Jean-Georges CORNELIUS (Paris, 1880 - Ploubazlanec,... Lot 195

Jean-Georges CORNELIUS (Paris, 1880 - Ploubazlanec, 1963). "The Malay", 1927. Oil, gouache and charcoal on cardboard. Height: 62.5 cm. Length: 44 cm. On view. This work, part of a suite of twelve, was created by Cornélius to illustrate Charles Baudelaire's "Les paradis artificiels" (1860). This work, enriched with ten selected works, including "Le Malais", was published in 1933 by Javal et Bourdeaux (Olivier Levasseur, Jean-Georges Cornélius, un primitif du XXème siècle, Rennes : éditions Apogée, 2009, p. 50). Provenance: Galerie Marie Watteau, Salon du Pavillon, Paris, 2008. Let's delve into Chapter IV, "Opium Tortures": The Malay, "yellow and bilious, illuminated by small, mobile and worried eyes (...) showed well that he knew opium, and he only took one bite of a morsel that could have killed several people". He "tormented him cruelly; he was an unbearable visitor. (...) The Malay had become Asia itself; ancient Asia, solemn, monstrous and complicated. (...) This image naturally called up the neighboring image of India, so mysterious and so disquieting (...); and then China and India soon formed with Egypt a menacing triad, a complex nightmare of varied anguish. In short, the Malay had evoked the entire immense and fabulous Orient". It's hard to imagine a better brush to illustrate Baudelaire's singular work. A mystical, inhabited painter was needed to translate the dreams, anguish, euphoria and delirium. Cornélius delivers here what only a cultivated soul can do. A soul that would give itself almost entirely to Christ when he converted to Catholicism four years later. In this case, the term "illustration" is reductive, almost inappropriate, since it is the very essence of the literary work that is here, before our very eyes. "You have to try (...) to put yourself in the place of the characters, to penetrate them, otherwise you fall into the banal and the déjà-vu" (Lettres à une Carmélite). These paintings are a reminder of Cornelius's genius as a colorist. Without any compromise, without any desire to seduce, here is the exact translation of a dialogue, of an inner penetration: "We are alone in hearing the music that accompanies our thought, and the words we say, and what counts is the emotion and passion of this music" (Ibid). Here, the artist surprisingly responds to the poet who spins the musical metaphor in this work: "Sounds are clothed in colors, and colors contain music". Cornélius writes as Baudelaire paints.