Landscape The Two Friends
Oil on canvas, representing two naked women enlaced in a rumpled bed. By a contrast of complexions and hair colours, they embody two female types of beauty. The broken necklace with pearls lead on the cloths, suggests a sleep after a fleshly relation. In the foreground, a bedside table is furnished with carafes and a cup. While in the background, a porcelain vase is furnished with flowers. The painting is covered by a serigraph, whom art nouveau motif, inspired by a René Beauclair’s design, acts as a tattoo. It is applied according to a technique elaborated by the artist.
Signed ‘Olivier Masmonteil’ and dated on the back, 2019
Dimensions :
Height: 55 in. Width: 78 ¾ in.
Commentaire :
This painting takes its inspiration and pays a tribute to the The Sleepers of Gustave Courbet painted in 1866, specially for the ottoman diplomat Khalil-Bey. This last, particularly interested in Courbet as a painter of women and sensuality, was very admirative of another artist’s masterwork, today disappeared, Venus and Psyche. So, he asked Courbet to create a similar one. Symbol of the world of reverie and bliss, The Sleepers, celebrates the beauty of the body and lesbian love. In a contrast between complexions and hair colours, two types of beauty intertwine in a rumpled bed. The redhead woman with light skin is Joanna Hiffernan, Whistler’s mistress. While a doubt survives concerning the identity of brown haired and fair-complexioned woman. It seems to be the same model as in The Origin of the World (another Khalil-Bey’s command to Courbet, painted in 1866 and now situated in the Musée d’Orsay), but, is it Jeanne de Tourbey, Flaubert and Khalil-Bey’s mistress or the dancer Constance Quéniaux, Khalil-Bey’s mistress too ? Olivier Masmonteil particularly admirative of this painting, for its elegance, grace and sensuality, used it many times in his series ‘The Forgotten Young Ladies’, ‘The Bathers’ and in ‘Memory of the Painting’, which the Landscape The two friends belongs to. Here, the painter expresses the story of covering and unveiling. Through the use of the serigraph, “traces”, “marks” and “veil” are synonyms. But, with the volunteer to cover the female bodies, resulted a print in giving the impression that both models are actually tattooed. Finally, covering the pattern, reveals it. Moreover, with the series ‘Memory of the Painting’ Olivier Masmonteil decided, according to his own terms, to “dilute the painting in the painting”, to “take the tools of the painting : history of art, oil on canvas, serigraph, pattern, trace, mark, drawing, representation, figuration, abstraction, [and to] put all together with the ambition of highlighting [his own] memory of the painting.
