Visionary Art: Séraphine de Senlis

Séraphine Louis with one of her paintings (photo taken by Anne-Marie Uhde)

Séraphine Louis (1864–1942, dite Séraphine de Senlis), the subject of Martin Provost’s recent film Séraphine (the release date in Washington has been pushed back until next month, when my review will be published [see review here -- Ed.]), is not exactly an unknown painter. Although her work is found in only a few museums now, in her native Senlis and a few other small cities in France, the Museum of Modern Art in New York ended up with a couple of her paintings, Les Pommes and Tree of Paradise. She was a naive painter, an ultimately unsatisfactory but unavoidable term indicating that although she was never trained in painting, she painted as a way to act out a sort of compulsion, what now is sometimes called visionary art.

Françoise Cloarec, Séraphine: La vie rêvée de Séraphine de Senlis

The paintings of Séraphine de Senlis were first championed by Wilhelm Uhde, a collector prominent enough to have been painted by Picasso in a 1910 portrait (Uhde was also an early Picasso collector). Uhde organized two famous exhibits of the primitif painters he favored, Les Peintres du Coeur sacré (1929) and Les Primitifs modernes (1932), including Henri Rousseau and Séraphine de Senlis.

Séraphine Louis, Feuilles, 1928-29, Collection Dina Vierny

Director and screenwriter Martin Provost drew most of the material for his film from the work of Françoise Cloarec, who has also just published a version of her thesis on the painter with Editions Phébus.

For most of her life, Séraphine painted in total obscurity, scrimping together enough money from the various types of menial labor on which she subsisted to buy a few art supplies. She mixed these with pigments of her own devising, colors distilled from plant and animal sources familiar to Séraphine from years of tending flocks and other outdoor work. These vibrant colors, which struck Uhde's eye as so unusual, are one of the hallmarks of her work. The subject of almost all of her paintings is the fauna flora of the region where she lived, generally viewed from close up and refracted through the bizarre lens of Séraphine's inner vision. She claimed that heavenly voices directed her to paint, visions that later became delusions strong enough to land her in a mental asylum in Clermont, where she died after a long incarceration. These plants, often dotted and striped like caterpillars or other insects, seem to quiver with life, making them seem more like the fauna of a psychotic landscape.