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| Nils Dardel, Young Man and Girl, 1919. |
I can and shall be a great painter, a beautiful human whose gaze is
pure.
– Nils Dardel
Narcissus is always with us. And
Narcissus was always with us with the
dandies, those entertaining personalities of the past who – as strange as it
might appear today – achieved things with an effort and a basic sense of
self-worth: “Above all, it is the burning need to create an originality for
oneself,” argued Baudelaire in his essay “Le Peintre de la vie moderne – Le
Dandy” (published in 1863). “Whether these men are called refined,
extraordinary, handsome, lions or dandies, they have all come from the same
origin; they all participate in the same characteristic of opposition and
revolt; they are all representative of what is best in human pride, of that need,
which is too rare in the men today, of opposing and demolishing triviality.”
The works by the Swedish-born artist
and complete dandy Nils Dardel (1888–1943) are a dish of scrambled stars, cosmetic
fairy tales, and disorderly hallucinations from the sorry corners of life. The
artist said that he was setting himself free “by painting myself away from my
visions and befriending my demons”. He knew that his time was measured.
Dardel is coiffured like a proto-version
of Lux Interior of The Cramps in his most famous (and to many Swedes
overfamiliar) oil painting The Dying
Dandy (1918) in which he reclines in a Pietà that dazzles with Renaissance
colours, Matissean lines and histrionic death. The effeminate star – with his
left hand on his failing heart and the other loosely united with his mirror of
coquetry, and surrounded by three caring young ladies and a fellow dandy in a
mourning pose – is a dashing figure. As Max Beerbohm indeed declared: “Dandyism
is, after all, one of the decorative arts.”
The Dying Dandy was Dardel’s superficial
farewell to his terminal homosexuality. (The pre-studies show the dandy served
by two soft males and a boy.) “By this time, he had established his own trademark.
But it was as if the role or myth of Dardel was already getting in the way of
the artist. His witticisms and the juicy anecdotes about him spread far and
wide. Dardel jokes were told like bar jokes. His private life had virtually
become public property,” writes Erik Näslund in the catalogue to Dardel and the Modern Age at the Moderna
Museet in Stockholm. Nita Wallenberg of the Wallenberg dynasty, and the
daughter of Sweden’s attaché in the Far East, became Dardel’s marriage
obsession in Tokyo in 1917 during a trip around the world together with his
friend (and lover) Rolf de Maré. Her father decoupled them as soon as he heard
about the engagement.
Dardel and Thora Klinckowström met
on a boat to France and then at the Café de la Rotonde in Montparnasse. He
proposed to her by saying that they could always divorce if their wedding
arrangement would ever bore them. Braque, Satie and Léger were among the guests
when they married in 1921. My Daughter
(1923) is a watercolour with Dardel in a snazzy outfit and Ingrid high in his
arms as if his only child was a trophy toy to flaunt with in the Mediterranean
landscape. Two years into the marriage he painted the watercolour Family Idyll (not in the show) with the
spouses back-to-back and bored to death, like the last phase in Orson’s
breakfast montage of Emily Norton and Charles Foster Kane. The lethargic Dardel
is meant to keep up enough interest to be reading the script for his wife’s
next book. The featured pictures on the wall in their Montmartre home at 108
rue Lepic are also taken from reality. They are about nightmares, wishful
thinking and the other’s sudden death.
Mr Näslund, author of several biographies
including Dardel and Rolf de Maré: Art Collector, Ballet
Director, Museum Creator, was also a friend of Thora Dardel: “I remember
she came to my home and she looked into my bedroom, and she said, ‘Oh, I see
you have a partous.’ And I said,
‘Well, Thora, what do you mean by that?’ And she said, ‘A partous! We had that in Paris in the 1920s. A big, big bed that
everybody got into.’ And I think that was also the spirit of the 1920s
artistically, that all the arts got into that partous, and participated somehow. Everything was allowed,
artistically, sexually and whatever. No one cared and everything was open.” The
Dardels were like Bowie and Angie in the 1970s, there was never any love but
they drove each other mad of jealousy.
British writer Arthur Symons called
Decadence a “beautiful and interesting disease” in the 1890s. Dardel was the
last in that tainted line of Decadents who sought the poisonous sensations of alcohol,
drugs and forbidden love in measures beyond dissipation. Dardel’s remarkable charm,
his delicate evasiveness and precise exterior masked the shadows of his self-destructive
conduct. He loved to cause a stir but no one really knew who he was.
Ragnar Josephson is one of the few
critics who have mentioned the connection between Dardel and Decadence. This is
from his review in the daily Svenska Dagbladet
dating May 5, 1939: “Much of Dardel’s art can be perceived as Surrealism
predating Surrealism […] but Dardelism is nevertheless neither Dadaism or Dalism.
These take their cause solemnly, they seek to reveal new aspects of man’s
subconscious, they aim to scrutinise the inexplicable. But Dardel, contrarily,
has an irony that fractures any such claims. He may be as eccentric as it is
possible to be, but he stands always with a glint in his eye, regarding his
bizarre antics. It is this confounding superiority that makes his so-called Decadence
seem not so severe after all. Were we to take excessive pains to psychoanalyse
his paintings, he would surely be most delighted at having hoodwinked us so
capitally. The curious is almost certainly what he himself has experienced,
albeit with an intellectual, lucid mind that is tall of ingeniousness and
tomfoolery.”
Nils Dardel was born as von Dardel in a mansion 150 kilometres from
Stockholm. The young man spent two years at the Royal Institute of Art before
he went to Paris in the autumn of 1910 to study at the Académie Matisse and to
refine his superlative talents as a social swinger in both Paris and Senlis
(north of the capital). Baudelaire’s description of the Dandy in “Le Peintre de
la vie moderne” suited Dardel just fine: “To be away from home and yet to feel at home
anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to
be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those
independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily
to linguistic definitions.”
Back in Stockholm in 1912, Dardel
met the man who would later become the impresario of the superb and revolutionary
Ballets suédois in Paris (1920–1925). The extraordinary wealthy and venturesome
Rolf de Maré acquired most of Dardel’s early work, and the artist introduced
him to Cubism and the great names of French Modernism. Dardel’s paintings
before WWI stretched from secondary but competent mimicries of Braque, and prismatic
city views, which are rather ruined by his Naïvism of the time, to his wishy-washy
country paintings, a crude mélange of Pointillism and druggy candy-shop Renoir.
The War and the Existentialism of the author Pär Lagerkvist, who Dardel
befriended in 1914, put an end to that.
“Dardelism” is not a singular style
but a tendency to collect and reject and wring out the pieces from any possible
movement to visualise the impressions of his morbid states of dreaminess and
intoxication – his overexcited nerves – flashes of life’s diversions, life’s ill-natured
undercurrents … Dardel was great with portraits when he added his own stuff (as
with the rogues among the Renaissance artists), and his tender portrait of Rolf
de Maré from 1916 is a lovely example of practical Dardelism – a photograph
couldn’t have captured de Maré better than this, and yet it is dominated by
Dardel’s whimsy: behind the aristocrat is a spongy coastline, a garden of Eden
with death lurking up around the next bend, turning our wish to its will.
What makes Dardel fascinating is
that he was this obviously contrived and disembodied figure who – when everything
was inspired – painted for the eye that registers more than the surface of
things. The ensembles of women in ghostly white robes and men in funeral suits
in The Drowned Girl (1919) are like
pins in a grieving game just waiting for their own collapse. The second version
of the work has an important inclusion: a man who is looking at us. Throughout
his entire life Dardel lived under the pressure that his weak heart could fail
him at any given time. Most of his best works are like confectionary boxes with
riotous configurations and sudden (stylish) death.
Cecil Beaton (another dandy) once
wrote that, “The West has an absolute need to inject not only the colours of
the East into its pallid spectrum of browns and greys and blacks but also its
qualities of the bizarre and the alien.” The little Rousseau there was in
Dardel painted “nature” as exotic zoos, and the animals – giraffes, lions,
elephants, reindeer and the dandy monkeys alike – they all have the look of
rub-ons in a panorama. Towards the end of his life he did a series of truly
bizarre works that were made after his travels in South America. The way he
painted the natives as weird aliens is not racist but a joke without amusement.
The surreal and brilliant Philippe at the Grave (1924) shows a
young dandy (likely Dardel himself) sitting on a grave in deep thoughts about
his own mortality. Nils Dardel finally met the Grim Reaper at the age of fifty-four,
after he and his companion Edita Morris had moved to New York at the beginning
of WWII. It is hardly surprising that his last work was his unfinished business
with a bunch of skeletons having a laugh. Ingrid von Dardel painted The Dream in 1943. She is the girl who
sleeps under a tree as an angel shines up her dream with pappa, dressed to the teeth for the hereafter.
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| Nils Dardel, Family Idyll, 1923. |
Nils Dardel and the Modern Age at
the Moderna Museet in Stockholm through September 14, 2014.