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Jean Louis Forain
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| • Nationality: French |
| • Roles: Artist, Printmaker, Painter, Lithographer, Sculptor, Caricaturist, Peintre á la Gouache, Aquarelliste, Pastelliste, Graveur, Lithographe, Dessinateur, Illustrateur, Caricaturiste, Affichiste |
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Jean Louis Forain |
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'Have you read the latest Forain?'
This was a familiar morning greeting among Frenchmen who lived through the thirty-five years or so of Forain's brilliantly successful career as a cartoonist. His satirical comments in the daily and weekly papers were awaited with feverish excitement by Parisians and provincials alike. These drawings together with their Ugendes formed a biting and highly personal entity. Leandre Vaillat had much to say about them in his book En Ecoutant Forain published in 1931, the year of the artist's death. The title gives the key not only to his own volume but also to the other two monographs and most of the numerous articles written on the cartoonist during and after his life. Forain's authors have laid particular stress upon his celebrated bons mots to the exclusion of much that would have been of greater value. It is true to say that he did come to exploit his wit socially until, like an actor who forgets how to be himself, the assumed personality became part of him. Whistler and Wilde were also of this ilk, but although writers made much of their witticisms, it was not to the neglect of their real work as was the case with Forain. […]
It is difficult nowadays to realise what tremendous power the satirical draughtsman once exercised upon the man-in-the-street. The influential political and social cartoonist no longer exists; gone are the days when his drawings comprised a compelling feature in nearly every paper. In Forain's time it was not at all unusual for him to be allotted as much as half a page or no less than a spread of six columns; on occasion he was even given the entire front page in colour. At the turn of the century there existed in France alone a whole body of gifted draughtsmen-satirists, among them Steinlen, Sem, Caran d'Ache and Willette.
Forain is generally accepted as being the most important of all, even the greatest cartoonist since Goya and Daumier. This is probably a just assessment but it should not be assumed that, talented though he was, Forain ever reached the heights of pure draughtsmanship attained by these two great masters. He was of a lesser calibre, but in his own scale marvellously well equipped. He had the capacity for prodigious work and was never satisfied until his drawings exactly expressed what he was determined to say, and in the most economical terms.
Through fierce self-discipline his observation became deeply penetrating and his memory so firm that later he did not find it necessary to make sketches in the court-rooms for use in his paintings on that subject. His legendes were evidently as important as the drawings themselves, but it is well nigh impossible for a foreigner to judge the subtlety of their nuances, and the finer points of their topical content may be fully sensed only by a native. Edmond de Goncourt wrote:
'Ce Forain a une langue toute Parisienne, faite de ces expressions intraduisable dans une idiome quel'conque, et qui renferment le sublime d'une ironie infiniment delicate.'
Humour is one of those traits which, perhaps more than any other, defies the breaking down of national barriers; its roots lie too deeply embedded in centuries of history and racial characteristics for them to be penetrated by any etranger. Partisanship is another necessary component in the equipping of a cartoonist, but Forain went a step further. He prided himself upon being an inflexible character. Once he had decided upon who and what was right, who and what was wrong, nothing could alter him. He confused rigidity with strength. There are, however, instances in his private life that reveal another and more sympathetic side to his nature, when he is known to have performed kindly acts to help those who had offended him and were therefore classed as enemies. These 'weaknesses' had to be performed under the strictest secrecy, for he was clearly ashamed of them.
Only his wife knew and sometimes betrayed her husband in order to disprove his reputation for heartlessness. In his family life Forain was a devoted, if difficult, husband and an adoring father who, though sometimes disappointed in his son, always forgave him his failings. Professionally he was full of prejudices, said by Degas to be the 'force of a society', and one of the characteristics shared by Forain with that great genius was his overwhelming and epoch-defying anti-Semitism.
Forain went so far as to refuse to believe in Captain Dreyfus' innocence even when, after those long years of tortuous exile, Dreyfus was at last proved the innocent victim of a perfidious plot. Not until after the 1914-18 war and when age had softened him, did Forain grudgingly admit that France's Jewish soldiers had also fought gallantly against the common foe. There are those who claim that his attitude over the Affaire was not that of an anti-Semite, but of a true patriot who could not accept the possibility of any such ignominy among the 'officers and gentlemen' of France; he believed, as Friedrich Sieburg so aptly put it, that God, without any doubt, is French. But Forain himself, recalling his fondness for Porto-Riche, a Jewish friend of his youth, is reported to have said:
'A cet age-la, on ne faisait pas attention si un homme etait Juif ou non. L'antisemitisme, c'est une chose qu'on decouvre ensuite.' Be that as it may, there is no escaping the fact that the man who fostered so many just causes through his pen and pencil could or would not recognise justice when it was on 'the other side of the fence'.
Forain, ironically, reached his heights as a draughtsman when he was being least admirable as a human being. A paradoxical and bewildering personality, the artist in him seemed to expand as the man with balanced judgement diminished. Perhaps it was this very hatred and fury that unleashed in the anti-Dreyfus drawings of 1898-9 certain inhibitions, a kind of smallness, still visible in those of the Album Forain of 1896 and of Doux Pays of the same year. 'Forain se couchait dans un etat de, rage, et se levait apres un sommeil agite, plus en rage, ne voulant pas approfondir les cotes juridiques du proces, resolu a ne pas en discuter.'
The drawings in Psst. . . ! revealed Forain as a fully equipped draughtsman. The expressiveness with which he handled the human body was complete; no longer could his figures be criticised as marionettes, they were people of flesh and blood. His compositions had become sure and interesting and the handling of the crayon masterly. The various borrowings had been absorbed and translated into entirely personal terms. These drawings are true Forain and while their sponsorship of gross injustice seems inexcusable in an artist who declared '. . . pour le bien de tous, je denounce', it is the aesthetic and not the moral issue which, here, is of primary importance.
It is very understandable that Forain's illustriousness as a satirist should have detracted from Forain the painter. These two professions are somewhat uncomfortable bedfellows and it cannot be denied that, by and large, Forain's least successful paintings suffer from this liaison in that their literary content is over-emphasised. Perhaps a second reason for his being neglected in this sense is that his pictures are mainly divided into two categories—lip to the last decade of the century, the scenes of La Vie Parisienne, and after a gradual transition, the long series of Court-Rooms which continued until the end of his life. The formal approach of the latter bears little or no relation to that of the former, indeed each might have been achieved by a different hand. As nothing flatters the amateur's ego more than to be able to recognise a painter at a glance, this sharp diversity in Forain's work did not prove endearing. Furthermore, having started as a 'modern' in company with the Impressionists—than whom he was born about half a generation later as were Seurat, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Lautrec—he turned his back on the Independants, ignored the dawning of the twentieth century and the new languages of Modern Art, and deliberately took a retrogressive step towards Hals, Goya, and Daumier. Such a move was not likely to win the approval of subsequent historians.
Forain's own explanation of his volte-face was that his early training under Carpeaux eventually made him dissatisfied with the ideals of Impressionism:
‘Les Impressionistes ont decouvert le precede pour peindre la lumiere, trouvaille magnifique! Mais la nuage est splendide lui aussi. Sont splendides tous les tons de la grisaille.'
But whether Forain realised it or not this declaration had meaningful undertones. It was not only against the Impressionists' effects of light that he turned but also against their enchanting enjoyment of nature and simple every-day pleasures which even their own material hardships could not quell. It is exactly this aspect, of what would nowadays be called 'escapism', that has made Renoir, Pissarro, Monet, and Sisley so appealing to the general public. Forain may well have come to prefer the beauty of the grisaille and to have eschewed the colours born of the play of sunlight, but the underlying cause lay within the man who had moved away from the early delightful paintings of cafes and courtesans into a deeper concern for the human situation which, from the beginning, had peeped through most of his cartoons.
Text excerpted from:
Browse, Lillian. Forain; The Painter 1825-1931. Elek, London, 1978.
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