Thursday, February 12, 2009

Art Blogging: Pierre Le Faguays

Pierre Le Faguays (1892-1935) was a French Art Deco sculptor. A native of Nantes, he studied in Geneva and exhibited at the Salon from 1922 on. Le Faguays specialized in figurative work in ivory, wood, stone, and bronze.


It was this work, Faun and Nymph from 1925, that caught my attention. Most of the decorative bronzes that I have seen from the Art Deco era (such as those of Ferdinand Preiss and Demetre Chiparus) reflect Jazz Age subject matter, but were essentially academic in style. Yet here, Le Faguays takes the three-dimensional medium of sculpture and adopts the heavy lines and two-dimensionality of Art Deco graphic design. This may be seen the most strongly in the poses and hair of the figures and the musculature of the faun.

It reminds me of Hildreth Meiers's sculptures on the outside of Radio City Music Hall. These were, by necessity, flat. But Le Faguays faced no such limitation and simply adopted the sharp angularity for purely aesthetic reasons.

5 comments:

Theresa Coleman said...

BTW, the kids and I started an "Art Appreciation" course yesterday. It's a video tour of the Louvre. It was quite enjoyable -- for about 30 minutes and then it dragged for a while.

I'm thinking about getting them some Sister Wendy.

John said...

Cool!

What kind of art has sparked your kids' interest?

Anonymous said...

Your daughters might like this video; it's a blend of 500 years' worth of portraits of women:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUDIoN-_Hxs

This site identifies all the images used in the video:

http://www.maysstuff.com/womenid.htm

John said...

Yeah, now I pretty much don't care about how parishioners deliberately misinterpret my blog.

Anonymous said...

I meant Rev. Mommy's daughters.

Your daughter might enjoy it, or she might be terrified by all the morphing faces.