Nearly 50 works collected by a couple of collectors will be on display. This exhibition provided an opportunity to restore almost all of the paintings and the vast majority of the drawings, and to review the mounting and framing.
Twenty‑one years ago, the Lambinet Museum was enriched considerably by the bequest of the collection of Fernande Guy (1903‑2004) and Marcel Guy (1901‑1991), comprising leading Post‑Impressionist paintings and drawings. In 2006, this exceptional collection had already been the subject of an exhibition at the Lambinet Museum, accompanied by a focus on the artist Paul Signac.
Nearly 20 years later, after an unprecedented campaign to restore the large majority of its works, the museum’s team wishes once again to pay tribute to these donors and offer visitors a new perspective on this collection of remarkable quality, now radiant once more. Visitors are invited to rediscover the richness of these landscape artists’ palettes and their very particular touch. Today, more than ever, this collection, rooted in the taste of its era, is a considerable asset among the modern collections at the Lambinet Museum. This new presentation, spread over the four exhibition rooms on the museum’s ground floor, is accompanied by a catalogue published by Lord Byron editions.
The exhibition retraces the formation of this ensemble, which began in 1946, after the war, with their first purchase: Fields of Wheat in Normandy by Gustave Loiseau. Their collection would grow by 24 paintings and 21 drawings, covering a period from 1880 to 1929. It brings together landscapes of Paris, Île‑de‑France, Brittany and Normandy, created by the major figures of the artistic scene of the time such as Gustave Loiseau (1865‑1935), Maximilien Luce (1858‑1941), Henry Moret (1856‑1913) or Paul Signac (1863‑1935).
Post‑Impressionism includes all painters who sought to go beyond Impressionism, which had made light its privileged subject matter. This current, which is not a unified movement, includes many styles and unites artists who express themselves with great freedom. A new, unique energy appears after 1880, and artists explore new pictorial languages: Pointillism, synthétism, as well as Symbolism. Within this group of artists are personalities both very different and yet characterized by explorations of touch, color, and structure that anticipate the fundamental movements of the early 20th century such as Fauvism or Expressionism.
And it is these artists, at the hinge between 19th‑century Impressionism and the bold movements of the 20th century, who fascinated the Guy collector couple to whom the Lambinet Museum pays homage. Increasingly frequently asked to lend works in France and abroad because of the growing enthusiasm for artists of this movement, these works are today gathered in the city of Versailles, which their owners had chosen with care to ensure their preservation and sharing with the public.
The last room of the exhibition gives pride of place to the artists who take the lion’s share in the Guy collection: Gustave Loiseau and Maximilien Luce. Maximilien Luce, who has just been the subject of an important exhibition at the Montmartre Museum, is one of the musts of the Guy collection. Characterized by a strong social fibre, a self‑declared anarchist, Luce is also an exceptional landscape painter, recognizable for his pointillist touch and vivid hues, playing on contrasts between powerful mauves and electric yellows as in Paris, view from the Seine, at night, a painting acquired in 1959 by the Guys.
Gustave Loiseau, meanwhile, paints landscapes along riverbanks, especially in Île‑de‑France, and does so at particular times of day in order to capture a singular light and with the intention of making his pictorial touch vibrate.
This pointillism or divisionism explored by most of the Post‑Impressionist painters assembled by the Guys was particularly carried out by Paul Signac. Thanks to the donation, these two watercolours by this major artist of Neo‑Impressionism have entered the collections of the Lambinet Museum. The Port of Cherbourg from 1932, for example, gives us a vivid and spontaneous testimony of the artist’s great project around the ports of France.
The exhibition opens with a presentation of Fernande and Marcel Guy, the collectors who originated the bequest of this important body of works from the late 19th and early 20th century. Industrialist, Marcel Guy shared his wife’s taste for fine arts, ranging from painting to decorative arts and drawing. They are what might be called “classical modern” collectors, in other words, interested both in 18th‑century furniture and in painting at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, chiefly landscapes. Some of their precious furniture but also archival documents such as the inventory book in which Marcel Guy recorded all his purchases are displayed in this room alongside their first acquisitions.
In 2004, following the death of Fernande Guy, the bequest officially passed to the Lambinet Museum. The important collection of drawings testifies to the couple’s eye for spontaneous creations of the artists of this period, especially Sisley, Signac, Maufra or Lebasque. It is the coup de cœur that guides their acquisitions, not seeking to complete their collection in a methodical and reasoned manner, but rather to give free rein to their collector’s desire. The drawings form, within this ensemble, a space of freedom—indeed, they are the only medium to present human figures and a nude, offered by the artist Filiberti himself.
It was by visiting galleries—among which that of Reynald Forgeot is noteworthy—and the sales rooms of the Hôtel Drouot that the couple gradually built their collection. Many works passed through the hands of the famous dealer Durand‑Ruel, and one can easily imagine that this reassured the Guys as to the quality of their acquisitions. Very quickly, the collection focused on these Post‑Impressionist landscapes which, while exploiting the pictorial explorations of their predecessors, develop personal investigations of colors, touch, and light.
The Guys added to the many landscapes of their collection a few still lifes and a nude. Pen‑and‑ink drawings by Max Jacob (1876‑1944) and A Woman at Her Toilette by Jean‑Louis Forain (1852‑1931) further attest to the keen eye of the two collectors. Without heirs, and after some research in the museums of the region, they decided to bequeath their collection to the Lambinet Museum in Versailles, upon the death of the last surviving one. With this act of generosity, the Guy couple placed themselves in the line of the many art lovers who, through their donations and bequests, have made the Lambinet Museum “the museum of collectors” that it still is today.
