THE MASTERPIECES OF THE LEON-DIERX ART GALLERY : Jacqueline MARVAL
Marie VALLET aka Jacqueline MARVAL
Quaix, 19 October 1866 – Paris, 28 May 1932
The daughter of two schoolteachers, Jacqueline Marval initially earned her living as a corset-maker and embroiderer. At the end of the 19th century, living in the artists’ neighbourhood in Montparnasse with the painter Jules Flandrin, she became friends with a large number of painters, which led her to abandon her other professional activities and become a self-taught painter.
In 1901, she started to exhibit her work at the Salon des Indépendants, then the Salon d’Automne. Ambroise Vollard bought some of her works, without ever organising an exhibition for her. Les cigales (The cicadas) was bought by Vollard and was exhibited at the 1906 Salon des indépendants.
A rather eccentric personality, she is considered to have been one of the early 20thcentury avant-garde artists. One critic, Gustave Coquiot, spoke of her paintings as being “of a thousand light frivolities”, but which totally avoided falling “into repugnant obscenity”. He appreciated her taste for bright lively colours, flowers, nature and nude women in sunlight.
In 1903, Les Odalisques, one of her most famous works, was praised by Apollinaire and Picabia. Exhibited in New York, then alongside Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, the painting contributed to launching Marval’s international career.
Her paintings were neglected by the critics after the First World War.
Les Cigales (The Cicadas), Jacqueline MARVAL
Around 1906
Oil on canvas
130 x 130 cm
Inv 1947.01.74
Lucien Vollard donation
The title of the work speaks to the imagination: taking in the atmosphere of the painting, the spectator should hear the song of the cicadas, which remain invisible.
In the foreground of the picture, most probably a reference to the Manet’s painting Déjeuner sur l’herbe, two naked women are reclining on a lawn dotted with flowers. In the middle ground, two trees treated as large masses, like the hedge in the distance, indicate that they are posing in a garden, contemplating a landscape. Our eye takes in the two centres of attention: first of all the two young girls and then the landscape, with no other focal point coming to disturb the harmony of this rather unreal scene.
The lower part of the painting is very pale, almost pearlescent, with brushstrokes of white paint that give the picture a soft woolly quality. The landscape behind the two girls appears like a flat curtain of flowers, a sort of wall-hanging. The colours are bolder and more contrasted, but also bathe in the somewhat veiled atmosphere.
The attitudes of the two women, one of them wearing a bright red scarf in her hair and her gaze fixed and piercing, give the scene a mysterious aspect. The spectator has the impression of disturbing their intimacy: are they taking the sun after a swim, since they seem to be reclining on a sheet? Another mystery also surrounds the composition, adding to its strange quality: what is taking place in front of the scene? What are the two girls gazing at?
