What did the inheritors of the Académie Ranson do during the 1950s?

In November 1923, when the painter Roger Bissière accepted an invitation to become the director of a painting and drawing workshop at the Académie Ranson, an invitation issued by France Ranson, the widow of the founder, he knew nothing of the rich consequences that would result from an activity that would amount to artistic companionship with the young artists and their critics who were to inhabit the atelier. Reputed to be one of “the most illustrious centres of liberal education,”¹ the Ranson Académie had the benefit of presenting the works of students who, from 1935, were destined to be granted solo or group exhibitions. Bertholle, Le Moal, Manessier, Wacker, Charlotte Henschel, Malfray, Littmann, Stahly, Latapie, and Jeanneret; Bissière exhibited here, together with d’Étienne-Martin, Ferdinand Springer and Alfred Pellan. The young critic Jacques Lassaigne, who had met Bissière in 1933, remarked that “at such courageous exhibitions only the closest of friends would appear. The public and even the press remained completely uninterested.”² And yet it is in this open pool for study and reflection that Cubism was established as the essential model for beginners searching for a sculptural interpretation of nature, as required by a “return to order” anticipated by Cézanne in reaction to the hazy Impressionists, and kick-started by Picasso, Derain and Braque. These sculptural matters were the foundation on which the future work was to be built of those who never forgot this time of encounter and exchange, their common beginnings under the sign of painting and sculpture. Undergone as an irreplaceable experience of the material and spiritual world, painting is an immediate extension of existence, a symbol of unity for Bissière, who said, after the war, about the artists who had passed through his workshop, “They brought me as much as I gave them. It was a work of collaboration and friendly exchange. A wonderful team, for sure, but I was never their master, for the very good reason that I don’t believe in instruction. The things that need to be transmitted are untransmissible.”³  And he added: “I have always maintained that I don’t believe in instruction and that they [the painters] were only comrades and friends who had no need of me in order to discover themselves.”

He who refused to be a master painter came past twice a week and gave his personal advice to each student in a way that encouraged discussion, to enrich them with comments and critiques that could move beyond a particular case to a general understanding of art. “His courses were not really courses. On arrival each student received a folio of suggestions, where everything was aid summarised in a few lines…His remarkably formulated, precise remarks, anxiously awaited, were spoken in a gentle voice but understood by all…Bissière also conveyed to everyone a moral attitude: modest research, doubt and taste of a direct quality, frank, flavourful.”⁴ This attitude aimed only at spurring on their sense of vocation and at stigmatising “a solemn and noble idea of art pictorially expressed in a fixed and measured language.”⁵ By emulating others, the beginners took part in freely correcting each other’s work, and this created a critical sense in each individual, which was used in the service of a personal language, all the more accessible, and was based on a solid understanding of the craft and its techniques without smothering effusiveness, and pointing out paths for the communication of emotion and poetry as well as reason and logic. The message was: arrive at an alliance between spirit and matter which expresses itself through the great tradition of French art, prioritising Fouquet, Poussin, Ingres, Cézanne and Seurat. Bertholle, Le Moal, Manessier, Vera Pagava, Latapie, Wacker, Charlotte Henschel, Vieira da Silva, Jacques Boussard, Étienne-Martin, François Stahly – all of them understood that. Most of them joined the group between 1936 and 1939 – giving witness to how the expression of formidable hope in a young generation aspired to a kind of painting born both from the lessons of the Cubists and from the emphatic breath of the Surrealists to transcribe a universal passion.

Convinced of the need to master pictorial methods as the basis of all creativity, Bissière allowed a text to be affixed to the walls of his workshop, where one can read: “Begin to sketch or paint only when you are sure about what you want to do. If your sketch is poor, don’t expect to improve it during the painting process.” The design can be a reduction into “essential forms”: cube, triangle, cone, pyramid, cylinder, circle, the elements of nature. Colour was not left out. “The most varied palette does not tend to create the best coloured picture; on the contrary, you can be assured that the simplest palette is the most expressive.”⁶ This advice was heeded. Manessier, Bertholle, Le Moal and Charlotte Henschel would refer in identical language to an exaggerated play with colours. Drawn from the depths or projected forward, they orchestrate harmonious colour combinations from a myriad of touches that energise the space, attuning to the feeling of inner life. What remains is the essence of the message delivered by Bissière to his co-disciples: “Forget instructions; be proud of your own powers, meaning of your own sensitivity, for in the last resort it’s the heart that justifies everything, and in the end, I can do nothing there.”⁶

Having entered the academy in 1928, like Charlotte Henschel, Nicolas Wacker became the technical assistant in Bissière’s painting workshop, being in charge of preparing the décors and responsible for the models. Due to his great skills in the matter of techniques, such as making egg-based tempura and grinding powders and pigments, he had a significant role at the heart of the academy, where he formed close and long-lasting friendships with Bertholle, Le Moal, Stahly, Manessier and especially Étienne-Martin, living close to the latter’s workshop in the Rue du Pot de-Fer. From 1969 to 1979 he taught the course in the techniques of painting at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, where he met Bertholle again, who was conducting the mural art workshop. Remaining faithful to the human figure, he made hundreds of sketches and paintings of nudes, solidly constructed in colour, as well as sensitive portraits.

From the years spent in the rue Joseph-Bara, everyone cherished the memories and the bonds of friendship woven there and then reaffirmed them after leaving the academy. Until February 1939, the time when Bissière stopped teaching at the Académie Ranson, on the eve of the declaration of war, which led him to leave Paris and finally settle down with his family in Boissierette in the Lot, his workshop was always full.

Fraternal bonds linked Roger Bissière to Louis Latapie. A former student at the Académie Ranson, Latapie returned as tutor in 1920 at the request of Madame Ranson. Nominated professor in 1923, the year in which he persuaded Bissière to join him, he strove every day to achieve a balance between figuration and abstraction. After the war, his carefully constructed nudes took account of the plastic unity which he achieved with a play of modulated forms in coloured light, combining the hieraticism of forms with grace. His interrogation of the problem posed by the more or less faithful interpretation of reality was shared by all his comrades at the Académie Ranson, who were clarifying a pictorial terrain prepared by the Cubists. Latapie was not the only one to approach the canvas in a constructive manner. Helena Vieira da Silva, who followed the free instruction of Bissière (for a short time) from 1929, was to rapidly root her painting in a complex structural play rigorously thought through.

After the 1950s, his themes of chessboards, building sites, railway stations and enclosed library spaces confirmed a geometric quality combined with a luminous vibrancy expanding the space to infinity. Vera Pagava, who arrived at the Académie Ranson in 1932, was initiated by Wacker into a range of painting techniques. Her great pictorial qualities were combined with stripping whatever she was painting - landscapes, objects - down to their essence, sometimes to the point of dissolution, in an increasingly ineffable space under the pressure of an inhabited light. She achieved a rigorous constructivism, and yet a sensual, almost immaterial one, by means of flat surfaces charged with pigments, worked with a supple brush.

Bissière, too, privileged an organised canvas, but, by contrast, one leaning towards a space, with little depth for an “affective perspective.” Anticipated by his writings on public mural paintings, published between 1913 and 1918, Bissière opened a course on fresco painting at the Académie Ranson, which he ran from 1934 to 1938. From the end of 1934, Alfred Manessier, whose atelier was nearby, enrolled, as did Bertholle, whom Étienne-Martin had introduced to Bissière. Jean Le Moal, who had moved to Paris from Lyon in 1929, joined them, having been informed by his friend Étienne-Martin who had studied sculpture at the Académie Ranson. Manessier stayed for only a few months, being called up for military service in April 1935, but having been appointed as a tutor in Bissière's workshop, like Bertholle and Le Moal, he became convinced that expression comes through perfect craftsmanship and daily drawing practice.

Bissière saw mural art as a collective and social activity where renewal is accompanied by the rediscovery of Roman art combined with an apparent primitivism in response to the problem of representation as well as the beauty of the material and the profundity of the colouring. The monumental quality inherent in this form of expression was absorbed into everything, especially the work of Manessier, Bertholle and Le Moal, who collaborated with Bissière in the railway pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques in 1937.

All of them laid claim to the French tradition that had passed through Cézanne, and in 1941 the exhibition “Vingt Jeunes Peintres de Tradition Française,” curated by Bazaine at the Galerie Braun, prefigured the lyrical abstractionism at the heart of the Nouveau École de Paris, which they instigated.

The problem of abstraction, as posed at the beginning of the fifties, had a personal response from each of these artistic heirs, more from a state of mind and an ethic than from an educational perspective. How to reconcile irreconcilables? Bissière set the tone by withdrawing from the real in favour of painting which would be a “desire for poetry.” His radicalisation of the Cubist vision with a line led to the unique design of a grill in which drawing, signs and symbols constructed his reality. This new pictorial field suited a play with splashes of colour suggesting “coloured images on which everyone can hang their own dreams.” This symbiotic universe was shared by his fellow artists, who laid claim to its original forces and profound resonances – the physical equivalences referred to by Bazaine, for whom the future of painting “will not be acted out between the figurative and the non-figurative but between the embodied and the non-embodied”⁷ – seen as the fundamental sources of painting that expresses the unity of man and nature: painting where the physical fact is underlain with a lyrical effusion. This art of non-figuration proceeds from the harmonious fusion of forms and colours in a reinvented space for the sake of epic, mystical, naturalist or spiritual lyricism.

In the case of Manessier, the evolution of coloured drawing takes place through what he called “passages” articulated through the interiorised quest for light. His creative intuition is fed by a profound spirituality expressed by his liturgical compositions. One notices the progressive liberation of the line structured in the manner of pieces of stained glass, a technique to which Manessier, Bertholle, Le Moal, Vera Pagava and Vieira da Silva devoted themselves (recalling the role of drawing in each of them) in response to interior rhythm expressed in an illusionist space. All their forms, arising from their human experiences, are moving and unpredictable under the action of the colour submitted to light. Manessier reconciled Bonnard and Picasso, light and the flatness of the pictorial field. “Non-figurative art seems to me an immediate opportunity for painters to rise more towards their own reality.”⁸ As for Bertholle, he spoke of a “figured universe.” Fascinated by Bosch’s fantastic world, he evolved in the direction of dreamlike painting, where all things are only “signs.” His network of straight and curved lines gave birth to rhythmic forms evoking tournaments. Still allusive, non-figuration imposed itself on him to communicate “the truth of the emotions I feel.” Sensing an impasse, Bertholle liberated himself from any submission to the real, to the benefit of a chromatic wealth, following the example of Bissière, whose advice he meditated on: “A painting is never black when it contains light … You mix everything with black … and black is another colour.” Like Bertholle, Le Moal evolved Picasso’s Cubism into “Surrealism” before an analytical approach followed by synthesis, like a conquest of a pictural space where the construction was based on strong verticals which built meshed graphics. With his evocation of trees and nature, of shells, of rigging in the ports of Brittany and of maritime views, he approached a kind of non-figurativeness to reach the invisible through a dematerialisation of forms. Refusing to break with reality, and consequently rejecting abstraction, he privileged the harmony of colours, which gave birth to light. His palette, dominated by indigos and purples, is nuanced with refined tones and transmits a chromatic vibration, a shimmer of colour that calls up mauves and greens to celebrate the shifting and expansive vision of nature. Participating in sculpture under the influence of Étienne-Martin, and Malfray, Le Moal, who worked in the Académie Ranson to the end, from 1934 to 1938, retained the sensuality of line in his nudes, which express monumentality in the plenitude of forms.

Prematurely vanishing in 1940, Charles Malfray worked at many commissions. At the centre of his work, his drawing likes to be close to the truth, amplified by an idea or a personal feeling. His search for the sensual line displays the synthetic forms inherited from Roman sculptors, where he shares with Bissière the quest for primitivism imbued with spirituality. It was this aspect of humanism that he transmitted to his students at the Académie Ranson, Étienne-Martin and François Stahly, whose figurative origins are rooted in a synthesis of clear, readable forms for serene and mysterious life. These two great sculptors from our French school of sculpture share an unforeseeable and secret world starting from exploded organic forms whose baroque and primitive accents weave a visionary course. In the case of Étienne-Martin, the visible and the invisible are united in signs expressing the pulses of memory until all desire for representation is abolished. Biomorphic and vegetable forms, ambulatory in principle, putting emptiness and fullness into perspective, respond to Stahly’s plastic vocabulary – he who also realises the Labyrinthes. At Crestet, Stahly continued the collegial and communicative life of the Adadémie Ranson. In the Vaucluse region, the park maintains paths punctuated with installed sculptures at their crossings, suggesting rest and meditation. A sharing of spirit in freely managed creativity.

In all cases, the metamorphosis is like a metaphor for forms of life caught in their forces by a kind of magnetism and radiance. In 1947, Bissière’s last message found individual resonances in all those who devoted themselves to a language in total independence: “Everything is permitted, everything is possible, provided that a human being appears behind the image, in total nudity, like life. And voilà. I have said everything. All that remains is to keep looking.”⁹

^* “Excerpt from the preface to the catalogue of the Bissière exhibition held at the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven and the Stedelik Museum, Amsterdam, 1958”

¹ Eugenio D’Ors & Jacques Lassaigne, “La condition des jeunes artistes,” Almanach des Arts, 1937, p. 274-277, here p. 274.

² Unedited typescript of a lecture by Jacques Lassaigne on 9 June 1969 at Villeneuve-sur-Lot, Bissière Archives.

³ Georges Peillex, “Bissière,” in Styles No. 2, February 1962, p. 8-17.

⁴ Jacques Lassaigne, exh. cat. “Bissière: Pense à la peinture,” Colmar: Unterlinden Museum, 2004-2005, p. 171.

⁵ “Les expositions:” 12 July 1935, No. 132, in the Bissière catalogue, Paris: Museum of Modern Art of Paris, 1986 p. 8.

⁶ Max-Pol Fouchet, exh. cat., Bordeaux 1965. Quoted in Paris: catalogue, 1986.                                                                                                                                 

⁷ Jean Bazaine, Notes sur la peinture, Paris: Édition du Seuil, new expanded edition, 1953.

⁸ Bissière, preface to the exhibition, “T’en fais pa la Marie. T’es jolie,” Galerie Drouin, October 1947.

⁹ Bissière, ibid.