Henri Ottmann (1877-1927)

Actress Eve Francis in the film El Dorado Large oil on canvas signed lower right, countersigned, dated 1922 and titled on reverse. Size 170 cm X 205 cm Our painting was exhibited at the Solon d'automne in 1922. A few small paint chips (which will be repaired before delivery) and an old restoration on the back. Wikipedia biography : Henri Louis Ottmann is the son of Henri Philippe Ottmann and Louise Lemaistre. On October 22, 1902, he married Marie Céline André Capron in Ixelles, a commune in the greater Brussels area. He studied at the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1898, he was one of the founders of the Atelier Libre Labeur for painters established in Belgium, and worked in Brussels at the very beginning of the 20th century. It was in this city that, in 1903, he first exhibited three views of the Gare du Luxembourg in La Libre Esthétique, executed under various atmospheric conditions (wind, frost, fog). In all likelihood, the painting Vue de la gare du Luxembourg à Bruxelles (View of Luxembourg station in Brussels) was included in this consignment. Trains for Namur and the south of the country depart from Luxembourg station. It is undoubtedly a work done, or at least begun, in the open air. For this composition, the painter placed himself on a bridge spanning the tracks. In his works dating from before the First World War, the artist drew lessons from Impressionism. Here, the color is reminiscent of Auguste Renoir, whom Ottmann particularly admired. But we also think of Claude Monet, from whom he borrows the motif of the signal emerging abruptly from the frame (La Gare Saint-Lazare: les signaux, 1877, Hanover, Museum of Lower Saxony). The bird's-eye view opens up a vast space in the foreground, where the artist plays with the repetition of the purely decorative rail motif. Ottmann wanted to create large, ornamental compositions from modern subjects. The Vue de la gare du Luxembourg in Brussels bears witness to this ambition, despite its relatively modest dimensions. He participated in the 1905 Salon des indépendants in Paris, the Salon d'automne, the Salon de la Société nationale des beaux-arts, and exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries in Paris. In December 1910, he exhibited at Galerie Barbazanges. Settled in Montmartre, Henri Ottmann made frequent visits to the La Baule region [ref.nécessaire]. He began painting plein-air nudes at the beginning of the 20th century. His landscapes, such as La Plage de Pornichet in 1920, Le Pont Marie and Le Port de Marseille, are influenced by Fauvism. Around 1920, he painted La Goulue -pseudonym for Louise Weber-, who served as a model for many painters, including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Auguste Renoir. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes conserves a dozen of his paintings, including L'Étal marseillais, L'Erdre au pont d'Orléans (1919) and Portrait de René Levrel (1925). The painting Vue de la gare du Luxembourg à Bruxelles (1903) is kept in Paris at the Musée d'Orsay. The Fonds national d'art contemporain holds a number of his works, including Courtisane endormie (1920). While this artist's aesthetic is more postimpressionist, his Courtisane endormie was presented among the so-called academic painters in the exhibition entitled Modernités plurielles at the Musée national d'Art moderne in Paris from 2013 to 2015, this canvas being considered by the curators to be at the crossroads of Alexandre Cabanel's La Naissance de Vénus and Raphaël's nudes, whose lines Ingres had long observed. El Dorado is a French film directed by Marcel L'Herbier, released in 1921. In Granada, Sibilla (Eve Francis) is a dancer at the El Dorado cabaret. She works there to raise her sick son. Men flock around her, but her loneliness and mal de vivre leave her without hope. One night, in despair, she attempts suicide before going on stage. The film's strength lies in its many visual effects: blurs, optical distortions, light and shadow effects, etc. To symbolize the heroine's dreamy absence, L'Herbier used a "screen blur", which provoked a furious outcry from Léon Gaumont at the screening, as he believed the operator had made a mistake in focusing.