User:Tournon75/Maurice Esmein

Maurice Esmein, who was born in Paris on 4 February 1888 and died on the front at Vaudesincourt (Marne) on 4 February 1918, was a French doctor and self-taught Cubist painter.

Origins
The son of the republican lawyer Adhémar Esmein, and from a family of Charente notables, Maurice Esmein first studied medicine before becoming a painter, without going to the academies. At around the age of eighteen, he was inspired by his uncle, Julien Le Blant (1851 - 1936), a painter specialising in historical and military painting, from whom he quickly broke away. He then befriended Jean Buhot, an Orientalist and painter (son of the engraver Félix Buhot), with whom Maurice engaged in enthusiastic debates about the painting of his time. He then met Alfred Reth, a Hungarian-born painter who had been living in Paris since 1905, who introduced him to Cubism. It was under this influence that, around 1913, the period in which he truly established himself as a painter began (he wrote in his Notebooks: "my intellectual puberty was around the age of 25").

His painting
Influenced by Cubism, he was interested above all in what he could bring to painting by working with form. But he never completely detached himself from the representation of reality. His paintings are often portraits and cubist landscapes, but never abstract. Life is always present, as if both captured and revealed by the form, rather like Cézanne. He was looking for a new pictorial genre, a "complete painting" that would combine sensuality with intellect, form with matter, cubist composition with the natural appearance of impressionism.

The war
Working in two studios (in the 15th arrondissement, and in Luzarches, in what is now the Val d'Oise), he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, and frequented the Abbaye de Créteil and Bateau-Lavoir circles [ref. needed]. However, the First World War broke out and he was discharged from the army, but could not bear to be favoured by fate over his fellow soldiers. He was posted as an auxiliary doctor to the lycée Chaptal hospital, but soon volunteered to go to the front as a doctor. Posted to Mont-sans-nom near Reims, he was accepted onto a patrol one night when there was a shortage of volunteers for a reconnaissance mission. The patrol was caught by an enemy searchlight and machine-gunned. He was killed in February 1918, on his 30th birthday.



The post-war period
He left around forty paintings and many drawings, watercolours and engravings. After his death, an exhibition of his work was held in 1919 at the Galerie Vildrac, rue de Seine, one of the first modern art galleries created by the writer Charles Vildrac and his wife. Vildrac, who was himself a combatant, exhibited works by painters who had died in the war. A small number of posthumous works by Maurice Esmein are on display. The Musée National d'Art Moderne acquired one of his paintings, Au laboratoire, which is now in the collections of the Beaubourg Centre. Many of his paintings are now in private collections, but some of them will be shown again at the Galerie du Luxembourg in the town hall of the 6th arrondissement of Paris in December 2022 and January 2023 in an exhibition entitled "Maurice Esmein, un peintre aux sources du cubisme".

His Notebooks (1913-1918)
Maurice Esmein also left a manuscript entitled Carnets, which Éditions Hermann will publish for the first time at the end of November 2022. Scribbled from 1913 until the war, even written at the front, they are reflections on painting, Impressionism, Cubism and the intellectual constructs underlying modern art. These Notebooks clearly show that, when he died in battle, his thoughts on painting were in tune with those of his time. Léon Werth had already mentioned the existence of these notes in 1923 in a chapter devoted to Maurice Esmein in his book Quelques peintres. He wrote: "Maurice Esmein has written some excellent pages on contemporary painters". Vildrac and Werth were interested in them, and wanted to make them public. These handwritten notebooks, found in the family archives in 2016, bear witness to the thoughts of a painter caught up in the movement towards Cubism. In November 1916, Maurice Esmein asked himself, "How should we now envisage the problem of painting after the war?" A highly cultured artist as well as an astute critic, he questioned the artistic practices of his time and explored the "dead ends" in which his contemporaries were lost. Commenting, sometimes harshly, on the works of Monet, Renoir, Matisse and Picasso, he also criticised his own mistakes. He was looking for that third way between cubism and impressionism, which would combine sensuality with intellect, form with sensitivity. The Notebooks reveal an artist in the making who was also a researcher, exploring ways of enriching the painting of his time by trying to introduce more plastic beauty and animation through light.