would be proper, then, “par droite de
conquête”, to make the first reference in these columns to the works now
exhibited.[6]
12. Almost two weeks after the opening of the General
Exhibition, the enthusiasm in relation to the Fancy Ball seemed not to
have ended. The columnist G. de O., from The Daily Mail [O Correio da
Manhã], who saw in Rodolpho and in his brother Carlos, as well as in other
painters of his generation, like Arthur
Timótheo, Alvim Menge or
Luiz Cristophe, “the overall vitality that projects them above the dispute”, gave prominence to the victorious reception of the
painting:
13.
Rodolpho is
already throwing himself onto the great jobs where the difficulties are piling
up in order that, not seldom, they, conquered, testify his talents of a
conscious artist.
14.
His Ball has
considerable qualities and it would even provoke a page of judicious criticism
praising its merits, in the subtle background of some rare defects. He has for
this reason the copious and abundant consecration in the admiration and in the
applause.[7]
15. But, that ‘consecration’ of the Fancy Ball was not limited to the
admiration and the applause, equally perceptible in the other critics published
at the time. In the September 14, 1913, edition, the same Daily Mail was
advertising that the list of works to be purchased by the NSFA, proposed by the
General Exhibition’s Directing Commission, had been approved and that the Fancy
Ball would be bought for 5:000$000 (five million réis [contos de
réis]). Among the paintings purchased on that year - which, being part of
the NSFA’s pinacotheca, today are held in the NMFA/RJ -, such quotation was the
highest: neither works of renowned masters as Baptista da Costa or Gustavo Dall'Ara had
reached such an equal price.[8] Since then the work have being copied and commented
with prominence in all the major NMFA’s catalogues, as well as in the most
meaningful works of references about Brazilian painting that appeared in the
last decades.[9]
16. Much of the immediate appeal that Fancy Ball
keeps still today, having passed almost one hundred years of its accomplishment
is due to the subject figured in it. Undoubtedly, we can see represented in the
painting some particularities of the ancient Carnival that today had fallen
into oblivion, both in relation to the fancies (cf. the ‘Dominos’, turned
backwards), as well as in relation to the dance steps of the carnival revelers
(they dance, as was pointed out by Gonçalo Alves, the maxixe, a rhythm
that, in the beginning of the years 1910’s, was still considered polemic due to
the nimble and sensual fashion in which it was danced). However, I believe that
the frenzy evolution of the figures inside a closed room, studded with confetti
and serpentines, can, even then, be easily identified by the majority of
today’s connoisseurs.
17. The fact is that the essence of the balls in closed clubs
seems to have changed little since the moment in which Chambelland painted his
canvas: these balls represented then an already well established tradition,
initiated still in the middle of the nineteenth-century, as a kind of reaction
by the elite and the middle class to the feasts of the streets, characterized
by the little refined play of the oldtime carnival [entrudo].
The contrast between an ‘external’ Carnival, popular and rude, and another
‘internal’, more elitist and refined, was perpetuated through the decades that
followed, and it was this later version of the feast that Chambelland choose to
fix in his canvas.
18. Beyond its intrinsic qualities, Fancy Ball
represents, no doubt, one of the highest points in the relationship between
visual arts and Carnival, a relationship that, since the end of the
nineteenth-century until the present, has questioned the distinction between
erudite and popular art, whose history, I believe, was not completely studied.
It is even possible to claim that, at least in the Rio de Janeiro, no other
popular feast is so intensely related to the visual arts like Momo’s
festivities. More precisely, as Mário Barata well anticipated in a text written
almost fifty years ago,[10] that
relationship presents two main sides: the first is related to the effective
participation of artists in the elaboration of the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro;
the second is related to the representation of the Carnival in works of drawing
and painting. Here, albeit quickly, I would like to dwell on the two sides of
the question.
19. We know that it is from the final years of the Second
Regency that start to appear the news of famed artists being hired by clubs,
carnival societies or ‘cordões’ to decorate the salons, to prepare allegorical
vehicles and/or to paint standards. This last activity is the one from which
there are more extant records. In the last Imperial Carnival, in 1889, for
instance, Rodolpho Amoêdo and Décio Villares
made the paintings of standards for
two of the most traditional rival carnival societies - respectively, the Devil’s
Lieutenants [Tenentes do Diabo] and the Fenians [Fenianos];[11] by
doing it, we can say, they were quite anticipating the ‘duel’ that they would fight, in the field of ideas, in the
occasion of the Reform in the Rio de Janeiro’s Academy of Arts in 1890. But Amoêdo and Villares
were not the only artists of renown who have made standards. As it is listed by
the writer Luiz Edmundo, recalling the festivities of the Momo in his youth, “Henrique Bernaredelli, for instance, has painted
in his youth several standards like this. Belmiro de Almeida had garb in saying that he painted
them. We know, still, many standards being painted by artists as Helios Seelinger, the Timóteo brothers,
Chambelland and Fiúza
Guimarães.”[12]
20. Besides that, several ‘erudite’ artists had worked,
since the first decade of the Republic, as ‘technicians’, the term by which
were known, in the epoch, the professionals that were dedicated to the creation
and the accomplishment of the processions of carnivals.[13] It was the case of the scenographers of Italian
descent Gaetano Carrancini and Oreste Coliva; of the already mentioned Fiúza
Guimarães, tireless collaborator for the Fenians; of Púbio Marroig, organizer
of the procession of the Democrats [Democráticos];[14] of
Modestino Kanto, the Devil’s Lieutenants sculptor and scenographer, who
was already much renowned even before of wining the Voyage Prize to a Foreign
Country, in the General Exhibition of 1918.[15] André Vento, Manoel Faria, and the inveterate
bohemian Calixto (K. Lixto) Cordeiro also acted out as ‘technicians’, among many
others.
21. The other side of the relationship between the erudite
artists and the feast of Momo referred above, the representation of Carnival in
drawings and paintings, is here the matter of my interests more directly. In
the field of graphical arts and caricature, for instance, it is well known the
long tradition of images that, say, beginning with Jean-Baptiste Debret,
crosses the entire nineteenth-century and has one of its high points in the
illustrations of Angelo Agostini, an artist born in Italy whom was one of the most
prominent figures of Rio de Janeiro’s press in the ending decades of the
nineteenth-century; in several opportunities, Agostini portrayed the Carnival
or used it as an instrument to transmit his acid criticisms to the Brazilian
political situation. In that same field, it is necessary to remember still the
exceptional work of an overall constellation of caricaturists and drawers that,
having appeared during the First Republic, dedicated themselves with huge
interest to the festivities of Momo. It is worth remembering, in this sense,
names as those of Raul Pederneiras, of the referred K. Lixto, J. Carlos, Nono, J. B., Julião
Machado and the modernist Di
Cavalcanti; Rodolpho Chambelland himself also produced nice illustrations
inspired in motives from the Carnival.[16]
22. However, it is more difficult to reconstruct the
genealogy of Brazilian paintings which versed about Carnival subjects, once are
rare the written references and - still more - the iconographical records of
paintings of that genre. Even then, the most probable is that the Fancy Ball
was not, in the time it was made, something without precedents. In 1908, for
instance, Helios Seelinger exhibited, in an individual show held by the
Commercial Museum, a composition entitled Carnival’s Frieze [Frisa
carnavalesca], which was commented by Gonzaga Duque in an article of the
Kósmos magazine, in which two fragments of the work were reproduced.[17] The
choice of the subject by Seelinger was very comprehensible for the Carnival was
being adapted itself, almost naturally, to that ‘Pantheist’ vein which the painter developed in the ateliers that
he frequented in Munich since the middle of the years 1890’s. On formal grounds, however, the markedly decorative
conception of the Carnival’s Frieze by Seelinger stands back from the
more ‘realist’ record of Chambelland’s canvas.
23. Significantly, in the same 1913 ‘Salon’, Arthur
Timotheo da Costa exhibited another painting that versed about the Carnival,
entitled The Next Day [O Dia Seguinte - Figure 3]. We could say that this work constitutes a true pendant
to the Fancy Ball, showing what was continually interpreted as a
melancholic moment that happened after the frenzy of Chambelland’s painting[18] -
one of the characters, the Pierrot in white, even seems to be repeated in the
two works. It is difficult to say what kind of agreement happened between
Chambelland and Timótheo - acquainted
since long - to the
exhibition of the two so interrelated paintings, in the same dispute; the fact
is that the critics of the time realized the obvious connection, and,
sometimes, the two works were commented together - with clear disadvantage to
the painting of Arthur Timótheo, which suffered criticism due to its esquisse
nature and its more shadowy aspect.
24. That simultaneous exhibition of the Fancy Ball
and The Next Day in the ‘Salon’ of 1913 seems, in itself, the sign of the
interest to the subjects of Carnival that existed lively among the Brazilian
artists of the epoch. I can list here some of the possible reasons behind this:
on one side, without looking too provincial, the Carnival incarnated an
essential Brazilian nature and a ‘local character’ eagerly sought after and
esteemed in an artistic milieu as that of the First Republic, which constantly
questioned itself about its distinctive identity. On the other side, was not
the Carnival, equally, an aspect of that dynamic and ephemeral modernity
praised already in the writings of Baudelaire, a true icon of that bohemian
‘heroism’ that marked all the generation of Chambelland?
25. Still in this sense of the images of modernity, it is
worth remembering that an entire thematic vein, which versed about new ways of
sociability, imposed itself and started to be widely explored by the artists in
Europe, since the middle of the nineteenth-century - in special by the
so-called independents, some of which with whom Chambelland had declared
affinities.[19] Not
by chance, in the production of such artists, we can find works that establish
great affinity with the Fancy Ball of Chambelland. I will limit myself
to some relatively known French examples: in 1873/74, for instance, Edouard
Manet painted a Bal masqué à l'Opéra [Figure 4], which, in relation to the subject, is much like the
Fancy Ball - although
it is considerably divergent in its formal conception, marked by the singular
inflexibility of the majority of the figures. A painter like Pierre-Auguste
Renoir has approached sometimes the agitation of the dance scenes, as in his
triptych La danse à Bougival, La danse à la campagne and La
danse à la ville, painted between 1882 and 1883; but it is the famous Le
Moulin de la Galette (1876) [Figure 5], in its iridescent fabric and in the attitude of the
couples of dancers represented in the left, that his painting most resembles,
in spirit, the Fancy Ball. Other artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, in La
danse au “Moulin Rouge” (1899/90) [Figure 6] and perhaps even more Marius-Joseph Avy, in his
amazing Bal Blanc (1903) [Figure 7], produced works in which it is plausible that
Chambelland, during his stay in the Light City, has seized direct suggestions
of composition and of treatment that, years later, would reemerge in the
occasion of the production of his Fancy Ball.
26. The relationship of Chambelland’s painting with the French works referred above
becomes much more evident when we analyze the compositional methods of the
Brazilian painter. A closer look enables us to perceive how the vertiginous
scene that is presented before our eyes - at first sight so informal, as if it
was an instantaneous photographic - is based on one of the most calculated composition.
Delineating the heads of all the characters, we can evidence that the sinuous
line that results [in blue, in Scheme 1] is organized around an explicit and quite stable horizontal direction [in
red, in the same Scheme 1]. Another line [diagonal in red, below, in Scheme 1] links the feet of the dancers, since the couple of
Pierrot and Columbine in the first stage, to the right, going through another
couple in half distance, and arriving, finally, to the girl that holds a
tambourine, in the background, to the extreme left.
27. This founding structure, as well as a series of other
compositional parallelisms that relate the characters of the Fancy Ball
one with the others [Scheme 2
and Scheme 3], evidences how the frenzy aspect that comes from the
work does not find echo in a merely random grouping of figures: much on the
contrary, the frenzy comes, paradoxically, from a pictorial conception
extremely calculated. A very similar founding structure can be seen in the
works of Renoir, Lautrec and Avy referred above [Figure 8], which suggests that a truly compositional type,[20] associated to representations of dance scenes - but
not limited to them[21] -, was deeply diffused in western painting, in the
ends of the nineteenth-century. By way of this type, the artists could
offer a precisely composed representation of an important subject underlying
their paintings, that is, the absence of a common purpose by the characters, a
symptom of the atomization of modern society, marked by individualism.
28. The diagonal lines of Scheme 1, Scheme 2
and Scheme 3, which suggests special recessions, are equally
responsible, in an elementary compositional level, by the strong effect of
dynamism that emanates from all the main figures of the Fancy Ball:
centripetally displaced from their vertical axis, they ‘equilibrate’
precariously over their unstable foundations [Scheme 4]. I hold great importance to this linear play,
somewhat arid if compared to the work that it synthesizes, for judging that, in
the context of Brazilian art from the First Republic, it is overwhelmed with
semantic implications. In order to demonstrate that, however, I shall make a
reference - necessarily brief - to the new concepts of artistic expression that
were gaining grounds in the painting of the epoch.
29. In this sense, what one can see among the painters of
the First Republic is a truly ‘eclectic’ acquaintanceship between, on one side,
already secular conceptions, like those purported by the theoreticians of the
Renaissance and systematized by Charles le Brun, still in the
seventeenth-century, which professed an idea of expression founded essentially
upon the human figure, above all upon their physiognomic play, and, on the
other side, more ‘modern’ conceptions of expression, which thought artistic
expression as being transmitted even by the purely visual characteristics of
the elements that constitute the image (line, color, texture, etc.).
30. In this last case, it is noteworthy the diffusion of
the ideas of the artist and Dutch theoretician David Pierre Giottino Humbert
de Superville, especially those
expressed in his book Essai sur les signes inconditionnels dans l'art
(Leiden, 1827-1832). On that work, Superville’s schemes - which would become much famous - are sketched for the
first time in relation to three fundamental expressions, calmness, sadness
and joy. The author makes correspond, to each of these emotions, a
specific linear arrangement [Figure 9]: the central image, ruled by horizontal lines, would
characterize calmness; the left one, with its expansive diagonals, would
express the feeling of joy; the right one, with its convergent diagonals,
would correspond to the feeling of sadness.
31. The schemes of Superville have notable analogies with
some drawings made still in the seventeenth-century by Le Brun. But, in the
writings of the Dutch, the realm of what is expressive is not anymore
restricted to what is merely anthropocentric and is expanded up to the point of
including abstract elements. To conclude, for Superville, the faces of his
schemes transmit their specific expressions because the lines with which they
are made are already full of meaning. That conception, which keeps analogies
with those put forward by an author like Johann Kaspar Lavater[22], imply
a singular generalization of the schemes’ application: according to it, every
phenomenon, be it animated or unanimated, becomes, therefore, potentially
expressive[23].
32. In order to exemplify that, I will concentrate here on
the quick consideration of the scheme of the expansive diagonals, for its
analogy with the scheme of the Fancy Ball, highlighted in Scheme 4. By one side, along the Essai, this scheme is
associated, beyond joy, with an extensive series of expressive and even moral
values, which have an analogous dynamic: vivid passions, movement, vacillation,
agitation, dispersion, voluptuousness, unstableness, etc [Figure 10]. By the other side, it is related not only to human
figures (some of them bearers of precise iconographical meanings, as the
goddess Venus or a Bacchant), but, equally, to non-human motives (animal and
vegetal) and to unanimated motives, as architectonic elements [Figure 11].
33. The idea that the abstract structures that are
subjacent to what is seen are already loaded with signification stands back
from the more known conceptions of artistic expression, according to which the
later is derived from psychological processes centered on the observing
subject, as the sympathetic association or projection. Superville puts forward,
then, some theories that only would be properly formulated in the
twentieth-century, as the Gestalt theory of expression.[24] For us it seems that in Chambelland’s Fancy Ball, in which the abstract scheme of
expansive diagonals is used as structural skeleton for the composition, it is
condensed one of the most interesting possibilities contained in the Essai,
that of impregnating not only the face of a figure, but an entire painting - or
even an overall style - with a determinate set of expressive values.
34. The hypothesis that Chambelland could have used the
ideas of expression formulated by Humbert de Superville wins support when one
considers the latter’s referred diffusion in the Brazilian artistic milieu.
Since the end of the years 1910’s,
for instance, references to them can be found in class syllabus, texts, and
theses of artists that graduated in the NSFA during the First Republic.[25]
Certainly, Superville’s ideas
were known here before that. Much probably, the Brazilians must have ‘read’ the
Essai in an indirect fashion, filtered by its diffusion in the artistic
context of the IIIe Republique in France. Very important, in this
sense, was the appropriation made by Charles Blanc, which, in the introduction of his famous Grammaire
des arts du dessin (Paris, 1867), he cited directly the thoughts
of Superville. By its turn, it is notorious the influence of Blanc’s Grammaire - whose third edition, dated of 1876, the library of the
NSFA has exemplars - in
the production of famous French artists, which the most famous proved case,
probably, was that of Georges Seurat.[26]
35. The reflex of Superville’s ideas, through France, can be perceived equally in
some details of Chambelland’s
Fancy Ball. An example is the face of Pierrot on the foreground of the
painting, which seems to derive from the experiences made by the Physiologist
Guillaume B. A. Duchenne de Boulogne, revealed in his album Mecánisme de
la physionomie humaine ..., of 1862.[27] Associating electrophysiology and photography,
Duchenne was producing and registering physiognomic expressions while
stimulating, with electric shocks, the facial muscles of patients assaulted by
facial paralysis - insensible,
therefore, to pain. Such photographs where cited and reproduced in other famous
works, as those of Charles Darwin[28] or
of Mathias Duval,[29]
teacher of Anatomy at the École des Beaux Arts in France. A
comparison between illustrations taken from these works with the referred
Pierrot of Chambelland [Figure 12]
reveals flagrant analogies and it is the sign of an intense circulation of
figurative references, whose study waits for its due deepening.
36. I let deliberately for the end another aspect of the Fancy
Ball that, although somewhat distinct from those that were presented here,
contributes in the same decisive fashion to the frenzy character of the work:
the vibration of the fabric of its surface.
37. The pictorial fabric of Chambelland’s painting is, in reality, very diversified. Areas
with vigorous impasto, where the strokes are frankly juxtaposed, are alternated
with others where the paint, more dilutedly applied, insinuate the background,
or still other areas in which the use of overpaintings serves as a unifying
element to the contrasts of values or color. Again, the seemingly improvised
aspect of Chambelland’s
technique is, in reality, the result of a calculated and intentional effort,
involving several independent stages of accomplishment.[30] His technique makes evident, still, a high degree of
virtuosity: in a relatively small area, like that which represents the frill of
the cloak of the ‘Domino’, in
the center of the painting, it is possible to see no less than a dozen of
different tones.
38. But it is in the superior strip of the painting that
the work of fabric acquires its highest autonomy [Figure 1, detail]. In it, with the exception of the subtle
pattern formed by some paralleled verticals, all the structural constrictions
are absent: the strip vibrates as a pure texture. Chambelland uses there,
predominantly, a divisionist treatment similar to those of his decorative
paintings, which marvelously translates the atmosphere of the ball’s room,
sprinkled with confetti. But it is also possible to see, especially in
the irregular lines that recall the serpentines, a very similar procedure to
that which the painters linked to the so-called Abstract Expressionism, as the
North-Americans Jackson Pollock or Mark Tobey, would employ decades later.
39. Elucidative of that unusual convergence would be a
comparison between the superior strip of Fancy Ball and another work
that also is held at the NMFA/RJ, the painting of Antônio Bandeira called The
Big Illuminated City [A grande cidade iluminada], of 1953 [Figure 13]. The formal convergences found among the two
paintings, whose creations are separated by a hiatus of forty years, serve
certainly as a sign of - this time formal - modernity of Rodolpho Chambelland,
a painter that certainly deserves more than the timid celebration that he
received until today in our historiography of art. Certainly, we should not
forget the differences of intention that existed between Chambelland and the
so-called informal painters: in the Fancy Ball, as i tried to put
forward, the fabric is not simply abstract, but refers to very well defined
semantic elements, as the confetti and the serpentines, which literally
vibrate the air of the salon. However, the exaltation of the painter’s gestures
- at a great measure the reason of being itself of a work as that of Bandeira - is equally important in the Fancy Ball, where
it is placed as an ultimate translation, this time on the pictorial fabric
itself, of the Carnival’s frenzy, evoked so convincingly by the work.
English
version by Marcelo Hilsdorf Marotta
___________________________________
[2] DUQUE ESTRADA, Luiz Gonzaga. Salão de 1905. In: Contemporâneos - Pintores e esculptores. Rio de Janeiro:
Typ. Benedicto de Souza, 1929, pg. 122.
[3] Cf. MACÁRIO, Paula Gomes. Neo-gregos
da Belle Époque brasileira. Campinas, SP: [s.n.], 2005 (M.A.
Dissertation).
[4] Escola Nacional de Bellas Artes - O
vernissage do 'Salon' de 1913, A Imprensa, August 31, 1913.
[5] Notas de Arte, Jornal do Commercio, September 5,
1913, pg. 6. Author
[6] Notas do 'Salon', A Noite,
September 8, 1913, pg. 2. Author: Gonçalo Alves.
[7] Artes e Theatros - Salão de 1913, Correio da Manhã,
September 13, 1913, pg. 4
[8] Artes, Theatros & Sports - O
Salão de 1913, Correio da Manhã, September 14, 1913; among other
important works that the NSFA acquired in the General Exhibition of 1913, there
are the Corral’s Pathway [Caminho do Curral], by Baptista
da Costa (4:000$000), Heavy Duty [Tarefa pesada], by
Gustavo Dall'Ara (2:000$000), Study of Reflexes and Supreme Effort
[Estudo de reflexos e Supremo esforço], both by Carlos Oswald, and Bianca, by
Eugenio Latour.
[9] I believe that the following
partial list of publications that exhibit and comment the Fancy Ball
serves as an indication of the truly paradigmatic character of the work in the
context of Brazilian art: ACQUARONE, F.; VIEIRA, A. Q. Primores da
Pintura no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro, 1941, n.p.; REIS JÚNIOR, J. M. História
da pintura no Brasil. São Paulo: Editora Leia, 1944, il.219; MUSEU
Nacional de Belas Artes. Colorama, s/d, pgs. 98-99; CAMPOFIORITO, Quirino.
História da Pintura Brasileira no Século XIX. Rio de Janeiro:
Pinakotheke, 1983, n.p.; Arte brasileira, século XX: Catálogo da galeria
Eliseu Visconti: pinturas e esculturas. Rio de Janeiro: MNBA/CNEC, 1984, pg.
31; LEITE, José R. T. Dicionário Crítico da Pintura no Brasil.
Rio de Janeiro: Artlivre Ltda., 1988, pg. 51; ACERVO Museu Nacional de Belas
Artes -
National Museum
of Fine Arts Collection. (Coordinated by H. A. Lustosa; texts by
Amândio M. Santos [et al.]). São Paulo: Banco Santos, 2002, pg. 132; CARDOSO,
Rafael. A arte brasileira em 25 quadros (1790-1930). Rio de Janeiro:
Record, 2008, pg. 160-171.
[10] BARATA, Mário. Desenhos de Carnaval e
Angelo Agostini, Diário de Notícias, February 28, 1954.
[11] A quatrain published in the
newspaper The Country [O Paiz] did reference to the carnival’s strike
between the artists: “Two superb standards / Works of brave artists / The Fenians’s were
painted by Decio / The Lieutenant’s by Amoedo” (cited
in ENEIDA. História do Carnaval. Rio de Janeiro: Editora
Civilização Brasileira S. A., 1958, pg. 275).
[12] EDMUNDO, Luís. O Rio de
Janeiro de meu tempo. Brasília: Edições do Senado Federal, 2003, pg.
499.
[13] In this respect, see the work by Helenise Guimarães, A
Escola de Belas Artes no Carnaval Carioca: Uma relação secular e a
revolução nas Escolas de Samba. In: TERRA, Carlos
G. (org.). Arquivos da Escola de Belas Artes n. 16, Rio de
Janeiro: EBA/UFRJ, 2003, in special pgs. 73-76.
[14] With his usual ironic verve,
Agrippino Grieco referred in this fashion to the works for the carnival of
these two last artists: “[Fiúza Guimarães] Prepared, during many years, the Fenians’ carnival procession, by the way with absolute popular failure, with all
the admiration turning to the Democratics’ procession, prepared by Púbio Marroig, who was not a Voyage Prize nor
was teacher of the School of Fine Arts” (GRIECO,
Agrippino. Memórias - Rio de Janeiro I. Rio de Janeiro:
Conquista, 1972, pg. 75).
[15] “Before that reward [the Voyage Prize], with which erudite persons of painting and
sculpture consecrated him, the people in the streets, in the expansion that the
carnival propitiated, had already glorified him” (EFEGE, J. Figuras e coisas do carnaval carioca. Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE, 1982, cited in GUIMARÃES, Helenise. Op. cit.,
pg. 75).
[16] As can be proved by his drawings of
the Devil and of the Old Men, reproduced in the pages 484 and 486 of Luiz
Edmundo’s book referred in the note 12.
[17] DUQUE ESTRADA, L. Gonzaga. Helios Seelinger, Kósmos, year 5, n. 3, March 1908, pg. 33-36.
[18] Cf . CARDOSO, Rafael, op. cit., pg.
169.
[19] In an interview made by Angyone Costa, in 1927, in the occasion of having been questioned about what was his “pictorial genre”, Chambelland answered without hesitate: “The impressionism, which is
a middle term, in painting” (COSTA, Angyone. A
inquietação das abelhas (O que dizem nossos pintores, escultores, arquitetos e gravadores, sobre
as artes plásticas no Brasil).
Rio de Janeiro: Pimenta de Mello & Cia, 1927, pg. 97).
[20] A Type is here understood in
the precise sense that Giulio Carlo Argan, following the indications of
theoreticians like Quatrémère de Quincy, gives to it in some of his writings,
in particular in the entry Tipologia, of the Enciclopedia Universale
dell’Arte, and in the Léccion II, La tipología arquitetonica, of El
concepto de espacio arquitetonico desde el Barroco a nuestros dias. Buenos
Aires: ediciones Nueva Vision, 1977, pgs. 29 and ff.
[21] Cf., in this sense, Rudolf
Arnheim’s comment about the famous Bureau du coton à la Nouvelle-Orléans,
by Edgar Degas, in O Acaso e a necessidade da Arte. Para uma
Psicologia da arte / Arte e Entropia. Lisboa: Dinalivro, 1997, pg. 169-170.
[22] LAVATER, Johann K. Physiognomische
fragmente, zur Beförderung der Menschen-kenntniss und Menschen-Liebe von
-. Leipzig & Winterthur, 1775-1778. Lavater postulated, for instance, that
the silhouettes, with their characteristic reduction of the human face to its
pure linear contour, were more adequate to the study of the connections between
external physiognomy and inner character than the direct observation of nature,
in constant transformation.
[23] STAFFORD, Barbara M. Symbol and
Myth: Humbert De Superville's Essay on Absolute Signs in Art.
University of Delaware Press, 1979.
[24] ARNHEIM, Rudolf. A Teoria Gestalt
da Expressão, Op. cit., p.59-79
[25] For instance: PEDERNEIRAS, Raul. A máscara do riso. Ensaios de anatomo-physiologia artistica.
2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Officinas Graphicas do “Jornal do Brasil”,
1917, pg. 13; PEDERNEIRAS, Raul. Programma da Cadeira de Anatomia e Physiologia Artísticas. Archives Collection of the Dom João VI Museum
EBA/UFRJ. Notation 2024, January 20, 1923, page 2 recto; ALBUQUERQUE, Georgina de.
O Desenho Como Base no Ensino das Artes
Plásticas. Rio de Janeiro: NSFA, 1942, p.39; MARQUES JUNIOR, Augusto José. Plástica das expressões fisionômicas. Arquivo da Escola de Belas Artes. Rio de Janeiro:
Universidade de Brasil, 1955, pg. 23 and ff.
[26] Cf. CHASTEL, Andre. Une Source
oubliée de Seurat. Fables, formes, figures. Reed., Paris: Flammarion,
2000, v.2, pg. 385-393.
[27] The complete title of the first
edition of Duchenne’s work was Mecánisme de la physionomie humaine: ou Analyse
electro-physiologique de ses différents modes d’expression. Another edition,
also of 1862, brought a new subtitle, which highlighted the possible artistic
use of the book: Analyse electro-physiologique de d’expression des
passions applicable à la pratique de arts plastiques (cited in BORDES,
Juan. Historia de las teorias de la figura humana: El dibujo/ la
anatomía/ la proporcíon/ la fisiognomía. Madrid: Cátedra, 2003, pg. 350).
[28] The expression of the
emotions in man and animals. by Charles Darwin, M. A., F.R.S., & C. with photographic and other
illustrations. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1872. In relation to
Duchenne’s photographs, see, in special, the chapters 8 and 12.
[29] Précis de Anatomie à
l'usage des artistes. Paris, n.d., pg. 314,
reproduced in BOIME, Albert. The teaching of fine arts and the avant-garde in
France during the second half of the nineteenth century. In: Las academias de
arte (VII Coloquio Internacional de Gaunajuato). D.F.:
Univesidad Autónoma do Mexico, 1985, n.p.
[30] A sophisticated technique as that
of Chambelland’s was observed in the work of the impressionist painters that he
admired, like Claude Monet. Still today, these are, frequently, praised for
having a pictorial fabric reductively perceived as improvised; cf.. HERBERT,
Robert. Method and meaning in Monet, Art in America, September 1979, pg.
90-108.