Marie Monnier (1894, Paris - 1976, Paris) was a French illustrator and embroiderer, known for her elaborate and vibrant compositions in needle and thread. Her work met with critical esteem during the 1920s, when she exhibited actively, but it has since been largely forgotten.
Monnier was born in Paris, during the final decade of the nineteenth century, to parents Clovis and Philiberte (née Sollier). [1] Monnier was married to painter and printmaker Paul-Emile Bécat. Her elder sister, Andrienne Monnier, was the proprietor of the famous Parisian bookstore, La Maison des Amis des Livres.
Marie Monnier exhibited her embroideries in Paris at La Maison des Amis des Livres and Galerie E. Druet during the 1920s to the acclaim of critics and writers including Paul Valéry and Léon-Paul Fargue. She contributed illustrations to editions of Fargue’s collection Ludions (1930) as well as Paul Valéry’s Moralités (1931). Valéry’s essay “Les Broderies de Marie Monnier” opened the catalog for her 1924 exhibition at Galerie E. Druet (then managed by Eugene Druet's widow), which included her illustrations for his “L’Abeille and “Palme,” Arthur Rimbaud’s “Les Chercheuses de poux,” and Fargue’s “Féerie.” [2] In that essay, Valéry described her work thus:
Look at the marvelous coloring of these panels. They have a brilliance akin to life's rosiest products–insects' wings, birds' feathers, shells, petals. No painting can match the force or delicacy that appears in these subtle associations of bits of dyed silk. Stitch after stealthy stitch adds up to the texture of sumptuousness. Even flesh tints are ravishingly reproduced, and the incalculable artfulness of a needle comes to delightful fruition in the modeling of a shoulder or a breast. [3]
In this last sentence, Valéry seems to be describing Monnier’s L’Abeille, based on his own poem of the same title; that embroidery now resides in the Bureau Valéry collection at the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques-Doucet. [4] Monnier also made a large embroidery inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. That novel appeared as the serial “Work in Progress” in the little magazine transition , which published a reproduction of Monnier’s embroidery Birth in issue number four (July 1927). [2] [5] The work appears in the context of a section of Modernist art reproductions including paintings by Cubist Juan Gris and Surrealist Kristians Tonny. Transition’s editors included a biographical note esteeming Monnier: "To call the work of MARIE MONNIER ‘embroidery’ is inadequate and unjust. Her compositions are magnificently organized but, because of her unique medium, she is able to use colors and textures which are denied a painter in oils and watercolors.” They added that her current exhibition at La Maison des Amis des Livres had “astonished art lovers of Paris,” and that her patient sensibility in her craft stood as a “deliberate artistic undercurrent beneath the apparent restlessness and confusion of the age. [6] In his essay “Broderies,” published in La Nouvelle Revue Française in June 1927, Fargue similarly praised Monnier’s art at length. Describing his encounter with her embroideries on exhibit La Maison des Amis des Livres, he wrote,
There was a singular vibration, a lucigène [related to a type of oil lamp] state (first aspect of the sun across flowers, leaves, the work of insects). No pigment heaviness. Bright Colors. Woven windows. I thought of [Johannes] Volkelt’s words: color is a movement particular to the ether. . . . The idea of time, of forest, of light and of seasons, presides over these embroideries, which have not cheated, which have not betrayed. Some of them took Madame Monnier two years of work. They have decorated, adorned themselves, like gardens, like branches, they sprout as they need, like a good seed. [7]
Following this praise, he suggests that these works are destined for a prominence that they little received: “Let's look at them closely while they are still free. Let's spend their final moments with them, unhindered, before they go to do their military service in collections and for sale [in galleries], with a lot of mutations, permissions, blackmail and paradoxical speculations, to retire, one day, in museums.”
Broderies de Marie Monnier, Galerie E. Druet, Paris, France, May 5–30, 1924
Exposition Marie Monnier: travaux de 1923-1927: broderies, aquarelles, gravures. La Maison des Amis des Livres, Paris France, May 16 – June 15, 1927.
Marie Monnier: ou, Le fil à broder nos rêves: Donation de M. Maurice Saillet. Musée départemental de l'Oise, Beauvais, France, October 21, 1992 –January 17, 1993.
Sylvia Beach, born Nancy Woodbridge Beach, was an American-born bookseller and publisher who lived most of her life in Paris, where she was one of the leading expatriate figures between World War I and II.
This schema for the novel Ulysses was produced by its author, James Joyce, in November 1921 in order to help his friend, Valery Larbaud, prepare a public lecture on the novel, which Joyce was still writing at the time. The lecture took place on 7 December 1921 at the Maison des Amis des Livres bookshop and lending library, owned and run by Adrienne Monnier. The schema was shown to intimates of Joyce during the 1920s and was eventually published by Stuart Gilbert in 1930 in his book, James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: A Study. Gilbert’s typed copy of the schema is housed in the Harley K. Croessmann Collection of James Joyce at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
transition was an experimental literary journal that featured surrealist, expressionist, and Dada art and artists. It was founded in 1927 by Maria McDonald and her husband Eugene Jolas and published in Paris. They were later assisted by editors Elliot Paul, Robert Sage, and James Johnson Sweeney.
Adrienne Monnier was a French bookseller, writer, and publisher, and an influential figure in the modernist writing scene in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s.
Gisèle Freund was a German-born French photographer and photojournalist, famous for her documentary photography and portraits of writers and artists. Her best-known book, Photographie et société (1974), is about the uses and abuses of the photographic medium in the age of technological reproduction. In 1977, she became president of the French Association of Photographers, and in 1981, she took the official portrait of French President François Mitterrand.
André Salmon was a French poet, art critic and writer. He was one of the early defenders of Cubism, with Guillaume Apollinaire and Maurice Raynal.
Jean Hugo was a painter, illustrator, theatre designer and author. He was born in Paris and died in his home at the Mas de Fourques, near Lunel, France. Brought up in a lively artistic environment, he began teaching himself drawing and painting and wrote essays and poetry from a very early age. His artistic career spans the 20th century, from his early sketches of the First World War, through the creative ferment of the Parisian interwar years, and up to his death in 1984. He was part of a number of artistic circles that included Jean Cocteau, Raymond Radiguet, Pablo Picasso, Georges Auric, Erik Satie, Blaise Cendrars, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Paul Eluard, Francis Poulenc, Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, Colette, Marcel Proust, Jacques Maritain, Max Jacob, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Marie Bell, Louise de Vilmorin, Cecil Beaton and many others.
The rue de l'Odéon is a street in the Odéon quarter of the 6th arrondissement of Paris on the Left Bank. Because of the presence of two bohemian bookstores, run respectively by Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach, and the coterie of emergent Anglophone writers surrounding them, James Joyce nicknamed it "Stratford-on-Odéon". Monnier and Beach thought of it as Odéonia.
Henry Jean-Marie Levet (1874–1906) was a French diplomat and poet.
Claire Castillon, born May 25, 1975 in Boulogne-Billancourt (France), is a French writer. She writes novels, short stories and children's books.
The Ludions is a song cycle for voice and piano by Erik Satie, composed in 1923 to five absurdist poems by Léon-Paul Fargue. It was the last of his vocal compositions. The songs are brief and a performance of the set usually lasts less than five minutes.
Le Navire d'Argent was a short lived but influential literary review, published monthly in Paris from June 1925 until May 1926. It was "French in language, but international in spirit".
Adolphe van Bever was a 19th–20th-century French bibliographer and erudite.
Laure Murat is a French historian and writer.
Charles Derennes was a French novelist, essayist and poet, the winner of the Prix Femina in 1924.
Marie Gabriel Mourey was a French novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, translator and art critic.
Disavowals or cancelled confessions is an anti-realist, surrealist autobiography by Claude Cahun. It was created to serve as a critique of the dominant cultural conservatism in France through the subversion of traditional autobiography with the use of illustrated photomontages alongside the artist's own aphorisms in the aftermath of World War I.
Vera Nimidoff (1879–1963) was a singer, born in Odessa, who performed at the Paris Opera in 1900–1903 and then held a literary salon with her husband Louis Bour.
Stratford-on-Odéon was both a literary circle and James Joyce's affectionate nickname for the Rue de l'Odéon in Paris's Left Bank, its two bookstores and the "coterie of emergent Anglophone writers surrounding them".
Marie-Anne Leroudier was a French embroiderer who received awards at several international expositions. Some of her works were hung in the Paris Opera, while others were held by the Lateran Museum in Rome and the Textile Arts Museum in Lyon. A street in the latter city bears her name.
Fargue, Léon-Paul. (June 1927). Broderies. In La nouvelle revue française, 165 (14th année), 711-19.
Jolas, Eugene. ed. (July 1927). Untitled biographical commentary on Marie Monnier. transition. (No. 4, July 1927) 102.
Marie Monnier ou le Fil à broder nos rêves. (1992). Catalog for exhibition, October 21, 1992 – January 17, 1993. Beauvais, France: Musée départemental de l'Oise.
Monnier, Adrienne. (1976). The very rich hours of Adrienne Monnier. New York: Scribner.
Monnier, Marie. (c. 1927). Birth. In transition. (no. 4, July 1927) “Reproductions of Paintings”, 102-104.
Monnier, Marie. (c. 1924). L’Abeille . Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques-Doucet, Paris France.
Valéry, Paul. (1960). Embroideries by Marie Monnier. In Degas, Manet, Morisot (David Paul, Trans.). New York: Pantheon Books. 173-74.
Valéry, Paul. (1960). Les broderies de Marie Monnier. In Oeuvres, vol II. Paris, France: Librarie Gallimard. 1244-45.
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