Bibliography
Philippe Kaenel (ed.), Marius Borgeaud, exh. cat. Lausanne, Fondation de l’Hermitage, Lausanne, La Bibliothèque des Arts, 2015: n. 112.
Bernard Wyder, with Jacques Dominique Rouiller, Marius Borgeaud. L’homme, l’œuvre, 1861-1924, La Bibliothèque des Arts, Lausanne, 1999: n. 286.
René Berger, Edith Carey, Jacques Monnier and al., Marius Borgeaud : poète de la lumière et magicien de la couleur, Denges, Éditions du Verseau, 1993.
Marius Borgeaud’s interiors are bathed in warm light that seems to bring time to a standstill. Each object is a solid, immediately identifiable presence, and it takes the viewer time to register the simplicity of their lines and shapes, devoid of detail and given depth only by the presence of shadows. Nothing is hidden: the shadows dance across the canvas. While the window is clearly the main light source, the shadows are not strictly aligned: Borgeaud places the shadows cast by the table and chair legs, glasses, and vase like hands on a clock.
The painting dates from 1923, the last-but-one summer Borgeaud spent in Audierne in the far west of Brittany. He was living with his wife-to-be at 7 rue Condorcet in a fisherman’s cottage overlooking the bay. The wide angle makes the room look much larger than it really was. The window opens onto a seascape that Borgeaud returned to in a handful of his late paintings. The sea is not a common motif in his work. His own vision of Brittany turned inland. The exception in the case heightens the richly contrasting dialogue between the interior and the world outside.
Another characteristic of Borgeaud’s late works is the room’s empty-yet-lived-in quality. The people who live there are not far away. They have just stepped out, leaving two empty glasses on the table. The bottle that filled them is slyly hidden behind the vase of flowers. Might the man of the house pop back in to fetch his hat? We will never know. Time may have been frozen for good, imbuing the scene in the painting with a deep sense of eternal life.