The cinema release of Sarah Bernhardt, La Divinea biopic film directed by Guillaume Nicloux, is an opportunity to discover the life of the actress’s lover and friend: the painter and sculptor Louise Abbéma.
The movie Sarah Bernhardt, La Divinewhich is released in cinemas this Wednesday, December 18, focuses on the passion that the actress, played by Sandrine Kiberlain, would have felt for Lucien Guitry (Sacha’s father, played by Laurent Lafitte). But Guillaume Nicloux’s biopic also highlights another figure with whom she had a notorious affair: the painter and sculptor Louise Abbéma, a role entrusted to Amira Casar.
Short hair and dark strapped jacket for one; frothy curls and flamboyant fabrics for the other. In archive photos, the austerity of Louise Abbéma (1853-1927) contrasts with the exuberance of Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923). But, in their respective currencies, “I want” et “Anyway !”something suggests that these temperaments were made to meet…
A cast of their entwined hands
Sarah Bernhardt was born to a (long) unknown father and on an uncertain date. Of aristocratic ancestry, Louise Abbéma is the great-granddaughter of Louise Contat, a famous 18th century actress.e century and Louis de Narbonne, the adulterous son of Louis XV. Thanks to a move to Italy the year she turned six, the kid discovered museums, then the practice of drawing and watercolor as an autodidact. Back in France in 1867, she was able to express her young vocation all the better as her parents were not opposed to it. Spotted by the painter Carolus-Duran in the corridors of the Louvre while she was practicing copying the canvases, she joined, in 1873, the workshop for women that the master of portraiture had recently opened. A year later, she exhibited for the first time, representing her mother.
“One day at the Salon [de peinture et de sculpture, renommé plus tard Salon des artistes français] – I was a very young girl – I saw Sarah Bernhardt next to meshe said. She was looking at a painting. I was seduced by this exquisite line, this supremely fine silhouette which became an integral part of her personality! I was overcome by the immense desire to paint his portrait.” After this meeting at the beginning of the decade, the momentum took shape in 1876, during the same salon, when Louise Abbéma presented her very first image of the idol. The painting has since disappeared, but was successful at the time. The same year, Sarah, who we often forget was a talented sculptor, obtained an honorable mention for her marble After the storm.
Between the two women a loving relationship is formed which they do not hide from their contemporaries, an artistic complicity and a friendship which only the death of the “sacred monster” (as Jean Cocteau nicknamed Sarah Bernhardt) will interrupt in 1923. Louise belongs to the intimate circle, participating in trips abroad, as well as vacation stays in the famous fort of Belle-Île-en-Mer (which now houses the Sarah-Bernhardt museum). Under her brush emerge a number of paintings and drawings which depict the actress on stage or in private, like this pastel where, seated in front of a plate of cherries, she offers a rare natural image. In 1883, a large painting shows the two of them on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne: it would have been painted on the anniversary of their affair… Reversing the roles, Sarah also sculpted the bust of her friend, kept at the Musée d’Orsay . And both had a bronze cast made of their entwined hands.
Liberated lesbian but anti-feminist
The dark silhouette that the feminist journalist Séverine described as “a Jansenist abbot dressed in cotillions” and his colorful model demonstrated the same taste for freedom. In a Belle Époque which confined the bourgeois woman to the functions of wife, mother and mistress of the house, Louise Abbéma transgressed all the codes. This lesbian, to whom a relationship was also attributed with the composer Augusta Holmès, refused marriage, she did not give birth – unlike Sarah – and lived from her work by venturing, beyond her predilection for portrait, in almost all pictorial genres: landscape, still life, floral or animal painting, decor, fan…
Despite a non-conformist lifestyle, the character was not exempt from paradoxes. In his master’s thesis which he devoted to it, in 2013, under the title Itinerary of a woman painter and socialiteTristan Cordeil evokes a rather conservative spirit who, although he admired the painter Rosa Bonheur, in no way shared her moral convictions. “Louise Abbéma was virulently anti-feminist, opposed to the opening of the right to vote to both sexes, and was (…) certain that art must remain gendered. (…) She was also completely satisfied with the situation of the female artist in the 19th centuryeand didn’t expect her to change.”
Two years ago, in the exhibition-event Sarah Bernhardt – and the woman created the starthe Petit Palais presented the last photo that the amputee tragedian dedicated, in 1923, to “her friend from forever and soon from beyond”. Four years later, Louise also bowed out. Greatly known during her lifetime, decorated as a knight of the Legion of Honor in 1906, but considered out of fashion in the immediate post-war period, the artist quickly fell into obscurity in the Montparnasse cemetery. Through Sarah interposed, the XXIe century rediscovers it… in all its singularities.
Photo credit: Les Films du kiosk
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