Henri Doucet in Modern Art maelstrom
1883-1915
❦
(…) because his subject is dead.
— V. Woolf
To live in the good and beautiful until life stops by itself.
— L. Wittgenstein
I have a feeling of absolute security (not based on anything real probably),
and I don’t think that I will be killed.
— H. Doucet
To those who sit to-day with their great Dead, hands in their hands, eyes in their eyes, (…)
— C. Mew
They won’t stay dead!
— G. A. Romero
Henri Doucet was born on the 16th of December 1883, around 4pm, in a working class family from Pleumartin (Vienne, close to Poitiers, France). His father was a day labourer, and one of his uncle was a carpenter. From an early age, he learnt to become an house painter, but his apparent gift for drawing pushed him to follow the lessons of a local artist, M. Mourgeon. So little Henri probably painted en plein air; as his c.1901 landscapes while later show – complex architectural elements (sluiceway locks, bridges, water mills), and a taste for light reflections on water.
At 17, he goes to Paris to find a job, as a tremendous amount of decorative work is needed for the 1900 World’s Fair. Thanks to his dedication, he saved enough money to live as an ‘artist’ for a full year; so he goes for drawing sessions in the public galleries of the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts. There, his natural drawing skills have him noticed by the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), who was in charge of an ‘atelier de peinture’. Doucet will go on to pass the school entry exam, allowing him to work in Gérôme’s atelier. He will remain at the school from 1901 until 1910, jumping to the atelier of Gabriel Ferrier(1847-1914), upon Gérôme’s death.
Member of the 1903 army class, he’s discharged due to its ‘weakness’. Doucet was 1m60 tall, with brown hair, blue eyes, an ordinary forehead, small nose and mouth, a round chin, and an oval face. His portrait by Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), from 1912, adds a light brown beard and shows pale blue eyes.
Aq early as 1905-1906, it seems, his desire to travel pushed him on a Grand Tour of his own, with Italy firmly in sight. On his way, he stopped in Saint-Tropez, where Paul Signac (1863-1935) bought a house in 1898. It’s easy to imagine Doucet being amazed at Signac’s divisionism theory, anarchism, love of colour; and being hooked on Signac light, free and dynamic watercolour technique.
Around 1906-1907, Doucet is introduced to the utopian artistic and literary community of L’Abbaye de Créteil, probably by Alexandre Mercereau (1888-1945). There he made lifelong friends in Charles Vildrac (1882-1971), Maurice Drouard, a sculptor (1886-1915, Mort pour la France), and Georges Duhamel, doctor and writer (1884-1966). Albert Gleizes (1881-1953), a founding member, will initiate the first cubism there. Brâncuși (1876-1957) took part to one of their art show, in 1907, where Doucet exhibited Venitian views and bucolic idylls. Marinetti visited them, amongst others. The Abbaye was a financial disaster, but a fruitful one.
Alongside Gleizes, Drouard and Géo Printemps, Doucet will take a studio in a derelict Parisian ‘hôtel’ rented by a young patron, Doctor Paul Alexandre (1881-1968); he wanted to create an artist community, a ‘phalanstère‘ of a kind. One evening, Henri Doucet met a young Italian painter at the Lapin Agile, a famous bar in Montmartre. The man was in search of a space to put all his stuff, as he had lost his studio. In typical fashion of his openness, Doucet invited him to join them at ‘rue du Delta’. So Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) took a studio there, and Paul Alexandre will become his first patron. And the rest is Art History.
From 1908 onwards, Doucet will exhibit with the Salon d’Automne and the Artistes Indépendants. Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) will mention him in his exhibitions critics, from time to time. (see Critics section)
Doucet will travel to Munich in 1910, to take part in the decoration of the newly open Moderne Galerie, installed in the munificent Arco-Palais by the dealer Heinrich Thannauser. There was not much work for him to be done in the end, but he probably got to visit the Islamic Art exhibition that took place there at the time (showcasing more than 3,600 artworks). Through Thannauser he surely had a glimpse of the beginnings of the Bleue Reiter, and of German Expressionism. Thannhauser will go on to consign watercolors by Doucet, and to eventually lent them at the Armory Show, three years later, in New York, and Chicago (1913).
Comes 1911 and Doucet seems to have his first solo show at galerie Marseille-et-Vildrac, a partnership of his friend Charles Vildrac. Doucet was instrumental in the installation of his friend art dealing venture, and into what became the first art gallery to open ‘rue de Seine’, the first of many more to come, as to this very day, the street showcases the highest density of art galleries in the world. In L’Intransigeant, on the 15th of February 1911, Guillaume Apollinaire will review the show in those terms:
“At Marseille-et-Vildrac, 16, rue de Seine, Mr. Henri Doucet exhibits a fairly large number of somewhat disparate paintings in which the most distant influences fight; they go from Signac to Georges Desvallières via Gauguin, Marie Laurencin, Le Fauconnier, Verhoeven, or straying towards Lavery. Influences which, in Doucet, are explained by a personality defect, with above all — and this is seen in the progress made in a short time — but before him a will, an emotion, an artistic rectitude that are really praiseworthy. Curious carved woods enhance the interest of this exhibition.”
Through Charles Vildrac, he will meet and befriend the English critic, painter and cultural entrepreneur Roger Fry (1866-1934) who will invite him to England, and introduce him to the Bloomsbury set. Fry will include Doucet’s works in his infamous Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912.
Alongside Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (1885-1978), he will take part in the memorable Omega Workshops, creating sketches for tableware, painting screens and curtains. Both artists painted his portrait, while Fry and him will met again to paint together around Poitiers, and in Provence – when Doucet will have moved there.
His large decorative ambitions will become reality thanks to his friendship and collaborations with Georges Duhamel, whose wife was the stage actress Blanche Albane (1886-1975). Alongside Francis Jourdain (1876-1958), he took part in the paint jobs at the Théâtre de Vieux-Colombier, newly opened by Jacques Copeau (1879-1949). In January 1914, he will paint there a stage design for the creation of L’Echange, by Paul Claudel. But for the production of his play Le Combat, Duhamel will ask him to design and paint four huge designs; including stage props, as he painted a box in the style of the decor.
At the start of 1914, that fateful year, he moved to Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, seated on a hill opposite of the Rhône from Avignon. There, he will bump into Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), who moved in Avignon for one summer only. End of July mark the start of the Great War. Doucet is not subject to call-up, but decides to enlist anyway, at the end of the year. He will be killed on his first outing, on the 11th of March 1915, at Ypres, Belgium – a month before the first German gas attack that would start the second battle of Ypres.
On May 2, 1915, Vanessa Bell wrote to Roger Fry, as they had learned about Henri Doucet’s death in the War:
“I have done nothing about Doucet’s pictures and won’t till you tell me what to do. I often think of his death. It seems to me the worst thing that has happened, for even if he wasn’t a great artist it was so important that he should work in the way he did and live that kind of life and be happy in that sort of way.”
❦
❦