P. (PIERRE) CARRIER-BELLEUSE

Biography

P. (PIERRE) CARRIER-BELLEUSE
1851 Paris (France) - 1932 Paris (France)

Pierre-Gérard Carrier-Belleuse was born in Paris on 28 January 1851, the son of the celebrated sculptor Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, from whom he received his earliest training. He went on to study at the École des Beaux-Arts under Alexandre Cabanel and Pierre Victor Galland. From 1875, he exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon, receiving an honourable mention in 1887, and was awarded a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1889. He joined the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1890 and taught at the Académie Julian during the 1890s. Although he produced landscapes, portraits, and genre scenes, Carrier-Belleuse is best remembered for his intimate depictions of women, and above all for his ballet subjects, in which he captured the poise of the corps de ballet of the Paris Opéra. From around 188,5 he worked almost exclusively in pastel, a medium he handled with marked virtuosity, and he also contributed drawings and lithographs to Le Figaro Illustré. He spent extended periods on the Côte d'Opale, where he owned a villa at Wissant and associated with the artists' colony gathered around Adrien Demont and Virginie Demont-Breton. Between 1914 and 1916, he conceived and supervised, together with Auguste François-Marie Gorguet, the Panthéon de la Guerre, then the largest painting in the world, comprising nearly five thousand portraits of Allied wartime figures. He died in Paris in 1932.

Pierre Carrier-Belleuse's pastel technique From around 1885, Carrier-Belleuse shifted his artistic focus almost entirely to pastel, a decision that coincided with the broader revival of the medium in Parisian artistic life during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. That revival, in which Degas, Manet and Berthe Morisot played leading roles, and which was institutionally consolidated by the founding of the Société des Pastellistes Français in 1885, freed pastel from its eighteenth-century reputation as a refined portrait medium and opened it to distinctly modern, sensuous subjects: the theatre, the wings, the body in movement. Carrier-Belleuse positioned himself emphatically within this development. Technically, his work is marked by a number of deliberate choices. He frequently worked on a large scale, at times well over a metre in height, and used canvas as his support rather than the more conventional paper. Pastel on canvas requires a prepared, lightly granular ground that grips the dry pigment stick, and it allows the artist to build up successive layers without the colour quickly becoming saturated. This choice partly accounts for the painterly density of his ballet scenes: the tutus acquire their characteristic, almost luminous volume through layers built up from dark to light, the uppermost touches often applied with the side of the chalk to produce a powdery, light-refracting texture. For skin and faces, by contrast, he worked with finer, more thoroughly blended strokes, occasionally smudged with the finger or a stump, yielding the smooth, porcelain-like surface so typical of his portraits of dancers. His reputation as a colourist, repeatedly noted by contemporary critics, is directly bound up with this layered procedure. Pastel does not permit optical mixing on a palette: every nuance must be selected as a separate stick and then reconciled with adjacent tones on the support itself. Carrier-Belleuse handled this register with notable assurance in the transitions between warm stage lighting and cooler areas of shadow, an effect he carried to a particular pitch in his backstage scenes. Although his name is often invoked alongside Degas, he is less inclined towards the compositional experiments and radical croppings of his more famous contemporary, remaining closer to Salon conventions of a centred, legible figure. Within the Belle Époque, he therefore occupies a distinct position: technically allied to the Impressionist pastellists, yet in subject matter and presentation still anchored in the refined academic tradition in which he had been trained.