Camille Mauclair

Camille Mauclair
Camille Mauclair in 1921
Born	Camille Laurent Célestin Faust (1872-12-29)29 December 1872 Paris, France
Died	Paris, France
Occupation	Art Critic · Poet · Novelist
Literary movement	Symbolism
Signature

Camille Laurent Célestin Faust (29 December 1872 – 23 April 1945), better known by his pseudonym Camille Mauclair, was a French poet, novelist, biographer, travel writer, and art critic.

Biography

Mauclair was a great admirer of Stéphane Mallarmé, to whom several works were devoted, as well as Paul Verlaine and Maurice Maeterlinck. He flirted with anarchism. Alongside Fénéon, Verhaeren, Mirbeau, and his close friend Paul Adam, Mauclair contributed to L'En Dehors, the magazine created by Zo d'Axa.

He distinguished himself initially as a poet and novelist. His poetry attracted critical attention, and was set to music by Ernest Bloch, Gustave Charpentier, and Nadia Boulanger. His best-known novel is Le Soleil des Morts (1898), a roman à clef containing fictionalized portraits of leading avant-garde writers, artists, and musicians of the 1890s, that has in retrospect been seen as an important historical document of the fin de siècle.

Woodcut of Camille Mauclair, by Félix Vallotton, 1895

With Paul Fort, he founded the Théâtre d'Art, which was the first to stage the works of Maurice Maeterlinck in France (Princess Maleine and, in 1893, Pelléas and Mélisande). He was also a cofounder of the Théâtre de l'Œuvre with Lugné-Poe.

Close to all literary circles, he was the lover of Georgette Leblanc, before the latter became involved with Maeterlinck. Among the portraits of Camille Mauclair, there are two oil paintings (Valère Bernard and Jacques-Émile Blanche) and two crayon drawings (Albert Besnard and Henri Le Sidaner).

He took the position of art critic at the Mercure de France, after Aurier’s sudden death. A perceptive analyst, a regular prefacer of Impressionist and Symbolist exhibitions at the Le Barc de Boutteville gallery, he did not hesitated to denounce, with foresight, the mercantile and artificial nature of a certain art market. He revealed, for example, as a witness, what he considered to be the "installation" of the Cézanne myth. Mauclair is noted for his defence of the Pre-Raphaelites, Edward Burne-Jones, and the French Symbolists, his attacks on Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and other avant-garde artists, and for presenting himself as an upholder of French tradition. According to Mauclair, this tradition linked Renoir and Manet to the masters of the eighteenth century, Fragonard and Boucher.

He formed part of the original staff of Georges Clemenceau’s founded newspaper L'Aurore. Mauclair was a dreyfusard "from the first minute, out of a taste for the truth."

Between 1901 and 1903, appeared the four volumes of Jules Laforgue's complete works, an edition prepared by Mauclair which was to be the standard text for the next twenty years. He was Rodin’s long-time friend and wrote extensively about his work.

Portrait by Louis Anquetin (1896)

Title page of Mauclair's study on Eugène Delacroix (1900)

He also wrote several non-fiction books about music including Schumann (1906), The Religion of Music (1909), The History of European Music from 1850-1914 (1914) and The Heroes of the Orchestra (1921) which contributed greatly to French awareness of musical trends in turn-of-the-century Paris. Defender of Richard Wagner, fine connoisseur of the musical practice, he delivered beautiful pages on composers and orchestras. Several of his poems were set to music, including the three "Lieder" by Ernest Chausson. The first movement of Claude Debussy's orchestral composition The Sea was inspired by "Mer belle aux îles sanguinaire", a short story by Mauclair.

He was horrified by the Great War, and despite his Germanophile training and his admiration for German philosophers and Heinrich Heine, he theorized the negative influence of Germanic culture.

During the interwar period, Camille Mauclair was very active and also devoted texts to the cities he admired, including Bruges and Venice. He denounced what he considered the decadence of French art and deplored the reign of "ugliness", and in 1934 he published L'architecture va-t-elle mourir? ("Will Architecture Die?"), a virulent criticism about modern and functionalist architecture, which he considered as being coldly concrete and impersonal.

Later in life he wrote mainly nonfiction, including travel writing such as Normandy (1939), the life of writers, artists, and musicians, and art criticism. He was Besnard’s first biographer. In his art criticism, he supported impressionism and symbolism, but disdained Fauvism, famously writing of the style (in a phrase borrowed from English art critic John Ruskin), "a pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public". He also provided the libretto for Antoine Mariotte's 3-act 'conte lyrique' Nele Dooryn, premiered at the Opéra-Comique in 1940.

At the end of his life, he collaborated with the Vichy France-government, and wrote ocasionally for Bunau-Varilla's newspaper Le Matin, the magazine Grand Magazine Illustré de la Race: Revivre, and other periodicals. After the war, he was included by the National Writers' Committee (CNE) in the list of banned authors.

He died in Paris in 1945.

Works

Poetry

• Sonatines d’automne (1894)
• Le Sang parle (1904)
• Émotions chantées (1926)

Fiction

• Couronne de Clarté (1895; novel)
• L'Orient Vierge (1897; novel)
• Les Clefs d'or (1897; short stories)
• Le Soleil des Morts (1898; novel)
• L’Ennemie des Rêves (1899; novel)
• Les Mères Sociales (1902; novel)
• Le Poison des Pierreries (1903)
• Les Danaïdes (1903; short stories)
• La Ville Lumière (1904; novel)
• Trois Femmes de Flandre (1905; short stories)
• Le Mystère du Visage (1906; short stories)
• L'Amour Tragique (1908; short stories)
• Les Passionnés (1911; short stories)
• Au Pays des Blondes (1924; short stories)
• Étreindre (1925; novel)

Miscellania

• Éleusis, causeries sur la cité intérieure (1894)
• Jules Laforgue (1896)
• L'Art en silence (1901)
• L'Art do M. Félix Ziem (1901)
• Les Camelots de la pensée (1902)
• Le Génie Est un Crime, Pièce en 4 Actes (1902)
• Fragonard (1904)
• L'Impressionnisme, son histoire, son esthétique, ses maîtres (1904)
• Idées vivantes (1904)
• De Watteau à Whistler (1905)
• Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1906)
• Schumann (1906)
• Trois crises de l'art actuel (1906)
• La Beauté des formes (1909)
• Victor Gilsoul (1909)
• Eugène Delacroix (1909)
• Essais sur l'émotion musicale. La Religion de la musique (1909)
• "M. Sorolla y Bastida." In: Eight Essays on Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, Vol. 1 (1909)
• Études sur quelques artistes originaux. Louis Legrand, peintre et graveur (1910)
• Essais sur l'amour. De l'amour physique (1912)
• Histoire de la musique européenne: 1850-1914: les hommes, les idées, les œuvres (1914)
• Albert Besnard, l'homme et l'œuvre (1914)
• Le Vertige allemand, histoire du crime délirant d'une race (1916)
• Charles Baudelaire: sa vie, son art, sa légende (1917; awarded the J. J. Weiss Prize by the Académie française in 1919)
• Auguste Renoir, l'homme et l'œuvre (1918)
• Essais sur l'émotion musicale. Les Héros de l'orchestre (1919)
• Pour l'Arménie libre, pages écrites au cours de la grande guerre (1919)
• Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) (1920; awarded the Charles-Blanc Prize by the Académie française in 1921)
• L'Art indépendant français sous la Troisième République (peinture, lettres, musique) (1919)
• Essais sur l'amour. La magie de l'amour (1921)
• Paul Adam, 1862-1920 (1921)
• Servitude et Grandeur littéraires, souvenirs d'arts et de lettres de 1890 à 1900, le symbolisme, les théâtres d'avant-garde, peintres, musiciens, l'anarchisme et le dreyfusisme, l'arrivisme (1922)
• Florence: l'histoire, les arts, les lettres, les sanctuaires, l'âme de la cité (1923)
• Claude Monet (1924)
• La Vie de Sainte Claire d'Assise, d'après les anciens textes (1924)
• Marie Duhem, Rémy Duhem (1924)
• L'Art et le ciel vénitiens (1925)
• Le Génie d'Edgar Poë: la légende et la vérité, la méthode, la pensée, l'influence en France (1925)
• Histoire de la miniature féminine française: le dix-huitième siècle, l'Empire, la Restauration (1925)
• Le Mont Saint-Michel (1927)
• Les Musées d'Europe. Le Luxembourg (1927)
• La Vie amoureuse de Charles Baudelaire (1927)
• Naples l'éclatante, Capri, Amalfi, Sorrente, Paestum, Pompéi, Herculanum (1928; illustrations de Pierre Vignal)
• Le Charme de Bruges (1928)
• Henri Le Sidaner (1928)
• Puvis de Chavannes (1928)
• Les Musées d'Europe. Lyon (le Palais Saint-Pierre) (1929)
• La Farce de l'art vivant (2 volumes)
  • Une campagne picturale. 1928-1929 (1929)
  • Les Métèques contre l'art français (1930)
• Le Charme de Venise (1930)
• Corot (1930)
• Jules Chéret (1930)
• Fès, ville sainte (1930)
• La Vie humiliée de Henri Heine (1930)
• Un siècle de peinture française: 1820-1920 (1930)
• L'Oiseau chez lui, by Roger Reboussin (1930; preface)
• Le Charme de Versailles (1931)
• Princes de l'esprit (1931)
• Au Soleil de Provence. L'Azur et les Ifs. Cannes. Antibes. Grasse. Le Var et la Vésubie. La Montagne. La Vie champêtre en Basse-Provence. La Terre antique et médiévale (1931)
• Le Greco (1931)
• Fernand Maillaud, peintre et décorateur (1932)
• La Majesté de Rome (1932)
• Le Génie de Baudelaire: poète, penseur, esthéticien (1933)
• Les Couleurs du Maroc (1933)
• Rabat et Salé (1934)
• Le Pur Visage de la Grèce (1934)
• "La Crise du 'panbétonnisme intégral'. L'Architecture va-t-elle mourir?." In: Nouvelle Revue Critique (1934)
• Greuze et son temps (1935)
• L'Âpre et Splendide Espagne (1935)
• La Provence (1935)
• Mallarmé chez lui (1935)
• Les Douces Beautés de la Tunisie (1936)
• W. H. Singer Jr. Peintre américain (1936)
• Visions de Rome (1936)
• Visions de Florence (1937)
• L'Ardente Sicile (1937)
• Degas (1937)
• Le Cycle de la Méditerranée. L'Égypte, millénaire et vivante (1938)
• Le Charme des petites cités d'Italie. Pavie, Crémone, Plaisance, Parme, Mantoue, Sirmione, Vérone, Vicence, Padoue (1939)
• De Jérusalem à Istanbul (1939)
• La Sicile (1939)
• Normandie (1939)
• La Hollande (1940)
• Le Secret de Watteau (1942)
• Cités et paysages de France (1944)
• Claude Monet et l'impressionnisme (1944)
• Auguste Rodin, l'homme et l'œuvre (n.d.)
• Léonard de Vinci (n.d.)

Translated into English

• "The Influence of the Pre-Raphaelites in France," The Artist. XXXII (1901)
• "French Impressionism and Its Influence in Europe," The International Monthly. V (1902)
• The Great French Painters (1903; translated by P. G. Konody)
• The French Impressionists (1860-1900) (1903; translated by P. G. Konody)
• Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works (1905; translated by Clementina Black)
• "Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau," The International Quarterly. XII (1906)
• Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) (1906; translated by Dorothy Bussy)
• Eugène Delacroix (1909)
• "The Garth" & "Questioning." In: Fleurs-de-lys: A Book of French Poetry Freely Translated into English Verse (1920)
• Claude Monet (1924; translated by J. Lewis May)
• The Art and the Skies of Venice (1925)
• Normandy (1927)
• Florence (1927; translated by Cicely Binyon)
• Mont St. Michel (192-?; translated by John Gilmer)
• Naples: Capri-Amalfi-Sorrento-Paestum-Pompeii-Herculaneum (1928; translated by John Gilmer)
• The Painter William Henry Singer, Jr. (1937)
• Painting Gone Mad: A Collection of Articles from the Paris "Figaro" (1938; translated by Frank L. Emanuel)
• Turner (1939; translated by Evelyn Byam Shaw)
• Degas (1941)
• Sun of the Dead (2015; translated by Rosemary Yeoland)
• The Frail Soul and Other Stories (2015; translated by Brian Stableford)
• The Virgin Orient and Other Stories (2016; adapted by Brian Stableford)
• "The Gaze into Infinity" & "The Sorrow of the Purple." In: Decadence and Symbolism: A Showcase Anthology (2018; translated by Brian Stableford)
• Henri Le Sidaner (2019; translated by Andrew Rickard)

Further reading

• Le Cardonnel, Georges; Vellay, Charles (1905). La Littérature Contemporaines: Opinions des Écrivains de Ce Temps. Paris: Société du Mercure de France.

External links

• Works by Camille Mauclair at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Camille Mauclair at Europeana
• Works by Camille Mauclair at Hathi Trust
• Works by Camille Mauclair at Gallica