Marchand, Jean (1883-1941) by Scholes, Robert

Jean Marchand (1883 – 1941) There was one painting by Marchand in the famous and Post-Impressionism show organized by and Bellin 1910, Still Life with Bananas. But “in the years immediately following the two Grafton Galleris exhibitions, the French painter who was bought and acclaimed most faithfully by Fry and Bell, as well as by their friends such as St. John and Mary Hutchinson, Hilton Young, and Percy Moore Turner, was Jean Marchand. (He was also the first modern artist, with Renoir, to enter Samuel Courtauld’s collection.) . . . . When Marchand is remembered today, it is usually as a joke against Fry and Bell. So sure a touchstone did he become for Bloomsbury’s understanding of legacy that, as Simon Watney has commented, ‘if Marchand had not existed, it seems that Fry could have invented him.’ Between 1906 and 1912 he moved through a brisk exploration of modern styles, briefly adopting the heightened colous of Fauvism, flirting hesitantly with Cubism and fleetingly with Futurism” (James Beechey’s “Defining Modernism: Roger Fry and Clive Bell in the 1920s,” in Richard Shone’s , Princeton UP,1999, p. 42). This is an important essay in a very useful book. Manet Fry Cézanne’s The Art of Bloomsbury Marchand also made woodcut illustrations for Paul Claudel’s book,, published by the Librairie de l’Art catholique, six place St Sulpice à Paris, in 1918. Le Chemin de la Croix

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