Seraphine louis biography of alberta

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In some cases, she appears to have signed her paintings before painting them.

Louis was an artist consumed by an irrepressible urge to create, "this famous internal necessity of which Kandinsky spoke", terms employed by Bertrand Lorquin, conservator of the Musée Maillol in his introduction to the exhibition "Séraphine Louis dite Séraphine de Senlis" at the Musée Maillol in Paris, which ran from 1 October 2008 to 18 May 2009.

Legacy

Louis's paintings are exhibited in the Musée d'art de Senlis, the Musée d'art naïf in Nice, and the Musée d'Art moderne Lille Métropole in Villeneuve-d'Ascq.

In 2009, the French biographical film Séraphine by director Martin Provost won seven César Awards, including Best Film and Best Actress for Yolande Moreau who starred in the title role.

Beginning in 1901, she was employed as a housekeeper for middle-class families in the town of Senlis.

Career

In addition to her arduous day jobs, Louis painted by candlelight, largely in secret isolation, until her considerable body of work was discovered in 1912 by German art collector Wilhelm Uhde.[1] While in Senlis, Uhde saw a still-life of apples at his neighbor's house and was astonished to learn that Louis, his housecleaner, was the artist.[2] His support had barely begun to lift her horizons when he was forced to leave France in August 1914; the war between France and Germany had made him an unwelcome outsider in Senlis, much as Louis was, given her eccentric persona.

Roger Ebert, SunTimes. Her father was a manual laborer and her mother came from a farmworking background. Louis was Uhde's housecleaner at that time.

In 1929, Uhde organized an exhibition, "Painters of the Sacred Heart," that featured Louis's art, launching her into a period of financial success. Her father was a manual laborer and her mother came from a farmworking background.

Her paintings' surfaces have a matte, almost waxy appearance. Although Uhde reported that she had died in 1934, some say that Louis actually lived until 1942 in a hospital annex at Villers-sous-Erquery, where she died friendless and alone. She used colours and pigments that she made herself from unusual and exotic ingredients she never revealed that have stood the test of time for durable vividness.

Louis") was carved by knife, revealing a ground of contrasting colour. She first worked as a shepherdess but, by 1881, she was engaged as a domestic worker at the convent of the Sisters of Providence in Clermont, Oise. Yale University Press. Then, in 1930, with the effects of the Great Depression destroying the finances of her patrons, Uhde had no choice but to stop buying her paintings.

In 1932, Louis was admitted for chronic psychosis at Clermont's lunatic asylum, where her artistry found no outlet.

In 1929, Uhde organized an exhibition, "Painters of the Sacred Heart," that featured Louis's art, launching her into a period of financial success she had never known – and was ill prepared to manage. p.

seraphine louis biography of alberta

Louis") was carved by knife, revealing a ground of contrasting colour.

Louis's mother died on her first birthday and her father, who remarried, also died before she was seven; at which point, she came under the charge of her eldest sister. de planches illustrées.
Alain Vircondelet, Séraphine : de la peinture à la folie, éditions Albin Michel, Paris, 2008, pp 211.
Françoise Cloarec, Séraphine : la vie rêvée de Séraphine de Senlis, Éditions Phébus, Paris, 2008, pp 172, 8 p.

In 1929, Uhde organized an exhibition, "Painters of the Sacred Heart," that featured Louis's art, launching her into a period of financial success she had never known – and was ill prepared to manage.