Eugène Carrière (France 1849 - 1906)

Eugène Carrière was a French painter and printmaker whose name is largely forgotten today, but in his day, he was a star of French art.   Carrière was an artist who responded to the intellectual inspiration of art in France, and in some ways he was an early adherent to the ideas and methods of Symbolism.  However, he abstracted from them, and his pleasure in the ideas can be seen in his monochromatic etchings.  He was neither poet nor symbolist, but a penetrating observer, whose distinction lay in the union of a quiet manner with a sensitive vision.  His portraits capture the delicacy of sitters, and yet even after all these years, they still have an airy with a crispness of execution.

The portrait below of Marguerite Carrière is underlit but leaves us with the character in the face, and the planes and plateaus of her face.  There is character in this face, and without colour, the image is sober and full and somehow full ot texture.  The other printworks also exhibit Carrière's skill and integrity.  In these works we are aware of the humility required to absorb the sitter's personality in order to reflect it again in the stone, this is one of the rarest of an artist's gifts.  In these works we find an acuteness of vision, a liveliness of imagination, and a passion for radiant, luminous light and shade that give the impression of an audacious mind, intensely alert and a wonderful sensibility.

Carrière's work is refined and the black and white lithographic medium is forced to convey as brilliantly as oils, capturing the irridescence of light on skin. However, we do see a trace of the French tendency toward exaggerations of projection.  I spend a lot of time waffling on about works on paper, but these works exemplify the value of the monochromatic print.  An artist subtracts colour, in order to give the utmost value to the line, and these images are made simply of dark and light, expressing the profound emotion of a creative mind.  The resolution of all secondary effects into this unity of impression demands a significance of thought and execution to bear the weight of concentrated interest. Carrière's paintings are also large rhythms and concerned themselves with human character, pity and love and the joy of childhood, all expressed in the lyric movement of life.  Carrière was an important member and one of the leaders in the French secessionist movement, which led to the founding of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

Carrière's works influenced Matisse and Picasso's blue period and it is a travesty that he doesn't receive the kudos he deserves.  In his day Carrière received high praise from the French critics for his treatment of light and air, and his works on paper are no less appealing.  They re-establish a kind of faith in art as a  performance reflecting the mind and emotion of the artist and the objective world that nourishes and colours them.