“Les horizons multiples. The painting of Jean Constantin”.
“Voir lʼhorizon. Et le peindre. Cʼest lui qui détermine le reste de ce que lʼon voit.”
In a room of the small villa in Pisa designed by Federigo Severini in the mid-1920s, just a stone’s throw from other Severini sites such as the monumental Faculty of Engineering building and the modern Sacred Heart church, Jean Constantin’s atelier has remained intact. Everything is in the rigorous order left by the painter: jars filled with brushes and pencils, tubes of paints, earths and pigments, varnishes, pads, canvases and tablets, but above all stacks and stacks of sheets stacked in geometric architecture. If time has stood still, it has done so without a trace of dust or cobwebs. As if everything is still ready for a new day’s work capturing lights and horizons, waiting for yet another sheet bathed in sea and clouds to be added to the light column of papers on which other sheets, of equal size and substance, would like to delicately return to rest.
A visit to the atelier explains much about Jean Constantin’s painting. And not only in the exclusive choice of theme and technique, but even more so for that Cartesian order of objects that implies the value of a profound poetic and intellectual measure, revealing its surprising clarity of design. Enchantingly, the infinite atmospheric registers captured in the borderline between land, sea and sky, rendered on paper by the soft chromatic vaporousness of watercolour – that is, a writing of water on water – lose the apparent immediacy of a naturalistic piece to acquire, in the repetition and multiplication of the pictorial gesture, their real status as fragments of a more complex and articulated discourse. A discourse that deserves to be recomposed today. (1)
Jean Constantin (1924-2009) had arrived in Pisa from his native Paris in 1952 as a lecturer in French at the Scuola Normale, bringing with him love and enthusiasm that would never be betrayed: for literature, for art, for Italy. A sentimental baggage that the fate of the name seemed to impose, if before him another Constantin, a painter to boot (the Genevan Abraham Constantin) had had the honour of signing the volume Idées italiennes sur quelques tableaux célèbres, printed in 1840 in Florence for the types of Giovan Pietro Vieusseux and written with his friend Stendhal. (2)
AndStendhal and Rousseauwere for Jean the main references of solid and wide-ranging literary interests, to which painting offered, by natural inclination, a valuable interpretative support. The Parisian landscapes of some canvases of the 1940s, evidence of a twenty-year-old who wished to understand the lesson of Corot and is up-to-date on Utrillo, are evidence of an intimate exercise felt from the outset as necessary and complementary to the reading and study of the adored classics.
In a biography that, out of tenacious reserve, has conceded nothing to exhibition and public confrontation, the clues for starting a critical reflection are to be sought precisely in the happy Pisan years. (3) The meeting with Maria Severini and with the work of her father, the engineer-painter Federigo Severini, in fact traces the coordinates within which to circumscribe the possible opportunities for the development of her pictorial research. Because Maria Severini, assistant at the Institute of Art History at the University of Pisa then directed by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, author in 1959 of the catalogue of drawings and prints in the Timpanaro Collection and above all Mrs. Constantin since 1964, meant the certainty of affection and deep intellectual complicity. (4) And because Federigo Severini, who died in 1962 and had just become known as a possible father-in-law, meant a precious legacy of themes and ideas to be preserved, studied and developed. (5)
The careful and loving cataloguing of the patrimony of paintings, drawings and watercolours by the Pisan engineer, a major figure in the panorama of the arts in the first half of the 20th century, seemed to offer Constantin the chance to reknit the threads of a long figurative and literary tradition of landscape enchantments. In other words, to revisit those qualities of a landscape – of marble, certainly, but also of wild coastal shores and pine forests – that Pisa had revealed to modernity.
Severini’s elegant naturalism, carried out for the most part along the sentimental itineraries of the San Rossore pine forest, the Boccadarno profiles or Marina di Pisa, reproposed the poetic scenarios of Shelley and Byron, Maurice Barrès and D’Annunzio, as well as the surprise of 19th-century travellers. And at the same time, it took up formal motifs and suggestions that from Nino Costa passed to Amedeo Lori and thus to an entire season of Pisa painting, whose distinctive features invited an unexpected consonance and complicity.
One could start from there, then, to identify in the landscape datum of shores and horizons a theme to be developed in further directions; and add more, perhaps the memory of Friedrich or that of Courbet and his amazing The Sea at Palavos, Boudin’s beaches, Manet’s water and Monet’s light and reflections. And on this, add again, and perhaps above all, the then revealing reading of Ragghianti’s Mondrian e l’Arte del XX secolo (Mondrian and 20th Century Art), published in its first edition in 1962 and a precious opportunity to reflect on the search for an absolute order of representation.
The production of abbreviated annotations of atmospheric fragments imagined at the meeting point of sky, water and shore, executed within the confines of the atelier table and to be entrusted exclusively to watercolour and identically sized paper, began in the 1960s. Already the uniformity of technique and size, the constant repetition of the same shot from a single interior window, were choices that excluded any narrative or naturalistic concessions. An eye to Turner and Whistler, therefore, although Constable’s extraordinary studies of clouds, as well as the skies of Rome captured at the beginning of the 19th century on the sheets of Valenciennes or Corot, could also suggest much to a solitary promeneur in the territories of abstraction.
A promeneur rigorously autour de ma chambre, whose rousseauiane rêveries fix imaginary landscapes of a mental map that seems to evoke and unite the marinas of Pisa and those of Trouville. No geographic indications, just a few elegant signatures, a few indications of colour and chromatic agreement – ‘lumiere cobalt outremer’, ‘jaune’… – left on the back of often recycled papers, never precious, on which the brush transcribes secret travel notes, silent musical scores that think of Debussy, of Ravel.
A production that would remain on this rigid operational grid for forty years, accompanying personal events (the birth of his son François, his return to France, the foundation of the ‘Fédération nationale des associations d’italianistes’ and his commitment to the promotion of the Italian language and culture, the grief for the death of Maria Severini in 1984), always confined to the ateliers of Pisa and Paris and always in the obstinate refusal of possible, and even already planned, exhibitions in galleries.
Yet, alongside the multitude of papers soaked in sand and clouds, shores and brackish, what remains to clarify his choices and motivations are some notes left by Constantin on his own work and some indications left to his son François on how to present it. (6)
On the one hand, painting felt to be a ‘fundamental exigence’ which, through a controlled process of narrative synthesis and compositional reduction, identifies in the point of contact and contrast between the sky and the earth the opportunity to free the imagination in delicate rarefactions of light and colour (Un combat entre le ciel (bleu) et la terre (rouge) arbitré ou/et récompensé par le jaune…). On the other hand, in the planned assemblage of the papers in rhythmic combinations of formal agreements and chromatic cadences, the affirmation of the value of the multiple (L’horizon… et les horizons multiples), of the continuous repetition of a subjective experience (Ma peinture me donne finalement le droit de dire ‘ Je “… c’est le droit de dire ” Je ’) that is born in the intensity of the vision and realised in the evanescence of the material. Segments of a non-Warburghian Atlas, Constantin’s watercolours can thus be included in that line of research on the relationship between the feeling of landscape and strategies of representation that goes from Friedrich to Gerhard Richter, (7) including, in various declinations, other contemporary protagonists.
Because the horizon imagined by the artist is a tennis court on which to play brushstrokes – Une partie de tennis (on se renvoie la balle!) avec l’horizon -, it is the trace of an interior seismograph on which to record subtle aesthetic and emotional oscillations, imprinted on paper like light clouds on the edge of the sea. And they are horizons, finally, to be paginated following rhymes and assonances, offered to the eye in compositions that speak of painting, that become poetry.
(1) This paper originates from the exhibition Jean Constantin. Rivages, set up at the Museo della Grafica (Pisa, Palazzo Lanfranchi) in 2014 in collaboration with the Amici dei Musei. For the realisation of this first Italian exhibition of Constantin’s works, as for many other initiatives promoted by the Museo della Grafica, Mauro Del Corso’s enthusiasm was decisive.
(2)Abraham Constantin – Stendhal, Idées italiennes sur quelques tableaux célèbres, édition établie et présentée par Sandra Teroni et Helène de Jacquelot, Paris, Beaux-Arts de Paris, 2013.
(3) A fine profile of Jean Constantin is to be found in Huguette Hatem, In memoriam Jean Constantin, in ‘Fédération nationale des associations d’italianistes. Compte-rendu’, 2009, pp. 40-43.
(4) M. Severini, La Collezione Sebastiano Timpanaro nel Gabinetto disegni e stampe dell’Istituto di storia dell’arte dell’Università di Pisa, Venice, N. Pozza, 1959.
(5) See A. Tosi, Federigo Severini pittore, in Federigo Severini. Opere e progetti, edited by Federico Bracaloni and Massimo Dringoli, Pisa, Pacini, 2011, pp. 161-172. And again A. Tosi, Emozioni sul filo del mare, in La costa pisana: architettura e paesaggio, edited by Federico Bracaloni and Massimo Dringoli, Pisa, Pacini, 2008, pp. 27-36.
(6) Cf. www.jeanconstantin.eu.
(7) Cf. Gerhard Richter, exhibition catalogue edited by B. Corà, Pecci Museum, Prato, 1999.