Séraphine Louis, known as Séraphine de Senlis, came from a modest family. At first she was a servant in the Convent of Charity of Providence in Clermont-de-l’Oise, but in 1904 she was employed as a housekeeper for the middle-class people of Senlis. It was during this period that her “good angel” appeared to her and told her: “Seraphine, listen to me: you must start drawing”.
In 1912, she entered the service of the collector and art critic Wilhelm Uhde, known for having discovered and purchased the first paintings of Picasso, Braque and Douanier Rousseau. At a dinner, Uhde discovered a small painting of apples by Seraphine. He bought it on the spot. He then took Séraphine out of her solitude and allowed her to devote herself fully to painting. Uhde had to leave France in 1914 and did not resume contact with her until 1927. From that time on, he bought all her paintings, decided to help her and distributed her work in France, Germany and as far as the United States. He stopped all support in 1930, following the Great Depression. Séraphine, thrown into excessive spending, is very disturbed and collapses psychically, which puts an end to these three years of fertile production. She was institutionalized in 1932 and died ten years later in total abandonment.
Both associated with naive art and art brut, the painting of Séraphine de Senlis is a unique phenomenon in the history of art of the twentieth century. Through painting, Séraphine gives herself away without restraint. She explores the whole palette of her emotions with ingenuity and expresses herself without imitating anyone. She creates a singular and sincere language which did not have to be discarded from a scholarly learning, only guided by her inner self and the divine spirit. The result is astonishing surrealist bouquets, painted with an ardor and fervor that Wilhelm Uhde described as “ecstatic confession”. Her paintings are like waking dreams that stand somewhere between the passion of art and the art of hallucination. Metamorphosed by her psyche, the monumental plant compositions move into landscapes: tears of blood bead in the leaves, eyes slip into the place of fruit and twisted smiles cling to the branches of imaginary trees.
If Séraphine’s name was forgotten for a while, it is perhaps because her art carried its own fragility, that of being isolated and describing a universe made of its own rules, with only her personal experience as a culture. However, it was brought back into the limelight in 2008 thanks to Martin Provost’s film and Yolande Moreau’s acclaimed interpretation (selected excerpts that will be shown in the cellar) as well as thanks to the exhibition organized by the Maillol Museum in 2008-09.
Séraphine’s works are presented in the following museums: MoMA, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Dina Vierny – Musée Maillol, Paris; LaM, Villeneuve d’Ascq; Musée de Peinture et de Sculpture, Grenoble; Musée d’Art et Archéologie, Senlis; Musée du Vieux-Château, Laval; Musée Anatole Jakovsky, Nice; Petit-Palais – Musée d’art moderne, Geneva; Museum Charlotte Zander, Bönnigheim; Clemens-Sels Museum, Neus; Staatliche Museen – Neue Galerie, Kassel; Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund; Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Setgaya Art Museum, Tokyo.