Timeline

Museums:

Algeri, Algeria (Musée des Beaux-Arts); Arles (Musée Réattu); Bagnols-sur-Cèze (Musée Municipal); Epinal (Musée départemental); Grenoble (Musée de Peinture et de Sculpture); Lione (Musée des Beaux-Arts); Montpellier (Musée Fabre); Nancy (Musée des Beaux-Arts); Paris (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville; Musée d’Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou; Musée du Luxembourg); Saint-Quentin (Musée A. Lécuyer); Saint-Tropez (Musée de l’Annonciade; Musée Tropelen); Strasburg (Musée des Beaux-Arts); Tolouse (Musée des Augustins); Tolone (Musée d’Art et d’Histoire) France; Bruxelles, Belgium (Musée royaux des Beaux-Arts); Gelsenkirchen, (Stadtische Kunstsammlung); Winterthur (Kunstverein); Wupperthal-Elberfeld (Museum of Stadt); Monaco (Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen) Germania; Geneve, (Modern Art Foudation, Pétit Palais); Losanna (Musée des Beaux-Arts); Zurich (Kusthaus) Switzerland; Leningrado (Museo dell’Ermitage); Moscow (Museo d’arte occidentale; Museo Pouchkine) Unione Sovietica; Philadelphia (Museum of Art); Princeton (University, Art Museum); San Francisco (Museum of Art) USA

Parisian born, Manguin began his career as an artist in 1894 by enrolling in the studio of Gustave Moreau at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Among his fellow students were Albert Marquet, Henri Matisse, Jean Puy and Georges Rouault. He exhibited for the first time in 1902 at the Salon des Indépendants and at Berthe Weil’s in 1903. Subsequently he became an associate of the Salon d’Automne to which he remained loyal until the end of his career. He also had one-man shows at Druet, Vollard and Bernheim-Jeune galleries in Paris over the years.

He was represented in the 1905 Salon d’Automne, where his canvas entitled La Sieste was hung in the room that was famously derided as the Cage aux Fauves. By association, therefore, he was known as one of the Fauvists. It was also in 1905 that Manguin discovered Provence and St Tropez, where he stayed with Paul Signac. Captivated by the beauty of the place, he finally bought a property called L’Oustalet in 1920 where later on he met Henri Edmond Cross.

In Paris at the Académie Ranson in 1908, he met up with François Jourdain and with Marquet, with whom he travelled to Naples the following year. Ever in search of landscapes to paint, Manguin travelled the length and breadth of France over a period of many years, though rarely again did he venture abroad. He followed this half-nomadic lifestyle, his watercolours always with him and never staying long in any one place, until the outbreak of war in 1939. He is known to have stayed in diverse locations: in 1910 Honfleur, in 1911 Sanary, in 1912-1914 Cassis, 1915-1918 Lausanne, in 1920 back to St Tropez and Honfleur, in 1923 Marseille and Albi, in 1924 La Rochelle and Bordeaux, in 1925 Antwerp, Uzerche, Cahors and Avignon, in 1926 Toulon, in 1927 Castellane and Haute Provence, in 1928 Gien, the Loire and Avignon, in 1931 Port Louis and La Trinité-sur-Mer, in 1933 Concarneau, in 1934 Saint-Servan, in 1937 St-Malo and in 1938 Dinard and St-Paul-de-Vence. In 1940 he distanced himself from the war and returned to the studio which he had kept in Avignon, returning there to work each year. In 1949, the year of his death, he decided to leave Paris for good and make his home in Saint-Tropez.

In 1937 during the Exposition Internationale de Paris he participated in an exhibition of the Maitres d’Art Indépendants at the Petit-Palais with eight paintings that represented his work. The first, Saint-Tropez, was named as a Fauvist landscape in the catalogue. The others were entitled Femme à la grappe, Nu couché, Femme nue, Baigneuse au rocher, La Coiffure, La Femme au carrick, and Le Pélargonium. In 1943 a gallery in Paris presented a large group of his paintings and in 1950 the Salon des Indépendants organised an Exhibition as a posthumous tribute to his work.

Manguin’s subjects are women, painted in a feminine manner, nude, asleep, at their toilette or bathing. He painted landscapes, many of them on the Mediterranean coast and still lifes, almost always flowers. The critic and poet Apollinaire characterised him as peintre voluptueux and indeed he considered himself to be the painter of a happy life”. He painted only the most harmonious aspects of the world and his methods and use of bright colours reflect his own joie de vivre. Whilst in St Tropez, he conducted long discussions (of which records exist) on the theory of colour and light with his contemporaries and friends Paul Signac and Charles Camoin. Renoir’s dealer Ambrose Vollard was greatly interested in his work and techniques and the poet/painter/musician Tristan Klingsor mentioned Manguin in his book La Peinture, published in 1921: “his search for bright, vibrant colours, his outbursts of orange, his sumptuous reds…even the shadows contribute to the levity and gaiety, often taking on tones of green”.

Working during the first heady days of the 20th century and having had his work exhibited in the very room whence Fauvism burst upon the public, it was natural that Manguin should consider himself a true Fauve. Initially he was criticised for his use of unnaturally strident acid greens, but in time he attenuated his palette and even the greens he used became harmonised with the rest of the piece. Indeed he was always rather less wild in his technique than some of the Fauves, planning his canvases with greater restraint than others in the group and retaining more control over the composition.

Exhibitions

Literature

Raymond Cogniat, in 'Dictionnaire de la Peinture Moderne' 1954

Bernard Dorival, in 'Les Peintres du XX siècle'

Pierre Cabanne, 'Henri Manguin', 1965

Michel-Claude Jalard, 'Le Postimpressionisme', 1966

Catherine de la Prezle, 'Dictionnaire Universelle de l’art et des artistes', 1967

Grange Batelière, 'Les Muses', 1973

'Dictionnaire Universelle de la Peinture', 1975

Lucile and Claude Manguin, Marie-Caroline Sainsaulieu, 'Henri Manguin, Catalogue Raisonné de l’oeuvre peint', 1980