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]
*
* *
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 being impressed. Getting closer
to such a work of remarkable dimensions (149 x 209 cm), a supposed visitor
would perceive, in the 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 narrows 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 be 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 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 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 latter 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, insinuates
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 like 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.