Émilie Charmy (pronounced "shar-mee") (April 2, 1878 – June 7, 1974) was an artist in France's early avant-garde. She worked closely with Fauve artists like Henri Matisse, and was active in exhibiting her artworks in Paris, particularly with Berthe Weill.
She had become an artist against the norms for French women in her day and became a well-regarded artist. She painted still lifes, landscapes, portraits, and figure paintings. Unusually for a woman at the time, she made a number of paintings of nude women in poses of sexual abandon. Charmy's initial works were Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. As her career evolved, she was influenced by Fauvism and the School of Paris movements.
Early life
Émilie Espérance Barret was born on April 2, 1878, in Saint-Etienne, France.
She grew up in a bourgeois family; her grandfather was Bishop of Toulouse and her father owned an iron foundry. She had two older brothers, one whom died of appendicitis. Orphaned when she was 15, she and her older brother Jean Barret then lived with relatives in Lyon. Émilie had a talent for both art and music as a child.
Education
Émilie received a bourgeois educational training at a Catholic private school, and qualified to become a teacher, which if a woman were to have a career was limited to education.
When living at Lyon, she refused teaching jobs in the late 1890s and went to study and work in the studio of Jacques Martin. This was a critical moment in the further development of her career. Martin was involved with a number of other Lyon artists who became influential in Émilie's artistic development, including Louis Carrand and François Vernay who had a local reputation for a unique approach to flower painting.
During this time she assumed the name Émilie Charmy as her pseudonym.
Career
Overview
When women were shunned from the French art world, and most women regarded painting as a hobby, Charmy was consumed by her work and was entirely financially dependent on her art. For her, "painting was an obsession which dominated many other aspects of her life". Charmy primarily painted women in domestic or bourgeois settings, as well as pictures of flowers and still-life. Her flower paintings and still-life paintings were very marketable because they were considered decorative, and were sought after by the middle class. In regards to Charmy's nude paintings, Gill Perry proposes that Charmy is intentionally trying to restrict the viewer from the intimate scenes that she depicts.
French novelist Roland Dorgelès described Charmy as "a great free painter; beyond influences and without method, she creates her own separate kingdom where the flights of her sensibility rule alone." There is a great sense of abstraction in her images, with varying opinions by art critics. Her bold use of color and her unapologetic brushstrokes have been deemed as "appropriating...a 'masculine' language of art production", according to her contemporaries. The most famous quote came from Roland Dorgelès:
It is Charmy's resistance to traditional gender roles that makes her unusual for her time. For her career and depiction of nude women in a period in which that was unusual for women, she epitomized the New Woman of the 19th century and early 20th century.
In terms of the business side of her career, Charmy refused to sign contracts with art dealers and gallery owners, save for one unsuccessful contract with the dealer Pétridès in the early 1930s.
Early career
In the 1890s, Charmy began making Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings of subjects that ranged from prostitutes and brothels to scenes of middle-class family life. For instance, she made orient-influenced Girl with a Fan , a morphine addict in Woman in an Armchair , a group of nude prostitutes in La Salon, cultured women in Card Players and Interior in Saint-Etienne .
In 1902 or 1903, Charmy and her brother left Lyon for Saint-Cloud, near Paris. Charmy exhibited her works in a number of galleries, but they were not exhibited with her male contemporary artists, and therefore were not assessed in the same professional manner as paintings made by male modernist painters. Her first documented show was at the "Salon des Indépendants" in 1904, and it is likely that it was through this show that she befriended other Fauve artists, like Henri Matisse, Charles Camoin, and Albert Marquet.