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Lot Essay
A student of Matisse; a skilful master of the poupées admired by the acclaimed French couturier Paul Poiret; and a cheerful hostess and proprietor of La Cantine, which succored many a starving artist during the First World War; Marie Vassilieff was a nexus of the Left Bank’s artistic circle. Unlike many Russian émigré artists in Paris, she fully integrated into French artistic society. Her immediate circle included many who shaped the development of 20th Century art: Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigliani, Ossip Zadkine, Guillaume Apollinaire, Suzanne Valadon, Erik Satie, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob and Chaim Soutine.
Thanks to Vassilieff’s inexhaustible energy, from 1912 L’Académie Vassilieff at l'avenue du Maine, 21 in Montparnasse became one of the main artistic centres for Russians arriving in the French capital and cosmopolitan Parisians. As Vassilieff recollects in her memoirs: ‘in the morning we painted nudes, after lunch - portraits and in the evening, we sketched […] Everyone did what they wanted and it cost them almost nothing: 16 francs per month, 4 francs per week or 4 centimes for two hours of sketching; unlike everywhere else nowadays for 5000 francs per month for 3 morning sessions’ (quoted in A. Raev, Maria Vasil’eva, Moscow, 2015, p. 36). At that time Vassilieff had neither influential patrons, nor gallery representation but, despite her lack of earnings, she recalls in her unpublished La Bohème du XX siècle how she loved to ‘put on the Ritz and visit Café de la Rotonde with (her) students. Champagne cost only three francs at the time. Life was beautiful…’ (Ibid, p. 36).
Situated at the corner of the boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail, the café became an emblematic gathering place for progressive Parisian intellectuals. The owner of the establishment, Victor Libion, tolerated penniless artists and poets sitting for hours, sipping a cup of coffee on the café’s sizeable terrace and giving their sketches in lieu of payment. A curious chronicle of those years is captured in a series of photographs taken by Jean Cocteau in August 1916. In the series, Pablo Picasso, Emilienne Pâquerette, Manuel Ortiz de Zarate, Max Jacob, Henri-Pierre Roche, Moïse Kisling, Amedeo Modigliani, André Salmon and Marie Vassilieff pretend to be in a big modern city with busy boulevards, cafés, shops and metro stations, all of which were in fact deserted during wartime. Apart from Picasso’s muse at the time, Pâquerette, Vassilieff is the only woman in this male company, showing her special standing in this bohemian circle. Vassilieff features in four photographs, including one (fig. 1) where the mischievous company is captured on their exit from La Rotonde.
For Vassilieff La Rotonde also held deep personal significance: it was the place where she met the future father of her son Pierre. She describes him as follows: ‘Once I met a Moroccan officer with a fez on top of his wounded, bandage-covered head, he was wearing a khaki-coloured uniform and a red overcoat over his shoulders. His beauty struck me. He had bright eyes, long curled eyelashes, a very thin nose with well-defined nostrils and sumptuous lips which lay like rose petals on his ivory face (Ibid, p. 71). Their affair was passionate, but did not last long and the French officer, Amar, was soon relocated without acknowledging the child.
Shortly after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, the standing of the Russian nationals living in French territories changed. Vassilieff, who had no documents and was a mother of an illegitimate child, was soon accused of being in contact with the Bolsheviks and arrested. She was sent with her son to an internment camp in Fontainebleau. The artistic community supported Vassilieff during her imprisonment and she was especially grateful to Léger and his wife Jeanne-Augustine, who not only helped during her pregnancy, but also came to the camp to take her son. As Vassilieff recollects, ‘This gesture of Léger who, whilst being a soldier, dared to take a child of a woman, who was declared to be an enemy of France, was so honourable, that even after many years, I saw the Légers’ actions as a great feat’ (Ibid, p. 77). Just before Easter of 1919 Vassilieff was released from the camp and, thanks to the support of Paul Poiret and André Salmon, was soon back on the Parisian art scene.
While in her memoirs Vassilieff describes the difficulties of single parenting, her paintings frequently depict the joys of a family life she never truly experienced in full. In Café de la Rotonde the artist introduces the viewer to the intimate world and psychology of a child, translated onto the canvas via Vassilieff's own brand of Cubism with primitivist elements. The spectator witnesses a scene at Café de la Rotonde, where, as the author of a recent monograph on the artist, Ada Raev, describes ‘a well-dressed woman with a child on her lap sits at the table on a balcony, from where an idealised panorama of a Sunday boulevard opens to the viewer. The man next to her is a waiter, who attentively serves the visitor, who gazes away with melancholy. The child unsuccessfully tries to attract attention of the adults. The situation gives an acute feeling of loneliness’ (Ibid, pp. 88-89).
The year Café de la Rotonde was painted, it was shown at the Salon d'Automne, where just over a decade earlier Cubist works were first introduced to the public. The painting also featured at the key exhibitions of Vassilieff’s oeuvre in Paris and London. On this occasion, the painting appears for the first time at an international auction house, thus offering collectors a rare opportunity to acquire an important work by the artist.
We would like to thank Claude Bernes for his assistance in cataloguing this work.
Thanks to Vassilieff’s inexhaustible energy, from 1912 L’Académie Vassilieff at l'avenue du Maine, 21 in Montparnasse became one of the main artistic centres for Russians arriving in the French capital and cosmopolitan Parisians. As Vassilieff recollects in her memoirs: ‘in the morning we painted nudes, after lunch - portraits and in the evening, we sketched […] Everyone did what they wanted and it cost them almost nothing: 16 francs per month, 4 francs per week or 4 centimes for two hours of sketching; unlike everywhere else nowadays for 5000 francs per month for 3 morning sessions’ (quoted in A. Raev, Maria Vasil’eva, Moscow, 2015, p. 36). At that time Vassilieff had neither influential patrons, nor gallery representation but, despite her lack of earnings, she recalls in her unpublished La Bohème du XX siècle how she loved to ‘put on the Ritz and visit Café de la Rotonde with (her) students. Champagne cost only three francs at the time. Life was beautiful…’ (Ibid, p. 36).
Situated at the corner of the boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail, the café became an emblematic gathering place for progressive Parisian intellectuals. The owner of the establishment, Victor Libion, tolerated penniless artists and poets sitting for hours, sipping a cup of coffee on the café’s sizeable terrace and giving their sketches in lieu of payment. A curious chronicle of those years is captured in a series of photographs taken by Jean Cocteau in August 1916. In the series, Pablo Picasso, Emilienne Pâquerette, Manuel Ortiz de Zarate, Max Jacob, Henri-Pierre Roche, Moïse Kisling, Amedeo Modigliani, André Salmon and Marie Vassilieff pretend to be in a big modern city with busy boulevards, cafés, shops and metro stations, all of which were in fact deserted during wartime. Apart from Picasso’s muse at the time, Pâquerette, Vassilieff is the only woman in this male company, showing her special standing in this bohemian circle. Vassilieff features in four photographs, including one (fig. 1) where the mischievous company is captured on their exit from La Rotonde.
For Vassilieff La Rotonde also held deep personal significance: it was the place where she met the future father of her son Pierre. She describes him as follows: ‘Once I met a Moroccan officer with a fez on top of his wounded, bandage-covered head, he was wearing a khaki-coloured uniform and a red overcoat over his shoulders. His beauty struck me. He had bright eyes, long curled eyelashes, a very thin nose with well-defined nostrils and sumptuous lips which lay like rose petals on his ivory face (Ibid, p. 71). Their affair was passionate, but did not last long and the French officer, Amar, was soon relocated without acknowledging the child.
Shortly after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, the standing of the Russian nationals living in French territories changed. Vassilieff, who had no documents and was a mother of an illegitimate child, was soon accused of being in contact with the Bolsheviks and arrested. She was sent with her son to an internment camp in Fontainebleau. The artistic community supported Vassilieff during her imprisonment and she was especially grateful to Léger and his wife Jeanne-Augustine, who not only helped during her pregnancy, but also came to the camp to take her son. As Vassilieff recollects, ‘This gesture of Léger who, whilst being a soldier, dared to take a child of a woman, who was declared to be an enemy of France, was so honourable, that even after many years, I saw the Légers’ actions as a great feat’ (Ibid, p. 77). Just before Easter of 1919 Vassilieff was released from the camp and, thanks to the support of Paul Poiret and André Salmon, was soon back on the Parisian art scene.
While in her memoirs Vassilieff describes the difficulties of single parenting, her paintings frequently depict the joys of a family life she never truly experienced in full. In Café de la Rotonde the artist introduces the viewer to the intimate world and psychology of a child, translated onto the canvas via Vassilieff's own brand of Cubism with primitivist elements. The spectator witnesses a scene at Café de la Rotonde, where, as the author of a recent monograph on the artist, Ada Raev, describes ‘a well-dressed woman with a child on her lap sits at the table on a balcony, from where an idealised panorama of a Sunday boulevard opens to the viewer. The man next to her is a waiter, who attentively serves the visitor, who gazes away with melancholy. The child unsuccessfully tries to attract attention of the adults. The situation gives an acute feeling of loneliness’ (Ibid, pp. 88-89).
The year Café de la Rotonde was painted, it was shown at the Salon d'Automne, where just over a decade earlier Cubist works were first introduced to the public. The painting also featured at the key exhibitions of Vassilieff’s oeuvre in Paris and London. On this occasion, the painting appears for the first time at an international auction house, thus offering collectors a rare opportunity to acquire an important work by the artist.
We would like to thank Claude Bernes for his assistance in cataloguing this work.