André Devambez knows how to take the high road

About the exhibition "André Devambez - Vertiges de l'imagination", on view until 31 December 2022 at the Petit Palais, Paris.

Of course, it is always a pleasure to meet a great name in painting at the turn of an exhibition that makes the news. To be able to come face to face with masterpieces of which we have often only seen the famous reproductions. But the pleasure is much more subtle when, at the turn of a less publicised exhibition that has decided to bring an artist out of oblivion, the surprise of the discovery pours out its flood of delightful enthusiasm. Such is the case with the exhibition "André Devambez - Vertiges de l'imagination", which is currently on show at the Petit Palais in Paris until 31 December. It's like a giant art gallery showing hilarious caricatures and illustrations, lively sketches, dizzying views of the sky and touching portraits.

We are now stunned, with our eyes wide open, in front of the fascinating paintings painted by this tall Parisian artist, born in 1867 and died in 1944... whom we had never heard of before! In addition to taking an incredible artistic height in the hullabaloo of a nascent 20th century, this same André Devambez is said to have opened the painting studio of the Beaux-Arts de Paris to women by taking over its direction in 1929, we read in the chronological box of the article that Daphné Bétard devotes to the man and his work in this month's issue of Beaux Arts Magazine. Among other feats of arms, this is not bad at all!

Was it because André Devambez was as talented as he was mischievous, never taking himself seriously, that he was forgotten by art history? Or was it because he remained completely unaffected by the artistic avant-garde all his life? The fact is that, apart from being honoured in 1988 at the Beauvais Museum in the Oise region, on the occasion of a fine donation of his studio collection by his daughter, Valentine, the artist's reputation after his death had melted like snow in the sun. As it turns out, receiving all the honours during his lifetime does not guarantee his accession to posterity... For André Devambez was awarded the Prix de Rome in 1890, a member of the Society of French Artists, head of the studio at the National School of Fine Arts, a member of the Institute, official painter of the Ministry of the Air Force, and an officer of the Legion of Honour...

In short, his honourable career was acclaimed in his time by the public and by institutions... and his works of art for sale were a hit on the art market. He also illustrated famous novels, such as Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift, La Fête à Coqueville, by Emile Zola, or Les Condamnés à mort, by Claude Farrère. And he caricatured politicians, showbiz society and the modern world for the press in a few lively pencil strokes. Haunted by the atrocities of the First World War, where he was wounded on the Somme while repainting military artillery to camouflage it, he also knew how to show as much gravity as humour. Proof of this is his monumental triptych La Pensée aux absents, which vibrated as strongly at the 1924 Salon as it did in the second version that André Devambez delivered ten years later, now on show at the Petit Palais.

But that's not the point. Until the exhibition at the MODO in Beauvais in 1988, we only knew one painting by him - if we knew him at all - called La Charge and kept at the Musée d'Orsay. This incredible painting from 1902 depicts a night-time riot seen from a rooftop, "the crowd gathering and demonstrating in a great movement of solidarity before being violently dispersed by a police charge", as described by the journalist from Beaux Arts Magazine, who also provided the reproduction. Yet it alone shows the full extent of André Devambez's talent for masterfully representing movement and tension.

It was time, however, for the Petit Palais and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes to refresh our memories with this fine retrospective, which was presented in Rennes before coming to Paris. With nearly 250 works, the exhibition takes us on a journey through the artist's overflowing imagination and bears witness to both his taste for modernity and his great creative imagination. "Devambez stands out for his singular vision, which is both humorous and deeply humanistic, and for his constant search for the right frame to best capture his subjects", emphasises Maïté Metz, heritage curator at the Petit Palais and co-curator of the exhibition with Annick Lemoine, director of the Petit Palais, and Guillaume Kazerouni, head of the ancient art collections at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes.

The son of the founder of the Maison Devambez, an engraving and art book publishing company, and a specialist in heraldry, André Devambez eventually followed the successful path of a late 19th century Parisian artist. After studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in Benjamin Constant's studio, he won the Grand Prix de Rome for painting in 1890 with The Denial of Saint Peter, and left for the Villa Medici, dreaming of being a history painter. His relatively academic style did not, however, succeed in stifling his fantasy and fiery sincerity. "So much so," writes Daphné Bétard, "that after a long period of oblivion, the charm still works when we discover his works in the exhibition devoted to him by the Petit Palais. They seem to us in turn funny, moving, singular and even dizzying, to use the words of this observer of the last century when confronted with the bird's-eye views of which the artist had made a speciality.

To the journalist Jean Valmy-Baysse in 1910, who asked her what she thought of André Devambez's paintings, this anonymous lady replied that she could not look them in the face... so much so that they made her dizzy! It must be said that the painter had just achieved the pictorial feat of representing a plane, seen from above, flying over a mass of clouds. "On the soft wadding, a quasi-abstract greyness occupying most of the composition, the tiny yellow silhouette of the aircraft, the pilot on board and his shadow projected, touching and ridiculous, in the image of a humanity that then aspired to dominate the air despite its fragility," wrote the journalist from Beaux Arts Magazine in 2022.

From the beginning of the century, the artist chose to depict his urban landscapes from an elevated viewpoint. A trick that Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) had already adopted. The very modern style of the 1937 Exhibition from the Eiffel Tower, one of the key works in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, shows how precisely the artist observed the evolution of his time, even though it was conservative. This work of art, with its flat colours, is also historically highly charged: In it, Devambez shows the flags of two countries that are about to clash, Nazi Germany on the right and the Soviet Union on the left. Against the backdrop of the Spanish War and the decline of the Popular Front, the painter brings together on his canvas some of the thirty million visitors who visited this exhibition over a period of six months. If he can now see from above the exhibition at the Petit Palais that is entirely devoted to him, no doubt Devambez has already picked up his brushes!