Le Grand Sentiment (ca. 1926) by Marie Monnier, Musée de l’Oise, Beauvais, France | Photo: Adrien Didierjean © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY
Translator’s Note
In May 1927, an exhibition of images embroidered in silk thread opened at La Maison des Amis des Livres in the Sixth Arrondissement, the bookshop and salon that Breton once called “the most attractive hub of ideas of the time.” The artworks were the creations of Marie Monnier (1894–1976) and were accompanied by a catalogue text from poet and essayist Léon-Paul Fargue (1876–1947).
Monnier’s embroideries were lauded by Parisian modernists (Paul Valéry wrote a lot about them)—a perhaps surprising popularity for a female artist working in a feminized medium, in the era of the valorized, decidedly masculine flaneur. Then again, Monnier’s inventions are significant departures from traditional needlework; writing some decades later, Jean Tardieu would humorously compare the gulf between Monnier’s artworks and what is conventionally written off as “ladies’ embroidery” to that between the Himalayas and the hills of Montmartre. Her embroideries consist not of the usual patterned ornamentation arranged on a plain background, but complete pictorial surfaces that are painterly in texture and composition. Some, according to Fargue, took two years to complete. You can see why the burgeoning modernist canon recognized her as one of their own. Le Bateau Ivre, after Rimbaud, conjures the symbolic luxuriance of Gustave Moreau. Trois Têtes treats the human visage with Magritte’s gently absurd logic. The radiant expression and colors of La Mouche may evoke something of Munch. And the pastel seashells drifting towards abstraction in Le Grand Sentiment recall what we know today of Hilma af Klint.
In addition to his catalogue text for the 1927 exhibition, Fargue wrote the poetic essay “Embroideries” that similarly resists easy classification. It opens by staging an anachronistic encounter with Jacques-André Naigeon (1738–1810), the revolutionary philosopher remembered as the compiler of Diderot’s work, who delivers across several relentless pages an increasingly absurd diatribe on the chemical repugnance of paint, the base nature of all those who continue to sully their names with it, and the devastating superiority of God’s creation to any representation of man. When the poet can get a word in edgewise it is to remark laconically on the Parisian art world leaving him and his companions “dead drunk on exhibitions.” He explains to Naigeon that theirs is a crisis of expropriation: The pursuit of art has become a predictable cycle through the same set of revolving doors.
So the poet is almost taken aback to be shunted once again through the revolving door only to encounter the embroideries of Monnier, who “summons great nocturnal butterflies in broad daylight.” Here Fargue finds a medium superior to that of ascendent paint, where the materiality of individual stitches emerging from an iridescent surface reflects more readily “the natural” that is at once discrete and continuous: “a kind of lucigenous state … No pigmentary heaviness.” The multitudinous texture of the textile is deemed uniquely suited to bearing the preponderance of symbols, beings and objects both natural and artificial; for Fargue, the saturated fabric serves to explain how “unity emerged from diversity,” rather than the other way around. We may track the passage of time by following each stitch that is a fossilized motion of Monnier’s own hand, more than is possible in the vague traces of paint. In all the “maneuvers” of “flora and fauna,” we may be inclined to see it as evolution itself taking place, the seasons of time and light are neither cheated into cheap tricks nor betrayed by evasion.
All this is characteristic of Fargue’s intensely illusive and densely referential style, mixing commentary on Parisian society, aesthetic arguments, theological debate, historical interpolations, and the known mechanics of natural sciences—all with a relentless precision of poetic imagery that enacts the curious beauty of regarding teeming pond water under a microscope. Never quite Surrealist, his language is so deeply strange precisely because of its hyper-objectivity that extends logic past its breaking point without abandoning it. Even as Fargue may overwhelm his subjects with cascading descriptions and exhaustive catalogues, he maintains a beguiling polemical directness.
“Hybridity” is a term with a decidedly contemporary literary currency, yet here is Fargue in the 1920s with a lyric essay avant-la-lettre—the boundaries between essay and poem as porous as those between Monnier’s embroidery and modern painting.
Fargue was a student of Mallarmé, attended the legendary Tuesday gatherings, and served as a crucial post-Symbolist link to the Surrealists. But the rising dominance of the latter group would cast Fargue into obscurity for the rest of the twentieth century, despite the praise his poetry drew from the likes of Joyce, Rilke, and Benjamin. The first English translation of his poetry was published in 2003; today, a modest Fargue renaissance is underway with recent translations of Vulturne, Haute Solitude, and Le Piéton de Paris. My translation of Épaisseurs, the collection in which “Embroideries” was published, is forthcoming with Wakefield Press.
Monnier, meanwhile, left us some 30 pieces of large-scale silk embroidery, before withdrawing from the world of art, possibly due to failing eyesight brought on by the intense demands of her practice. It appears there was no significant exhibition after 1927 until a 1992 retrospective at Musée de l’Oise, a situation F argue himself seems to have predicted this at the end of “Embroideries” where he extol s the reader to look upon these works while they are still free: “before they go off to do military service in collections and auctions, reinforced heavily by transfers, loans, manipulations, and paradoxical speculations, only to retire one day in museums.”
Nearly a century after La Maison des Amis des Livres, this translation reunites Fargue’s text with its subjects in Monnier’s embroideries for English-language readers, restoring a dialogue that illuminates the boundary-dissolving character of avant-garde practice.
—Chris Holdaway, translator
Embroideries
By Léon-Paul Fargue
—For Paul Valéry
“I can no longer bear the art of man. I can’t stand to see it in paintings. Nor in sculpture, for that matter. Nor in decoration. Nor in literature. Only music remains, which lets us escape from prison for but a moment. We’ll come back to that. But as for the rest, there’s nothing—no love left. Those whom I admire above all make the question even more pressing. Before their works, all is worse than elsewhere. They struggle, they empty themselves, they fall backwards; they must be scattered in turn sooner or later, like the others, after a longer conflict and more lost time. It’s just a matter of time. The moment we speak of is already far behind us. Nothing holds still, nothing is indestructible, no work is beyond question—not one that reassures us, not one that is completely airtight and impervious to deflation. For, there’s no denying it, they’re all dubious, all worm-eaten. There is, indeed, nature and life, whose models are unreachable, and they keep renewing themselves. So? To be, or to live? I’m afraid to choose. But why choose? Obsession with condensing nature into tablets, obsession with triple extraction, obsession with taking our meals in pill form, obsession with drawing a vial of essence from the sea. Satisfaction for the mind! And why, good God! Why advance, why isolate oneself, why put one’s head in the spotlight, why try to impose order on it, why attempt to groom the world? God dresses it better. Everything has been done before, and better, with air, with light, with terrestrial magnetism, with the music of the spheres, which is never the same and stirs me differently in the morning and evening.”
I replied to Naigeon: that he was going through an expropriation crisis. We were dead drunk on exhibitions, salons, collections: “Just think,” he would reply, “that we paint with these filthy materials, these chemicals, these toxins, these violent poisons, medicines for external use—if you like—these oil cakes, these creams from sewage fields, these wastes from Achères, these old cheeses whose civil status we recreate, these freight excesses, roasted horse liver, sweet acorn coffee, crushed bricks, old offal, spoiled meat; just think that we butter all this muck with pig-hair handspikes, rat-beard crutches chair-leg oil, twisted wood juice, onto canvases, papers, panels salvaged from flea markets, chewed-up rags, babies’ nappies cured of green diarrhea, bedside table veneers, toilet seats; just think that we burnish this old mirage of the world, that we plaster onto it the old prismatic novel with great patience for filth, that we slip our bread and butter into a wooden frame made of yoghurt, varnished with a fine gold that’s really copper, and we tack it on a bug-ridden wall, between marble columns made of compressed brewer’s yeast, cut with alimentary chapels of roast beef incense, third-time around tea, and cakes with coconut substitute! And there’s the old master, laden with years and honors, piling twenty kilos of marl onto his canvas, and he’s called a great painter; another one, who makes it fester like a sore until the scabs fall off; yet another who paints bivalve angels eating tripe and playing the rebec in the shit; then there’s the butcher who grabs his cleaver, splits his meat in two, dumps the pieces on either side of the road, and bam! There’s a village; still another who paints bloated polyhedrons and earwax crystals. And then come the Patagonians of Montparnasse, with their bunions in their mouths, dissidents greener than yellow, more oily than green; the Black-Jews, the intellectual Poles with their stone-grinding teeth, with their wives, noses pierced with a necklace of shells; the bankers, merchants of oil, of carpets, of fur scraps, the journalists, the gossip-mongers, the full-time critics—life-sized—who hallucinate, take step back, wipe sleep from their eyes, huddle together to be more certain of their business, knock the pots of their heads together, raise a half-mourning thumb (there would be much to say about thumbs), nod their gourds, and proclaim, in a voice emerging from Bedel’s salmon in green sauce or a martini from La Rotonde: ‘Interesting handling of paint, delicate spirit in the brush, values are well-placed, broad spatial awareness, etc.’ And these cemeteries of busts, leftover cauliflowers, cesspit hearts à la crème, moth-eaten eyes, a real pince-nez on the nose, oxidized, fished out of chamber pots. And the furniture, the collections, catafalques and sarcophagi built from cakes of Cockaigne. And the art objects, and the jewelery! As for typography, it’s intellectual vermin, a perfected parasitism, what a parade of learned fleas! You can’t approach any of it, you can’t look at it with a critical eye, without detecting the flaw, the rot, without catching a whiff of death. Don’t you prefer the polished furniture, the waxed floors, the linoleum and lincrusta of the old masters? No, no, allow me. Let’s look at the works of man with eyes other than our own. Look through a magnifying glass, a microscope, at a delicate piece of human handiwork, the movement of a watch, the point of the finest needle. What do you see in the well of the sky? What do you say about this boxing toad, these rough-cut stems, nought but metal boulders full of straw, striated kidneys, untrimmed slag, and you can’t even discern in all this chaos the point’s intention. The most finely worked jewel, under a good Zeiss lens, gives off a kind of Parmentier omelette. No, was that it? Yes, that was it! So, we need to console ourselves, don’t we, Groult, don’t we, Seguy, don’t we, Duchartre, and we place on the magical plate a bit of insect wing tissue, a grain of dust, the smallest organic mischief, and we contemplate therein the most audacious unconscious mathematics, the most humiliating to our ken, a kaleidoscope where blood cells of all colors wrestle, auroras with streaming lace of silence, chasms swarming with fans, daring bridges, terrifying gems—you could eat them—bloody drops where the Noah’s Ark teems, where ivory elephants with noses as complex as ophicleides roll against each other, teratological fellows on whose flanks cogwheels and drive belts turn, moundsters thrumming with pianistic hammers, augers with calf’s eyes, spirilla racing like couriers. You can look, go on, you can be sure: not a defect, not a blur in the form, not a weakness in volume. It’s clean, precise, flawless in the light. The detail doesn’t suffer, it bears any magnification. On the contrary, the more the infinitesimal emerges, the closer you get to the point of attachment, the cell, the nucleus, the origin, the better it gets. We live among such marvels like the wealthy, ‘whom their possessions surround but do not penetrate.’ We have no imagination, no curiosity, no craft. It’s disgusting to create anything!”
“If God dresses all, man undresses to dress again as he pleases. If God arranges all, man dismantles and chooses from within what interests him. He’s magnetised, he attracts, he’s drawn to certain objects. It’s up to him to find the unknowns through what is given. Better to make something of your own than to do nothing, and better to love approximations than to love nothing at all. You’re not overly sentimental. So how are you not moved, and how do you not understand that this need for idols comes from a certain indulgence of the heart?” At last I responded to Naigeon with whatever I could muster, with what there was to say about the individual, about choice, about atmosphere, and other artistic nonsense, and there we were in our ramblings, which were repeated fairly often during that period, trudging along that corridor of neurasthenia that leads to sentimental crisis, well-known to all who entered at a young age into passion, into the pursuit of art, exhausted by so many years of practice, of excitement, of ruptures, drunk on fine arts, when we were given, amongst ten exhibitions, leafed through like a revolving door, the chance to discover the embroideries of Marie Monnier.
Suddenly, at a glance, man’s stock seemed to rise. But, as the song goes, this man was a woman.
I had the feeling that this unknown, whom our satiety had vaguely hoped for at the end of so many journeys, that this artist, who would receive—if one might say—and give off new radiations, and whose imagination would need to shape a matter all her own and create all its resources—we had found her.
There was something singularly vibrant here, a kind of lucigenous state. (Like the first sunlight seen through flowers, leaves, the work of insects.) No pigmentary heaviness. Luminous colors. Woven windows. I thought of Volkelt’s line: “Color is a particular motion of the ether.”
I was amazed, hesitant, yet I felt myself, little by little, vaguely carried away. I was caught, turning in a net of waves, of Orphic cells. The artist was bringing us back to those natural wonders that had so disgusted Naigeon in human works; she seemed to embody them, she was tattooed by nature, she was fabulously natured. I was entering into a kind of spiritual madrepore, infinitely variable, into a perfectly harmonious silken glasshouse—a fabric of rhythms where individual lives unravelled without breaking the braid, where each monad was free within the system—into a well-oiled machine, into a substance whose elements formed a dizzying chain and palmed off—under studio lighting, in the hive’s fiery labour, with the speed of compositors and insects—the pieces of an excessively thrilling organic work. Sap and pulp, fur and plumage, stones where reverie sees strange figures being drawn, warm symmetry of radiant animals, faces faintly human with magnetic eyes, stared minerals, crystals and corollas, the radiant form and the mirrored form … I found myself in a mysterious colony of phenomena where life endlessly divided itself before my eyes.
Even so, I could hear the song emerging from the harmony; I saw actors entering the scene, living beings catching the light, eyes becoming fixed. It had grown like a plant; it hadn’t arrived from the outside by passing through all sorts of intellectual breakdowns. Here, intelligence performs a diplomatic function. Nature climbs through the artist, drawing its thread behind it, which an increasingly visible plan leads beyond its point of attachment, in a direction discrete yet imperious. Unity emerged from diversity; I could trace its order and its design. Marie Monnier’s embroideries are both paintings and objects. No more than nature does she skip over obstacles or skirt the difficult parts, as do those modernist underlings, just as restless but no more practised than apes. This phenomenon—to which I would have sworn my faith without hesitation—now revealed an unusual intervention: a subtle, clever spirit that both organised and deviously diverted it; like a ripple in a pond, with its bracelets in perfect order, where the precise whim of an insect paints the sorrowful flaw of a windowpane; like a beehive, an anthill, disturbed at the height of work by an intruder who knows perfectly well what he intends, and what flurries, what swarms of insects, what tempestuous effect he wants to create. This intruder in nature that is the artist is here someone who knows their feints—a hunting spirit, a poacher, a diviner; someone who stoops low, who works close up, and who follows nature intently to throw it off course, and to make it say what it didn’t intend to, yet secretly thought. I was led, needle and thread, in a strange way. I reached a point where you can catch in the act the latent accord, the tacit complicity between nature and her charmer, between the bird and the fowler, between the executioner and the martyr. There were great silk roses where the light followed as if magnetizing the embroiderer’s hand, stealing her shadow, pre-empting her patience. The natural spirit, with its mysteries, its pollens, its rapid visits, crowned the work before my eyes, like St. Elmo’s fire in motionless air lights a mast’s candle. The living cipher, the number of flesh, had found someone to speak to, to confide in, through whom to extend itself and be loved, to whom it could whisper secrets to be transmitted to those most worthy. Just as an intense thought and will can create new beings, nature, in its richest forms, in its densest zones, in its entanglements, can create, through and for mankind—who loves it and draws strength from it—a second nature, entirely active and miraculous. Its nervous points, its sensitive extremities, imperceptible to the prodigal son, to the hurried man, to the man detached from the earth, must be encountered. The man who deserves them, whom they fascinate and impregnate, receives one day the gift of true magical power. An ardent exchange occurs between his organism and the cosmic medium. This is the whole story of bird and snake charmers; it’s Saint Francis of Assisi’s entire trick. You can, if you wish, walk on water, rise high into the ether with a secret push off the ground at a precise spot, in a state of trance, to dissociate yourself and wander through forbidden light and matter; or, if you simply wish to live and be a man among men, you can enclose them in nets that no one can evade. This is how Marie Monnier can tame miracles, she man euv ers the flora and fauna; how she summons great nocturnal butterflies in broad daylight, which, at her command, smear their faces on the corolla’s pistil; how she sets them against each other, within the mouldings of the waves and across the sand of beaches, darting through leaves, entangling them in cacti; fish armed with scythes like an ancient chariot, starfish walking barefoot, shellfish whose brains are gnawed at by plagiarists, hotels by the sea, seahorses arched like a woman combing her hair, snakes wearing caps, birds playing on their own lyres, jellyfish in nurses’ bonnets, and all sorts of strange creatures that form circles, surface, and hum around her, gathering with fanciful rigor, under the sign of poems she dreams or those written by our greatest poets. She draws them in, brings them close, capturing them under the harp of her thumb; she gently chains in silk these crumbs fallen from the immense God that we can grasp only through his weaknesses, and who sleeps, scattered throughout the system, like a snoring Gulliver, drunk on music, chained by a thousand links; while in the distant planes one sees emerging from the vapor little by little, in their dreamlike order, the benches of the ancient world, the maelstroms, the volcanoes, the crystals, the groping creatures, the giant sympathetic monstrosities from before the Flood, the abandoned gods, the mummies, the dead, and there appear—at the edge of sea and sky—mirages, condemned cities, enigmatic gazes, figureheads, closed eyes fanned by palms; divine and unclassifiable witnesses akin to that phantom which Arthur Gordon Pym saw emerging from the cataracts of the pole, and whose face, he said, was white as snow. The idea of time, of forest, of light, and seasons presides over these embroideries, which have neither cheated nor betrayed it. Some of them cost Madame Monnier two years of work. They have embellished themselves, adorned themselves like gardens, like branches, and have emerged when needed, like a good sowing. The weather is fine; we open the windows upon them. Let’s take a good look at them while they’re still free. Let’s spend their final moments with them, unfettered, before they go off to do military service in collections and auctions, reinforced heavily by transfers, loans, manipulations, and paradoxical speculations, only to retire one day in museums.
We are the contemporaries of few masters and few masterpieces. We don’t pay them much attention, we don’t take stock of their worth, because they live alongside us and we can see them without difficulty. A wise man once said—I no longer remember where—that if we were told a troop of sirens would arrive at the Museum tomorrow, we wouldn’t go. But it’s time, it’s high time, it’s more than time, to prove the wise men wrong.
Works Cited
- André Breton and André Parinaud, Interviews (1913–1952), Gallimard, coll. “Idées,” 1969, p. 44.
- Jean Tardieu, “Marie Monnier, ou le Fil à tisser les rêves” in Marie Monnier ou le fil à broder nos rêves, Editeur Conseil régional de l’Oise, 1992, p. 6.
- Léon-Paul Fargue, “Broderies” (June 1927), in La nouvelle revue française, 165 (14th année), 711–19.
- Jacqueline Fischer, Marie Monnier-brodeuse (online), textpatch.e-monsite.com.
