Author: jessylarson

Throughout my studying of French history, I have read about some of the highest pinnacles that our species has reached; Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, where men of different backgrounds, ideologies, and classes joined together to oppose tyranny and forge a more equal world, the works of the Enlightenment, which prevailed reason over superstition, the impassioned painting of David amidst the chaos of revolution, and the countless scientific advances that ensured a safer world for future generations.  But yet, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction meant to knock humanity down a peg and I am pretty sure that the Great Cat Massacre of the late 1730’s cancels out the development of insulin.

Though the exact causes of this event are, as they should be with something so strange, uncertain, we do know some of the specifics.  In the 1730’s the printing business largely encompassed the professions of those on the rue Saint-Séverin, and incidentally it was all the rage for printers to own multitudes of cats, with one of the more wealthy printmakers apparently having had portraits painted of his twenty-five felines.  One night disgruntled workers decided that enough was enough and rounded up the cats, massacring dozens with lead pipes and subsequently, deciding that hammering cats wasn’t theatrical enough, put on a mock trial for the kittens.  Amongst the mob, a hangman, confessor, guards, and judge were named.  A miniature gallows was erected, which must have been adorable, and the cats were hanged for witchcraft.  Such is the darkness that lies in men’s hearts.

Historian Robert Darnton attempted to make sense of this cat-astrophe in his book “The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History,” observing how modern commentators on the subject tend to be stymied by the fact that this cat massacre was done for amusement and was a source of hilarity amongst the workers for some time to come.  Nicolas Contat, an apprentice who took part in the kitty killings and the Michael Vick of the Ancien Régime, wrote “The printers delight in the disorder; they are beside themselves with joy.  What a splendid subject for their laughter, for a belle copie! They will amuse themselves with it for a long time.”  Though bludgeoning and hanging cats has never really been my thing (yet), I can be sympathetic to the extent that this act symbolically reversed the class hierarchy for a night.  When a wife of one of the printmakers saw what was done to her cat, she reportedly exclaimed “These wicked men can’t kill the masters, so they have killed my pussy!”  The Carnivalesque appeal must have been poignant to the workers, underfed and overworked by their masters who instead gave their best meat to their beloved cats.  Thus, the eighteenth century’s greatest social commentary comes not from Rousseau, not from Voltaire, but from the Great Cat Massacre.

The tunnels and Catacombs of Paris have served a large range of functions throughout history; the French Resistance hid from their Nazi Occupiers in the depths of the Catacombs, Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean uses the tunnels to escape from the police and save the life of Marius, and some guy I met while I was studying abroad their named ‘Dave’ got arrested for drinking in them.  Yet, what of the fabled Mole People, who traditionally reside in modern folklore somewhere between freak mutant status and noble under-dwellers?

In case you are unfamiliar with the concept of Mole People (shame on you!), they are a ‘maybe they do exist maybe they don’t’ group of people who live in the tunnels beneath cities, most famously the Mole People of NYC (who do seem to actually exist).  These people are rumored to emerge only at night to gather food and drink, or occasionally to leave a baby on the surface world in the hopes of it leading a non-tunnel existence. Purportedly, these Mole People form ‘tribes’   of sorts, with their own distinct cultures and leaders.  The tunnels and Catacombs of Paris are said to be particularly well adept for Mole People; the Metro and RER would allow them to easily move about the city and Paris’s tunnel system is a labyrinth of mystery, extending all over the city with few openings and no lighting in the vast majority.  I assume the skeletons in the Catacombs are also fun to put clothes on and make into puppets.  It is also inferred that the rats are feasted upon by the Mole People (still beats eating at Arby’s).  In 2004 an underground cinema was discovered, leading many experts in the field of Mole People to think they might have more access to electricity than previously expected.  An unexplained skeleton of a monkey was also found in the tunnels, which could also possibly have associations to the Mole People.

Now, before you get any romantic ideas about abandoning your bourgeois lifestyle, replete with non-rat food options and Tetanus-free furniture, to join the Mole People, I will remind you that (if they exist) the Mole People are almost certainly nothing like the Phantom of the Opera.  When I was in high school my family visited Paris for a couple of days and my mom insisted that we go on the glamorous and famous sewer tour because art museums are for wussies.  On the tour I saw no signs of Mole People or candelabras, only feces.  If you expect to penetrate their secretive clan you will face more obstacles than simply the law.  But if you do manage to reach our underground brethren, please bid them welcome tidings from the surface world.

This is Misleading

This is more accurate

Right now I am at that exciting part of my college career where I get to figure out a topic for an honors thesis for my art history major.  Admittedly (and probably weirdly), I’m pretty enthusiastic about this and have sacrificed all of my actual papers due this week to research topics for this, which I’m not even supposed to start for like 4 months I don’t think.  But in any case, I’ve finalized a topic with my thesis director and am prepared to throw back into the water the flopping around, almost dead fish which are my previous attempts at a topic.  So here, for your viewing pleasure, are some cool (or at least I think they are) tidbits from art history that I came upon in my search…

1. Les Femmes Tondues – after the liberation of France from the Nazis in 1944, women accused of sleeping with German officers ceremoniously had their heads shaved in public areas like city squares, fountains, or war memorials.  Some interesting writing has been done by the historian Richard D.E. Burton about the French love of and delight in gruesome spectacle; my intent would have been to view les Femmes Tondues as a performance of indirect feminine castration, also in consideration to visuality as identity.

1. Victor Hugo’s graphic work – most people don’t realize that apart from being a writer, Victor Hugo did do some kind of weird art.  Most of it is things you would expect, like dark Romantic castles or stormy landscapes, but then there are also his drawing titled “Justitia,” of a guillotined head being thrust into the sky by the force of the decapitation.  It is probably good I didn’t pursue this topic further because I have no idea what to make of that.

1. Pornographic prints of Marie-Antoinette – there are a million valid reasons as to why this topic was a problem from the start. Number one being that it would be a thesis on porn.  Regardless, there are a lot of very interesting prints of the queen, mostly because of the way they single her out and scapegoat her solely because of her gender.  There are also some great ones of her as mythic animals, which is always fun.

Melissa Hyde’s challenge to “cherchez la femme” defines 18^th Century views on femininity within the context of a hostile masculine world; even the colloquial implication of the phrase indicates the accusatory and suspicious dismissal of female influence that confined women artists like Vallayer-Coster, Labille-Guiard, and Vigée-Le Brun.  Hyde’s thesis makes the case that the problem with the modern lack of visibility of 18^th Century female artists does not rest in any shortage of women painters, but rather the limitations put in place by institutions like the Académie and the Salon that obstructed any significant advancement in the profession.  The combination of this intrinsic “culpability” of the female and the hindrances to professional acceptance are weighed on opposite sides of Elizabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun’s Madame Rousseau et sa fille, from the side of the painter and of the sitter.  Paradoxically, Vigée-Le Brun does the work of capturing the confines of a woman’s space while still being a successful, albeit scandalous, artist.

Gill Perry’s introduction to gender and art history charges the reader with not only assessing the constructs of femininity that can be gleaned from visual representations of women, but also contemporary definitions of masculinity.  An unintentional glimpse into this duality can be gained through the Louvre’s current mistranslation of Vigée-Le Brun’s work, which lists Madame Rousseau et Sa Fille as “Madame Rousseau and His Daughter.”  The emphasis on an external masculine possession is fitting, particularly if Perry’s aspect of the “role of gender in the physical or social environment” is considered.  Madame Rousseau inhabits the role of mother and, consequentially, dutiful wife.  Her daughter appears as more of a prop to support Madame Rousseau’s apparent fecundity; the little girl is

held up by the mother but is still forced toward the back of the painting, is mostly covered by shadow, and does not look toward the viewer.  Despite motherhood being more or less Madame Rousseau’s ‘profession,’ it is still a private space.  Vigée-Le Brun’s own self-portraits even supersede her actual career in place of motherhood; similar to Madame Rousseau et Sa Fille, her role as a mother is what defines her.

Presumably, Madame Rousseau et Sa Fille would have been commissioned by Madame Rousseau’s husband, the architect of the Palais de le Légion d’Honneur, Pierre Rousseau.  This normative representation of femininity twists the typical definition of the male “gaze” into a purely dominating form, sans overt sexuality.  Monsieur Rousseau’s commission would have given him a work that placed his wife in a respectable context and reminded the viewer of her position within the confines of the Rousseau family.  This subtle confining of the woman is reflective of the diverting of male concern over the power of female sexuality with references to maternity that Geraldine A. Johnson writes about in her essay on Marie de’ Medici.  Like Marie de’ Medici’s allusions to fertility and the Virgin Mary, Madame Rousseau et Sa Fille extirpates any “culpability” of the female sex with the placement of the daughter in what is essentially a portrait of Madame Rousseau.

Vigée-Le Brun’s position as the painter of this work, however, does not necessarily lend her to accusations of being complacent to this misogyny.  Her status as the chosen portraitist of Marie Antoinette would have gained her no ground with the revolutionaries or the conservatives who wished to ground women within the home.  Vigée-Le Brun may have been painting a portrait of a woman within the private sphere, but ultimately the fact remains that a female was the one being commissioned.

Illness, whether a mental or physical debilitation, has been the subject of countless works of art throughout history.  It has been pictured scientifically, religiously, sympathetically, heroically, and any number of other variations.  In relation to the artistic discourse, the ways in which illness is depicted reflects historical stigmas as well as broad human emotions.  Much of what we know about responses in society to illness, like the Plague, are documented in art but it is often used to evoke an appeal, like in works by Picasso or Basquiat, to universal distress.  To examine this, works concerning illness spanning several centuries will be analyzed, as well as texts related to art in illness and artists that suffer from illness themselves.  In order to do this, it is important to look at these works of art comparatively, thus many works will be compared to others in their same time period and other eras.  Illness is complicated through art because it can take something fairly scientific objective and turn it into a work that is subjective, propaganda, or even just reflect it back objectively.

Though art traces its roots back much farther than the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, some of the most terrifying and prolific images of illness came from these eras.  An example of this would be Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Triumph of Death.  The “Triumph of Death” (or the “Dance of Death”) motif was a common one, arising from medieval times with religious reinforcement.  In the face of the Black Plague, this theme was given ample commissions by the Catholic Church as a memento mori, reminding the public of the pains of Hell and the rapidity that death can come in.  The hysterical lust for repentance during the outbreak and spread of the Bubonic Plague reflected the religious fervor that gripped Europe, and this is partially why the Triumph of Death’s savage depiction of illness is important documentation.  In Bruegel’s painting, finished circa 1562, Death is seen ravaging every social hierarchy, from peasants to emperors.  Some “Triumph of Death” works from this period even went as far as to include Catholic bishops among those being cut down by Death (represented by skeletons).  In relation to illness, this painting shows the intense religious reaction to a fear of sickness.  Through depicting illness and death, Bruegel examines people’s frantic and desperate desire to escape the inevitable but not without religious propagation.

In the same vein as Bruegel’s piece, artists continued to use their talents to the liking of higher authorities.  The subject of illness and death seemed to be a point of supreme sympathy or relatability for the masses because it continued to be the center of many works commissioned by governments or churches, possibly because of its ability to tap into the fears of every person; dying is inescapable for everyone and you’ll be lucky if you don’t suffer greatly while doing so.  In the 18^th Century Neoclassicism began, unlike its state commissioned predecessor Rococo, to use illness to illustrate “civic virtue” in relation to the rise of Republicanism in Paris.  Themes included bodily sacrifice for the state, like in Drouais’s The Dying Athlete, David’s The Death of Socrates, or Regnault’s Liberty or Death.  It was considered a great honor to die for the Revolution and those running it spent lavish amounts of money in order to propagate this ideal.  Jacques Louis David even proposed parading the decomposing body of one of the Revolution’s “martyrs,” Jean Paul Marat, in the bathtub he was murdered in through the streets of Paris (though the body atrophied beyond recognition before this could be carried out).  Unlike the previous religious implementations of illness into art, the Neoclassic and later Romantic usage was meant to display a choice: Republicanism or an un-honorable death, or Republicanism with a heroic death.  However, both religious and Jacobin propaganda stressed

unwavering devotion.  French Revolution artists would have been fools not to draw from Christian artwork though; centuries of blind Catholic following in France was a resource widely tapped into by the likes of David and Ingres.  There was already the perfect model of martyrdom and illness: Jesus.  Probably the most famous work to come out of the 18^th Century was David’s Death of Marat, styled after countless Pietas, most famously by Michelangelo.  Along with the death motif the painter made a point of displaying Marat still in his bathtub.  Marat spent most of his time in that bathtub because he had a very sensitive skin condition, something that increases the perception that this was a cruel murder against a helpless victim.  This shows how, among other things, illness can be manipulated and exploited in art.

Toward the middle of the 19^th Century state commissioned art began to disappear.  With the restoration of the Bourbon Dynasty in France, less concentration was paid to funding political art in an attempt to disassociate themselves from the still leftist and revolutionary artists prevalent at the time, like Daumier, who was imprisoned briefly for unkind caricatures of Louis Philippe in the form of a sickly, rotting pear (which also caused a nationwide ban on any depictions of pears) or Delacroix.  A new form of bourgeoisie was also in place, one offended by the growing influx of peasants drawn to the city during the Industrial Revolution.  With this brought unclean and unhealthy living environments, along with a fantastic rise in prostitution and an artistic desire to depict these realistically, hence Realism.  Emile Zola, an ardent supporter of Impressionist Realism, remarked upon hearing outcries from the upper classes over Manet’s masterpiece Olympia “Why not be honest?”  Olympia, a sardonic response to Cabanel’s saccharine Birth of Venus, shows a thin, pale, and bold prostitute lacking the typical voluptuous body that was associated with beauty.   This pursuit of the real, an unglorified view of the sickness the Parisian poor were experiencing, became a fixture in Impressionism.  This was done, almost to a grotesque point, by Degas in his sculpture Little Dancer of Fourteen Years ⁹.  Called by one critic the “Flower of the Gutter,” Degas disgusted critics with his bony, often speculated as anorexic, ballerina.  His original sculptures of Little Dancer of Fourteen Years was not a bronze cast as the current ones are but a wax sculpture with genuine human hair  and displayed in a glass case.  Unlike today, displaying a sculpture in a glass case was not common practice for artists in the 19^th Century and was perceived as a reference to medical displays.  This was a scandal; prior to Impressionism artists did not attempt to exhibit realistic interpretations of the lower classes.  Full scale paintings were previously reserved for heroic battle scenes, aristocrats, or works of civic virtue but to devote them to the flâneur and prostitutes, and not kindly done, of Paris was an outrage.  Other then class relations, Realism changed how illness was dealt with.  It was no longer used as a tool to instruct or cause fear for the masses, but was instead a point of power and change in shocking the bourgeoisie.

Considering I just arrived in Paris last Friday, and will be studying here for the next semester, I thought it would be fun to compile some of my favorite things about French history:

– In 1560, while walking down a street in France, a man was mugged.  While the thief tried to flee the gentleman pulled out his sword (remember, 16th Century) and cut off the bastard’s ear.  The gentleman was then subsequently sued by the local executioner for the right to own the ear because technically it would have been his job to cut it off had the thief then been arrested and tried.

– Napoleon wore a black handkerchief around his neck for every battle except for one, where his black handkerchief was accidentally thrown in the wash and he was forced to wear a white silk cravat.  That battle was Waterloo.

– People familiar with the Kirsten Dunst 2006 feel good hit of the year, “Marie Antoinette,” of course know that Marie and Louis’s marriage was not consummated in a time frame pleasing to Maria Therese.  In fact, it took over 7 years before the deed was done.  There are many theories as to why this took so long; for a long time it was thought that Louis XVI had a condition wherein his foreskin was too tight, making sex painful, but was given an operation after 7 years that would have fixed this.  However, recent examinations of his very meticulously taken hunting diaries show no breaks that would have been necessary for the healing process, so who knows.

– Shortly before his retirement (the real one.  For those unfamiliar, retirement for de Gaulle was like a Cher farewell tour.  Never actually the last one) him and his wife were visiting with English friends.  In response to the question as to what she looked forward to the most after her husband’s retirement, de Gaulle’s wife said “a penis.”  After some awkward silence, de Gaulle corrected his wife “My dear, I think the English don’t pronounce the word quite like that.  It’s ‘appiness.”