Robert Bretin, Jardin avec sculptures grandeur nature de gens de paille / Garden with life-size representations of people of straw

all pictures (around 2017)

courtesy of Sophie Lepetit, from her weblog

 

An inhabitant of the community of Les Peintures, located in the south-west of France some 45 km east of Bordeaux, created an art environment in the capacity of a garden decorated with  life-size depictions of people in all kinds of situations in daily life.

Life and works

This garden, situated along the departmental road D674 that crosses Les Peintures, was begun in the early 1990s by Robert Bretin (1930 - 2021),  a retired mason, about whom the internet has only limited biographic information.

Bretin became inspired to make such creations because of a tradition that originated in the community of Campan, in the French Pyrenees, where life-size dolls -in Occitan called mounaques- were placed along the roads in the summer, a tradition that has now spread to many villages in the area of the Hautes-Pyrénées.

For example, in Boussan, a village of 200 inhabitants, three times in summer there is an exuberant display of groups of mounaques made by numerous residents. representing events with a daily or festive character, such as a baker at work or a family celebrating a wedding.

The bodies of these life size creations are traditionally made of straw and dressed with discarded garments. 

Bretin also made his creations from straw, dressing them with second hand clothes he regularly bought or was offered by acquaintances.

The accessories of the straw people would depend on the time of the year, taking into account days such as Easter, Halloween, the French National Day (Storming the Bastille) on July 14, Armistice Day (End of WWI) on November 11 and Christmas.

The faces of the creations Brein made partly looked like commercial masks, for another part they appeared to come from shop-window dolls from earlier times, especially those with hairdos. The available documentation doesn't have information about this.

Bretin arranged the creations in his garden in a cozy way. People could be seen sitting around a table enjoying a meal, a child was swinging, someone was catching a fish, people were talking or walking together....

Robert Bretin passed away on September 29, 2021, at the age of  91.

The future of the decorated garden is not clear. 

Documentation 

* Article (December 2011) in regional newspaper Sud Ouest

* Posts (March 20 and 21, 2018) on the weblog of Sophie Lepetit, general impression and detailed pictures

Robert Bretin

Sculpture garden

18 lieu dit Champ du Mil

33230 Les Peintures, dept Gironde, region Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France

the garden, located along the departmental road D674 that crosses

the village can be seen from the street

streetview

Alcide Teynac, Les Grottes du Luc / The Caves of Luc

exterior of the caves with pond and garden

postcards licensed under Wikimedia Commons,

the photos on all postcards have been made by Marcel Delboy (1882-1941)

Espiet is a small community with currently some 800 inhabitants, located in the south-west of France, about 30 km east of Bordeaux. 

Fallen into oblivion over the years, in the first decades of the 20th century the community featured a self-made complex of decorated caves called Les grottes du Luc (The Caves of Luc). 

Life and work

The complex of caves was built from cement between 1904 and 1928 by Alcide Teynac. The internet has no information about the dates of birth or death of this self-taught artist. But it has been reported that he lived in Espiet, was a beekeeper by profession, loved to compose songs in his spare time and wrote a book, self-published in 1927, entitled Isabeau de Curton.

And he also worked for around thirty years on the construction of a complex of decorated caves.

With regard to this creation the main source of information  is a series of postcards dating from the early years of the 20th century. So here we go.....

The first postcard, at the top of this post, gives a general impression of the place where the caves were located: a pond flanked by a series of structures, which may have housed the caves, all situated 200 meters from the railway station of Espiet ¹. 

In the photo above there is not much to distinguish apart from the rocky structures, but the caption on the map suggests that this is the entrance to the cave system. It is mentioned that there is a secret door that connects the entrance to another room, a door that will open on command

And the caption also refers to a menhir, a dolmen, a chair (or a pulpit) and a rock, but it is not clear whether these items were part of the entrance area or were situated elsewhere in the caves.

The photo above shows that Alcide Teynac also added sculptures to the interior of the caves. This is a natural-sized representation of a prehistoric family carved in bas-relief. This piece of rock can also rotate and then provides access to the next space.

The caption on above postcard says that here the Gothic door is depicted. It probably gives entrance to the room of stalactites, bisons and other animals, incised or painted.

On the postcard above, the explanatory text is difficult to read, but it says that this is a representation of:  

"Aquarium, the door closed by a rock opens to the floor, descent by a staircase carved in the rock, the Pendelogue, the Virgin, Boudha, the Devil's Tower, the Theater of Nature, the stalactites and the stone draperies, the secret closet" ......

Well then, that is a large series of all kinds of creations, which, moreover, are practically not distinguishable in the postcard.

This enumeration of creations, together with the creations mentioned in the other postcards, indicates that Teynac with his Grottes du Luc has delivered a piece of work that deserves a place in the field of art environments.

For now, however, it can only be concluded that this is far from the case, because the internet neither  has referrals to informative articles about the Caves, nor information that could be used to compile a coherent description of the site.

 

The data about this creation are so scarce that it has not become known what became of the Grottos after the death of their creator.

Documentation

* One of the few scholarly remarks on the internet about Teynac is in: 

Veronique Moulinié, D’une architecture à l’autre : Les habitants paysagistes et le Musée d’Art Moderne de Lille-Métropole, à Villeneuve d’Ascq (2010) (Programme interdisciplinaire de recherche Art, architecture, paysage Sessions 2004 et 2005) Alcide Teynac is referred to as follows:

"En Gironde, entre 1904 et 1928, Alcide Teynac construisit des grottes artificielles, pur chef-d’œuvre de ciment, dont il orna les murs d’une vision très personnelle de la préhistoire, art pariétal et équipement de chasse compris". (In Gironde, between 1904 and 1928, Alcide Teynac built artificial caves, a pure masterpiece of cement, the walls of which he adorned with a very personal vision of prehistory, cave art and hunting equipment).

note

¹ The railway line that was served by the station, in 1954 has been disbanded and the building now houses a restaurant. 

Alcide Teynac

Grottes de Luc

Espiet, dept Gironde, region Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France

there is no information available about

the fate of the site after its author died

József Balogh, Zdobený dom / Decorated House

facade of the house 

(pictures published here in agreement with Georgó Fülöp) 

The picture above shows the decorated facade of a house in the small village of Pribenik, located in the south-east of Slovakia, near the borders of this country with both Hungary and Ukraine. In the past the village has also been part of alternately Hungary or Ukraine and currently many inhabitants still have a Hungarian origin.

Life and works 

The decorations of the house, meanwhile removed, were added by József Balogh, who was born on January 3, 1920 in a peasant family in Vojka, some 12 km north-west of Pribenik,

In October 1941, at age 21, he was enlisted to the Hungarian army. Deployed in the war fought by Germany and allies against Russia, he ended up in a Russian prisoner of war camp.

After the war Balogh settled in Pribenik, where he became the local shoemaker. He married and his wife Margit and he had four children, two of whom would die at a young age.

Balogh was a sturdy man, with long hair, who made his own clothes and, if it suited him, was dressed in shorts, a way of doing most villagers did not understand much about.

the roof in detail

Around 1978 the villagers would be even more surprised. Balogh was in his late fifties, the two children had left home and he started to decorate the house,  a project he would be engaged with for the next decades.

Roaming the region by bicycle, he collected all kinds of discarded items, such as bicycle wheels, dolls, plastic bottles, windmills and other finds, which he attached to the sloping front part of the roof of the house, as can be seen in the picture above

detail of the facade 

 

As the picture above shows,  the wall at the front of the house, under the roof, was partly decorated with small semicircular mosaics directly under the eaves, and furthermore with larger square mosaics between the windows. which in turn were provided with colorful curtains.

Balogh used broken pottery, old pieces of porcelain and colored glass for his mosaics.

The square surfaces on the wall at the front of the house seem to have included mosaics with a mainly decorative look, geometrically ordered abstract configurations.

But Balogh also made mosaics with a more narrative character and more or less recognizable characters, such as in the image above, in which a fish can be seen as well as an animal that could be a two-headed bird.

The picture above shows that the two-headed bird and the fish are depicted in the context of a larger mosaic that might represent an elephant.

Balogh has remained active in updating his creation until old age. In 2008, when he was at the age of 88, the regional newspaper Novy Cas (see documentation) visited Balogh and reported that in the previous year he had once more adjusted the facade and the fence of his house.

The newspaper also reported that Balogh's health was deteriorating. 

He died in 2009

The house with the decorations has been demolished

After Balogh's death his property, that included two buildings, was sold and the new owner demolished the house with the decorations. 

In the following years Balogh's art environment gradually fell into oblivion.

This probably would have remained so, if not in the course of 2019 Gergó Fülöp, who as a young boy lived in Pribenik and in the 1990s on his way to school passed Balogh's decorated house, decided to take action to keep the memory of Balogh's creation alive and to give the site a place in the field of art environments. 

Fülöp, who had become an artist running an exhibition space, organized an exhibition (January-March 2020) in his art gallery in Budapest and wrote an article that in April 2020 was published on the Polish website PrzeKrój (see documentation).

Recently Raw Vision also reported about this development. 

Exposition in Budapest in 2020 

,

As said, from January until March 2020 the art-gallery Kavics (Pebble, in English) in Budapest, managed by Georgó Fülöp, had an exhibition about József Balogh entitled Práci Mesterúr (Work of a master!).  

Thinking back to what he had experienced in his early years passing Balogh's decorated house, Gergó Fülöp in the course of 2019 realized that József Balogh represented a breath of fresh air. 

As he noted: 

"This man had very few material riches and at times went through hardships, yet he did not pursue wealth or fame through his works. József was able to see value in things that weren’t valued by others; he was able to find fulfillment, precisely because he focused on those small pleasures that brought him joy. At a time when it might feel like the world is collapsing, perhaps we can all learn something from József and seek solace in simplicity'  (quote from Fülöp's article The Humble Poet, see documentation)

Indeed, that is why it is so satisfying to add Balogh's creation to the inventory of art environments this weblog is

Documentation
* Article (April 2008) in newspaper Nový Cas (with a series of pictures)
* Article by Georgó Fülöp, "The Humble Poet. A Local Cobbler's Folk Art", on website PrzeKrój (April 28, 2020)

* Introduction to and a series of photos of Balogh's work, a document on Georgó Fülöp's website, edited in the context of the exposition early 2020 

* The website of the municipality of Pribenik has a photo gallery with pictures of the site
video

* Documentary film Balogh József, Pribenik 66 (16'08", 1996) by Peter Kerekes, Martin Kollár and Marek Šulík (on Vimeo)

József Balogh 

Decorated house
Pribenik 66
Slovakia

Albert Diekmann, Replik im Vorgarten / Replicas in front yard

replica of Neuschwanstein Castle (Schwangau, Germany)
pictures: screenprints from the Merca2.tv video
(see documentation)

The picture above shows a replica of the famous Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, Germany, as it can be seen in the front yard of a house in the small village of Abbensen, part of the municipality of Wedermark, located north of the German city of Hannover.

This replica and eleven others, all located in the front yard, were created by Albert Diekmann.

Life and works

Diekmann was born in the early 1940s and worked in an office job with the German Railways, a job he retired from in the late 1990s. 

The beginning of his activity as creator of an art environment was in the year 1998, when his wife received a scale model of a castle as a present for the garden. The model was made of a kind of cardboard and Diekmann thought that if small stones were added, the model would be more realistic and better protected against influences of the weather.

replicas of the Eiffel Tower in Paris 
and the Big Ben in London

Diekmann got to work on this and was so enthusiastic about this type of activity that he then started working on his first replica.

In 1999 this piece of work, a grandfather clock, was completed and -somewhat hidden- it is still standing in the front garden. For the next twenty years or so, Diekmann would focus entirely on making relatively large-scale replicas of famous buildings in Germany and elsewhere in the world. 

The front yard currently (2020) includes twenty creations, including Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Big Ben in London and the Washington Capitol, all depicted in this post. There are also replicas of the Johannis Chapel, which is near Diekmann's house, and of the Water Tower in Lehrte, 17 km east of Hannover.

A few years ago, due to his age, Diekmann decided not to make any new creations, but to focus on the maintenance of the site. In August 2020 the site got a lot of publicity in regional newspapers and TV.

A labor-intensive and time-consuming activity

For the various parts of a creation Diekmann made wooden molds, which were provided with iron wire mats for strength. To these molds a layer of a few centimeters of poured concrete was added, which then had to harden for a few weeks before the different elements could be merged.

To give an example, here is how the construction of the replica of Neuschwanstein went. 

As there were no construction drawings of this structure available, Diekmann used a 3D jigsaw puzzle as a guide. Establishing that the highest part of the building should be around 1.80 meter high, he could then determine the different dimensions of the composing parts of the structure, such as the towers and the various individual buildings that make up the complex.

All in all, the construction of this replica took him almost a year,

the Capitol in Washington

Diekmann has apparently tried to render the various buildings as realistic as possible. For example, the Big Ben is equipped with the necessary dials that also indicate the correct time. The Eiffel Tower also has an authentic look, although the replica is not made from iron, but from concrete slabs. 

The various creations are each individually constructed to scale, the scale of each structure probably being determined by what for Diekmann was a workable height. This might explain why the replicas of the Eiffel Tower and of the Big Ben have almost the same height, when in reality the Eiffel Tower is three times as high.

Documentation\
* Article (August 2015) in regional journal Hannoversche Allgemeine

* Article (August 2020) on the website of broadcasting company NDR1 Niedersachsen, with a series of pictures of the site

* Article (August 2020) in regional journal Süddeutsche Zeitung

* Article (August 2020) on the website of RTL Germany

Albert Diekmann

Replicas in front garden

Alte Zollstrasse

Abbensen, municipality of Wedemark, Lower Saxony Federal State, Germany

the site can be seen from the street