Barthélemy Menn

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Barthélemy Menn
undate photo from the collections of the Bibliothèque de Genève
Born20 May 1815
Geneva, Switzerland
Died10 October 1893
Coinsins, Switzerland
NationalitySwiss
EducationGeneva Art Society and apprenticeships
Known forPainting
Notable workWetterhorn from Hasliberg
Movementplein air painting and paysage intime

Barthélemy Menn (20 May 1815 – 10 October 1893) was a

plein-air
painting and the paysage intime into Swiss art.

Early life

Menn was the youngest of four sons, born in Geneva to Louis John Menn, a confectioner from Scuol in the canton of Grisons, and Charlotte-Madeleine-Marguerite Bodmer, the daughter of a wealthy farmer from Coinsins in the Canton de Vaud. Already at the age of twelve, Menn took drawing lessons from the little-known Jean Duboi (1789–1849), and later, he entered the drawing school of the Geneva Arts Society [fr]. The repeated claim that he was also a pupil of the famous enameller Abraham Constantin appears to be erroneous.

Farmhouse in Coinsins

In 1831, Menn was second in the annual drawing competition of the Geneva Art Society. The following year, he entered the studio of the Swiss history painter

Rubens in the Louvre, and works by Ingres.[5]

When the latter decided to give up his studio to take the post as director of the

Museo Borbonico
.

Self-portrait

When back in Rome, he produced history - and genre paintings, of which in 1837, he sent 'Solomon presented to Wisdom by his Parents' (Salomon présenté à la sagesse par son père et sa mère) to the annual Salon in Geneva. Menn returned via Florence,

utopian socialist ideas of Charles Fourier
.

Later career

South of France. It was in these years that he turned completely to the paysage intime (intimate landscape) and achieved similar results to those of Corot, without attaining the latter's impressive level of creativity. In 1850, Menn was appointed director of the Geneva art school and from then on taught figure drawing, rather than landscapes, for 42 years. In this position, he trained two generations of Swiss painters, among them Eugène Burnand, Pierre Pignolat [fr], Edouard Vallet and Ferdinand Hodler, who reputedly said: ‘It is to him [Menn] that I owe everything’.[6]

Menn made a second voyage to Rome in 1852 and, in conjunction with Corot, Henri Baron (1816–1885), Armand Leleux [fr] (1818–1885) and François-Louis Français, decorated the large salon in Gruyères Castle that then belonged to the Bovy family. Menn also organized three exhibitions with contemporary French painting in Geneva in 1857, 1859 and 1861 that showed works by Corot, Courbet, Daubigny and Delacroix. Yet, the critics in Calvin's hometown were harsh and hostile towards contemporary art, which annoyed Menn so much as that he resolved never to exhibit in public again. He became even reluctant to sell his works privately and finally, in the 1880s, destroyed many of his paintings. In 1865, at the age of fifty, Menn married the widow of his cousin Jean Bodmer, Louise Bodmer-Gauthier (1818–1887), who brought with her a beautiful estate at Coinsins. It is here that Menn found peace and painted most of his last landscapes.

Legacy

Menn's grave

Although Menn was trained as a history painter and had, during his last forty years, only taught figure drawing, it was he who challenged the Swiss academic landscape tradition as early as 1845. At that time, the internationally successful Alexandre Calame and the somewhat older François Diday dominated Swiss alpine painting with romantic, wild and fantastic mountain sceneries that have carefully composed foregrounds against which distant but highlighted mountain peaks are set under a pleasantly blue sky – or in a frightening storm. Menn, however, when exhibiting his Wetterhorn from Hasliberg at the annual art exhibition in Geneva, had not only ventured into the domain of his competitor Calame, but had done so by applying the principles of plein-air-painting to an alpine landscape. The ‘photographic’ view point, the structure of the rock formations and the handling of light and colour make this picture the earliest modern landscape in Swiss art history.

As the painting did not go down well with the critics, Menn turned to more modest landscapes that he painted outdoors, and with which he introduced the principles of the modern French paysage-intime into Switzerland. ‘In a bush I see everything’,[7] Menn used to say, capturing in his self-contained landscapes atmospheric changes of evening and morning hours, quiet harmonies of an unspoilt riverbank, a swampy plain or of an orchard in midday, casting them in sensitive tonal values and poetic tenderness. His approach derived entirely from contemporary French landscape painting, in particular from his friend Corot whom Menn called the ‘master of the right values’.[8] It was these new values combined with his quest for natural beauty that Menn would promote as a teacher to generations of Swiss artists.

Barthélemy Menn is buried at the Cimetière des Rois in Geneva.

Notes

  1. ^ Tripier Le Franc, Histoire de la vie et de la mort du Baron Gros, 2 vols., Paris: Jules Martin, 1880, vol. 2, p. 589. Lugardon was not, as has been repeatedly claimed, a pupil of Ingres, but he knew him from his Italian journey where they met in Florence in 1824
  2. ^ ‘Tout le monde, jusqu’aux plus anciens de l'atelier, tremble devant M. Ingres. On le craint beaucoup, en sorte que ses corrections font beaucoup effet. Il est d'une sensibilité extrème.’ From a letter to Jules Hébert of 2 December 1833, quoted in: Jura Brüschweiler, Barthélemy Menn 1815–1893. Etude critique et biographique, Zurich: Swiss Institute for Art Research, 1960, p. 17.
  3. ^ ‘Les élèves partageront leur temps entre l'étude de la nature et celle des maîres, s’attachant spécialement à Phidias, aux bas-reliefs du Parthénon, à la sculpture antique en générale.’ Quoted in Théophile Silvestre, Histoire des artistes vivants- Etudes d'après nature – Ingres, Paris: E. Blanchard 1855, p. 16.
  4. ^ Marc Fehlmann, ‘Casts & Connoisseurs. The early Reception of the Elgin Marbles’, in: Apollo, Vol. 165, No. 554, June 2007, pp. 44–51.
  5. ^ On Menn's copies see Marc Fehlmann and Marie Therese Bätschmann, ‘Menn copiste’, in Genava, No. LVI, 2008, pp. 49–81.
  6. ^ ‘C’est à lui que je vaut tous’, quoted in Jura Brüschweiler, Barthélemy Menn 1815–1893: Étude critique et biographique, Zurich: Swiss Institute for Art Research, 1960, p. 57.
  7. ^ "Dans un buisson, je vois tous", quoted in Jura Brüschweiler, Barthélemy Menn 1815–1893. Etude critique et biographique, Zurich: Swiss Institute for Art Research, 1960, p. 39.
  8. ^ "le maître des valeurs justes", quoted in Jura Brüschweiler, Barthélemy Menn 1815–1893. Etude critique et biographique, Zurich: Swiss Institute for Art Research, 1960, p. 30. On Menns friendship with Corot see Marc Fehlmann, 'Menn Copiste II. Barthélemy Menn et ses contemporains', in: Genava. Revue d'histoire de l'art et d'archéologie, Vol. 57, 2009, pp. 61–91, esp. pp. 83–87.

References

  • Guinand, Léon, Notice abrégée des principes de Barthélemy Menn sur l'art et l'enseignement humaniste. Genf: Jarrys, 1893;
  • Daniel Baud-Bovy, Notice sur Barthélemy Menn. Peintre et éducateur, Geneva: La Montagne, 1898.
  • Anna Lanicca, Barthélemy Menn. Eine Studie, Strassburg: J. H. Ed. Heitz, 1911
  • Daniel Baud-Bovy, ‘Lettres de Rome de Barthélemy Menn à Jules Hébert’, in: Jahrbuch für Kunst Kunstpflege in der Schweiz 1921–1924, Vol. III, Basel: Birkhäuser, 1925, pp. 326 –359.
  • Daniel Baud-Bovy, ‘Lettres de Rome de Barthélemy Menn à Jules Hébert’, in: Jahrbuch für Kunst Kunstpflege in der Schweiz 1925–1927, Vol. IV, Basel: Birkhäuser, 1927, pp. 201 –225.
  • Daniel Baud-Bovy, Barthélemy Menn. Dessinateur, Geneva: Les Éditions du Rhône, 1943.
  • Jura Brüschweiler, Barthélemy Menn 1815–1893: Étude critique et biographique, Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1960
  • Georges Vigne, Les élèves d'Ingres, Ausstellungskatalog Montauban, Besançon 2000, Montauban, Musée Ingres 2000, pp. 20–21.
  • Marc Fehlmann, 'Menn Copiste I. Barthélemy Menn et l'Antiquité', in: Genava. Revue d'histoire de l'art et d'archéologie, Vol. 56, 2008, pp. 25–41.
  • Marc Fehlmann, 'Menn Copiste II. Barthélemy Menn et ses contemporains', in: Genava. Revue d'histoire de l'art et d'archéologie, Vol. 57, 2009, pp. 61–91.
  • Matthias Fischer, Der junge Hodler. Eine Künstlerkarriere 1872–1897, Wädenswil: Nimbus, 2009.
    ISBN 978-3-907142-30-1

External links

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