“What is touching is that he found his way with obvious happiness,” smiles Hélène Schneider as she strolls through the exhibition dedicated to the painter Alfred Renaudin (1866-1944). The director of Toul Museum of Art and History (54) is convinced of this: “Even in the midst of the Art Nouveau period, the majority of people actually kept very classic tastes! The art of the Belle Époque was not only violence and avant-garde rupture: it could also be peaceful and quite simply offer a form of rest… ”
This is indeed the feeling that dominates after having successively plunged into each of the 83 canvases that unfurl on a two-story course around themes such as water, flowers or travel. The same search for accuracy in the representation of landscapes everywhere. “I want people to walk around in my paintings,” said Alfred Renaudin to Marshal Lyautey. “I have no other ambition than to make others experience in front of my paintings, what I have experienced myself in front of nature. “
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The artist put his easel where beautiful seemed to him
Walking through the countryside by bike, the artist put his easel where it seemed beautiful, even if it meant walking around with a flowerpot that can be found here in a scene of children’s games, there on the facade of a house , history to bring if necessary a touch of red to the whole… Its vital need for harmony was well worth it! If this “good pupil” loved nothing more than painting the villages of his native Lorraine, finally documenting a rural heritage which has often disappeared today, he was also passionate about the colors of the Mediterranean, Scotland, the Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Paris… or Auvergne, this region where he finally chose to take refuge.
“As a good determined Vosges, he always refused the slightest compromise with the artistic trends of his time”, says Francine Roze, scientific curator of the Toulouse exhibition, former director of the Lorraine Museum and honorary chief curator of heritage. Who also signs the very beautiful reference book published for the occasion. “Everything is not said here”, writes Francine Roze. “Some of his works raise questions, to which we will one day have to come back. There would also remain a lot to decipher the personality of this master landscaper appreciated by the old families of Lunéville and Nancy who, during his lifetime, held a large place in the Lorraine School of painting. “
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Apprentice ceramist at the pottery of Lunéville
It is indeed at the Croismare glassworks, in Lunévillois where the family took refuge in 1870 after seeing their house burnt down by the Germans, that the kid born in Laneuveville-lès-Raon (88) comes into life. active, before joining the Lunéville earthenware art workshop as an apprentice ceramicist. Amazed, this son of a railway worker sees flowers, landscapes, birds emerging there … Nature is there posing naked. Alfred Renaudin observes. As he will observe all his life, even once he will work alongside Émile Friant, Henri-Paul Royer or Léon Husson, and his paintings will be hung each year at the salons of Paris and Lorraine. This cantor of the appeasement of the soul by the observation of nature will never stray from a classical informative invoice. He will never tire of contemplating the ever-changing reflections of a river or the buds of flowers just hatched on a branch. To better show them with precision. Perhaps also to better be able to stand upright in the flames, he whose Nancy workshop was ravaged in 1940 by a bomb, the Fontannes workshop in Auvergne, devoured by a new fire in 1942, and who had only 4 years old when he saw his first house go up in smoke… The peaceful paintings of Alfred Renaudin are balms.
The exhibition “Alfred Renaudin (1866-1944)” is visible until April 3 at the Museum of Art and History of Toul (54). The first large-format beautiful book devoted to the painter by Francine Roze is co-published by the City of Toul and Serge Domini publisher (€ 39).
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