| Introduction
T. F. Chen's "Eiffel Tower Series" came between his 100 Neo-Iconographic paintings for the Centennial of the State of Liberty in 1986 and the Centennial Celebration of Vincent van Gogh who inspired Chen to be an artist and to whom Chen attributed 100 paintings called "Post-van Gogh Series". Touched to tears by van Gogh's art and life, Chen determined when he was 14 to become an artist-painter and go to Paris when he was 14. In 1963 soon arrived in Paris, he visited the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, the old and the new of Paris's attraction. After 12 years study in Paris, Chen ventured to the USA and discovered he missed Paris, his second homeland. After "Liberty Series" while Chen was busy in introducing his "Neo-Iconography" back to his homeland Taiwan, he was surprised by the coming of Eiffel Tower's Centennial Celebration. Without hesitation, he set up to paint homage to this Icon of technology and industrial Beauty. Indeed, if deprive Eiffel Tower from Paris, Paris will become New York without the Twin Tower after 911 incident. Intended originally to produce also 100 artworks for Eiffel Tower, T. F. Chen was forced to cut in half, as an another important project quickly followed, that of the (1990) Centennial Celebration of van Gogh's death in 1890 which Chen couldn't ignore. Among the 50 artworks of "Eiffel Tower Series" many are done in pastel which were not presented in this website. Chen regrets of not being able to accomplish the 100 tributes to this Icon of Steel, symbol of Belle-Spoque in new dimension. Maybe Chen will take the challenge again and complete the series in full as promised. |
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| I00 |
Eiffel Tower Centennial Celebration After a serious intestine surgery which urged Matisse to remain long hours on the bed everyday, he discovered paper cutout (papiers-decoupes) to continue his artistic creation. "Icarus" was among the early trials of this new method in 1943. It depicts a fallen god in black with a red beart floating among stars. In this "Eiffel Tower Centennial Celebration", T. F. Chen appropriated Matisse's paper cutout to produce a simple and simplified yet brilliant and modern interpretation of the Eiffel Tower. The silhouette of this Technology Beauty surges from the ground to the dark sky while yellow lights in leaf-shape hovering around the tower like angels singing in the sky. Actually this is Chen's assumption of Matisse's treatment of the Eiffel Tower, once he is commissioned. Do you agree? |
| I01 |
Eiffel Tower Peaceful Symphony The Eiffel Tower, "Shepherd of the clouds", must be also a hub for birds, especially for the dove, angel of peace. Standing elegantly high above Paris roofs, the Eiffel Tower must be very sensitive to the seasons and the weather. As a watching angle, She must be very sympathetic to the human conditions under the roofs. Yet aloof and timeless, she welcomes birds of every kind, to fly by, above, through, or rest, singing or cooing. In this painting by T. F. Chen who has studies under the Eiffel Tower for twelve years, Paris is a cosmopolitan capital of the world, welcoming all peoples and cultures from every corner of the world. The world fair of Paris in 1900 marked an international relationship which has been developing towards a globalization of a world culture to come. As world peace becomes the main concern of the 21st century, Paris with its multiple-culturalism can be the best stage for dialogue among different civilizations as the Eiffel Tower enjoys to be home to all birds, especially the pigeon. |
| I02 |
Looking Out of Matisse's Window In this painting by T. F. Chen, even just a very small portion of an interior is shown here, it is quite easy that we can recognize that was borrowed from Matisse's "Harmony of Red" by its stylized arabesque flora and tapestry-like frontality of color treatment. Through the window we see the Eiffel Tower instead of a green landscape in the original painting. It's dark outside and the illuminated Eiffel Tower stands alone. Inside, the dark red of the table in comparison of the bright red on the wall suggests the time of early hours of a winter night, for the lamp is not lit for the family to enjoy the food on the table and the chairs are still empty. As the outside getting dark early in the winter of Paris, dinner is usually prepared earlier. Matisse repainted the "Harmony of Red" in 1909 out of its original "Harmony of Blue" which was repainted from the first state of "Harmony in Green" of 1908. It's a grandiose monumental "still life" of 69 3/4" x 85 7/8", a masterpiece of that period in Matisse's artistic career, developing from his early Fauvism to a more personal stylization and coloring. It's manifested equally in his "Music" and "Dance". This "Harmony in Red" inspired T. F. Chen to start his "Post-van Gogh" series as the first painting of the series was "Vincent Coming Home" with van Gogh appearing outside the window of this interior of "Harmony in Red". The Eiffel Tower has been existing in Paris since 1898 but so few artists in Paris painted this symbolic Icon and Pride of Paris. Why? Imagine, if Matisse paint it, what would it be like? |
| I03 | Beautiful Sunday
Under Eiffel Tower Monet: Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe", 1862-63, Louvre, Paris. Seurat: "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte", 1884-86. Chicago Art Institute. Gauguin: "Maternity", 1896, private collection, USA Chagall: "The Birthday", 1923. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY In all of Chen's work it is hard to find a painting with a more saturated and varied iconography than this. From front to back: On the leading edge is one of Chen's favorite images, a basket of fruit. In the foreground Dejeuner sur L'Herbe/Picnic on the Grass, which was one of the first works of modern painting [along with two other paintings by Edouard Manet (1832-1883), "La Musique aux Tuilleries, 1861", and "Olympia 1863". Picnic, with its formally clad figures and the inexplicable nude, caused scandal, and it was refused by the 1862 Salon. In the upper half of the canvas: icons of all sorts. There is a mythology of sorts to all the icons. The promenading figures with parasol and the two women seated on the grass became characters in the Broadway musical about Seurat, Sunday in the Park with George. The two figure moving into the picture from the right is Van Gogh on his way to the town of Tarascon, which was the locale of many of Alphonse Daudet's fanciful stories. Gauguin celebrates the myths and moeurs of Tahiti, and flying in the midst of heaven Chagall figures add to the folklore, as does the astronautic figure and the tower itself. So count seven major icon manifestations, with the painting styles adding at least four more. |
| I04 | Eternal France J.F. Millet: "The Gleaners". Louvre, Paris Sometimes the style of a painting is the message. Consider this to be true for some examples of Pointillism and Abstract Expression. If it's style you discuss, Chen can paint like anybody whose name you can think of, but in most cases a gross approximation of a style can fill his purposes. He is not an imitator or a thief, not a counterfeiter, but an adapter, and even a transmogrifier. He reworks the icons, altering their structure, changing their colors, adding here, taking away there, revolving perspectives, adjusting volumes - any quirk or trick which will bring the image to Chen's purposes. And when he is playful he will give one painter's style to another painter's images, as rendering a Millet icon with a Seurat brush, which of course, gives the image a double icon. In this homage to the Centennial of the Eiffel Tower Chen has moved Millet's gleaners from the French field to another, stripped away unnecessary details, and changed the style radically from Barbizon peasant realism to Post-Impressionist Pointillism. Jean Francois Millet (1814-1875) glorified the moral superiority of hard labor. Gustave Eiffel raised civil engineering to the heavens and built a structure that dumbfounded his critics. This is one of Chen's most beautiful paintings. |
| I05 | Picasso's Eiffel
Tower Journey Daumier: "The Third Class Carriage", ca. 1860-62 Picasso: "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", 1907. MOMA, NY In 1831 when young Honore Daumier (1808-1879) did a caricature, Gargantua, which insulted King Louis-Philippe, his reward was six months in prison and instant notoriety. Censorship laws restrained his republican opinions, but he went on to create an outpouring of drawings, paintings, and an immense body of lithographs - nearly 4000 of them - stigmatizing rogues, mocking the middle class, and tenderly immortalizing the downtrodden. Chen fills a decrepit rail car with Daumier peasants and Picasso weirdos and a mysterious man in black silhouette on excursion to see Paris' new steel marvel. The woman right behind the mother looks like the Mona Lisa, what can be seen of her. No artist would ever have enjoyed the Eiffel Tower more than Da Vinci who was as great an engineer as a painter. |
| I06 | New Eiffel
Tower for Paris Chagall: "Paris through the Window", 1913. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY In nature the giraffe is quite as wonderful as man's Eiffel Tower. Both are improbable. Both seem to defy what should be natural law. Yet both exist and give great pleasure. There is a difference. I have been to the top of the Eiffel Tower. I have never been to the top of a giraffe. Chen defies natural law again-he makes the top train on the left run upside down. If you want to delve for meanings of symbols, go ahead. I'd rather look at this just for fun. |
| I07 | Dreaming Paris
at Tahiti Gauguin: "Le Repos", 1897. Courtauld Institute of Art "We Greet Thee, Mary", 1891. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY Chagall: "Le Plafond de l'Opera de Paris" After deciding that Pont Aven in France and Martinique in the West Indies did not fulfill his dreams, Paul Gauguin kept going back to Tahiti, where he lived for ten years and died. Although the Marquesas Islands were French, did Gauguin's natives dream much of Paris? No matter! Chen leys Gauguin's two natives represent anyone who has been to Paris or wants to go. Of course the Eiffel is what everyone must see, but now there is a newer symbol, although less accessible and not widely known: Chagall's fanciful ceiling of the old Paris Opera House. Ah! Again notice the panniers of fruit in the foreground. |
| I08 |
The Lonely Companion "In a cold winter night, a poor old blind guitarist was playing his instrument in a dark corner of a building, behind him stood the Eiffel Tower accompanied by a crescent". This can be the beginning of a novel dated 1914, after the burst of the first world war. Picasso arrived in Paris in 1900 for the record time and decided to live there. The poverty of his early stay there was reflected in many sensitive and melancholy works of his celebrated "Blue Period". Picasso never painted the Eiffel Tower which had witnessed the glorious as well as miserable days of Paris. Chen appropriated Picasso's "Blue" guitarist in order to evoke the memory of cruel hardship during the wartime when even the beautiful Icon of Paris became vulnerable, if not an irony to the stupidity of the war which would produce thousands and thousands of "models", young and old, men and women for Picasso's "Blue" motives. |
| I09 |
Cafe de la Tour Eiffel Chen did not know whether there was any cafe in Paris called "Cafe de la Tour Eiffel", but it is reasonable to assume there must be at least one using the Tower's name, especially those near the place or part of the Eiffel Tower could be seen from their shops. Paris is famous for her thousands and thousands of coffee shops, big or small. The dazzling cafes alongside the grand boulevards are indispensable Parisian cityscape. Sitting on the "terrace de cafe" alone or with friends is part of Parisian life and tourists' satisfaction. In some occasions, coffee rooms serve as cradles of artistic/cultural movements, such as Impressionist and existentialist. Degas's and Toulouse-Lautrec's Parisians occupied Chen's "Cafe de la Tour Eiffel". They were ordinary citizens or bourgeois, some, pleasure seekers. While coffee-sipping became essential in their social life, coffee shops became the places for their meeting and dating. Throughout the transparent window screen appeared eternally the Eiffel Tower, the pride and beauty of the capital, yet they were too familiar to her existence, no attention neither admiration was raised, as we used to take for granted the creation of God around us. |
| I10 |
Up to the Sky High above the Butte in Montmartre appears the Eiffel Tower. Beneath it, we find a narrow impasse with houses crowded in both sides. It's a picturesque corner of Montmartre where Picasso and van Gogh ought to be very familiar since both had lived for some years in that area. As a son of Montmartre, Maurice Utrillo, a shy alcoholic loved to paint the Bohemian little streets, the old bistros, the charming relatively quiet artists quarter of Montmartre as it existed before the World War 1. He liked to paint the houses and walls and unsatisfied with the zinc white from the tube, he mixed it with plaster and applied thickly with the palette knife, thus produced an exquisite ambiance of urban corners which made him famous and in turn he made Montmartre famous. In this well-structured street scene Picasso, once a resident of "Bateau-Lavoir" there, appeared on the foreground while van Gogh strolled behind. The Picasso in Chen's version of Utrillo's Montmartre is of his "Rose Period": "Self-portrait with a Palette". It's a static, pensive portrait in yellowish pink. The simplified treatment with wided-open eyes seems to suggest the self-confidence and ambition of a young genius. Van Gogh, roaming afar with his materials to paint, seems prepared to set up his easel and start to paint any time as painting is his only reason to live, ignoring the existence of the Eiffel Tower and other artists. Yet all of these three Icons, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and the Eiffel Tower are destined to go "Up to the Sky" physically or spiritually. |
| I11 | La
Belle Epoque Among the many painters who have depicted Montmartre, none can surpass Maurice Utrillo in capturing the neighborhood's paticular charm. Utrillo was a child of La Butte, where he lived since 1905. He knew every street, every wall, every garden, every brick around the Sacre-Coeur. An alcoholic, Utrillo sought refuge in painting, which has been introduced to him by his mother, Suzanne Valaton. Urtillo loved to use a richly nuanced color of white, a thick mixture like the plaster of Montmartre's walls. To build his Montmartre scenes, he then juxaposed this white with solid brown, rosy-tinted gray, acid green, earthly-blue, and chromatic black; often under a gray-pink sky. In T.F.Chen's "La Belle Epoque," we see Vincent van Gogh striding up to Utrillo's "Les Moulins de la Galette" (c.1911). A large poster of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's "Le Moulin Rouge" is posted near the entrance. The Eiffel Tower partially appears on the left. The compostion as well as the subject is similar to a preceding painting, "The Moulin de la Galette at Montmartre" (1840) by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Yet seventy years have passed between the time limit that Corot painted this scene of Montmarte and from Utrillo 's depiction; and Van Gogh and Lautrec's poster are still there. Once an image becomes an "icon", it defeats time and lives eternally.
Maurice Utrillo, an illegitimate child of Susanne Valadon who was introduced by Toulouse-Lautree to Degas who taught and encouraged her to paint. As her son grew up and became alcoholic, she forced him to paint as a kind of " Occupational Therapy" and discovered his talent as a painter. In this " La Belle Epoque" by T.F. Chen, Toulouse - Lautrec's
poster of a scene at the Moulin Rouge appeared on the wall of Utrillo's
Montmartre, as Van Gogh's everlasting silhouette of carrying painting
materials was in front of the gate. A portion of the Eiffel Tower surged
overwhelming on the upper left side of the work. All is quite and subdued
except the noisy poster and Van Gogh's dressing. |
| I12 |
A Delightful Garden View A garden view with the Eiffel Tower must be a pleasant look to Parisians who enjoy what is beautiful in life. The real estate of such a luxury might be quite expensive. T.F. Chen's painting of this interior scene with such a delightful garden
makes us quite naturally Bonnard preferred to live a simple and private life, cared no glory or fortune. Yet the delicacy and the brilliance of his art works made him one of the favorite masters of his time, and the price of his paintings soared consequently. So he was able to buy a sumptuous lodging in Paris or elsewhere if he liked. Chen assumed Bonnard own a residence, in Paris, with a garden in the direction towards the Eiffel Tower, viewing from his dinning room as shown by Chen's painting. Anyway, the Tower may just serve as a pretext for Chen to recreate Bonnard's " A delightful View" which he realized one in oil pastel (30" x 41") and one in oil measuring 36" x 24". |
| I13 |
Echoing Magic Flute Like Maurice Utrillo, Henry Rousseau is regarded as a miracle in the history of modern art. At the beginning, nobody would think that their arts would be valued as those of masters like Picasso and Matisse. Even they never dreamed to be professional. As armatures "Sunday Painters", it seems that they painted for themselves, either as a kind of therapy or as a past time pleasure. Out of academy and self-taught, both of them were regarded as naive and childish in painting. But what a purity in Rousseau's art world, what a utopic dream and exotic charm! As in his "la Charmeuse de serpents" (1907), a dreaming scene unholds a Flutist, a serpents-chermer playing at the edge of a virgin forest beside a river where serpents come from every direction, up from the tree, down from the ground and across the river. Echoing the mysterious music, flowers are openning, foliages are quivering, grasses spout, and a flamingo is strolling gently around. T.F. Chen put the Eiffel Tower on the background behind the forest of
oppositive bank while above the Tower appears a full moon like the point
on the i. By adding the Eiffel Tower to Rousseau's paintings, T. F. Chen offered his homage to both the scientific beauty and the beauty created by amateurs, for " A thing of beauty is a joy for ever". |