Gaston la Touche

Sale: Butterfields, San Francisco, May 18, 1993, lot 1440, illustrated Private Collection, California
Acquired from the above by the present owner

La Touche’s subject matter, palette and technique made a radical shift during the 1890s. The artist moved from more realistic, somber portrayals of daily life to idealistic compositions of peaceful parks and fanciful gardens dotted by fountains, streams and forests populated by swans, water nymphs, fauns and revellers returning home.  While certain mythological or spiritual elements of these works are clear in The Spirits of the Night, the 1897 work is largely mysterious: swirling shifts of purple and blue vapors form the bodies of a group of mist babies rising from the water, as peach-pink tones form their guardian figures. This strange pastel vision, composed of carefully studied color complements and contrasts and a harmonious juxtaposition of linear and curved forms, evidences La Touche’s experimentation with the Symbolist art movement. La Touche, like so many of his fellow fin de siecle artists, would have closely studied the poet Jean Moréas’ article “Le symbolisme” first published in the Figaro in 1886.  In defining the term and its tenants, Moréas advocated a link between the spiritual and the material by clothing “the Idea [sic] in a form perceptible to the senses” (as quoted in Henri Dorra, ed., Symbolist Art Theories, Berkeley, 1994, p. 150). While this Symbolist manifesto is notoriously confusing, La Touche’s dreamy composition does seem to closely follow the poet’s instruction to create a “rhyme of mysterious fluidity” to visualize “primordial ideas” through a series of intentionally obscure and ambiguous metaphors (Dorra, p. 150). Indeed, La Touche employs techniques reminiscent of his fellow artists Henri Martin and Henri le Sidaner, both handled by his dealer Georges Petit; like them, he cloaks his composition with vaporous figures and objects, creating multicoloured surfaces and a magical atmosphere.  In so doing, La Touche could be considered an unofficial member of the late nineteenth century artistic group known as les artistes de l’âme (the artists of the soul) who focused on a somnambulant air of detachment, of dreaminess, to suggest states of the soul--often to explore the foreboding possibilities of the approaching new millennium (Dorra, p. 252). These artists’ works were not intended to hold complete narratives, but rather to serve as a starting point for the imagination, a way to unearth elements of the subconscious. In fact, Sprits of the Night resembles a major oil painting by La Touche entitled L’aube (Musée de Strasbourg), which shows young mothers holding babies, merging into a column of cherubs drifting upwards into a dawn sky. The day promises a new beginning and symbolizes rebirth. This present work, similarly, shows spirits rising from river mist and vaporizing into the warmth of a new day.  Yet in its feathery application of pastel and glorious shifts of color, it inspires a more meditative affect; rather than a narrative to be ”read,” this composition intends to be experienced and contemplated aesthetically.