203. GEORG PAULI. Carmen, Parijs.

Oil on cardboard panel, 49,5 x 33,5 cm. Signed G Pauli and also signed on the back.
Performed in Paris in the autumn of 1911.

In the auction's painting, Georg Pauli has depicted the lush favorite model Carmen in full figure, sitting in a nonchalant pose, wearing only a green-shimmering diadem and a pair of pink shoes. This work, performed in Paris in the autumn of 1911, is a unique and almost sensational example of how Georg Pauli was inspired by Henri Matisse at this time.

The painting is executed in the Spartan atelier on Rue Denfert-Rochereau in Montparnasse that Georg Pauli rented in the autumn of 1911. There he painted models between one and four o'clock in the afternoons. It was part of the studies for the famous frescoes “A healthy soul in a healthy body”, which were erected in the stairwell of the Jönköping Higher Education Centre in 1912 (now Per Brahegymnasium). Since the model studies were central to the process of working with the frescoes, the greater variety of models offered by Paris was one of the reasons Georg Pauli had travelled to the French capital this autumn. Carmen, with her plump body and powerful features, was one of Pauli's favourite models and he has also depicted her with flowers in her hair and exposed breasts in a half-figure portrait, dated Paris 1911 (Sold at Stockholms Auktionsverk 2015).

Already the previous autumn, Georg Pauli had been in Paris with his wife, the artist Hanna Pauli, to look at the latest in the art world. The Pauli couple then visited the home of siblings Gertrude and Leo Stein, where they marveled at ultra-modern art by names such as Matisse and Picasso. During his stay in Paris in the autumn of 1910, Georg Pauli also saw for the first time samples of Cubist art, and it was this avant-garde art direction that primarily interested him in his work with the frescoes.

The fact that the encounter with Matisse's art also left a clear mark in one of Georg Pauli's works must have been unknown to most people to date. With the painting of the auction, however, one can add another chapter to Pauli's multifaceted artistry. Thanks to the fact that he was a long-established artist with a great deal of experience when executing this work, Georg Pauli in many ways trumps the young Swedish Matisse students in his approach to Matisse. Of the epigonery exhibited by these artists not infrequently, there is no trace of Georg Pauli's painting. He is able to incorporate central elements from Matisse, while maintaining a style of expression of his own. In this way Georg Pauli manages to create a unique and highly personal work of art.

An obvious connection with Matisse is the pink draping that Georg Pauli imposes very effectively against the skin color of the naked female body. The pink color is one of Henri Matisse's signum and in the same year that Georg Pauli performs the painting of the auction, 1911, Henri Matisse paints “The Pink Studio” in his atelier in Issy-les-Moulineaux. Although this famous painting is characterized entirely by pink, it was more common for Matisse to use the pink color as a limited, but highly effective element in coloristically more multifaceted compositions, in the same way that we see Georg Pauli doing in his current painting.

The work that will be really interesting to compare the painting in the auction with is Henri Matisse's “L'Algérienne” from 1909 (Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou). Here Matisse, like Pauli, depicts a female model seated in a nonchalant pose. Both models have raven-black hair, which is rendered heavily stylised and set against small glimmering features - in Pauli's case a diadem and in Matisse's case a smaller headdress. While Pauli sets the fully exposed skin color of the female body against a pink element, Matisse shuns his model with a dressing gown in another color so typical of the artist, the turquoise. Just as the pink draping provides a full equilibrium to the powerful curvature of the naked female body in Pauli's painting, the turquoise dressing gown becomes a similarly full-fledged equilibrium to the powerful facial features of the model in Matisse's painting. Both artists thus balance form and color in an exquisite way in their compositions.

Where Pauli's model is inviting and at the same time challenging with its exposed and more naturalistically rendered body and sharp gaze towards the viewer, Matisse's draped model with its away gaze gives a considerably cooler and more distanced impression. These different impressions are also effectively enhanced by the artists' different choices of the main colour in the eye — pink and turquoise respectively.

In both paintings there are also the closest elements of concretism. In Pauli's case, we find this at the bottom of the painting. There, the artist allows the warm red floor to be followed by a gray and a black horizontal part, which together makes the associative paths to Mark Rothko's compositions in red and black, from the period when Rothko's depressive state characterized the choice of colors in his art. In Matisse's case, we find a corresponding concretistically embossed, tricolour feature in the right wing of the painting, which runs all the way from the painting's lower edge to its upper edge.

These austere, concretistic elements pit both artists directly against elements characterized by undulating ornamental form, in warm orange or brown tones. In Pauli's case in the form of the orange chaise longue's soft pattern meeting with the hard black lot, while Matisse lets the brown-toned curving of the wall-hung oriental carpet contrast with the chilliest lot of the concretistically austere feature.

In conclusion, if we focus on the upper left parts of the paintings, one can see how the austere zigzag features of Matisse's wall-hung oriental carpet have their counterpart in a similar line play in Pauli's wall section. When Matisse lets a cromulon-shaped oat-yellow feature balance up the downward flow created by the prominent red part of the carpet and the model's slackly hanging turquoise-covered right arm, Pauli achieves the same effect by letting a portion of the pink drape stick up behind his model's descending right arm.

With his open mind to all new trends in art, Georg Pauli sets himself apart from his generational peers and he is in many ways unparalleled in Swedish art history. Like no other, he became a significant player in most of the art directions that emerged during the dynamic period 1880-1920. He was a prominent French-influenced outdoor painter in the 1880s, a forerunner of Syntheticism, a professed National Romantic at the turn of the century and
cubism swedish banbryare during the 1910s. With the painting in the auction, Georg Pauli also proves to be one of the first Swedish artists to acquire in an initiated way central lessons from Matisse and manage these in his own, uniquely marked work of art.

“It is not possible to live on only old masters, you have to see what is done in time.”
(Georg Pauli)

Supplementary image: Henri Matisse “L'Algérienne” 1909 oil, canvas 81x65 cm (Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou) Image source: Wikipedia.