The Head of a Young Woman, Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer

Lucien Lévy was born into a Jewish family in Algiers in 1865 and by 1879 had enrolled in L’école communal supérieure de dessin et sculpture, Paris. A precociously talented ceramic artist, Lévy first exhibited his work at age seventeen in the Salon of 1882 and quickly rose to prominence, becoming the artistic director of the Clément Massier studio at Golfe-Juan—an ornamental stoneware manufacturer near Cannes—from 1885 to 1896. Known as an innovator in Islamic-inspired ceramic shapes and experimental iridescent glazes, Lévy distinguished himself in the Art Nouveau revival of the decorative arts in France at the end of the nineteenth century. While continuing to build his reputation as a ceramicist, Lévy traveled in 1885 to Florence and Venice, where he immersed himself in fifteenth-century Italian art and expanded his interests to include easel painting and pastel drawing. Returning to Paris in 1896, he began to exhibit with the fashionable Parisian dealer Georges Petit, and it was then that he added the last two syllables of his mother’s maiden name of Goldhurmer to his own, signing his paintings and pastels, Lévy-Dhurmer. Lévy-Dhurmer found success among French collectors, and gained the admiration of fellow artists and literary figures, with his ethereal pastels of languid nudes and his atmospheric portraits of notable authors and personalities of the day. These works exhibit a nostalgia for fifteenth-century Italian art, as it was understood in the 1890s, through the filter of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) and the Pre-Raphaelites; the artist’s distinctive graphic style shows the influence of the visionary pastels of Odilon Redon (1840–1916) and the Symbolist painter and lithographer Eugène Carrière (1849–1906). Drawn around 1897, at the height of the Symbolist movement in France, this idealized profile of a young woman emerges from an explosion of calligraphic pastel strokes in shades of orange, brown, and red. This pastel relates to a series of largely monochromatic works made by the artist from 1895 to 1898, including the enigmatic Le Silence (1895, pastel on canvas, Musée d’Orsay) and Eve (1895, pastel, gouache, and gilt, private collection, Paris). Lévy- Dhurmer’s compositions from this period typically focus on a single introspective female figure that embodies a suggestive quality or concept. After 1901, the artist began to travel widely, and his focus shifted to include exotic landscape subjects and allegorical representations of musical themes. His aesthetic sympathies, as well as his abilities to coordinate painting, furniture design, and the decorative arts into a harmonious environment, perhaps lie closest to those of the expatriate American artist James McNeill Whistler (1834– 1903). The Wisteria Dining Room (1910–14), designed and painted by Lévy-Dhurmer and built by Edouard Louis Collet (Swiss, 1876–?), now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is undoubtedly the best-known work by the artist in America.