Pierrot Through the Arts: Deburau, Laforgue, Schoenberg and On

Pierrot, the sad clown, with white face and loose white blouse, expressing slowly and subtly and in the absence of and beyond words, emerged in the nineteenth century from his roots in stock comedies and pantomimes to become the embodiment of a certain artistic type, a specific strain of artistic emotion: sensitive, melancholy and solitary, and at once playful and daring in subverting language and suggesting the fraught but still facile and fluctuating nature of gender.

The character of Pierrot can be traced back to Molière’s Don Juan, or The Feast with the Statue, first performed in February 1660 at the Palais-Royal theatre in Paris, and with Molière playing the role of Sganarelle. Pierrot is the name of a peasant character who appears in the second act of the play, the fiancé of Charlotte. The Palais-Royal theatre had been established by Cardinal Richelieu, in the east wing of the Palais-Royal, in 1637; and by 1662, Molière’s acting troupe was sharing the venue with a troupe of Italian Commedia dell’Arte performers, including Domenicio Biancolelli, famous for his performances in the role of Harlequin. The Italian Commedia dell’Arte flourished throughout the seventeenth century in France, and in fact the character of Molière’s Sganarelle already drew from the Italian comedians. With Molière and Biancolelli’s troupes in such proximity, this interplay and cross-pollination continued, the Commedia dell’Arte incorporating Pierrot into its repertoire and well establishing the figure by the time of the Italians’ expulsion from France, by Royal decree, in 1697.

So Pierrot persisted on in Italy, and then again in France after Italian troupes were permitted to return during the second decade of the following century. Through the 1700s, though the character began to appear in performances in European centres outside of Italy and France, the Pierrot on display often featured in lesser and disparate roles: the basis of the character, his unrequited love for Columbine, who prefers Harlequin, was sometimes lost, and he was frequently portrayed in a purely comic, or even bumbling and foolish manner. It was in the 1800s that Pierrot gained stature, and began his reach into the other arts, developing in literature and painting as an emblem and as a muse.

Jean-Gaspard Deburau, a mime from Kolín, in what is now the Czech Republic but was then Bohemia, was most responsible for this recreation of Pierrot. Born in 1796, he began appearing in Paris at the Théâtre des Funambules some time around 1819, under the stage-name ‘Baptiste’. The Funambules had opened in 1816, on the Boulevard du Temple, otherwise known as the Boulevard du Crime owing to the volume of crime dramas shown nightly in the Boulevard’s numerous theatres – all but one of which, including the Funambles, were demolished during Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in the 1860s. The Funambules originally hosted only acrobats and mimes; and Deburau, taking the role of Pierrot as a young man, would continue at the part until his death in 1846. He extended and deepened Pierrot, his restrained and nuanced acting style replacing the tendency towards bold and gesticulating comedy; gaining recognition and increasing fame towards the end of the 1820s, Deburau’s Pierrot would even be compared to the works of Shakespeare when, in 1842, the versatile and distinctly modern man-of-letters Théophile Gautier wrote a fictionalised review entitled, ‘Shakespeare at the Funambules’.

Other mimes would continue to have success playing Pierrot after Deburau’s death. These included his son, Jean Charles, and most notably Paul Legrand. Still, it was Deburau who enshrined Pierrot within French culture, and established the sense of Pierrot as a sensitive and anguished artist. This conception of Pierrot was celebrated, explored and entrenched in 1945 with Marcel Carné’s film, Les Enfants du Paradis, often considered one of the greatest films of all time; which suffered its own anguishes as it was made in occupied France, with damaged sets, short of supplies, with a cast and crew short of food and comprising several Jews who had to work secretely or risk production shutting down; and consisting of a fictionalised story drawing upon real figures from early nineteenth century France. Deburau is portrayed in the film as ‘Baptiste’, a lovelorn mime who achieves success in the Funambules, in a magnificent performance by Jean-Louis Barrault.

Gautier’s piece on Deburau’s Pierrot was but one of the first entwinements of Pierrot with literature. Writers including Flaubert (who, early in his career, wrote an unperformed pantomime entitled Pierrot au sérail), Verlaine and Huysmens incorporated Pierrot into their works. Most extensively, he was the central figure in the poetry of Jules Laforgue. Laforgue – a French Symbolist poet who died in 1887 aged just twenty-seven years old – wrote three of the ‘complaints’ in his first selection of poems, Les Complaintes (1885), in Pierrot’s voice; then devoted his second collection, L’Imitation de Notre Dame de la Lune (1886), entirely to Pierrot and his moonlit world, influenced by Albert Giraud’s poetry cycle published a couple of years previously.

In his book, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, first published in 1899, which served to introduce French Symbolism to an English readership, Arthur Symons devoted a chapter to Laforgue. Symons describes Laforgue’s verse and prose as,

‘alike a kind of travesty, making subtle use of colloquialism, slang, neologism, technical terms, for their allusive, their factitious, their reflected meanings, with which one can play, very seriously. The verse is alert, troubled, swaying, deliberately uncertain, hating rhetoric so piously that it prefers, and finds its piquancy in, the ridiculously obvious…It is an art of the nerves, this art of Laforgue, and it is what all art would tend towards if we followed our nerves on all their journeys.’

and defines Laforgue’s laughter in the following terms:

‘His laughter, which Maeterlinck has defined so admirably as ‘the laughter of the soul’, is the laughter of Pierrot, more than half a sob, and shaken out of him with a deplorable gesture of the thin arms, thrown wide. He is a metaphysical Pierrot, Pierrot Lunaire, and it is of abstract notions, the whole science of the unconscious, that he makes his showman’s patter.’

Laforgue was a great influence upon a young T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Eliot would write that, ‘Of Jules Laforgue I can say that he was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech’, and, ‘I have written…nothing about Jules Laforgue, to whom I owe more than to any one poet in any language’. In this way the figure of Pierrot maintained a relevance beyond French Romanticism and Symbolism, on into the literature of the Anglophone Modernists. He also appeared in canvases by painters who led their art-form into modernity: in Seurat’s Pierrot with a White Pipe (1883); in Cézanne’s Pierrot and Harlequin (1888); whilst Picasso’s Pierrot and Columbine (1900) was the first of several pieces in which he depicts Pierrot.

Pierrot became a canonised figure within twentieth century classical music with Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, a setting of twenty-one poems from a German translation of Albert Giraud’s cycle. Schoenberg’s work was premiered in Berlin, on 16 October, 1912, with Albertine Zehme the solo vocalist. Theodor Adorno, theorist, philosopher and musicologist, wrote some of his earliest pieces on Schoenberg; including a 1922 review of a performance of Pierrot Lunaire in Frankfurt, in which Adorno puts it that Schoenberg’s piece characterises ‘the homelessness of our souls’. Musically and aesthetically, Pierrot has exerted his influence too on popular music: Björk, a fervent admirer of Schoenberg, sang Pierrot Lunaire in a one-off performance at the Verbier Festival in 1996; whilst David Bowie, after studying theatre and mime, played a role in the 1967 theatrical production Pierrot in Turquoise, and appeared as Pierrot in the video to his 1980 song, ‘Ashes to Ashes’.

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Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis

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Jules Laforgue – ‘Autre Complaint de Lord Pierrot’ (‘Another Complaint of Lord Pierrot’). In French; then translated into English courtesy of Paul Staniforth and brindin.com

——–

Celle qui doit me mettre au courant de la Femme!

Nous lui dirons d’abord, de mon air le moins froid:

“La somme des angles d’un triangle, chère âme,

Est égale à deux droits.”

–
Et si ce cri lui part: “Dieu de Dieu! que je t’aime!”

– “Dieu reconnaîtra les siens.” Ou piquée au vif:

– “Mes claviers ont du coeur, tu seras mon seul thème.”

Moi: “Tout est relatif.”

–

De tous ses yeux, alors! se sentant trop banale:

“Ah! tu ne m’aimes pas; tant d’autres sont jaloux!”

Et moi, d’un oeil qui vers l’inconscient s’emballe:

“Merci, pas mal; et vous?”

–

– “Jouons au plus fidèle!” – “à quoi bon, ô Nature!

Autant à qui perd gagne!” Alors, autre couplet:

– “Ah! tu te lasseras le premier, j’en suis sûre…”

– “Après vous, s’il vous plaît.”

–

Enfin, si, par un soir, elle meurt dans mes livres,

Douce; feignant de n’en pas croire encor mes yeux,

J’aurai un: “Ah! ça, mais, nous avions De Quoi vivre!

C’était donc sérieux?”

——–

The one who’ll give an update on her sex!

We’ll tell her first in our least frigid air

“The sum of a triangle’s angles makes

exactly two right angles, dear.”

–

And should she peal “O God! how I love you!”,

‘God’ll know his own’ – or, cut to the quick: 

“My heart knows love’s keys; I’ll play but of you!”, 

then I: ‘All’s relativistic.’

–

Then, with all eyes, feeling too commonplace 

“You don’t love me whom men crave with each muscle?” 

And I, with an eye on Unconsciousness, 

‘Oh, not so bad, ta, and yousel’?’

–

“Let’s vie in fidelity!” – ‘Might as well play

(Nature!) loser wins.’ And after those, these: 

“Oh, you’ll tire of me first, you’ll go away…” 

‘Oh no: ladies first, if you please.’

–

Last, if one night she die in my ‘Divan’, 

soft … with fake disbelief in my closet 

I’ll go ‘Well, now, we’d something to live on –

it was serious then, was it?’

____________

Pierrot with a White Pipe, by Seurat

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Pierrot and Harlequin, by Cézanne

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Pierrot and Columbine, by Picasso

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Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21

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David Bowie as Pierrot

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Raine, C. T. S. Eliot (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Symons, A. The Symbolist Movement In Literature (Dutton & Company, 1919)

Wiggerhaus, R. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (MIT Press, 1995)

Zola’s House at Médan (or Le Château de Médan), by Cézanne

In a piece on Cézanne’s Banks of the Marne, published on this site several weeks ago, I mentioned and briefly considered, by way of comparison, the painting Zola’s House at Médan. The painting is just as often referred to as Le Château de Médan; it was painted between 1879 and 1881; and is now part of the Burrell Collection in Glasgow.

Over the last week I have been reading through a book on Cézanne by Hajo Düchting, published by Taschen, entitled on the front cover simply Cézanne; with the title page expanding upon this via the provision of a subtitle, 1839-1906, Nature into Art. The book makes particular mention of Zola’s House at Médan; and includes a lengthy quotation by Gauguin which I thought was worth republishing here.

Gauguin is recorded as the painting’s first owner, purchasing it from the Parisian art supplier and art dealer Julien François Tanguy. Over the course of years, Tanguy established in his shop quite a collection of Impressionist paintings, owing to the fact that, where money was lacking, he accepted paintings in exchange for paints. He was called Père by his artists, and sold, or attempted to sell, works by Monet, Sisley, Seurat and Van Gogh alongside Cézanne and Gauguin. Van Gogh painted him three times, the latter two paintings increasingly experimental, Japanese-inspired portraits.

Gauguin’s remarks provide us with his own sense of the interplay of colours in Cézanne’s painting. They continue with a second-hand account of an occurrence which took place with Cézanne mid-paint. This account is humorous in its evocation of the professorial passer-by, it provides a nice depiction of Cézanne’s character, and it is also a suggestive shot of a perhaps not atypical contemporary response to Cézanne’s work. Here is Gauguin:

Cézanne is painting a shimmering landscape against an ultramarine background, with intense shades of green and ochre gleaming like silk. The trees are stood in a row like tin soldiers, and through the tangle of branches you can make out his friend Zola’s house. Thanks to the yellow reflections on the whitewashed walls, the vermilion window shutters take on an orange tone. A crisp Veronese green convey the sumptuous leafage in the garden, and the sobre, contrasting shade of bluish nettles in the foreground renders the simple poem even more sonorous.

A presumptuous passer-by takes a shocked glance at what seems, in his eyes, to be a dilettante’s wretched daubing, and asks Cézanne in a professorial voice, with a smile,

‘Trying your hand at painting?’

‘Yes – but I’m no expert!’

‘I can see that. Look here, I was once a pupil of Corot. If you don’t mind, I’ll just add a few well-placed strokes and set the whole thing right. What count are the valeurs, and the valeurs alone.’

And sure enough, the vandal adds a few strokes of paint to the shimmering picture, utterly unabashed. The oriental silk of this symphony of colour is smothered in dirty greys. Cézanne exclaims: ‘Monsieur, you have an enviable talent. No doubt when you plant a portrait you put shiny highlights on the tip of the nose just as you would on the bars of a chair.’

Cézanne picks up his palette once more and scratches off the mess he has made. Silence reigns for a moment. Then Cézanne lets fly a tremendous fart, and, gazing evenly at the man, declares: ‘That’s better.’

Banks of the Marne, by Cézanne

The Hermitage Amsterdam is currently home to two complementary exhibitions. The first, Impressionism: Sensation and Inspiration, with a tagline explaining that the works on display are ‘Highlights from the Hermitage’, endeavours to place the Impressionists within their French Nineteenth Century context. It shows Neoclassicists Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Léon Gérôme, the Romanticism of Delacroix – who Van Gogh regarded as the supreme colourist, and about whom he wrote in September, 1888,

‘Now, it is true that I see in impressionism a resurrection of Eugène Delacroix, but as the interpretations are both divergent and also rather irreconcilable, impressionism cannot yet formulate a doctrine. That is why I am staying with the impressionists, because it means nothing, and commits you to nothing, and as one of them I do not have to take up any position.’

– and intermediaries, including Charles-François Daubigny and Carolus-Duran, alongside Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Sisley and Renoir.

The second exhibition, entitled simply Vincent, with the subtitle ‘The Van Gogh Museum at the Hermitage’, shows a selection from the Van Gogh Museum’s collection whilst that museum is undergoing refurbishment in order to meet updated Dutch safety and security regulations. The exhibition is organised thematically rather than chronologically, the seven themes comprising, in order, ‘Practice makes perfect’, ‘A style of his own’, ‘The effect of colour’, ‘Peasant painter’, ‘Looking to Japan’, ‘The modern portrait’, and ‘The wealth of nature’. Whilst some of the earlier themes in particular are conceptually slight, the exhibition itself is coherent and succeeds in providing novel points of connection. Impressionism is open until January 27; whereas Vincent will run until the end of April, when the Van Gogh Museum will reopen with a major exhibition celebrating the museum’s fortieth anniversary, to be called Van Gogh at Work.

I visited Impressionism last weekend, and especially admired a painting by Cézanne, Banks of the Marne (1888). Cézanne achieves in this painting one of the purest and most convincing depictions of water I’ve seen; and he does this by largely replicating the river bank in the water below, presenting a reflection that is almost a mirror image. The trees and the residence on land appear reflected at the same angle, and with the same dimensions. Cézanne’s palette – with its predominant blue-greens offset by the white villa and its ochre roof and balcony – also remains constant, with the darker tones in the water serving to differentiate and providing a sense of depth. Whilst there is nothing amounting to a rippled brushstroke, the short and dense diagonals which give the trees their matter are replaced in Cézanne’s water by looser horizontals.

Around 1888 when Cézanne painted Banks of the Marne, he also worked on a number of other water paintings, experimenting with different ways of representing, different ways of bringing his canvases together. Bridge over the Marne at Créteil, with its view looking down the river, features geometric curves and larger blocks of colour as trees, reflected in the water with vertical rather than horizontal brushwork. From the same period, the more abstract Bridge over a Pool consists of a mass of vivid green diagonals which encroach upon and enclose the bridge, the water only delineated by some darker tones and shadows; and Aqueduct and Lock repeats Banks of the Marne‘s trick, the aqueduct immediately mirrored in the water below, here slightly extended and outlined, with unfastened foliage hovering above on each side.

Banks of the Marne recalls an earlier work, Zola’s House at Médan (or Le Château de Médan), which Cézanne completed between 1879 and 1881, Zola having bought the house in 1878. The painting depicts the banks of the Seine – of which the Marne is a tributary, running southeast from Paris – in an unusually rigid and symmetrical fashion: whereas Banks of the Marne is broadly split into river bank and river, here the canvas is divided into the five horizontal sections of river, river bank, houses, hills and sky, with tall trees rising vertically at regular intervals between the houses. Cézanne’s palette is much brighter, the sensation sunnier, with intense yellows, greens and ochres and a bold blue sky. Still, both paintings confront the viewer in a similar way: we look directly across a stretch of water towards a river bank, densely leafy, something solidly constructed and impenetrable. Like in the later painting, so here Cézanne indicates those reflections in the water through more loosely painted, horizontal brushstrokes.

De Leeuw, R. (ed.) The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, trans. A. Pomerans (Penguin, 1997)