Ondine
Painter, ceramist and sculptor Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (1865-1953) was one of the most interesting artists on the Parisian scene at the end of the century. His art has an extremely refined, intimate character, cultivated in its references and brilliant in its technique.
When the Parisian art world discovered his immense talent in 1896, thanks to a solo exhibition organised by the prestigious Georges Petit gallery, Lévy-Dhurmer was practically an unknown. Since 1887, he had settled in the south of France, in Golfe-Juan, where he had joined Clément Massier’s ceramics factory, while developing his own personal style and technique. The 1896 exhibition was a great success, revealing the work of an extremely refined Symbolist artist, capable of combining the cultivated references of Italian art (notably Leonardo da Vinci) with the decadent sensibility that characterised French art at the end of the century. Thanks to this exhibition, Lévy-Dhurmer began to frequent Symbolist circles in the capital, including the eccentric writer Joséphin Péladan (1858-1918), Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) and Claude Debussy (1862-1918), to name but a few.
It is in the context of this knowledge that our pastel needs to be contextualised. Thanks to the dedication in the lower right-hand corner, we can deduce that the work was a gift from Lévy-Dhurmer to Henri Cazalis (1840-1909), a Symbolist doctor and poet associated with the Parnassian poetic movement. The title “Ondine” suggests that this figure is a female river genie from Germanic mythology. Undines are like the freshwater mermaids that populate lakes, rivers and streams, creatures dear to Symbolist poets and artists who saw in them the counterpart of bathers, idealised and purified from the triviality of the world. The artist makes this face emerge from the depths of a pond, while in the foreground greenish streams of water flow swiftly and disorderly. The elegant beauty of this work brings together all the elements that characterise Lévy-Dhurmer’s work, from the female subject interpreted allegorically, to the cultivated reference to the art of Leonardo da Vinci that we see in the seraphic features of the woman’s face, in the sfumato of the technique, to the atmosphere of suspension and dream.
This perfect union between the human figure and nature (in this case, the element of water) can also be seen in other masterpieces by the artist preserved at the Musée d’Orsay, such as Le Silence (fig.1), another pastel drawing in which Lévy-Dhurmer succeeded in creating subtle plays of light and colour, making him one of the virtuosos of this technique. In 1900, Lévy-Dhurmer changed direction and gradually abandoned his early mystical subjects, entering a phase of his production shared by other artists such as Hawkins and Cottet where, to use Bouyer’s expression, he positioned himself “against mysticism that is delirious and impressionism that rambles”. He began to produce landscapes and portraits, souvenirs of his travels in Europe and North Africa, until 1953, the year of his death.
