Camille Mauclair 1872-1945

Camille Mauclair was born in Paris on December 29, 1872, and died there on April 23, 1945.

A novelist, historian, and art critic, he was also an artist. Few works of his artistic production survive, apart from a handful of pastels, a medium he seemed to favor.

Defining himself as an “art writer” rather than a historian, as was common in Symbolist circles, Mauclair authored around a hundred books and thousands of articles. A defender of idealist art, he was close to the Symbolists and participated in Mallarmé’s “Tuesdays” from 1891. He was the one who introduced the poet Jules Laforgue to France, and also the one who staged Maurice Maeterlinck for the first time in the country, at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre, which he founded with Paul Fort and Lugné-Poe.

For a time, Mauclair supported contemporary artistic movements, primarily Symbolism but also Impressionism. He notably wrote the prefaces for numerous exhibitions of artists belonging to these movements, such as Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer and Henri Le Sidaner.

However, by 1897, he considered Symbolist art to be dead (L’Ennemie des rêves, 1900), and from 1905 onward, his stance became more reactionary. He condemned the modernity of the avant-garde as embodied by the Fauves, the Cubists, the Bauhaus, and architects like Le Corbusier (La Farce de l’Art vivant, 1929). According to him, these movements blasphemed the cult of beauty by breaking with an aesthetic ideal that should exalt tradition and a certain sincerity. He was thus one of the first to denounce this new art market, which he deemed mercantile and artificial.

For Mauclair, it did not matter who were the good or bad artists:

“we have only to judge the liars and the sincere, for vanity is the mortal enemy, the only truly terrible one, of a man who feels himself gifted with thought and expression” (Princes de l’Esprit, 1920).

In response to the invasion of modernity and what he called artistic decadence (a reign of ugliness), Camille Mauclair envisioned an alternative in Intimism (Les Peintres intimistes, 1910). Intimism presented itself as a return to tradition, emphasizing regionalism and sentimentality. With Symbolism considered dead, the Intimist movement, represented, for Mauclair, by artists such as Lucien Simon or Émile René Ménard, inherited Symbolism by cultivating “the love of beauty” (La Beauté des formes, 1927) through landscapes and still lifes that expressed “the inner life of things or beings” (Letter from Camille Mauclair to Maurice Denis). Unlike Symbolism, however, this art was social, as it conveyed the soul of a city, a region, or a country, Mauclair left many accounts of his travels.

His nationalism led him to encourage an art rooted in French traditions and past values. According to him, the roots of French artistic genius went back to the seventeenth century, when painters such as Poussin, Vernet, and Le Lorrain restored France’s grandeur by painting noble landscapes imbued with moral meaning.

Thus, for Mauclair, landscape and still life were the most capable of expressing “the inner life of things [and the] life of silence.” Mauclair and the Intimists “seek not ‘literary’ painting but ‘thoughtful’ painting, painting as the decoration of an idea or belief” (Letter from Camille Mauclair to Maurice Denis).