Remarkable: The Académie Ranson in the Thirties

“This wasn’t a school but an academy…”

“…as the Greeks used the word. A spiritual home created by a conjunction of people and the times.”¹ The ardent statements by the Georgian painter and student Vera Pagavato about the Académie Ranson reveal its atmosphere of friendliness, collective research and profound humanism during the 1930s. Unusually, the 20^th century artists have left finely worded testaments of their school, their teachers and their fellow-students. In that time of economic depression, with scars still remaining from the Great War, the workshops on the rue Joseph-Bara are a melting point of life and emulation. Installed in Montparnasse, the artistic centre of Paris, the Académie Ranson was a celebrated and desirable institution. Throughout its history, beginning in 1908, it grew in reputation after the successive departures of its founders and its repurchase by the sculptor Harriet von Tschudi Cérésole in 1932.² Around Roger Bissière and Charles Malfray, the full professors, Jean Le Moal, Étienne-Martin and François Stahly – to name only the best-known – initiated their careers here in an independent and free manner. All of them remained exemplary supporters of the school for several years. Cosmopolitan and open to a wide range of trends and talents, the Académie Ranson offered its young painters and sculptors a means to avoid the dogmas both of official art and of the avant-garde. No academic doctrine was enforced and no dogmatism asserted at the time of so-called social realism and the rise of dangers in Eastern Europe, well symbolised by the closure of the Bauhaus by the Nazis in 1933. The Académie Ranson benefited from sharing a variety of influences. Post-cubism, surrealism and primitivist influences, married to a love of aesthetic crafts and their techniques: that was the fruitful recipe for this independent form of instruction. Conveying a multiplicity of traditions and innovations, the Académie Ranson represents an educational model which was successful and unique in the heart of artistic Paris during the 1930s. It fully anticipates the blossoming of a non-figurative school of Paris to be brought about by a renovation during the post-war years.

– The Ranson Tradition: Independent French Art

The fact that the Académie Ranson was founded by the Nabis, spearheaded by the painter Maurice Denis, guaranteed that it was assured of a reputation for independence and a certain prestige during the thirties. Soundly established, it conveyed the modern heritage of Gauguin and Cézanne. In sculpture, the patronage of Maillol gave this school a high level of credibility. Through its educational celebrities the Académie Ranson avoided the sclerotic patterns of pompous academicism. After the Great War it was preoccupied with blending tradition and modernity according to the rich concept of an appeal to order expressing the taste of avant-garde artists for classical sources. From the beginning of the twenties, the Académie Ranson was completely in touch with the zeitgeist. Its managers recruited a new teaching staff carrying the hallmark of the JPF (Jeune Peinture Française). In painting, after a brief period with Jules-Émile Zingg, who was considered one of the best realist landscape artists of his time, Denis took on Roger Bissière in 1923, sporadically accompanied by other reputed artists of the French tradition.³

At this time, Bissière’s art was closely related to that of Georges Braque, the initiator of the “call to order.”⁴ Closely identified with the life of the academy, Bissière held the post of Professor of Painting until 1938 and created a fresco workshop in 1934. He totally embodied the image of an artist attached to the modernist tradition. His role in founding the Salon de l’art française indépendente in 1928, which had the ambition of “restoring the framework and the spirit of the pre-war Independents,” makes that clear enough. On his recommendation, the sculpture workshop was entrusted to Charles Malfray in 1931, probably on the insistence of Maillol. A dissident from academic teachings, Malfray was the creator, in particular, of two very controversial war memorials in Orleans and Pithiviers. In rejecting pompous commemorative iconography in favour of a powerful expressionism in the manner of Rodin and de Bourdelle, he was assured of support from a whole community of artists. Bissière and Malfray were thus two respected personalities and were well-known to the young, as Vera Pagava says: “Bissière for painting and Malfray for sculpture were the two poles of attraction for all those young people who came from the four corners of the world.”⁵

“The reputation of the Académie Ranson couldn’t fail to attract a young sculptor like Étienne-Martin, the recipient of a scholarship from the school of fine arts in Lyon, who enrolled in 1933. It was the promise of a comprehensive and liberal education in contrast to the sclerosis of the National Superior School of Art in Paris and the increasingly outdated Prix de Rome.⁶ The Académie Julian, an old academic institution, had lost its charm by now for an artist in search of the sensational. For young people, who had been plunged into future anxiety by the economic crisis, it could be preferable to enrol at the École supérieure des arts décoratifs, which was enjoying a revival with the introduction of a workshop of the poster-painter Cassandre. For others, who were seeking experience rather than economic opportunities, the Montparnasse academies such as the Ranson and the Grande Chaumière, were the favoured paths. They embodied independent, cosmopolitan and quality instruction. Antoine Bourdelle’s sculpture course at the Grande Chaumière remained one of the most popular in the capital until 1929. Workshops opened by the artists Fernand Léger and André Lhote were also much frequented by young people. There, Cubism, purism was taught as an apprenticeship in modern painting.”⁷

– Ranson, a community spirit

The witness statements of students and contemporaries show that the special quality of the Académie Ranson was its community spirit, sometimes almost collegial, unique and dynamic. “Young artists complain of having to work in isolation, without teachers and/or companions. Thus, it is worth knowing about the liberal and sincere effort made by the Académie Ranson […] to revive the style of the workshops of former times.”⁸ These workshops of former times referred to by Jaques Lassaigne evoke the revitalisation of medieval guilds, humble and efficient, according to the colleges of the 15^th century, which gathered in poor students from the university. More than a professor, the teacher in this case is a companion, or an accompanist, a midwife, or a man of wisdom. At Ranson, it was not unusual for students to work without paying, and access was generally open to strangers.

This community spirit seems to correspond to the popular social vision of the thirties, anticipating the aims of the Front Populaire in the field of art. But that this humanistic orientation existed in the academy was due more to tradition than to proselytising or opportunism. At the Ranson, the team spirit is a part of its heritage from the spirit of the Nabis. It is a fruit of Maurice Denis’s attachment to décor and to the Ateliers de l'Art Sacré, which he founded at the end of the Great War together with Georges Desvallières, who was already also working at the Ateliers du Moyen Age. Moreover, the choice of Bissière as professor is probably no more surprising because of the interest he had expressed since 1915 in the fresco technique, a collective art par excellence and an ancient technique much used during the Renaissance.⁹ Bissière, a model of the artist as craftsman, was in perfect harmony with the image of Malfray, the heir of stone cutters; this distinguished them sharply from the other teachers of the period, especially from Fernand Léger, the painter of the machine and the modern town, and from André L’hote, who was seen as the representative of a certain kind of salon Cubism.

In terms of communitarianism, the Académie Ranson also stands out for its interdisciplinary dialogue and the bridges it built between workshops: painting, drawing and design, wood-cutting, decorative arts and sculpture, fresco painting and directly cut sculpture. Certain painters, such as Manessier, figure as clichés showing sculpture students at work, thus attesting to the permeability between different courses. In terms of instruction, “Ranson” offered the same level of seriousness and a greater diversity than the École des Beaux-Arts,¹⁰ and was probably less exclusive and livelier. In comparison with the Lhote and Léger workshops, it was multidisciplinary. The practical, everyday organisation of the workshops, in these terms, is not greatly different. Thus, Nicolas Wacker who worked beside Bissière for more than a dozen years, was the one who collected the student fees, taught how to stretch canvas on frames in new situations, and organised the workshop. The sum of knowledge he acquired performing these tasks enabled him later to become a professor of painting techniques at the École des Beaux-Arts in the seventies, and to publish a manual which was very useful for generations of students.¹¹ The frescoes workshop was also an environment conducive to the discovery and diffusion of unaccustomed techniques, such as egg tempera painting, very compelling for its remorselessness. It was reused by certain artists on their own accounts, for example Le Moal, who used it in his works outside the workshop during 1935.

Académie Ranson was also collegial in relation to exhibiting collective projects. On the one hand, several monographic exhibitions were even mounted on academy premisses during the thirties, but their character remains confidential. On the other hand, the “Ranson Group,” which it was sometimes called in accounts of exhibitions, is closely associated with the Témoignage Group founded by Marcel Michaud in 1936, The Ranson students again figured as a collective. In this way they appeared at the Salon des Jeunes Artistes organised at the Beaux-Arts Gallery in 1937, in competition with the Groupe des Forces Nouvelles,¹² the incarnation of another dynamic tendency in modern French painting, of whom Bissière was an honorary member.¹³ Manessier and other students of the frescoes workshop contributed to the monumental commission for the pavilion of Air et des Chemins de Fer on the occasion of the International Exhibition of Art and Technology.¹⁴


– An Intersection of Influences: Post-Cubism, Art Brut, Surrealism

Instruction provided by the Académie Ranson had nothing academic about it in the conventional sense of that term. Certainly, painters and sculptors worked in front of a living model, but without excessive control and with a wide range of possible interpretation. At the beginning of the year, Bissière distributed as “principles” a list of aphorisms to encourage the students to develop their spirit of analysis and synthesis. “Don’t copy nature; make a choice between the elements it offers you,” he was accustomed to saying. From a mental point of view, in its conception painting is driven more by pleasure than by virtuosity.¹⁵ Bissière fed his students on a rich diet of open discussions more about art than about theories. Quite unlike André Lhote, who directly rearranges the student’s canvas as if it were his own, Bissière seems to avoid the posture of a professor. Less authoritarian than Fernand Lèger, who never hesitates to criticise his students vigorously, he accompanies and encourages his students to develop their own personality, even when their talent is still being asserted only timidly. Like his colleague Bissière, Malfray breaks with a certain conception of official and conventional instruction in the fine arts. “Academicism consists in copying and recopying the models […] and thus one constructs a canon, and anything that doesn’t resemble it is condemned,” he said a few years later.¹⁶ According to him, a model is rather material to be worked with than to be imitated. And art consists in interpreting nature into a language appropriate to the student, with the brio of his personality. “Malfray was an astonishing teacher. He could correct a work even if, in spirit, it was completely foreign to what he himself was doing,” Stahly tells us.¹⁷

On the chessboard of contemporary tendencies, the Académie Ranson appears as a veritable crossroads of influences. Bissière’s teaching methods had a reputation at that time for the realism of his subject-matter, a central idea about art in the interwar years which was taken over for political and social goals.¹⁸ It is notable that Bissière’s art originated in cubism, in construction based on volumes and masses, but without offering a watered-down version. Closer to Picasso and Braque in his aesthetic evolution than to André Lhote, Bissière showed, furthermore, a very personal affinity for the forms of primitive art, approaching the premisses of art brut, but without adhering totally to it in the aftermath.¹⁹ This association with the untamed nature of the artist is something he shared with Malfray, a defender of the direct cut in the interwar years, a technique which related to the tradition of statues from the Middle Ages.²⁰ The students of Bissière and Malfray cultivated this wealth in their works for the workshop while avoiding pastiche due to the autonomy they were accorded. If one understands the importance of the apprenticeship in direct cutting especially in the work of Étienne-Martin, one can also clearly see another interesting influence in the painting workshop: that of surrealism, an extremely innovative movement, but not occupying a central position in terms of visibility. The works of Nicola Wacker and Le Moal pay witness to a bundle of interests in a pictorially imaginative and introspective language, shifting towards the non-figurative. Outside the academy, they perhaps visited the various small exhibitions devoted to the works of Brauner, Miró, Dalí and Picabia, and then probably the major Surrealist exhibition of 1938 which preceded by a year the start of the war and the closure pf the Académie Ranson. The wide range of influences and the rich intellectual and artistic diet was in contrast to the post-impressionism practised at the Académie Julian or the École des Beaux-Arts, seen as obsolete by many critics. This artistic energy truly made the Académie Ranson “one of the liveliest centres of contemporary art”²¹ in the 1930s.

¹ “Vera Pagava se souvient [V.P. remembers],” in “Maîtres et élèves, l’exemple de Bissière [Teachers and students exemplified by Bissière],” Les Lettres françaises, 1 November 1959, p.10.

² For the history of the Académie Ranson, we refer to the 3^rd Cycle of Sandrine Goudai-Nicollier, L’Académie Ranson, creuset des individualités artistiques, 1919-1955, master’s thesis supervised by Guitemie Maldonado, Sorbonne-1, Paris 2003.

³ Louis Latapie (1923-1925), Demetrios Galanis (1925-1927), Georges Sabbagh in 1928. Amédée de la Patellière between 1929 and 1932. On a part-time basis, Gino Severini and Moïse Kisling presented some courses in the early 1920s.

⁴ Georges Braque embodies the model of post-war avant-garde painters of French Cubism. It was in relation to the evolution of his art that the critics first employed the expression “call to order” (rappel à l’ordre). Bissière dedicated a work to Georges Braque in 1920: Notes sur l’art de Georges Braque, in the collection “Les maître de cubism” published by L’Effort Moderne (republished in 1925 in L’Art d’aujourd’hui. No. 6, and in 1933 in Cahiers d’art in a special issue devoted to Braque).

⁵ “Vera Pagava se souvient [V.P. remembers],” in “Maîtres et élèves, l’exemple de Bissière [Teachers and students exemplified by Bissière],” Les Lettres françaises, 1 November 1959, p.10.

⁶ The inter-war years were a difficult period in the life of the National Superior School of Art to the point where Monique Segré was able to talk of “the Great Lady’s slumber.” See Segré, L’École des beaux-arts, xix^e et xx^e siècles, Paris, Éd. L’Hormaton, 1998.

⁷ See Claire Maingon, “L’académie Lhote – L’atelier Léger: enseignement comparés,” in L’Éducation artistique en France, du modèle académique et scolaire aux practiques actuelles xviii^e-xix^e siècles, Rennes, Presses universitaires, 2010, p. 219-230.

⁸ Jaques Lassainge, “Exposition de l’académie Ranson,” Sept, 7 July 1934, p. 10.

⁹ Roger Bissière wrote many articles for the journal L’Opinion between 1913 and 1920. Several of them were dedicated to Maurice Denis and the Académie Ranson (see the list of writings and statements by Bissière in vol. 1 of the Catalogue Résumé, p. 200-209). For the first time, Bissière wrote in favour of collective art as a unique tool for a revival of art in L’Opinion, 20 November 1915.

¹⁰ L’École des Beaux Arts also offered a workshop for direct sculpture and fresco during the thirties.

¹¹ From 1969 to 1981, Nicolas Wacker held a workshop dedicated to painting techniques at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. In 1980 he published a practical manual: La Peinture à partir du matériau brut et la role de la technique dans la création d’art (republished by Édition Allia in 1993).

¹² The Groupe des Forces Nouvelles, active from 1935 to 1939, brought together young realist artists who announced that they were recovering the language of French masters of the 17^th century, while taking current political themes for their content. Some, such as Humblot, had emerged from Lucien Simon’s workshop at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts but they left their master to claim an affiliation with Roger de La Fresnaye.

¹³ The Salon de L’Art Mural met at 64bis, rue de La Boétie from 31 May to 30 June 1935. Organised by the Association de L’Art Mural, it gathered together artists who adhered to all artistic tendencies but assembled around the question of “murality,” which is to say the place of the artist in society and the federal power and popularity of art in urban settings.

¹⁴ Bissière was one of the contributors to this set, with artists of an abstract persuasion, under the direction of the painter Robert Delaunay.

¹⁵ Suggestion by Bissière in T’en fais pa la Marie. Écrits sur la peinture, 1945-1964, La Temps qu’il fait, 1994, p. 53: “When a boy joins my workshop, it is enough for me to see how he lays on his colours – with pleasure or as if he is brushing his hat – to know whether he will ever be a painter.” Furthermore, any corrections were made in an informal manner. [Publication referenced is Baptiste-Marrey (editor), Bissière: Don’t Worry About It, Marie [Bissière: T’en fais pas la Marie], Le Temps qu’il fait, Cognac, France, 1994]

¹⁶ Letter from Charles Malfray to the mayor of Orleans, 23 April 1925 (municipal archives of Orleans), quoted in the exh.cat. Malfray, 1887-1940, Paris, Galerie Malaquais, Meudon, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, 6 April-30 June 2007, p. 23.

¹⁷ In the exh. cat. Francois Stahly, Meudon, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, 6 April-12 June 1994, p. 12.

¹⁸ See “La Querelle du realisme,” in 1935, a debate organised by the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (A.E.A.R.), a group of pacifist intellectuals fighting fascism. Globally it was a question of determining how art, through its figurative realism, could be a didactic and popular vehicle without falling into proselytism or propaganda.

¹⁹ See vol. 2 of Bissière, Catalogue Raisonné, 1886-1939, by Isabelle Bissière and Virginie Duval, Neuchatel, Édtion Ides et Callandes, 2001, as well as the exh. cat. Bissière, le rêve d’un sauvage qui aurait tout appris, Antibes, Musée Picasso 5 November 1999-2 January 2000.

²⁰ The direct cut was revived in the field of sculpture in the 1920s.

²¹ Jaques Lassaigne, “Exposition de l’académie Ranson,” Sept, 7 July 1934, p. 10.