Madeleine Castaing

Madeleine Castaing (1894 - 1992), Antique dealer and decorator of international repute, was the friend and the Mécène of many artists, among whom Soutine, which carried out its Portrait in 1928. Original personality, even odd, it revolutionized the world of decoration. The “Castaing style” has the appearance of a reference today.

Beginnings

Girl of a Engineer which built the Gare Chartres, Madeleine Magistry married very early a heir Toulousain, the Critic art Marcellin Castaing, of which it had made knowledge whereas it was teenager. Their meeting, from most romantic, had been concluded by a “removal” of the young girl, who hardly had but fifteen or sixteen years at the time.

From twenty years older than it, Marcellin Castaing was famous for his impressive literary and artistic culture. During about fifty years which their marriage lasted, it was the great passion of his wife, according to all the friends of the couple, among which the writer and Photographe François-Marie Banier, which remembers “the legendary love of Madeleine for her husband”.

In the Years 1920, Madeleine Castaing made her beginnings of actress in the Silent film, then renonça with this career whereas it was called already the “French Mary Pickford”. At the same time, her husband came to offer a neo-classic Gentilhommière to him of which she dreamed for a long time, in the commune of Lèves, close to Chartres. He wanted, said he, that it can “défouler”. The young woman had been indeed discovered a vocation for the Décoration, but as a simple amateur the first times.

Patronage

Shortly after the death of their friend Modigliani, Castaing became acquainted with Soutine, met with the coffee of the Rotonde, in the district of Montparnasse to Paris. The first interview was difficult, Soutine refusing the ticket of 100 francs which Marcellin Castaing tightened to him to buy a painting to him without to have looked at it. A few years later, in 1925, Castaing could acquire their first fabric of this painter at Zborowski, the principal merchant of Soutine and Modigliani, and bound friendship with him.

Of 1930 with 1935, they on their premises accommodated it during the summer in their field of Raise, becoming its Mécène S and its principal purchasers. It is thanks to them that Soutine could organize its first exposure, with Chicago in 1935. In all, Castaing had more than forty fabrics of this painter, i.e. the most important collection of tables of Soutine pertaining to private individuals. Madeleine Castaing saw in him the great painter of the 20th century: “Over the others, it gives the hand to the Greco and to Rembrandt”, she said.

Generally, Castaing were the patrons of painters of the École of Paris and artists of the Académie of the Large Thatched cottage.

Madeleine Castaing was the friend of Erik Satie, of Maurice Sachs, Blaise Cendrars, André Derain, Cocteau, Chagall, Picasso and Henry Miller.

The Portrait of Madeleine Castaing by Soutine, heading the Small Madeleine of the decorators , is today with the Metropolitan Museum off Art of New York. The expression “small Madeleine” returns to the “small madeleine” of Proust, author with whom the interested party maintained a particular bond: of her own consent, Madeleine Castaing devoted several tens of years to reading and reading again With the research of time lost , constantly and completely. She had discovered this work in 1913.

The Historian and Politician Michel Castaing (1918 - 2004), second wire of the Castaing husbands, was a famous Libraire, expert in Paléographie. With his death, in 2004, one sold with the biddings the property of Raise as well as the family Collection S of tables and objets d'art, including seven works of Soutine.

Antique dealer and decorator

The Diva of decoration

Starting from the Years 1930, the artistic choices of Madeleine Castaing played a considerable part in the world of art, as well through its profession of Antiquaire as in his trade of decorator. Still today, the “Castaing style” is the subject of many republications.

The gallery of antique dealer opened with Paris in full war, with the angle of the Rue Jacob and the Rue Bonaparte, for a simple reason: the property of Raise had just been requisitioned by the troops of Occupation, and Madeleine Castaing wished to continue “to cloud” in the Brocante S, and to accumulate objets d'art and curios of less value. In this shop, famous during one half-century for its black front and its broad windows, that which one called “the Diva of the decoration” was besides famous to sell only according to its sympathies, i.e. only with the people which it liked and with which it could chatter of the hours during.

The style of Raise and of the gallery of the street Jacob influenced the taste of several generations of Collection neurs, in Europe as with the the United States. There exists even a Couleur, “Castaing blue”, created by the decorator for the installation of Raise: a Bleu at the same time clearly and intense, that it used readily contrasts about it with broken white or black, in particular in the printed paper and fabric ranges which it produced.

Throughout her double career of antique dealer and decorator, Madeleine Castaing was explained on her choices by repeating that one “needed that changes”, referring by there for the ostracism whose esthetics suffered from the 19th century, in particular the style Napoleon III. With counter-current of the mode, she insisted on the feeling of “saturation” which “the forgery Louis XVI, the disasters shepherdesses and the struck velvet hangings inspired to him”. It was thus a question, initially, of deviating from conventions “to make poetry with furniture”, according to its currency. “I make houses like others of the poems”, said it, and the decorator Jacques Grange evokes in this connection “of the emotions which one hitherto did not know in the world of decoration”.

The Castaing style

Madeleine Castaing takes as a starting point the neo-classic Esthétique not without interpreting it with her manner. Contemporary of the Italian Mario Praz which moves away from the usual guns of the interior decoration and turns towards the beginning of the 19th century, rival of Emilio Terry which invents the “style Louis XVII”, it falls under the same movement of revival compared to the omnipresence of the Louis XV-Louis XVI whole while being characterized by its mixture from the kinds. In its gallery as in its gentilhommière or her apartment of the street Jacob, are neighborly the benches in half-moon of the Second Empire, the reasons of rhombuses, oves and palmettes borrowed from the Directoire, the English chintz - that it gives to the mode -, the “massacres” (hunting trophies) and the monochromic examination of the style “gustavien”, the stripes “bayadère” which it adapts to the last style, the frank colors (especially blue and green) of the 18th century and the half-tones of the Wedgwood, curves of the Biedermeier, seats of bamboo and pediments triangular with the manner of Pavlovsk, Othomans and fitteds carpet of false leopard or lactescent opalines of the Louis-Philippe period. The Russia, the Sweden, the Great Britain of the Années 1790 côtoient sheets enamelled and the “love seats” Napoleon III, the screens lithophanes, the silhouette S and the black profiles with cutting on white zone.

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