Ink & Image Spring 2026 Volume 18 Contributors
Benjamin Charnecki Sophia Valentina Clark Meghan Mandra Liv Steinhardt Maeve Sullivan Jesus Talón-Bueno Jack Teehan Audrey Wang
Editors-in-Chief
Becca Melin Sofia Portal
Editors
Annelise Johansen Neeharika Kakanuru Jacqueline Marks Siobhán Minerva Robert Zabin
Design Editor
Yutong Wei i
Table of Contents Letter From the Editors Sofia Portal & Becca Melin....................................................................................... iii
Long-Form Papers: Hidden Subversion in the Bosnia-Herzegovina Pavilion Benjamin Charnecki........................................................................................... 3 Girdles are Back in Season!: The Girdle as Fashion, Function, & Faith Sophia Valentina Clark............................................................................................ 19 The Power of Display: How Exhibitions Represent Seydou Keïta Meghan Mandra............................................................................................... 32 Dating Dadaism: Recontextualizing Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes’s Silence Liv Steinhardt..................................................................................................... 45 Wandering Women: The Female Flâneur Through Agnès Varda’s Eyes Maeve Sullivan......................................................................................................... 55 Abbott Thayer and the Chagrin of the Camoufleur Jack Teehan................................................................................................................. 68
Notes: Feminist Abstraction and the Construction of Female Identity in Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Head Audrey Wang............................................................................................................ 83 Heterodox Portrayals of Nudity in the 19th Century: Unveiling Édouard Manet’s Olympia and Paul Gauguin’s Manaò tupapaú (Spirit of the Dead Watching) Jesus Talón-Bueno................................................................................................ 92 ii
Letter From the Editors Dear reader, We are thrilled to present to you the 18th edition of Ink & Image, the undergraduate research journal of art history, architecture, and urban design from The Department of Art History at New York University. Founded in 2008 by Alexis Wang and Malcolm St. Clair, the purpose of Ink & Image is to promote and celebrate the pursuit of undergraduate research in art history and related fields, and we are grateful for your readership as a core part of this mission. The incredible cohort of authors featured in this issue explore topics spanning over one thousand years of history of the arts. Their papers tackle traditional works from new perspectives and center genres not always found at the forefront of the canon, such as fashion, cinema, and digital technologies. Our aim was to present as diverse an array of subject matters and methodologies as possible, highlighting the breadth and depth of art-historical inquiry being engaged by students at NYU. We believe in the enduring value of studying the arts, a creed that has only grown more vital as we labor under conditions that seek to suppress attempts to critically investigate our past and present histories. All the papers here demonstrate how studying art serves as a means to elucidate the power structures in place that shape how we perceive the world. We hope this issue reflects our belief in the need to challenge those structures and inspires you to work toward the same goal. We are indebted to the hard work of our Editorial Board members: Neeharika Kakanuru, Annelise Johansen, Jacqueline Marks, Siobhán Minerva, Robert Zabin, and Yutong Wei. Their thoughtful collaboration with our authors, forward-thinking vision, and unyielding dedication are the foundation for the success of this publication. We also extend our deepest thanks to our faculty advisor, Professor John Hopkins, whose support and guidance has been invaluable over the course of the past year. Finally, thank you to the CAS Student Council and the Department of Art History for their financial support and recognition of the important role this journal serves in our community. We hope that the papers in this publication inspire, engage, move, and challenge you in equal measure. Our sincerest hope is that you will find a new idea to explore or question to ask in the pages that follow. With gratitude, Sofia Portal and Becca Melin, Editors-in-Chief iii
Long-Form Papers
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Karel Pánek, The Bosnia-Herzegovina Pavilion, Paris Exposition Universelle (1900). Photo: Brown University Library.
Hidden Subversion in the Bosnia-Herzegovina Pavilion Benjamin Charnecki
Edited by Annelise Johansen
Abstract
Bosnia-Herzegovina by placing them in their historic contexts. Contrary to previous studies, which argue that the pavilion was used to affirm Habsburg colonial prowess, this paper examines dynastic subversion within the Bosnian Pavilion. With this aim, I locate the pavilion in the context of the Exposition Universelle and rising nationalism within the
This paper analyzes the Bosnian Pavilion at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair (“Exposition Universelle”) as it relates to Bosnian and Czech nationalism at the dawn of the 20th century. I interpret and analyze Karel Pánek’s architecture and Alphonse Mucha’s Allegory of 3
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Austro-Hungarian Empire. While the pavilion may promote loyalty to the Habsburgs on its surface, critical examination reveals that the pavilion is replete with illusions to Bosnian national intent. This must be reconciled with the artist’s backgrounds: Pánek and Mucha were not Bosnian but in fact Czech. Therefore, I also look to the state of late 19th-century Czech nationalism in search of artistic motivations. There was no Czech pavilion at the Exposition Universelle, and thus no place to present the Czech national cause. As Bosnia sat at a similar position as a Slavic country under Habsburg direction, the Bosnian Pavilion provided the perfect outlet to channel Czech national frustration.
Austrian figures like Freud examined the unconscious mind, and artists like Klimt expressed their interiority, the nationalists undertook their own interior journey. Previously, the rationalists of the 19th century focused on European progress under Enlightenment ideals. They looked outward to massive constructions like the Ringstrasse, hoping to build a new Europe on their values of enterprise and material production.3 They were the generation of the liberal revolution. 4 Yet, by the turn of the century in Austria, the old liberal rationalists were no longer in power as nationalist populists took their place.5 Nationalism involves an internal examination coupled with a declaration of faith in an imagined community. It is often guided by a warped lens of the past reminiscent of nostalgia where nationalists look inward to imagine a community in order to reify that community around them. Schorske identifies this as a voyage intérieur,6 a journey which I argue is embodied by the 1900 Exposition Universelle and the Bosnia Herzegovina Pavillion.7 Thus, the Exposition Universelle featured the world’s nations looking inward and defining themselves. The 1900 Exposition Universelle presented European nationalism
Section I. A Fin-de-Siècle Exposition Universelle To understand the Bosnian Pavilion, we must first understand the Exposition Universelle in its historical context. The theme of the 1900 Exposition Universelle was Le Bilan d’un Siècle–looking back on a century.1 Let us analyze this theme by drawing inspiration from historian Carl E. Schorske’s book, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. Schorske argues that at the turn of the century many found themselves in a crisis of meaning, and looked inward.2 While celebrated
3 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: The Ringstrasse, and its Critics, the Birth of Urban Modernism (Vintage Books, 2012). 4 Pieter M. Judson, “Whose Empire? The Revolutions of 1848–1849,” in The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2016), 155. 5 Schorske, 6. 6 Interior Journey 7 Schorske, 208.
1 Alfred Picard, Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1900 à Paris. Le Bilan d’un Siècle (1801–1900), vol. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1906), 1. 2 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Vintage Books, 2012), 208.
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on a transnational stage–La Rue des Nations. There was no AustroHungarian Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle. The Empire, which was generally eager to portray itself in happy unity, split into its two most powerful component parts, Austria and Hungary. 8 Though these were two separate pavilions, they were located in close proximity to each other. The Exposition Universelle was carnivalesque: people traveled from around the world to see costumed parades, eat food, drink beer, and have a good time.9 While the Habsburgs may have desired to display Bosnia as the bon élève10 of their imperial guidance, the geist of the Exposition Universelle was working against this goal. National pride was in the air. As a result, the empire needed to frame Bosnia as a young and subservient nation to justify their newfound power over the land.11 Such is the context of the Finde-Siecle Exposition Universelle. It represents a drastic pivot from the 1889 Exposition Universelle, which was boycotted by all European monarchies for its subversive theme
of Revolution in Europe. 12 In contrast, all of the monarchies in Europe represented themselves at the 1900 Exposition Universelle. If the 1889 Exposition Universelle was revolutionary, then the 1900 Exposition Universelle was nostalgic, launching a voyage intérieur à la nation. I suspect that empires like AustriaHungary may have interpreted the theme as a conservative look towards the past as a means of informing the future. However, this deeper collective exercise in nationalism may have actually been subversive to the multi-national nature of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. To post-revolutionary states, Emperors belonged to the previous century. When considering which of the competing visions of the 19th century was being portrayed – the bourgeois revolutionaries, the emperors’, or the nationalists’ –I argue that the nationalist’s undoubtedly held the most influence. Section II. Henri Moser, the Colonial Narrative, and the Press T he Bosnia Herz egov ina Pavillion was a three story structure designed by Karel Pánek. 13 The design combined wooden Ottoman vernacular and Moorish revival architecture into a rectangular
8 Charles Lavigne, “Le Pavillon de La BosnieHerzégovine,” in Le Livre d’or de l’Exposition de 1900, (E. Cornély, 1900), 217. 9 Cynthia Paces and Nancy M. Wingfield, “The Sacred and the Profane: Religion and Nationalism in the Bohemian Lands, 1880– 1920,” in Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, ed. Pieter M. Judson and Marsha L. Rozenblit (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 112. 10 Accomplished pupil 11 “Les Exposition Étrangers - Pavillon de Bosnie,” La Vie Illustrée: Journal Hebdomadaire, July 27, 1900, Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 280.
12 “1889 Exposition Universelle,” National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, last edited 2025, https:// americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/ nmah_1125099. 13 Catalogue général officiel, t. 14 annexe (Paris: Lemercier), 44.
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Central European castle.14 The white stucco walls were complemented by ornamental vines while the wooden semi-closed cantilevered overhangs texturized the building.15 Checkered red and white arches covered an enclosed hallway running along the corner of the building’s edifice. Rich red roofs, resembling clay, declined at a shallow slant. The numerous overlooks, overhangs, and the third story solarium gave patrons a chance to observe the Exposition Universelle as would-be archers observing their surroundings.16 Atop the two stories was a crowning tower, referred to as a kouba by the French press, and a large green wooden terrace.17 Moving through the large wooden door and into the interior, patrons would find themselves in a massive three story chamber looking onto a realistic mural of a central street in Sarajevo titled The Panorama of Sarajevo painted by Adolf Kaufmann.18 Above the mural and encircling the top level were Mucha’s fantastical Art Nouveau friezes. The rest of the room was painted in maximalist organic and f loral patterns. A
second floor wooden perch provided another balcony from which to display rugs and view the art. The large pentagonal skylight brought light onto the rug covered floor.19 Continually adding to the pavilion were costumed weavers working their looms, inviting fairgoers to take home a piece of their work for themselves.20 T he Bosn ia n Pav i l ion released an official description in the Exposition Universelle’s official exhibition catalogue. It is a combination of flowery language, self-congratulation, and paternalistic rhetoric towards Bosnia, portraying Bosnia as a Habsburg triumph. The description of the pavilion’s architecture stresses its literary quality: “There is something soft and restful which emanates from the picturesque decor, the charm of it all is like being enveloped by the freshness of poetry.”21 However, the description does not just praise the pavilion’s architecture but the government of Bosnia for uniting the diverse country into a single structure. Uniting diversity was a chief narrative of the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire. Consequently, Austro-Hungarian imperial guidance was credited as the centripetal force binding the
14 René Baschet, “La Rue des Nations,” in Guide Lemercier: Dictionnaire pratique des objets exposés et des attractions (Paris: Imprimerie de Lemercier, 1900), 100. 15 Lavigne, 218. 16 Ibid. 17 “À l’Exposition de 1900,” Supplément Littéraire Illustré, Le Bon Citoyen de Tarare et du Rhône, July 22, 1900, 1. 18 In Le Monde Littéraire et Pittoresque, A. Fabre claims that Kauffman was so inspired by Mucha’s work that he designed Panorama of Sarajevo according to Mucha’s sketches. Kathrin Pokorny-Nagel, ed., Alfons Mucha: The Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the Exposition Universelle (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2011), 110.
19 Mucha Foundation, “Bosnia & Herzegovina Pavilion at the Paris Exhibition1900: ‘Diorama of Sarajevo’ and Mucha’s Painting ‘Bosnia Offers Her Products to the World Exhibition 1900,” Mucha Foundation, 2026. https://www. muchafoundation.org/en/gallery/browse-works/ object/148. 20 La Vie Illustrée, 281. 21 Catalogue général officiel, t. 14 annexe (Paris: Lemercier), 44.
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troubles and revolutions which pitted the different castes of the population against each other, has entered a new era of prosperity now that the Treaty of Berlin (1878) has placed them under the wise administration of Austria Hungary, which has introduced order and peace to the land.27
multi-ethnic Bosnia together.22 The catalogue description also credits the Orientalist and Commissioner General of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Pavillion, Henri Moser, with the successful design of the pavilion.23 Yet, Moser was simply the coordinator. The interior was designed by Czech artist Alphonse Mucha.24 The Czech architect Karel Pánek who actually designed the structure received no mention at all. 25 Bosnians were not permitted to submit artistic designs themselves.26 The idea that Bosnians were not fit to represent themselves reveals the coordinator’s orientalist and colonialist tendencies. Additionally, the catalogue takes time to congratulate Benjamin de Kalláy, Minister of Finance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the administrator of Bosnia, for his “rehabilitative work.”
(La Bosnie et l’Herzégovine, naguère encore ruinées par les troubles et les révolutions qui armaient l’une contre l’autre les différentes castes de la population, sont entrées dans une ère de relèvement et de prospérité depuis que le traité de Berlin (1878) en les plaçant sous la sage administration de l ’Autr iche-Hong r ie, y a introduit l’ordre et la paix.)
Bosnia Herzegovina, which was until recently ruined by
Here, the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia is championed as a civilizing mission to such a degree that Bosnia is repeatedly referred to as a Habsburg colony in the general catalogue. The Austria-Hungarian Empire was not just credited with bringing peace to the land, but with introducing the very concept to the Bosnians. With such press, it is understandable why one might write off the Bosnian Pavilion as nothing more than Austria displaying an imperial trophy. While this may have been the colonial narrative intended
22 The term centripetal is being borrowed from Oszkár Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2013), 4. 23 Имре Решш, “Генрих Мозер. Человек Беньямина Каллаи в Париже,” Central‑European Studies, no. 7 (2024): 72-76. 24 Fabio Giomi, “At the Margins of the Habsburg Civilizing Mission,” in Making Muslim Women European: Voluntary Associations, Gender, and Islam in Post-Ottoman Bosnia and Yugoslavia (1878–1941) (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2021), 56. 25 Giomi, “At the Margins,” 56. 26 Matthew Rampley, “Decolonizing Central Europe: Czech Art and the Question of ‘Colonial Innocence,” Visual Resources 37, no. 1 (January 2, 2021): 1–30; Pieter M. Judson and Marsha L. Rozenblit, “Religion and Nationalism in the Bohemian Lands, 1880–1920,” in Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 13.
27 Catalogue général officiel, t. 14 annexe (Paris: Lemercier), 45 (my trans.).
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by the project’s administrators, we must not be so hasty as to ascribe this same intention to the Czech artists involved. Bosnia’s status as an imperial protectorate under Habsburg administrative control was not lost on the French press. The Bosnian Pavilion was sandwiched between the Austrian Pavilion and the Hungarian Pavilion on the Rue des Nations; in response, French Magazine Le Bon Citoyen remarked that “Between old Austria and old Hungary, Bosnia resembles a young girl whose parents have taken her out into the world for the first time.”28 Placed above this statement was a drawing of Franz Joseph I smiling benevolently, captioned “Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, and Sovereign of Bosnia.”29 Bosnia was infantilized. Le Bon Citoyen appeared to accept and perpetuate the colonial narrative of the pavilion. Another contemporary journal, La Vie Illustré, also identified the overarching narrative of the pavilion as a statement about how much progress the territory made under Habsburg guidance. However, by openly engaging with the pavilion as a constructed narrative, the validity of the narrative is lessened. No longer are we witnessing a natural truth about Austrian imperial authority
but something that has been cultivated and is thus less credible. Le Vie Illustre states: The goal of the interior was eminently practical and intelligent. One senses from the first visit to the Bosnian Pavilion that the decoration is part of an organized effort to present a desired narrative. The goal of this narrative is very specific. Present the Young Bosnia to the world; a young Bosnia rich in hope, having already achieved much in its twenty years of existence under an intelligent and protective tutelage.30 On sent dès la première visite au Pavillon de Bosnie que la décoration y fait partie de l’organisation [Sic] et que celle-ci est due à une volonté très nette tendue vers un but bien déterminé. Ce but est évidemment la présentation de la jeune Bosnie au monde ; de la jeune Bosnie riche d’espérance ayant déjà fait beaucoup en ses vingt années d’existence propre sous une tutelle intelligente et protectrice. 31 Of course, the aforementioned “intelligent and protective tutelage” comes from none other than the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This description of the pavilion’s goal as intelligent and practical has particularly interesting word choice. It affirms that the journal was privy to the justificatory narrative which the Empire put forward, that is, the Empire’s heritage as an imperial power governing a vastly diverse land. However, the La Vie Illustrée
28 Le Bon Citoyen, “À l’Exposition de 1900,” 1 : “Entre la vieille Autriche et la vieille Hongrie, la Bosnie ressemble à une jeune fille que ses parents conduisent pour la première fois dans le monde. Mais, dans ce monde chrétien où on l’introduit, la jeune catéchumène a conservé son aspect musulman, elle est comme enveloppée tout entière de ses voiles et n’ose regarder qu’à travers ses moucharbies.” 29 Le Bon Citoyen, “À l’Exposition de 1900,” 1.
30 31
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does separate the artistic narrative— of presenting a Bosnia rich in hope—from the general narrative of Habsburg Imperial guidance. What’s more, “protective tutelage” suggested that Austria-Hungary may not have a permanent role in the territory. While they may still act as “civilizers,” the ultimate goal was interpreted as Bosnia realizing its independence. To La Vie Illustrée, Austria-Hungary was habituated to governing ethnically diverse populations; they were fit to govern Bosnia in the meantime. While Le Bon Citoyen furthered the Habsburg narrative without identifying it as such, La Vie Illustrée acknowledged that there was a narrative that the empire intended to perpetuate. French press and Exposition Universelle’s official catalogue understood Bosnia’s position in the Habsburg imperial narrative, yet this narrative was not always taken as absolute, leaving uncertain Bosnia’s position in relation to the empire— colony, conquest, or protectorate. However, La Vie Illustrée did not grant this narrative so easily. Crucially, the article comments on the Mucha frieze depicting a Bosnian King: “The coronation of the Bosnian king recalls that this province once had an independent national life of its own of which they [the Bosnian people] retain ( garde) their memory.”32 Beyond acknowledging Mucha’s intent to evoke a sovereign national past, La Vie Illustrée understands that Bosnians cherished their past
sovereignty. Henr i Moser’s i nf luence over this narrative should not be underestimated. He was a key figure in Benjamin Kállay’s “nongovernmental representation in France”33 and it was Moser who handled press for the pavilion. 34 Therefore, it was no coincidence that the infantilizing descriptions of Bosnia in the French press are mirrored in Henri Moser’s own travel writing. In his books, l’Orient Inédit and An Oriental Holiday: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moser identifies Bosnia as a virgin to European influence, and he lauds Kállay’s government for having done so much for a “backwards country” in such a short amount of time.35 The press praised Moser without question: the most shameless instance being an 18 page narrative with the pretenses of being an about the Bosnia Herzegovina pavilion, but which in reality functions as an exposé on the “superb” “genius” of Moser whose military awards “aristocratic kindness” make him “cold and brave like the blade of the officers’ sabers 33 Imre Resh, “Генрих Мозер. Человек Беньямина Каллаи в Париже,” Central‑European Studies, 2024, 7. 34 Alfred Edwards, “L’Orient Inédit,” Le Matin : derniers télégrammes de la nuit, no. 5899, 1900, 1-2. 35 Henri Moser, L’Orient inédit : à travers la Bosnie et l’Herzégovine, (Paris, 1895), 3, 6; Ágnes Sebestyén, “Henri Moser as Commissioner General of the Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris,” In À l’orientale : Collecting, Displaying and Appropriating Islamic Art and Architecture in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries, eds. Francine Giese, Mercedes Volait, and Ariane Varela Braga (Brill, 2020), 131.
32 La Vie Illustrée, 280. Presumably referring to the frieze, The Coronation (1900).
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he bore in youth.”36 The official commemorative history book of the Exposition Universelle, le Livre d’or de l’exposition, which repeats many of the same orientalist remarks, thanks Henri Moser for giving them a tour and applauds his cordial relationship to the press: Moser is an extremely erudite expert and admirable coordinator. He is also a man of great manners and unparalleled likeability. He has always had a frank and cordial relationship with the press. We were greatly obliged to have been accompanied on a guided visit to the Pavilion. Thanks to his enlightened guidance, we can provide many curious and unique details about the Pavilion.37 These remarks suggest that Moser had undeniable inf luence over the narrative and publicity surrounding the pavilion. However, he is not the artistic driver behind the pavilion, and it would be unjust to accept his words as an artist’s statement. For this reason, it becomes increasingly apparent that this “colonial narrative” may have more to do with the position of Henri
Moser than any objective artistic interpretation of the pavilion or the intentions of the two Czech artistic contributors. Section III. Pánek’s Castle There is a conceivable explanation for Karel Pánek’s mysterious absence in the French Press. During the construction of the pavilion, Pánek spoke contemptuously of Mucha’s work and artistic vision. Much to his chagrin, Henri Moser was placed in the role of intermediary between the two artists. While Mucha was willing to make concessions, Pánek was uncompromising.38 Additionally, Pánek wished to incorporate columns into the main hall, which Moser felt would be overcrowding. Rather than revise the design for the mains hall as Moser wished, Pánek submitted a petition to Benjamin Kallay requesting that his original plans be implemented. Kallay agreed with Moser that the exhibition space would be overcrowded and too small. He also objected to the fact that the columns were reminiscent of an Orthodox Cathedral.39 At one point construction even stalled – perhaps as a result of Pánek. For all this headache, it comes as no surprise that Moser was not eager to bolster Pánek’s reputation in the press. Moser told the press that the pavilion was a synthesis of Oriental style – excluding Panek’s name and
36 Wailly Gaston, À travers l’Exposition de 1900 (Fayard frères, 1900), 6-24. 37 Lavigne, 218: “M. Moser est un très érudit savant et un admirable organisateur. C’est aussi un homme d’une grande courtoisie et d’une amabilité sans égale. Il a toujours eu avec les représentants de la presse des relations franches et cordiales. Très obligeamment en effet, il nous a offert de nous accompagner et de nous guider dans notre visite au pavillon de la BosnieHerzégovine. Grâce à son concours éclairé, nous pouvons donner sur la très intéressante participation de ce pays à l’Exposition de 1900, des détails fort curieux et des renseignements instructifs”.
38 Imre Resh, “Генрих Мозер. Человек Беньямина Каллаи в Париже,” Central‑European Studies 7 (2024): 84. 39 Ibid.
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consequently undercutting whatever Panek’s true vision might have been.40 The Bosnian Pavillion has been reported to be inspired by the Gradaščević Castle in northern Bosnia. 41 The two buildings are remarkably similar–both feature similar footprints, white stucco exteriors, and a central tower, albeit the Bosnian Pavilion is distinguished by its Moorish arches and more complex wooden outlooks. 42 The pavilion symbolically unites historic Bosnia with the modern country. By examining the history of the castle which inspired the Pavilion, it is clear that the building is marked by the struggle for Bosnian national aspiration. The castle is eponymous
with Husein-Kapetan Gradaščević, also known as the Dragon of Bosnia. 43 Kapetan Gradaščević led the 1830 Bosnian struggle for autonomy against the Ottomans. Initially invoked as a protest against Ottoman reforms, including the abolition of the Janissaries and territorial transfer of Bosnia to semiautonomous Serbia, the revolt met a head at the Second Battle of Kosovo, where Gradaščević was defeated by the Herzegovina Kapetan Bey Ali Agha Rizvanbegović and the Sultan’s forces. After several attempts by Gradaščević to regain influence in Bosnia, he was exiled to Istanbul.44 Kapetan Gradaščević remains a powerful figure in Bosnian national memory. Today, he is considered by Bosnian Muslim nationalists to be the first unifying Bosnian leader–a father of Bosnian national aspiration. 45 Though the Austrian Hungarians held sovereignty over Bosnia, they did grant the territory autonomy–a status which Gradaščević fought for against the Ottomans. Yet, as stated above, Gradaščević holds a more radical place for Bosnian nationalists. Historic circumstances aside, Gradaščević came to represent Bosnian independence, something antithetical to being controlled by a foreign empire. Through a nationalist lens, we might understand Gradaščević as a figure parallel to Jan Hus in Czech
40 Alfred Edwards, “L’Orient Inédit,” Le Matin : derniers télégrammes de la nuit, no. 5899, 1900, 1-2. 41 Maximilian Hartmuth et al., The Governance of Style Public Buildings in Central Europe, 1780–1920, (Böhlau, 2020), 344; Albert Quantin, L’Exposition du siècle (1900); Baschet, “La Rue des Nations,” 100. Amos Chapple, “When Mucha Painted Bosnia,” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, September 2, 2020, https://www.rferl.org/a/when-alfonsemucha-painted-bosnia/30813702.html. Pokorny-Nagel, Alfons Mucha: The Pavilion, 119. 42 The Moorish arches have an interesting history as were distinctive of Habsburg architecture in Bosnia, and have an interesting relation to the Exposition Universelle. Though this style plays off of Islamic roots, it is inherently tied to Austria. In fact, this sort of orientalist style was largely popularized during the 1873 Vienna Exposition Universelle (D. Gethmann & P. Eckhard, “Orient Assemblage (Made in Austria): Colonial Typologies, Trade Relations, and the Politics of Architecture at the Vienna Exposition Universelle 1873,” Architectural Histories (2023), 8. Vijećnica, the celebrated town hall in Sarajevo and one of the most celebrated buildings in the Moorish revival style, was erected in Bosnia during the Habsburg period (1907). Locals commonly refer to this as Habsburg style.
43 Mirsad Kriještorac, “A Short History of Bosnian Muslim Groupness,” in First Nationalism Then Identity: On Bosnian Muslims and Their Bosniak Identity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022), 48. 44 Kriještorac, 49–51. 45 Ibid., 48.
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nationalism. While Pànek was not Bosnian himself, he came from the Czech lands at a time when German and Czech nationalist groups were anachronistically claiming historic figures as nationalist heroes. 46 To a great extent, the historic Czech religious reformer Jan Hus and Austrian Emperor Joseph II were regarded in the same light as Gradaščević. The Czech nationalists invoked Hus as a national hero and the first Czech patriot. Hus departed from the Catholic church by delivering sacraments to the laypeople. He infamously preached in the Czech language, translating Catholic rites and prayers. As a result of ongoing linguistic battles in Bohemia, Hus was a particularly appealing figure to Czech nationalists at the time. 47 However, his reasons for employing the Czech language were religious, not national. The Hussite rebellion would see an attempted Bohemian secession from the Habsburg empire, something which later Czech nationalists channeled to advocate for national sovereignty. In a parallel manner, German nationalists transformed the historical emperor Joseph II from Volkskaiser to Kaiser des deutschen Volkes, largely inspired by Joseph’s decision to make German the lingua franca of Austria. 48 Frequently, his
image was employed by nationalists protesting Austrian language rights reforms. 49 In choosing his design, Pánek could have easily recognized the resemblance between Jan Hus and the Hussite rebellion and the Dragon of Bosnia and the rebellion against the Ottomans. It is conceivable that Pànek chose Gradaščević castle with the subversive intent to honor nationalist rebellion and perhaps draw a parallel to Jan Hus. There was no Czech pavilion at the 1900 Exposition Universelle. As a crownland controlled by Imperial Austria, the Czech speaking lands generally had few opportunities for autonomous representation at world’s fairs.50 There are records of Czechs nationals refusing to participate due to the fact that the Czech lands were denied an independent exhibition space. While some scholars attempt to argue that what is seen in the Bosnian pavilion is an example of Czech colonial complacency, further examination reveals that the opposite is true. Bosnia, as another slavic country under Habsburg imperial rule, may have provided an optimal subterfuge for channeling Czech national frustration. The parallels which the pavilion paints with Czech nationalism are striking. At this point we must recall a similar moment in Czech national memory: the loss of the Crown of Wenceslas, also known as the Crown of Bohemia.
46 Cynthia Paces and Nancy M. Wingfield, “The Sacred and the Profane: Religion and Nationalism in the Bohemian Lands, 1880– 1920,” in Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 113. 47 Paces and Wingfield, “The Sacred and the Profane,” 113. 48 Ibid., 111.
49 Ibid., 111, 112. 50 Marta Filipová, “‘Highly Civilized, yet Very Simple’: Images of the Czechoslovak State and Nation at Interwar World’s Fairs,” Nationalities Papers 50, no. 1 (2022): 145–65.
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Ferdinand V was the last Habsburg to be crowned with the Crown of Wenceslas. After the Thirty Years War, Bohemian nobles were denied the right to coronation. 51 Franz Joseph ruled Bohemia as a birthright, rather than with permission from local nobles. Evidently, this loss of power was considered a tragedy by Czech nobles and nationalists alike.52 These incidents are crucial to Czech nationalist thought, and there was a continued push to regain the power of coronation. Motifs recalling these themes are replete in the Bosnian Pavilion, including a coronation scene which will be discussed in the next section. Scholars broadly recognize the influence of Czech nationalism in Mucha’s later work. Yet, his work at the time of the Exposition Universelle suggests that these themes had already begun to develop. Perhaps, Mucha channeled his personal aspiration for the Czech people into a shared aspiration for the Bosnian people. In doing so, he merged one Slavic struggle with another. Grouping together histories into a collective “Slavic” narrative can be more clearly observed in Mucha’s later work, the Slav Epic.53
elements of the Bosnian Pavillion. By 1900, Mucha was already wellknown in Paris for his commercial work.54 It is likely his contribution to the pavilion attracted quite a bit of patronage. His work in the pavilion transcends history, fantasy and nationhood in a Secessionist-inspired style. Fairgoers were struck by panels depicting fantasized Bosnian history, including the introduction of the three major Bosnian religions and a plethora of Bosnian folk tales.55 The cumulative effect of these friezes is a subversive albeit constructed personification of Bosnian national identity. One panel, entitled The Revenge of the Bogomils - The Coronation of a King of Bosnia, is particularly striking. The frieze depicts a man, perhaps a prince, killed in battle with Bosnia being returned in the shadows to the furious Hungarian king. Meanwhile, a coronation procession marches victoriously, with the sun shining gracefully on the Bosnian king. The frieze takes place in the context of Hungarian aggression against the Banate of Bosnia. On the pretext of Bogmil religious heresy, the Hungarian Kingdom launched crusades into Bosnian territory.56 Like
Section IV. Voyage à l’intérieur
54 Lavigne, 220. 55 Pokorny-Nagel, Alfons Mucha: The Pavilion, 93. 56 “The Kings of Catholic Hungary claimed a suzerainty over the bans of Bosnia, and were perhaps inclined to treat accusations of heresy launched against Bosnians with great seriousness only when they coincided with their own territorial ambitions. Technically, the campaign was a crusade preached in the auspices of Gregory IX; but it had the opposite effect to that intended. The Reactions of the Bosnian nobility and the expulsion of the Hungarian conquerors
Alphonse Mucha’s friezes are undoubtedly one of the most striking 51 Paces and Wingfield, “The Sacred and the Profane,” 112. 52 Judson, 295. 53 “Slav Epic - Themes - Gallery - Mucha Foundation,” Mucha Foundation, https://www. muchafoundation.org/en/gallery/themes/theme/ slav-epic.
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the Czech Hussites, the Bogmils were a Christian offshoot who resisted religious and state authorities.57 This frieze of a historical Bosnian coronation is thereby unmistakably reminiscent of the Crown of Wenceslas and religious persecution in Czechia by the Austrians during the Thirty Years War. What’s more, it recalls a time when one of the powers in the dual monarchy exhibited aggression against Bosnia. Hungary was the country from which Benjamin Kállay, a Hungarian Nobleman and the chief executive of Bosnia Herzegovina originated.58 Clearly, Mucha is invoking a memory of Bosnian national sovereignty and resistance to Hungarian imperial power. Alphonse Mucha’s designs unite the interior of the pavilion with the exterior. While vines run along the exterior walls, organic embellishments are replete in the interior. It is foreseeable that some scholars would interpret this as a feature of an orientalist and colonialist narrative. The central frieze depicts Bosnians emerging from a forest. By portraying Bosnians as a people living alongside nature, they are reduced to existing in a more “primitive” and “animalistic ” state. Them emerging from nature could recall the narrative that Bosnia
was brought into modernity by the Habsburgs. I, however, do not find this argument convincing, as such naturalistic elements are characteristic of Mucha’s Art Nouveau style; they are not a unique feature of his work in the Bosnian pavilion. Additionally, it is common in nationalism to look on a past “natural” state with nostalgia rather than conceit.59 If Mucha was drawing on this natural element, context seems to favor the idea that he was doing so from a point of pride in Bosnians for reclaiming their territory and, as The Revenge of the Bogomils suggests, asserting their sovereignty. Another interesting element that united the interior and exterior was a conceivable reference to Gradaščević. When Mucha was preparing to paint his friezes in 1899, he produced a series of darker charcoal drawings depicting Bosnian life and folktales. Ultimately, The Death of Hasagana’s Bride and Ivo and Anica were integrated into the topmost panel of friezes. 60 The legend Hasagana tells of a Bosnian woman who did not visit her husband after he suffered injuries at war. As punishment, she was condemned to leave her children and be married to another man. The husband in this story is a military general or Kapetan like Gradaščević, who could be thought to reside in a castle similar to the Bosnian pavilion. The story of Ivo and Anica tells of the Bosnian Queen’s children being
brought about a cessation of all persecution and the removal of the Catholic bishops.” Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy; Popular Movements from Bogomil to Hus (Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1977), 143 57 Lambert, “Medieval Heresy,” 142 58 Имре Решш, “Генрих Мозер. Человек Беньямина Каллаи в Париже,” Central‑European Studies, 7.
59 Gabriella Elgenius and Jens Rydgren, “Nationalism and the Politics of Nostalgia,” Sociological Forum 37 (2022): 1230–43. 60 Pokorny-Nagel, Alfons Mucha: The Pavilion, 60.
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Figure 1. Paris, World's Fair 1900, Yugolsavia, Fresco in the Bosnian Pavilion, 1900, Fresco. Image courtesy of Blindindex.
captured by Turks and given to the Sultan — another evocative image in the context of stolen sovereignty.61 Mucha’s central frieze was titled The Allegory of Bosnia-Herzegovina (or Bosnia Offers Her Products to the World Exhibition) (Fig. 1). The frieze represents Bosnia and Herzegovina as a woman sitting on a throne, gazing outwards. She is surrounded by Bosnians in folk dress, some of whom kneel not towards Lady Bosnia but the viewer. Scholars have often interpreted the Bosnians’ gaze as landing on the Austro-Hungarian Empire that has come to “civilize” them. As highlighted by Edin Hajdarpasić, “Mucha’s centerpiece 61
was a grand art nouveau rendering of the Habsburg imperial fairy tale, depicting a Bosnian Sleeping Beauty roused from centuries of sleep by wise imperial governance.”62 In this interpretation, the woman kneeling is not bearing fruit for Lady Bosnia –she is serving the Empire. By extension, the viewer becomes the Austro-Hungarian Empire coming to awaken the grateful Bosnians from their “backwardness” or “natural state.” Let us pursue the idea that Lady Bosnia is presenting herself to the 62 Edin Hajdarpasic, “Another Problem,” in Whose Bosnia?: Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 194; Giomi, “At the Margins,” 37.
Ibid., 102-106.
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Empire. We will see that she is not presenting helpless people who need to be “civilized.” These are people wealthy from the land and adorned with splendid folk dress. Mucha did not depict Bosnians rejoicing at the site of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: the blonde woman looks resigned; the boy approaches with trepidation. This suggests that the Bosnians viewed the Austro-Hungarian Empire as foreign occupiers – not welcomed saviors. Though Lady Bosnia presents her children with open arms, they are clearly her children–not Austria’s. This is not a depiction of joyful Bosnians welcoming the Austrio-Hungarian Empire. If one desires to see joy in a Mucha painting, consult the parallel frieze, The Oath of Omladina under the Slavic Linden Tree. The difference between these two friezes is that in the latter, we see Czech nationalists not facing away but facing towards their personif ied nationalit y. Children hold hands and face each other under a slavic goddess–Czech nationalists could well be confronted by a foreign power yet they rejoice in their own nationality. If Mucha truly wanted to depict Bosnians celebrating Habsburg rule, would he not have gone in a similar direction? Yet, we do not see the Bosnians rejoicing. If we still wish to interpret the painting as a positive depiction of Habsburg rule, we can reinterpret the central figure. Perhaps we are not looking at Lady Bosnia but a Habsburg empress. Notably, she has the distinct long black hair of the famed Empress Elizabeth. In addition, the Habsburgs were known
to don the national dress of their various lands. However, I could not find any record of a contemporary Habsburg donning Bosnian national dress. All said, this interpretation is highly circumstantial. If we do not interpret our role as that of a civilizing empire but rather as tourists of an ethnic pavilion, perhaps a different message can be read. By gazing at The Allegory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, visitors gazed at “Bosnianness” personified. Patrons were forced to recognize Bosnians as having a robust history and individual identity, and accordingly, Bosnian national identity was affirmed. Is it not this very process of affirmation, of looking at a nationality and reifying it, that prompts a national awakening? The Bosnian Pavilion contained all the elements necessary for constructing a national community. There was traditional music, food, and dress, culminating in a cohesive national identity. While it seems that Lady Bosnia is presenting her services to someone, it need not necessarily be the empire. We must now direct our attention to the pavilion’s effect on the Bosnians who witnessed and worked the pavilion. While the design was carried out by Czech artists, Henri Moser recruited Bosnian merchants to staff the pavilion. These merchants used the pavilion to promote their trades. 63 Under the exterior arches, craftsmen worked with silver, 64 and on the second floor, merchants sold goods such as cereal, 63 64
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Conclusion
fruits, tobacco, wine, and honey. 65 Bosnians would have entered the pavilion and witnessed themselves in nationalized form. Their dress, their music, their food, and their language were showcased to inspire national pride. When engaging with nationalism, artists, architects, merchants, and musicians all had the potential to become ‘centrifugal’ to the Habsburg empire.66 With this in mind, we must jointly assess the art and architecture of the pavilion’s main chamber to determine what its goal really was. The focal point of the main chamber was a polygonal extrusion. Prayer mats lined the floor. On top of two towers, Bosnian warriors stood elevated like saints or angels. A ridged arch framed the Panorama of Sarajevo mural with the Allegory of BosniaHerzegovina frieze above, the vaulted ceiling coming inward to resemble the apse of a religious structure. The frieze depicts two Bosnian men carrying a log which evoked the crucifixion. As with Czech nationalism, religion was employed to further Bosnian nationalism. At the center was a crowned woman with outstretched arms: this Christlike figure is Bosnia personified. Thus, the Bosnian Pavilion was itself a temple of the Bosnian national identity.67
W hile the Commissioner General of the Pavillion Henri Moser certainly framed the Bosnian Pavillion to further AustroHungarian rhetoric, we must not limit its narrative to these ends. The subversive elements of the Bosnian pavilion which this essay has uncovered are powerful and farreaching; depictions of Hungarian religious aggression, personifications of the Bosnian nation, and symbols of national resistance all work against the Habsburg’s imperial narrative. Furthermore, the parallels between the Czech national struggle and the Bosnian national struggle constructed in the pavilion are striking. Pánek’s design displays a national tradition while calling back to a time of Bosnian resistance. Additionally, it is doubtful that a man like Mucha, who spent so much of his career furthering Slavic nationalism, would compliantly offer Bosnia to the Habsburgs. I have shown that parallels between Bosnia and Bohemia would have certainly been apparent. It is no surprise that the Mucha Foundation accredits the artist’s experience with the Bosnian Pavilion as having inspired his famous Slav Epic.68 One can imagine Mucha painting the Bosnian friezes with the same nationalist fervor that he would have brought to a Czech pavilion. In a letter to Viktor Oliva, Mucha writes, “I was again engaged
65 Ibid., 102. 66 Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, 4. 67 Perhaps it is a bit far-fetched, but we could read this as a temple housing the three most-practiced Bosnian faiths: the prayer mats are Muslim, the altar is Catholic, and the apse is Byzantine Orthodox.
68 “Slav Epic - Themes - Gallery - Mucha Foundation,” Mucha Foundation, https://www. muchafoundation.org/en/gallery/themes/theme/ slav-epic.
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in historical painting, but this time it did not concern Germany but a fraternal Slavic nation. When depicting the glorious and tragic times in [Bosnia’s] history, I thought of the joys and sorrows of my own country, and of all the Slavs.”69
69 Chapple, “When Mucha Painted Bosnia”; Pokorny-Nagel, Alfons Mucha: The Pavilion, 140. (I used elements from two translations to improve readability).
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Girdles are Back in Season!:
The Girdle as Fashion, Function, & Faith Sophia Valentina Clark Edited by Siobhán Minerva
In the realm of modern fashion, the belt has evolved to become a versatile accessory that serves an important function and signifies style. In its most basic form, the belt acts as a secondary way of adjusting the fit of an individual’s waistband. This long accessory became broadly available during the Industrial Revolution and officially secured its spot as a closet staple in 1922, when Levi’s became the first brand of pants to add belt loops to their garments with the classic Levi’s 501s.1 Since then, the belt
has experienced a metamorphosis, evolving from a purely functional item to occasionally the star of one’s ensemble. In a Vogue article from April 2025, Senior Fashion and Style Writer Christina Allaire reports on the return of statement belts in the fashion industry; with designer brands like Balmain and Chloé reintroducing the body-hugging, waist-accentuating accessory in their Fall 2025 runway looks, the belt’s place in modern-day fashion continues to evolve.2 Yet, as fashion continues to reinvent the belt’s purpose and
1 “Countdown to 150, 501® Fab Facts: The First Belt Loops,” Levi Strauss & Co, May 18, 2022.
2 Allaire, Christian, “Is It Time for the Return of Extra-Wide Belts?” Vogue, April 2, 2025.
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allure, historical belts show that such reinvention is hardly modern. Beginning in the early Middle Ages, girdles were introduced into European wardrobes as objects of utility and were worn principally to secure garments or carry tools.3 In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the girdle began to take on a more decorative role but still maintained many of its functional values as individuals attached various personal items to them. By the late Middle Ages, the girdle had transformed into a symbol of wealth, identity, and status. Similar cyclical fashion trends emerge when comparing the evolution of the modern belt and the medieval girdle. Yet, the form of the girdle was shaped by medieval Christian social values, making it far more than merely a medieval precursor to the modern belt. The medieval girdle engages three distinct yet interconnected modes of significance: fashion, function, and faith. By exploring these three spheres, the medieval girdle’s aesthetic and moral underpinnings are brought to the surface and aid in a contemporary understanding of the girdle as an accessory of many meanings. While its role as fashion accessory is the most visibly preserved aspect of the girdle today, the girdle’s functional dimensions become clearer through the study of related objects, including girdle books, purses, and relics that
once hung from it. Furthermore, medieval politics and piety develop religious associations around the girdle, intensifying its association with chastity and devotion. The understanding and analysis of the girdle as a devotional object reveals yet another form and function of the girdle, providing insight into broader medieval understandings of the body, childbirth, and spiritual frameworks that shaped reproductive care. Exploring the evolution of the girdle as a multifaceted item through these three dimensions during the medieval period in Europe will illuminate how objects of personal adornment embody identit y, devotion, and lived experience, while simultaneously shifting in meaning with changing socio-cultural needs. Girdles as Fashion Like the modern belt, the medieval girdle was worn by both men and women. Depending on its function and design, it could be worn low on the waist or higher under the ribcage, usually over a long-sleeved garment called a houppelande. 4 The most common way to secure the girdle was to wrap it around the front of the body, cross it in the back, and tie it loosely in the front, with the pendant hanging. The same way one contemplates which belt best compliments an outfit in the contemporary world, a medieval patron would likely take their own
3 Iris Brooke, English Costume of the Early Middle Ages: The Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries; Drawn and Described (London: A. & C. Black, Ltd., 1936), 86, col. front., illus. 24 cm. Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 10.
4 “A Silver-Gilt Girdle Decorated with Fantastical Beasts, Serbian Empire, c. 13501400,” Les Enluminures.
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wardrobe and popular styles of the time into consideration when making their commission to the metalsmiths. Many of the girdles featured in this paper serve as examples of how the overall construction of the girdle made the accessory easily malleable, revealing how “keeping up with fashion trends” is not merely a contemporary concept. However, it took sufficient funds to keep up with the latest styles, forging a connection between fashion and status. A girdle’s design and degree of ornamentation varied with the commission. Some were so long that the pendant would fall to the hem of the wearer’s garment. Rather than drawing a direct parallel to modern accessories, it is more precise to understand medieval girdles within their own material and social context: their craftsmanship, precious materials, and elaborate metalwork functioned as visible indicators of wealth and rank within a highly stratified society. Elements such as buckles, pendants, and metal fittings were not merely decorative but signaled access to skilled artisans and costly resources. These features now provide scholars with important evidence for interpreting the social and economic circumstances surrounding their production and use. One remarkable example is Les Enluminures’ Silver-gilt Girdle Decorated with Fantastical Beasts from the Serbian Empire, c.13501400. Measuring 126 cm long, this girdle showcases the cultural interconnectedness created by medieval European trade and introduces the girdle as a product of courtly fashion trends. The girdle’s
capacity for ostentation made it an ideal way to display one’s wealth and style, which increased its popularity as a court accessory and gift for special occasions. Sleek, silver-gilt fleur de lys fixings travel along the entire length of the red velvet base of the Les Enluminures girdle. The garment is capped on either side by a pendant and buckle-chape that feature griffins in raised relief—an example of the type of secular, even fantastical imagery that gained popularity from the thirteenth century onwards. While the fleur de lys capped bars are a generic pattern that can be seen in earlier girdle examples from various locations such as northern Italy and Germany, similar griffin and beast motifs have been documented in other precious metalworks made in the Serbian Empire around this time.5 The exact origin of the griffin, however, is a topic that is still being researched. Unfortunately, Western typologies often permeate modern scholarship, affecting the credibility of such work. This kind of approach places emphasis on assigning the unknown work to a specific production site based on national boundaries, which is a by-product of underestimating just how fluid and multicultural exchanges were in the medieval world. The museum-based taxonomic method further restricts the modern viewer’s understanding of these kinds of works and motifs, often reducing them to “works of art,” disregarding their cultural 5 Vendor Description for Silver-gilt Girdle Decorated with Fantastical Beasts, Sam Fogg, London, internal gallery document, Les Enluminures, 4.
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significance. 6 In contrast to this approach, Eva R. Hoffman delves into the intercultural significance of the griffin and other images and motifs that demonstrate the fluidity of Mediterranean objects and visual culture. Hoffman argues that the ambiguous origins of motifs like the griffin stand as “an affirmation of circulation and networks of connection rather than…singular sources of origin… this helps to explain the similarities of these Mediterranean objects…and points to their belonging within a wider, shared visual culture.”7 The griffin is the first example Hoffman reviews, identifying it as a creature representative of power and victory, and a symbol that would have been both pictorially and thematically recognized and understood regardless of its production point.8 In conjunction with Hoffman’s reading of iconography and culture, changes in trade routes induced by imperial expansions shaped the material of the girdle. Military campaigns in the late thirteenth and early-to-mid fourteenth centuries (c. 1282-1355), under the reigns of King Milutin (1282-1321) and his grandson Czar Dusan (1331-1355) led to the expansion of the Serbian Empire. Due to this growth, Serbia gained control over the largest silver mining centers in the Balkans, making the region’s workshops the ideal place for goldsmiths to procure
materials. Goldsmiths traveled from as far as Germany and Italy to create these luxury court items, which gradually increased in demand as lords and ladies aimed to keep up with the latest “fashion trends.” Hoffman briefly touches on the fact that many of the surviving works of this kind are luxury items; their materialistic and iconographic splendor, along with the status they accrued by virtue of their place in courtly relations and affairs increased their value. All of these developments and ideas can be seen in the iconography and purpose of the Les Enluminures girdle. Additionally, the flexibility of silver—a metal that is easily melted and recast—made it possible for artisans to keep pace with shifting fashion trends. Goldsmiths’ records reveal that it was common for owners to bring in their girdles to be remade in the latest style.9 In this regard, medieval and Renaissance patrons practiced upcycling long before the term existed. It is for this very reason, however, that surviving girdles are extremely rare. In the event of financial trouble, individuals would often turn to taking their silver vessels and adornments to the goldsmith to have them melted down into currency.10 It is important to note that the velvet mount of Les Enluminures girdle is a later addition to the 9 Anna Parker, “Women, Bridal Girdles, and the Household in Renaissance Prague,” The Historical Journal 65, no. 2 (2022): 232-233. 10 J. F. Hayward, Virtuoso Goldsmiths and the Triumph of Mannerism, 1540–1620 (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet; Totowa, NJ: Biblio Distribution Center for Sotheby Parke Bernet Publications, 1976), 31.
6 Eva R. Hoffman, “Pathways of Portability: Islamic and Christian Interchange from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century,” Art History 24, no. 1 (2001): 21. 7 Hoffman, “Pathways of Portability,” 21. 8 Ibid.
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metal fixings. With girdles of this construction, it is not uncommon for the bases to have been replaced with a later material, or simply not to be redone altogether, leaving only the metal fixings of the girdle. Unlike gilded altarpieces and bejeweled reliquaries, which were stored and protected by the church, secular and personal items such as girdles were not so meticulously preserved, making them more prone to loss and destruction. Be that as it may, girdles with fabric bases weren’t always a byproduct of later reconstruction. In an effort to prevent the circulation of fraudulent buckles and fittings, crafting regulations were implemented to limit which fabrics could be used. A metal’s quality was measured by its weight, and to evade this standard, forgers often sewed their counterfeit fixings onto heavier fabrics to disguise the lightness of their inferior metals. Accordingly, lightweight textiles like fine silk and velvet were deemed the only materials proper in form, as they allowed the weight and therefore the authenticity of the metal to be more easily assessed.11 While this preference for delicate fabrics helped foreground the intrinsic value of precious metals, surviving girdles also reveal that ornamentation itself could become a central site of display. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds a girdle of more complex and rich ornamentation than the Les Enuminures example. Mounted on silver thread, this eightfoot-long girdle composed of enamel plaques presents a different kind of 11
craftsmanship and girdle style. Due to the intricacy and small size of the enamel plaques, the girdle draws the viewer in for a closer look to fully appreciate all of the details, creating an intimate and personal viewing experience for both the wearer and the viewer. This sumptuous girdle displays a variety of fine details, including courtly scenes of love, musicians, and animals in the enameled quatrefoils, and an open buckle formed by an intricately carved lady playing a tambourine. On the left side of the girdle next to the buckle hangs two small quatrefoil metal loops that almost blend into the gilded composition underneath them. Although small, these rings could potentially have been a method of fastening personal items to the girdle. A Northern Italian girdle in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago displays a more prominent example of this mechanism and further demonstrates the effect of trade and craftsmanship in the production of secular goods (Fig. 1). Dated c. 1325-1385, the AIC’s Girdle shares many compositional and design aspects with the Les Enluminures Girdle with Fantastical Beasts—both girdles are refurbished with similar modern velvet bases and feature fantastical beasts. These similarities affirm Hoffman’s ideas about the influence of cultural and social interchange on the popularity and spread of fantastic imagery as a motif for courtly girdles across different regions, Northern Italy and Serbia respectively. The expansion of the griffin within northern Italian goldsmiths’ iconographic knowledge may be
Vendor Description for Silver-gilt…, 2.
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Figure 1. Girdle (Belt), Northern Italian, c. 1325-1375, Silver, gilding, basse taille enamel, on a modern velvet support, The Art Institute of Chicago, IL. Image courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago, IL.
connected to the Pisa Griffin, a bronze sculpture produced in Islamic Spain. The sculpture’s origin introduces an additional geographical location that underscores the fluid circulation of such iconographies and its place of display furthers this narrative. It was mounted on the Pisa Cathedral in the early twelfth century, hence its name. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a girdle that is constructed and decorated with mythical beast details that are similar to the aforementioned girdles. This girdle is attributed to Northern Italy and dated c. 1330-50. While it would be reductive to attempt to retrace a precise pathway of transmission, as Hoffman cautions against, these overlapping geographies nevertheless suggest some degree of iconographic continuity or exchange. Since goldsmiths of the Middle Ages rarely left signatures or marks on their works, attributing pieces to specific workshops, masters, or regions is
increasingly difficult.12 Despite such restrictions, these surviving examples featuring metalwork with the same fantastical imagery placed on similar style girdles from different regions indicate that there were certain design elements that were popular and chosen to be featured so the patron could be “in vogue” with the times. Inasmuch as the iconographic programs of these girdles stand out, it’s the large hook that carries a heavier topic—literally and figuratively. Fastened to the velvet base between two fleur-de-lys mounts, a U-shaped hook hangs over the edge of the AIC girdle. Unlike the smaller quatrefoil rings of the Cleveland girdle, this rounded fitting on the AIC girdle provides a strong surviving example of the girdle not just as fashionable, but as multi-functional as well. 12 Hayward, Virtuoso Goldsmiths and the Triumph of Mannerism, 1540–1620, 55.
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Girdles as Functional
girdles had for a betrothed woman receiving a girdle as part of her wedding trousseau. Titled The Fool and the Lady, c. 1440/45–1503, the lady wears a girdle, weighed down at her side by a cluster of household items that indicate her role and responsibilities as lady of the house: a ring of keys and a pair of scissors enclosed in a pouch. As a homemaker, the keys are a direct reference to her authority over the household’s stores and valuables, while the scissors— regarded today as an ordinary domestic tool—carried far greater significance in the medieval context. A woman who wore scissors at her girdle displayed her practical role in the management and upkeep of textiles through her sewing skills.15 Having a pair of scissors handy and readily available demonstrated her attentiveness to her family and their belongings, visually displaying her compassion. There is an underlying theme of irony etched into this engraving, however, that introduces the girdle as a visual device in medieval art. The engraving belongs to Israhel van Meckenem’s Twelve Scenes of Everyday Life, a series rooted in the fifteenth-century tradition of moralizing prints practiced by artists such as Master E.S. . The Fool and the Lady, also known as The Older Woman and Her Younger Husband, is one of two scenes depicting a mismatched couple and relies heavily on irony to undercut the woman’s apparent domestic authority. Diane E. Scillia highlights these engravings
Much like the modern-day belt, the girdle was first fastened to the body as a practical way of ensuring that tunics stayed closed and pants held up. Oftentimes, the girdle itself was not visible, as the tunic would have folded over it, thus hiding the belt from view.13 However, this placement and display of the girdle on the body shifted with peoples’ changing needs. In the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, garments lacked pockets, which raised the issue of where to hold one’s items during travel and led to the introduction of the girdle as a means of carrying items.14 Some girdles, like the AIC and Cleveland examples, have hooks or rings that would be used to attach a variety of items to oneself. Pomanders were one type of unique personal item that was hung from the girdle. The pomander, a small, compartmentalized container, usually contained spices, balms, and other fragrant substances. Examples like the Pomander in the form of a book, c. 1620–1650, from Les Enluminures and a Pomander, c. 1600-10, from the Victoria and Albert Museum present two different kinds of pomanders that were likely hung from girdles, giving their owner easy access to their contents. Using the girdle to carry personal items was practiced in the medieval home as well. A playful engraving from the Met’s collection provides an example of the subtle underpinnings 13 Brooke, English Costume of the Early Middle Ages, 24. 14 Ibid.
15 Parker, “Women, Bridal Girdles, and the Household,” 237.
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as satirical and moralizing, and her analysis aids in revealing another unique perspective on girdles and their symbolism. As Scillia notes, this older woman has been married once previously and has now taken a younger husband out of either lust or economic dependency. 16 Within the moralizing framework of Meckenem’s engravings, the girdles and ribbons function here as pointed visual devices. The tangled ribbons conjoin at a knot between the two, symbolizing their marriage, yet the contrast in their body language exposes the instability of this union. The old wife’s blase expression is contrasted by her young husband’s drunken foolishness as he dances in untied shoes around a wine pitcher. The physical placement of their girdles reinforces this imbalance; her heavily laden girdle is emblematic of the weight of her domestic duties, while her foolish husband’s girdle and purse lay discarded on the ground, displaying his blatant disregard for his responsibilities. The old wife’s rounded, distended belly adds to the engraving’s ambiguity; while such a silhouette was desirable at this time, it may also suggest pregnancy. 17 Considering the wife has remarried to a younger man, depicting her pregnant in old age undermines the wife’s authority and responsibility, casting her not as a figure of stability and governance within the household
but as one susceptible to folly and excess. This visual contradiction destabilizes any clear moral hierarchy between the couple and reinforces the satire of the scene, thus providing further evidence of van Meckenem’s use of irony and moralization in the engraving. Van Meckenem’s choice to utilize the girdle in this satirical subject draws out the symbolic power the girdle held through a printed artistic medium; it shows how the values associated with the girdle as an accessory could be translated and understood when portrayed as a visual device in a pictorial work. As convenient as simply attaching individual items to one’s girdle was, it was not an entirely secure method of carrying around personal belongings. In the continual absence of pockets, purses came into fashion, and were commonly attached to girdles in the same manner that objects were.18 A miniature in the Manesse Codex, c. 1300-1320 illustrates how the two accessories were often sold together at markets, displaying how a potential buyer might have deliberated over which purse would match their girdle and vice versa.19 Aumônière or alms purse, was another name for these portable bags, and they would be used to hold these usual personal belongings. While both men and women carried purses, there were greater implications regarding one’s character for women. A Tomb Effigy of a Lady from the mid-thirteenth
16 Diane G. Scillia, “Looking for Fun in All the Wrong Places: Humour and Comedy in Moralizing Prints,” Profane Imagery in Marginal Arts of the Middle Ages (2009): 216. 17 Isabel Davis and Anna Burel, Conceiving Histories: Trying for Pregnancy, Past and Present (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2025).
18 Geoff Egan and Frances Pritchard, Dress Accessories, c. 1150 - c. 1450 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2002), 35. 19 Manesse Codex, ca. 1300–1320, Zürich, Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. Pal. Germ. 848, fol. 64 recto.
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century at The Met Cloisters sculpts a perfect example of how the new girdle-purse style was worn (Fig. 2). The lady wears her girdle in the style typical at the time: high on her ribs with the pendant hanging loosely down the front of her gown. Her aumônière is suspended from her girdle, weighed down with “coins for the needy [and] a needle case.”20 Similar to how Israhel van Meckenem incorporated the girdle as a moralizing visual device, the same concept is applied to this Tomb Effigy. In the context of a tomb sculpture, the girdle and suspended alms purse operate as moral signifiers, casting the woman as eternally charitable and reinforcing idealized feminine virtue beyond death. Yet while such moralized depictions and modes of wearing the girdle became widespread, they were not fixed; like all forms of dress, medieval clothing and its symbolic meanings remained subject to change. In the late sixteenth century, the upper middle class shifted away from girdle purses, which began to be associated with the working class,and toward the new beaded purse. 21 Through these developments, we begin to see the girdle fluctuate in function in the same manner it did through fashion and style, showing how varying changes in social values and needs can influence not just aesthetic appearance but also functional value. Although girdle
Figure 2. Tomb Effigy of a Lady, mid-13th century. Limestone, 87 x 35 1/4 in. French. The Cloisters Collection, New York. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.
purses fell out of fashion due to association with the working class, there were other functional aspects of the girdle that continued to persist and grow as a way to identify oneself as not just wealthy, but also pious. Alongside sheathed scissors, bulging girdle purses, and various other personal effects, hung the girdle book with a unique cover that was constructed specifically for hanging from one’s girdle. From England to Scotland to Germany, girdle books were used fervently, attesting to their popularity. The contents of these books ranged from religious to legal to even philosophical. Margit J. Smith turns the pages of these
20 “Tomb Effigy of a Lady,” French, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 21 Hannah Robb, “Purses and the Charitable Gift,” Journal of Social History 49, no. 2 (2015): 400.
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ways, including tying the fabric strips directly to the girdle, folding the long end under and over the girdle, or by a ring or metal hook.23 The painting, St Catherine and the Demons by an Unknown Polish master c. 1500 in the National Museum provides a clear artistic example of one way the girdle book was attached to the girdle (Fig. 3). The book covers were attached to the girdle in such a way so that when the book was lifted by the patron, its inscriptions were rightside up and could be read without having to remove it from the belt. Un l i ke item s prev iou sly discussed that displayed decorative qualities like girdle purses and eventually the beaded purse, girdle books were produced with the purpose of being used.24 One example from Smith’s book exemplifies what it meant to maximize the utility of these handy vade-mecum. Kept in the National Library of Scotland, Neil McBeath’s Psalter (MS. 72.1.4) was found in Edinburgh and is the only known surviving example from Scotland today. At only 2 ½ x 1 inches, this tiny manuscript is packed with religious and medical texts, providing unique insight into the life of the patron as well as the relationship between clerical responsibilities and advancements in medical proceedings. 25 Girdle books came in a variety of sizes, but the particularly small dimensions of this manuscript differentiates it from others, and the amount of visible wear in the binding suggests that this
Figure 3. Birth scroll with prayers and invocations to Saints Quiricus and Julitta Figure. vellum, 100 mm x 3320 mm. The Wellcome Collection, London. Image courtesy of The Wellcome Collection, London.
fascinating manuscripts in her book The Medieval Girdle Book. Smith defines a “girdle book” as a book that “has a cover that extends usually from the bottom edge of the boards beyond the limits of the book itself and may end in a knot.”22 Made out of various animal skins like goat, sheep, and calf, these bindings were attached to the girdle in a myriad of
23 24 25
22 Margit J. Smith, The Medieval Girdle Book (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2017), 2.
28
Smith, The Medieval Girdle Book, 12-13. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 78-79.
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book was intensely used. As much as these girdle books were functional, owning and wearing one on a girdle was no doubt a status symbol. Having the means to not only commission a book but also obtain the specialized binding to attach it to a girdle is a point that must be considered when reflecting on the usage of the girdle book in the medieval period. Despite this class-based view on the book-girdle relationship, the girdle fulfills yet another functional role as it carries a patron’s book for them. When the book in question contains a religious text, the girdle itself takes on a faith-related role— something that has been embedded in the value of the girdle for centuries prior and continues to reshape its contemporary understanding. Unfortunately, like girdle purses, girdle books faced a similar fate; as medieval garments gained pockets and books began to be stored in the upright position on shelves, resulting in the loss of their unique covers via the patron cutting or completely redoing the binding, the hanging vade-mecum met its end. The girdle itself, however, persists against these stark fashion advancements and trends and continues to transform with the introduction of the cult of relics.
of the Virgin’s Assumption into heaven, the girdle had a role as a relic of the Virgin. Mary is said to have given her girdle to Saint Thomas at her Assumption, leaving tangible evidence of her corporeal existence.26 According to tradition, her girdle was eventually transferred to the Pieve of Santo Stefano in Prato, where it was a cherished relic, credited with miracles related to protection in battle and childbirth. In contemporary relic culture, Prato continues to hold ostentation rites five times a year, affirming how this girdle became a prominent item of faith, civic pride, and protection. The cult of the Virgin’s girdle stretches into other regions in Italy and beyond, further developing the religious connotations associated with the medieval girdle. In fourteenth century Tuscany, imagery of the Madonna del Parto—a depiction of the Virgin pregnant and wearing the belt claimed by Prato— became popular. Well-known frescos portraying the Madonna del Parto include versions by Taddeo Gaddi and Nardo di Cione; both show the Virgin wearing a girdle above her distended belly, the same way chastity belts would have been worn in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The girdle relic’s association with childbirth introduced a new cult and dimension to the girdle and what it meant to wear one as a woman. Pregnancy and childbirth is an intense and laborious process
Girdles as an Expression of Faith B eyond t he cha n nels explored thus far, the medieval girdle is fastened to a third, more nuanced sphere of significance: faith. Rooted in apocryphal accounts
26 Brendan Cassidy, “The Assumption of the Virgin on the Tabernacle of Orsanmichele,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 51 (1988): 179.
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for the mother and, despite the technological advances in modernmedicinal practice, the chance of an unfortunate turn in the delivery of the child looms over every mother’s head. Such anxieties and fears were only heightened in the Middle Ages, when the medical practices we have today did not exist. With the added stress of producing a child to continue the family lineage, this first step into motherhood was precarious. During the Middle Ages, the mortality rates for both mothers and their babies were between 30 to 60 percent.27 In medieval England, these dangers inspired the creation of the birthing girdle which functioned as ritualistic items to pray for a safe pregnancy. Low class women often used birthing girdles constructed from silk paper and parchment inscribed with prayers, while higher class women were loaned holy girdles like the Prato belt and relics for their pregnancies. 28 Regardless of the prestige or quality, these women wore birthing girdles with the same hope: the safe delivery of their child. During the Reformation, birthing girdles were banned and targeted for destruction. Due to their centurieslong association with the cult of relics, birthing girdles were seen as superstitious tokens of protection and considered more magical than biblical, thus making them vulnerable to iconoclasm throughout the sixteenth-century religious
movement. Surviving girdles are rare, but even rarer is an example that shows they were worn during active labor. However, in 2021, Dr. Sarah Fiddyment of the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge led a study wherein she confirmed their use. Fiddyment utilized proteomic analysis, a technique that extracts a biological sample from the object and analyzes the proteins in it. Through this sampling, she found proteins that match cervico-vaginal fluid as well as proteins from honey, milk, and eggs—all of which are items that have been documented in medieval texts as treatments related to pregnancy.29 The medieval birthing girdle Fiddyment tested is from the Wellcome Collection (Fig. 4). The girdle dates to c. 1500 and is made from sheepskin. When completely unfurled, the belt reveals three meters of figures relating to the Passion of Christ, as well as prayers and charms. Many of these inscriptions are now illegible or smudged, presumably from age and usage, thus demonstrating how much the patron valued and persistently wore the girdle. Similar to fashion girdles, the belt is long and narrow, which led Fiddyment to believe that the birthing girdle was worn in the same way that chastity belts were. Although the function may have changed, and the materials have shifted from glamorous enamels to strips of parchment, the basic structure of
27 “Medieval ‘Birthing Girdle’ Parchment Was Worn during Labour, Study Suggests,” University of Cambridge, March 10, 2021. 28 Parker, “Women, Bridal Girdles, and the Household,” 235.
29 “Medieval ‘Birthing Girdle’ Parchment,” Cambridge.
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the girdle remains consistent. This ability to simultaneously maintain its basic structure and move fluidly through different communities and values is a unique aspect of the girdle; the accessory stays the same but the interpretation and application of it does not.
blur the boundary between utility and expression, serving in both the structural and decorative roles considered in this paper. Regardless of its specific usage or interpretation, the girdle fastens itself into medieval history as an object that reveals subtleties of private life, spiritual practice, and personal identity.
Conclusion T he development a nd characterization of the girdle through history spans regions and centuries, demonstrating how the form of this functional and decorative accessory was responsive to shifting socio-cultural and religious currents. What was initially conceived as an item of function has also been a multifaceted object of fashion and protection. In many ways, contemporary fashion trends are echoed in medieval consumption movements surrounding the girdle, demonstrating that time does not necessarily separate human engagement with material objects and culture. While the belt is a straightforward comparison, other contemporary fashion trends, such as pants shape and rise or the cyclical popularity of corsetry and waistemphasizing silhouettes, reveal how fashion repeatedly returns to the waist as a site of aesthetic and symbolic attention. The recent revival of corset-inspired tops or waist belts layered over dresses demonstrates a continued fascination with defining, adorning, and visually highlighting the midsection of the body. Much like the medieval girdle, modern waist-centered garments 31
Issue 18
The Power of Display:
How Exhibitions Represent Seydou Keïta Meghan Mandra
Edited by Siobhán Minerva Across multiple exhibitions since his global introduction, Seydou Keïta has been positioned as a leading African photographer and continuously examined through individual and group exhibitions. These exhibitions have played a crucial role in shaping the art historical narrative around Keïta. However, they often reinforce institutional control over his representation. As Carol Duncan writes in Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, “To control a
museum means precisely to control the representation of a community and its highest values and truths.”1 Despite his earlier exhibitions legitimizing Keïta’s reputation beyond Mali, many curatorial approaches have overlooked him and his sitters’ efforts to visualize unique self-presentation and aspirations for independence under French colonial 1 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals : Inside Public Art Museums (Taylor & Francis Group, 1995), 24.
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rule. As a result, they frequently failed to convey the depth of Keïta’s studio practice and the social histories embedded within his work, instead offering a narrow view that reduces his prints to aestheticized images of “modern” African citizens. More recent exhibitions have addressed and challenged these generalizations by foregrounding Keïta and his sitters, highlighting not only his creative eye and technical skill as a photographer but also his intention to capture the unique agency of each person he photographs. To demonstrate this, four exhibitions, including Keïta’s first in 1991 and his most recent in 2025, will be investigated. These exhibitions uniquely address — or fail to address — the fact that his prints were taken out of their African context and have since had their portrayal controlled by the ideals of curators and scholars from the West. Through exhibition photos, curatorial choices, catalogs, and published critiques, this essay will analyze how museums and galleries contribute to the evolving representation of African photography and Keïta’s legacy.2
he opened a studio to photograph family, friends, and clients.3 In the late 1940s, Mali underwent rapid societal change, including the growth of urban life and the rise of anti-colonial movements, with photography used to document it. During this transition, Keïta used his portraiture to show people amid social and political change. 4 Keïta captured the feelings of his time in a way photographers hadn’t before. Seydou Keïta’s portraits depict citizens of Mali who wanted to present or invent themselves, using various props and backdrops to customize their image and make them look and feel their best. Clients were often depicted with patterned sheets beneath or behind them, adding shapes and movement to the composition. This use of fabric is a key element of his photographs, heightening each individual’s “visual intensity” and serving as a frame for the sitter’s body.5 The sitters’ clothing was also ornately patterned, with traditional Mande or Europeaninspired styles worn. Sitters could choose to wear traditional clothing to emphasize their cultural heritage, or Western-inspired dress as an aspiration to align with the modern style. For example, many men often wore French suits in their images,
SEYDOU KEÏTA Initially a carpenter, Seydou Keïta was first introduced to photography by his uncle, who gave him his first Kodak camera in 1935. Later in 1948, fueled by his newfound passion,
3 “Seydou Keïta,” The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, https://www. guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/seydou-keita. 4 Mali gained independence in 1960, so while Keita practiced photography after independence, many of his subjects were from the preindependence era. 5 Candace M. Keller, Imaging Culture: Photography in Mali, West Africa (Indiana University Press, 2021), 305.
2 While this essay draws on mainly past exhibitions, it is important to note the reliance on archival materials rather than live experience and writing.
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TRANSFORMATION OF PURPOSE
and Keïta even had suits available for those who could not afford them. Often his portraits were created to deliberately look “formal, serious, conservative or restrained” but also “appearing stylish, rebellious and in control.”6 There was a trust between Keïta and his sitters, as he helped develop his clients’ identities through individual or collective depictions. Due to this, each photograph shows a level of intimacy and uniqueness, as Keïta carefully posed his clients in flattering positions, a practice not commonly seen before in African portraiture, as the history of photography in Africa began with trying to capture “exoticising” images of individuals.7 Besides being a material form of selffashioning, these portraits became a means of documenting agency after being under French colonial rule for 70 years between 1890 and 1960, 8 making the non-visual aspects of these photographs almost more important than the physical image itself. These images capture Mali at a time of change and show a visual history of resistance.9
Displaying these photographs to Western audiences greatly tra nsformed t heir f u nct ion. Originally, Keïta’s photos were privately commissioned and printed as small-scale postcards for personal treasuring, but are now shown in museum and gallery settings for thousands to view.10 In large-scale viewing, the sitters and composition remain captivating, but impact is driven mainly by form and appearance and not by the individuals shown or the photographer.11 This shift highlights the complex, often violent, presentation of African photography in Western contexts. Through this transformation of their purpose, their prints become decontextualized and open to Western interpretations of “high art” and commercial value rather than their African reality.12 Africa Explorers: 20th century African art at The New Museum and The Center for African Arts in New York. May 11 – September 18, 1991 When discussing Seydou Keïta’s
6 Keller, Imaging Culture, 240-241. 7 During 19th-century colonialism, Westerners documented Africa and its citizens as “primitive” or removed from modern “civilized” society. 8 “Changes in the Borders and Name of Mali Since 1890”, Virginia Department of Education, https://www.doe.virginia.gov/teaching-learningassessment/instruction/history-and-socialscience. 9 Allison Moore, Embodying Relation: Art Photography in Mali (Duke University Press, 2020), 42.
10 Keita’s prints were formally exhibited across the United States and Europe before they arrived in Bamako, underscoring the flawed canonizing of Keita while failing to address his local contexts. 11 Keller, Imaging Culture, 386. 12 Alessandro Jedlowski, “Constructing artworks. Issues of Authorship and Articulation around Seydou Keïta’s Photographs” (ResearchGate, January 2008), 37.
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exhibition history, it is important to address Susan Vogel’s 1991 exhibition Africa Explorers: 20th-century African Art, held at The New Museum and The Museum of African Arts in New York. This event was Keïta’s first formal introduction to an international audience. Vogel’s curatorial framework sought to expand the exoticizing conception of African Art through thematically divided spaces such as “international,” “traditional,” “new functional,” “extinct,” and “urban” art. Among the objects in these exhibitions, she displayed small-scale prints from negatives she collected in West Africa during the 1970s. At the New Museum, the prints were mounted closely together on a tealcolored wall in a dimly lit room. Vogel’s intention with these prints was to introduce a kind of African photography to the United States, depicting the “modern” African citizen and contrasting it with previous colonial-driven images. However, she did so by presenting these highly personal and private portraits as “high” art in a museum, thereby undermining the idea that these images are forms of cultural resistance. Labeling these images as “high” or “elevated” hides the fact that the negatives were taken from their original country and decontextualized. In addition, the subtle imposition of a new “type” onto these photos’ subjects creates a kind of canon that the United States art market began using to categorize the “modern” African citizen. Most astonishingly, the prints she displayed showed portraits of unknown African citizens by an
“unknown” artist. This artist was Keïta, who was then unaware that his prints had made an international debut, especially one in a formal museum setting. Since they were labeled without context, the absence of these details draws attention solely to aesthetics rather than the identity of Keïta and his subjects. Without this background, the American audience visiting this show would not know the radical agency being asserted by these prints. This raises questions about how audiences can successfully view and assess the importance of an artwork when all that is known is its visual form, erasing the truths of its reality. In Vogel’s statements on the exhibition’s intention, she explicitly expressed her desire to remove preconceived and biased ideas about African art. She said: Africa Explorers seeks to focus on Africa, its concerns, and its art and artists in their own contexts and in their own voices…we preferred to try to understand Africa’s experience of this century from the African perspective, from a point of view in which Western things and ideas are particles in a matrix of preexisting African styles and philosophies, in which images of whites do not take pride of place, and in which it is perfectly natural, even expected, for an artist to paint in acrylic, or for a mask costume to include a digital watch (if, of course,
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it is a high-status mask). 13
and exploited by other cultures.”14 Brenson implies that the exhibition shows a shift in how African artists have become more active participants in art scenes. Despite not mentioning Keït a’s pr i nt s i nd iv idu a l ly, Brenson also writes, “They include photographs of Africans in which a longing to be recorded by the camera seems, at times, almost a physical part of the print.”15 This shows that even with little knowledge of the photo’s background, they still stuck with the viewer. In contrast, more recent critiques are less celebratory. Specifically in 1993, author John Picton states the exhibition “was developed in and by ‘Western’ institutions and therefore had nothing to do with the perspectives of the artists from Africa.” Picton critiques the show’s failure to consider the African artists’ motivations or the histories of the works being shown. Instead, he says the exhibition serves “digestible nibbles” to American viewers. 16 Further, author and artist Olu Oguibe stated in 1993 that while Vogel describes herself as an “intimate outsider,” she makes deliberate choices that distance African artists (the supposed “insiders”) from their art. This makes them “strangers in their own discourse.”17 These conflicting reactions show the complexities with handling and implementing change, as some may support a museum’s
Even with the intention of being transformative, the extent to which this exhibition succeeded was limited. Furthermore, with statements like this, while there is a notion to amplify African art and artists, the tone undermines what African arts really are, thereby undermining Vogel’s declared motivation for the exhibition. How can Keïta or his photographs tell a story “in their own voices” if his name or the historical context are not specified? Keïta’s portraits are deeply connected to their pre- and postcolonial context and the sitters’ self-fashioning, and by stripping them of this specific perspective, viewers are denied the ability to understand them properly. Also, by generalizing the African continent as a whole, it continues the stereotypes of viewing Africa as culturally homogenous. W hile it is d iff icu lt to accurately determine how the show was interpreted overall, reviews reveal polarizing responses worth examining. Art critic Michael Brenson reviewed the show the year it began, generally praising it in his New York Times article “Africans Explore Their Own Evolving Culture,” stating, “It is a clear attempt to present African artists as active explorers and exploiters rather than passive specimens being explored
14 Michael Brenson, “REVIEW/ART; Africans Explore Their Own Evolving Cultures,” New York Times, May 17, 1991. 15 Ibid. 16 Julia Friedel, “Colonial History Africa Explores,” Contemporary And, January 6, 2017. 17 Ibid.
13 “Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art,” The New Museum, https://archive. newmuseum.org/exhibitions/206.
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Seydou Keïta: The Image King of Africa at Sean Kelly, New York. January 28 - March 4, 2006
actions and control of narratives of its artists, like Brenson, while other authors, like Oguibe, emphasize the danger of passively viewing objects and not questioning the history that led to it being shown in a public display. Notably, this exhibition took place over thirty years ago, when African art was often categorized as “timeless” and “primitive.” Therefore, one cannot completely tarnish this exhibition’s attempt to change this sequence. It eventually bolstered artists like Seydou Keïta and inspired more exhibitions to showcase him, marking the beginning of his extensive exhibition history. Yet, it had glaring shortcomings that would later shape early interpretations of Keïta’s work. Although Mali has since gained political independence, this exhibition demonstrates how museums are able to perpetuate systems of hierarchy by exerting control over African art and systemically undermining its unique cultural value. This exploitation also suggests that only Americans or Europeans can elevate these artworks, when they were never theirs to show or elevate in the first place. It also raises questions about how an audience can successfully view and assess the importance of an artwork when only its visual form is known. The audience is forced not to understand Keita’s prints, but to view them as a spectacle.
The 2006 Sean Kelly exhibition Seydou Keïta: The Image King of Africa in New York marked a significant presentation of Keïta’s work for its pivotal role in establishing a standard of transparency regarding authorship. The Sean Kelly Gallery worked with Keïta’s foundation, established in Bamako in 2001, to address the lack of attribution for his prints, which had since been a problem for the photographer after Jean Pigozzi and Andre Magnin acquired hundreds of his negatives in 1992. The gallery and the foundation displayed works that were “carefully chosen in collaboration,” reflecting a mutual decision-making process.18 This allowed the foundation to maintain control of how Keïta’s work and legacy were presented, particularly since he had passed away shortly before this exhibition. Jean Pigozzi, a French art collector, and Andre Magnin, a French curator, both played a large role in Keïta’s sensation since they were the ones to find and bring him to the United States following their fascination with the prints in Vogel’s show. Despite having a symbiotic relationship with Pigozzi and Magnin at the beginning, Keïta severed ties with them because they profited tremendously from exploiting Keïta’s prints through continuous printing and circulation of his work. While 18 “Seydou Keïta The Image King of Africa,” Sean Kelly, https://www.skny.com/exhibitions/ seydou-keita?view=slider#2.
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Keïta had a prosperous local career in Bamako, supporting himself and his family through his studio, he voiced concerns about the rights and compensation for his prints to international audiences. Tensions grew as questions of authorship and control remained unresolved by the time of Keïta’s death in 2001. This 2006 exhibition asserted to the public that Keïta’s portrayal did not rely on the Pigozzi Collection and publicly rejected the controversial practices surrounding his work. Consequently, Kelly’s exhibition showed how museums can help artists reclaim their agency and legacy. It also re-emphasizes the powerful dynamic that American and European collectors possess in controlling a narrative. Sean Kelly was able to support Keïta in this fight and helped him to reclaim his narrative. Although the gallery excelled at uplifting Keïta and his work, the exhibition itself has many weaknesses. The gallery’s large, open space showcased numerous large-scale prints of Keïta’s work, many of which had never been seen before. The walls and lighting were bright white, creating the “white cube” aesthetic. The purpose of using a “white cube” as a model is to present works in white-walled, minimally decorated spaces that typically remove context and didactic information, encouraging viewers to focus solely on the displayed object. The sterile setting diminished the image’s vibrancy. This setting elevates artworks to “high art” status but strips them of their original purpose, treating them as aesthetic objects
for display. In a manner similar to Vogel’s, this curatorial strategy decontextualized the prints entirely. The prints’ larger reproductions are captivating and allow the viewer to engage with the images more in depth, to see details more closely, but they remove their intimacy and their true historical purpose. The gallery did write about how the models used photographs to show “how they saw themselves, and how they wanted to be seen by others,” and how Keïta captured the social and political climate in Bamako, but the catalog lacks an analysis of Mali during this time.19 Critiques of this exhibition focus on disputes over ownership and distribution of archives, not on the exhibition’s formal qualities. As writer and lecturer Kobby Ankomah Graham notes, “the commercialization of Keïta’s portraits, and the way their deep cultural ties to Mali are often diminished when framed for the Western art market,” exemplifies the exploitation of African art on a global scale. 20 Similarly, writer Michael Rips, in the New York Times article “Who Owns Seydou Keïta?,” details Keïta’s concerns that Pigozzi and Magnin were signing his prints without authorization. To protect his work, Keïta signed image rights to his agent, Jean-Marc Patras. When Pigozzi heard of this, he screamed at Sean Kelly, “I own
19 Ibid. 20 Kobby Ankomah Graham, “Seydou Keïta’s Revelatory Portraits of Malian Life,” Aperture, August 15, 2025.
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Seydou Keïta.”21 This language shows how American and European museums and collectors commonly assert ownership over an artist and their work, profiting without regard for the artist’s authorship and autonomy. While this show made strides in reclaiming his narrative, his previous histories of display still lead some to believe they have ownership of his work and can indefinitely have authority over his photographs. Displaying Keïta’s work in a gallery changes how the public perceives his art, as in galleries, the commercial value of his pieces takes priority. While museums emphasize the artist and the art’s context, galleries primarily focus on collectors, which often leads to the “white cube” setting intended to elevate the objects and increase their appeal to buyers. This exhibition is significant because, while it is geared toward commercial interests, it highlights major concerns about copyright and ownership. Therefore, the gallery gives Keïta the credit he is due and protects the images from commercial exploitation. Having an exhibition that prioritizes his foundation and authentic archive signals that his work is not merely reproducible images to be constantly reprinted; they are meaningful historical artifacts and valuable representations of his skill and his sitters’ presence. Since Keïta’s foundation was heavily involved in the process, it shows a standard for how institutions should involve the artist or their foundation
for commercial or display reasons. Seydou Keïta: Bamako Portraits at Foam Fotografiemuseum. April 6 - June 20, 2018 The 2018 Foam Fotogra f iemuseum ex hibition Seydou Keïta: Bamako Portraits in Amsterdam presented an engaging collection of Keïta’s prints, showcasing a range of scales and styles of prints. It comprehensively illuminated his role as an African photographer through the extensive collection it displayed. The prints for this exhibition were presented not linea rly along the wall, but clustered and asymmetrically arranged on walls painted blue, red, and yellow. The wall colors are bright and rich, contrasting with the black-and-white prints. The walls do not detract from or overwhelm the images; rather, they connect to the vibrant realities of these moments between Keïta and his sitters. It replaces the colorful aspects of the sitters’ backgrounds, clothing, and accessories, that were rendered as a monochrome image. In addition to the images on the walls, display tables featured smallscale prints and postcards. By doing this, the Foam Fotografiemuseum created a successful way to showcase “vernacular photography,” or photography taken for personal or functional means and not meant to serve as “high art”. By showcasing these images in their original form, the viewer better understands their original historical context as personal property for the commissioner.
21 Michael Rips, “Who Owns Seydou Keïta?,” New York Times, January 22, 2006.
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By showing how Keïta’s artwork originally functioned and how it is now displayed as large-scale prints, the museum acknowledges the work’s transformation when produced outside its home country of Mali. The accessible critiques of this show are primarily favorable. Lauren Jackson commends the use of vintage prints in the display tables. She notes that, “Keïta envisioned his work to be treasured by his customers.”22 This underscores the exhibition’s success at demonstrating the prints’ significance as objects for each sitter. Writer and artist Cihad Caner explained the exhibition as a space that “reverses the colonial fantasies we got used to seeing.” Therefore, it presents the viewer with an exhibition of Keita’s work that seeks to reveal his photographs as not just being visual, but also informative.23 This exhibition was significant for making strides toward more considerate curatorial choices and for using Keïta’s archive beyond largescale reproduction. The FOAM had a small description for their exhibition, but it made strong statements like “His oeuvre reflects a portrait of an era that captures Bamako’s transition from a cosmopolitan city in a French colony to the proud capital of independent Mali,”24 highlighting the transition Keita is able to capture. However, the exhibition’s writing lacks emphasis on how the sitters in
these images commissioned their portraits to showcase their unique self-image and represent themselves as they desired. A sentence mentions, “People visited Keïta’s studio to have their picture taken at their best,”25 but sitters not only wanted to look their best they also wanted a physical image that showed their agency and style. Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens at Brooklyn Museum October 10, 2025–May 17, 2026 Catherine E. McKinley and Imani Williford’s 2025 Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum is one of the most ambitious presentations of Keïta’s work since his introduction to international audiences. The exhibition features 280 photographs, along with supplementary materials such as textiles, jewelry, camera equipment, and a video interview. The curators worked closely with Keïta’s living family members to ensure thoughtful consideration and family consent in representing his artistic identity after his passing. Alongside loans from The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection, Keïta’s family loaned negatives from their archive and provided oral histories to elevate the exhibition, unlike any other so far. In an interview, McKinley explained, “It’s a chance to offer new information, a new framework.”26 In this show,
22 Lauren Jackson, “Feature Seydou Keïta: Bamako Portraits,” lensculture. 23 Cihad Caner, “Sun in the mist of colonialism, ‘Bamako Portraits,’” Daily Sabah, April 23, 2018. 24 “Seydou Keïta,” Foam, https://www.foam. org/events/seydou-keita.
25 Ibid. 26 Folasade Ologundudu, “In ‘Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens,’ a Legendary African
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Figure 1. Meghan Mandra, Installation view Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens, 2025. Digital photograph. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn. Image courtesy of Meghan Mandra.
McKinley attempts to contextualize Keita’s work by exploring the motivating factors of his sitters, who may have been driven to the studio by new urbanization, by a desire to create family memorabilia through photography, or by a desire for selfdocumentation with embellishments of fashion and accessories. The exhibition is arranged in a series of blue-walled rooms, each focusing on a category such as “The Elegants,” “The Pretenders,” or “Coming of Age.” Prints are hung in both linear and salonstyle arrangements, ranging in size from floor-to-ceiling works to the original small postcard formats in which they were produced. Beyond
the hung prints, display boxes with more postcards and archival material are shown. The exhibition explains that original small prints are often considered secondary to modern prints, but they are, in fact, the true works of art.27 The exhibition also confronts colonial history, describing how photography once acted as a visual form of control and ethnographic practice, going beyond what previous exhibition catalogs have included. Doing this helps provide more context for the importance of Keïta reclaiming photography as a mode of agency. Besides just displaying the images, this exhibition categorizes 27 Wall label for “Handheld” Display Table, in the Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Photographer Gets His Biggest Showcase Yet,” Vogue, October 24, 2025.
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them for further analysis. For example, “The Pretenders” category shows how later generations critiqued Keïta’s images and sitters for the amount of Western accessories shown. Citizens of Bamako are seen with wristwatches, handbags, cars, or radios, which is commonly seen as an embrace of colonial aesthetics. In “The Elegants,” subjects wear tailored outfits inspired by European styles, underscoring the importance of clothing and fabric in his images. The exhibition shows how, through local fashions, Western styles, or a synthesis of both, dress operates as a visual language in Keita’s prints that ref lects personal expression while also reflecting broader social relations. The “Coming of Age” section shows how the studio was a place for youth to dress their best and have a photograph taken as they enter adulthood. Most notably, in addition to prints, this exhibition presents physical materials that have not been shown before, such as Keïta’s personal photography equipment, highlighting the more tactile and technical qualities of his work and allowing the viewer not only to praise the final product but also to understand the process he went through. They also show negatives, which are the original results produced by the camera that allow replication of prints to continue; they are the objects that have sustained Keïta’s legacy. The Brooklyn Museum displays digital versions of original negatives in a light box to show what the images usually look like versus how they would look after printing. The museum made this
decision because some negatives are in extremely fragile condition, but this is also the intended way to see his images. The back room of the exhibition is dedicated to textiles. Various dresses and fabrics are displayed to explore how style translates into personality and identity in photography. From the garments being worn to the backdrops behind them, they played a significant role in Keïta’s images. Textiles are also spread throughout the space, hung from the ceiling, showing patterns and colors that draw the viewer’s attention straight above. Chairs and catalogs are dispersed throughout the gallery, and a video interview with Keita’s family members plays at the back of the space, contributing to the exhibition’s sounds. Posing two viewpoints, critic Arthur Lubow wrote, in the New York Times article, “Seydou Keïta and the Forging of West African Identity,” that the images are “enlarged, framed and hung in a museum, these images are uprooted from their functional context, the sort of transformation that also occurs when African ritual masks and religious objects are displayed on white gallery walls.” However, Lubow also commends the show, writing it “opens a window into the life of the artist.”28 In another review, writer Loring Knoblauch criticizes the thematic categorization McKinley uses for each room section.
28 Arthur Lubow, “Seydou Keïta and the Forging of West African Identity,” The New York Times, October 16, 2025.
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Figure 2. Meghan Mandra,Identification photos Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens, 2025. Digital photograph. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn. Image courtesy of Meghan Mandra.
Figure 3. Meghan Mandra, Gallery wall Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens, 2025. Digital photograph. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn. Image courtesy of Meghan Mandra.
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They state, “While curator Catherine McKinley has divided the exhibit up into various thematic sections, likely to help break up the flow, these distinctions aren’t really necessary. The truth of the matter is that during the 1950s, Keïta had a steady stream of portrait clients that filled up his workdays. The resulting photographs capture a vibrant (and broad) cross section of Bamako society.”29 This highlights an important fact that categorizing these photographs into separate sections is just a way of dividing the collection to create a narrative fitting for contemporary viewers, but unfitting for Keïta’s photos. Although the exhibition has been open for less than a year, it has already marked a critical shift in the presentation of Keïta’s work. The approach redefines how institutions conduct research, draw on archives, or find new perspectives in their conversations about Keïta. This exhibition sets a precedent and new standards for the attention to detail and consideration future exhibitions should command.
reaches thousands, whether one views it in person or sees it online; its interpretations continue indefinitely like a living being. Whether they’re celebrating the pure visual forms of the prints or truly interested in learning the deep history behind them, each exhibition has a story that can be critiqued in the overall conversation about how Keïta’s legacy is projected to the world. Since the initial exhibition in the United States in 1991, these exhibitions have shown the limits and strengths of curatorial approaches to Keïta’s work. While recent shows like Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens show the expanding recognition of his skill, the context of his practice, and the fashioning of his subject, earlier shows like Africa Explorers: 20th century African art lacked consideration for the fuller context, yet still made a strong impact on Keïta’s legacy. Looking forward, since his prints can be reprinted indefinitely and his body of work remains alive, museums and galleries need to approach Keïta and his sitters with greater consideration for their role in shaping representations of Mali and their continued significance within art history.
CONCLUSION Over time, through exhibitions in Europe and the United States, we see how the interpretation and legacy of Seydou Keïta’s photography are shaped by how art institutions claim authority and choose to represent his work. A gallery or museum can create a spatial and multisensory space that 29 Loring Knoblauch, “Seydou Keïta, A Tactile Lens @Brooklyn Museum,” Collector Daily, November 5, 2025.
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Dating Dadaism:
Recontextualizing Georges RibemontDessaignes’s Silence
Liv Steinhardt
Edited by Jacqueline Marks
Issue 18
While lauded as a prolific poet, author, playwright, librettist, composer, performance artist, and active member of both the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes is rarely remembered as a painter.1 Limited scholarship exists regarding his artwork, and formal analyses of even his most famous painting, Silence (Fig. 1), displayed periodically as part of The Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, are few and far between. This painting has been construed as somewhat of a Dadaist mystery: both its content and context have been, rather ironically, shrouded in silence, thus complicating any attempt at deriving specific meaning from Ribemont-Dessaignes’s work. Although the museum label and other scholarly research has assigned Silence a date of circa 1915, consideration of Ribemont-Dessaignes’s biography and the history of Dada proves that the work was, in fact, painted circa 1919-1920. Pushing Silence’s creation date to the end of the 1910s reveals not just a cohesive stylistic lineage, but a significant political message that would have been pertinent to post-war headlines around 1919. Ribemont-Dessaignes’s output of paintings throughout the early to mid-1910s is poorly documented, likely because he made very few.2 His early paintings and sketches, made throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, experimented
Figure 1. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Silence, c.1915, Oil on canvas, 921. x 73.3 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.
with only pointillism and Fauvism, focusing on landscapes and the occasional human figure.3 But in 1913, Ribemont-Dessaignes quit painting, later writing, “I had come to the conclusion that there was no reason to depict in one way rather than another.”4 He personally recounts that he “ceased all artistic activity” up until his involvement in World War I, “living a very difficult life, filled with worries and various emotions,” only writing poetry.5 The earliest publicly available 3 Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Paysage pointilliste, aux pins maritimes en bord de mer, 1906; Ibid, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Femme à l’ écharpe, circa 1905–1909. 4 Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Déjà Jadis ou du Mouvement Dada à L’espace Abstrait (Belles Lettres, 2016), 44. 5 Ibid.
1 Victoria Nes Kirby, “Georges Ribemont Dessaignes,” The Drama Review: TDR 16, no. 1 (1972): 104. 2 Artnet, “Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes Artists Works”; MutualArt, “Georges RibemontDessaignes | 44 Artworks.”
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painting of Ribemont-Dessaignes after his break from painting in 1913 is Young Woman from 1919, which is stylistically consistent with his Dadaist contemporaries’ later works. 6 In 1915, RibemontDessaignes was drafted and sent to the Military School at the War College, then immediately assigned to the Family Information Service within the College in Paris. There, he began writing his play, The Emperor of China, on green index cards and War Ministry letterhead, using the scarce resources at hand during his time in the service. 7 In fact, Ribemont-Dessaignes and several friends published a “clandestine” absurdist journal during their time in the Military School. 8 Had they been caught, it would have earned them a court-martial.9 If RibemontDessaignes was short on scraps of paper in 1915, it is unlikely he would have been able to obtain spare oil paints, let alone a 92.1 x 73.3 cm canvas. It is even less likely that, under threat of severe legal prosecution and punishment, he would have deigned to create and store this large absurdist painting. It is also implausible that, in 1915, Ribemont-Dessaignes would have known about the Dadaist machine painting craze. While artists like Duchamp and Picabia were creating machine paintings since 1915, their mechanomorphs only began circulating in New York
gallery exhibitions and Picabia’s stateside publication, 291, in early 1916.10 Dadaism was officially named in 1916, in Zurich by Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Richard Hülsenbeck, and Hans Arp.11 In fact, in RibemontDessaignes’s autobiography, Déjà Jadis, he confirms that Dadaism’s creation occurred during the time he was participating in military service, noting that he wrote his proto-Dadaist play, The Emperor of China, “While Dada was being prepared in Switzerland, and being as completely unknown to me as Tristan Tzara, the Emperor of China was one of the first pre-Dada testimonies that became an integral part of Dada.”12 Paris’s own Dada movement did not spring up until 1917, when avant-garde champion Guillaume Apollinaire received poems from Tzara and Francis Picabia’s 291 magazine — which featured some of the first Dadaist machine illustrations on its cover — and he began cultivating a friendship with André Breton.13 Apollinaire’s most serious contribution to the dissemination of Dada in Paris came in his November 1917 lecture, “The 10 “The Mechanised World of Francis Picabia,” Phaidon, last modified January 22, 2015, https://www.phaidon.com/en-us/blogs/ phaidon-archive/the-mechanised-world-offrancis-picabia. 11 Paul Trachtman, “A Brief History of Dada,” Smithsonian Magazine, 2006. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/ dada-115169154; Salvador Dalí Museum, “Dadaism,”in The Dalí Library Guides (2022). 12 Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Déjà Jadis, 44-45. 13 Pepe Karmel, “Marcel Duchamp and Dada in Paris and New York, 1913–1923,”lecture, New York University, New York, October 7, 2025.
6 Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Young Woman. 7 Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Déjà Jadis, 43-44. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid.
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New Spirit and the Poets,” in which he announced that this “new spirit” would reflect the discontinuity and disorientation in modern society by embracing ridiculousness, modern machinery, and surprise. He wrote, “Poets are not only men in pursuit of the beautiful; they are also, indeed they are especially, men seeking the true, inasmuch as the true is the key to the unknown. Thus surprise, the unexpected, is one of the principal springs of today’s poetry.”14 He also directly likens machinery to art and storytelling, writing “As long as planes did not crowd the sky, the fable of Icarus was but a supposed reality. Today it is no longer a fable…. Fables having mostly become reality and having even gone beyond it, it is now up to the poet to imagine new ones for inventors to implement in their turn.”15 Here, Apollinaire seems to outline an avenue for artists to invent ideas for creators to engineer: a niche that would eventually be filled by paintings acting as blueprints for machines that cannot yet operate. Apollinaire further beckons, “One must call the inventor, the creator— insofar as man can create—a poet. The poet is he who discovers new joys, even if they are difficult to withstand.”16 Apollinaire died the following year, but his ideas would echo throughout the Dadaist imagination beyond 1918. Tellingly, that year, Ribemont-Dessaignes made his earliest recorded machine
painting: Oceanic Spirit (Fig. 2). R i b e m o n t- D e s s a i g n e s ’s paintings were evidently influenced by his contemporaries and friends, and especially by Picabia’s machine paintings. Machine paintings within the Dadaist movement often depicted dysfunctional apparatuses, alluding to the movement’s dual enthusiasm for the mechanical age and critique of the technological innovation and “logic” that led to the obscene brutality of World War I.17 First produced in New York in 1915, Picabia’s machine paintings would only have reached RibemontDessaignes when Picabia moved to Paris in 1919 and founded the Paris Dada group.18 While their friendship began in 1911, it was only after 1917 when Ribemont-Dessaignes began to appear in Dadaist publications, specifically in 1919 when RibemontDessaignes began contributing to Picabia’s European extension of his American 291 magazine, 391.19 It was through their initial friendship that the two artists would have become aware of each other’s works, and this awareness would have become more prevalent with these publications’ creation and circulation, as mechanomorphic art was heavily featured in the zines themselves. Ribemont-Dessaignes’s painting, Oceanic Spirit (1918) evokes Picabia’s earlier machine paintings, such as Ideal (1915), Voilà Elle (1915) and Love Parade (1917) (Fig.
14 Guillaume Apollinaire, “The New Spirit and the Poets,” in Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology, ed. Henri Dorra (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 313. 15 Ibid, 312. 16 Ibid, 313.
17 Pepe Karmel, “Marcel Duchamp and Dada in Paris and New York, 1913–1923.” 18 Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, “Francis Picabia.” 19 Victoria Nes Kirby, “Georges RibemontDessaignes,” 105.
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3), with both artists cropping their images similarly and delineating bold outlines with occasional pops of color to recall the look of technical manuals. Oceanic Spirit appears as a simplified Love Parade. The large mechanical pendulum on the left side of Ribemont-Dessaignes’s Oceanic Spirit distills the vertical, mechanical forms in Picabia’s Love Parade, visually evoking medieval French trumpets. The hanging, golden baubles in the middle of Picabia’s painting correlate to RibemontDessaignes’s outlined circle, triangle, and square. Ribemont-Dessaignes transforms the black, curved mechanical arm in Picabia’s painting into a sinuous bold curve. Likewise, Ribemont-Dessaignes references the gold weight in the middle of Picabia’s 1917 painting, which he stretches into a gold sun at the bottom left corner of Oceanic Spirit; furthermore, the cylindrical basin in the Love Parade is narrowed into an outlined, rectangular form in Oceanic Spirit. We can observe the same manner of formal visual simplification in other late 1910s paintings between the two artists. Ribemont-Dessaignes condenses the upward-moving wires of Picabia’s Voilà Elle into the strong, upward diagonal forms in the middle of Oceanic Spirit, emulating the pure, outlined forms of Picabia’s Ideal, and reproducing a circular shape like the ones at the upper right-hand corner of all three influences. If Oceanic Spirit is truly the first Ribemont-Dessaignes machine painting, it exemplifies his simplification of Picabian Dadaist forms, removing shading, flattening shapes, and clarifying linework. Silence, however, is more visually
Figure 2 . Georges R ibemont-Dessaignes, Oceanic Spirit, 1918, Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm. Minneapolis College of Art and Design Collection, Minnesota. Image courtesy of JSTOR.
Figure 3: Franics Picabia, Love Parade, 1917, Oil on canvas, 37 1/2 x 28 1/4 in. Image courtesy of Artists Rights Society/ ARS, NY.
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analogous to Picabia’s machine paintings created during and after the year 1919. As RibemontDessaignes closely followed his friend’s work, he would have been attuned to the style shift Picabia’s art underwent in 1918.20 Suddenly, Picabia’s cartoonish forms grow even flatter in paintings like Balance (1919) and The Child Carburetor (1919). Shading lines on Balance seem to merge into their outlines, focusing purely on the harsh, graphic outlines of the forms in the piece. The Child Carburetor positions a tricolor machine against a vibrant, likely varnished piece of plywood, making the composition legible from afar. In Silence, Ribemont-Dessaignes picks up on the clarity of later Picabian works, but emphasizes his personal interest in two-dimensional shapes. Silence depicts a stylized, abstract arrangement of mechanical components, including gears, levers, pumps, pulleys, wires, and one conical, trumpet-like form—a more musical version of the car horn in Picabia’s Voila Elle— rendered in bold colors and smoothed geometric forms against a light blue background. The composition evokes an industrial machine or musical instrument, combining precision and rhythm with a playful, almost surreal sense of mechanical motion. As in Oceanic Spirit and his other machine paintings, RibemontDessaignes recycles the idea of inscriptions in Silence, an aspect that typically accompanied Picabia’s
images for magazines throughout the 1910s.21 Specifically, RibemontDessaignes adapted these inscriptions into both a scrawled “Silence” at the bottom, and, rather curiously, the word “Szegedin” written in the top right corner of the work, which, at first, seems like an arbitrary addition. 22 The brassy texture of the central cone and the glimmer of Silence’s steel teeth emphasize the mechanical quality of the imagery. However, upon closer inspection, the impossibility of this machine comes into focus: wires are disconnected, the teeth of two saws inexplicably face one another, and the primary gear awkwardly attempts connection at the trumpet’s base. There seems to be no sense of movement, progress, or noise emanating from the contraption in Silence, especially given the lack of airflow at the trumpet’s base and the horizontally-dominant saw, which compositionally cuts off the top of the instrument. The machine does not and cannot churn nor trumpet, hence the name Silence. Ribemont-Dessaignes seems to revel in the Dadaist irony of constructing a musical instrument only to render it broken and mute, made especially evident via the simple Picabia-esque inscription at the bottom of the contraption. Young Woman (1919) and Grand Musicien (circa 1920), RibemontDessaignes’s other existing machine paintings, are also rendered in this 21 Cyrus Manasseh, “Art, Language and Machines: The Interrelationship Between Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Raymond Roussel,” January 1, 2009, http://hdl.handle. net/10453/17182, 4-5. 22 Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Silence.
20 Claire Maingon, “Les machines de Salons de Francis Picabia,” Histoire de l’art 61 (2007): 125–33.
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later, color-blocked style. Young Woman seems to reference Picabia’s many mechanomorphic innuendo paintings that use machine parts to represent women, orgasms, or reproductive organs. 23 RibemontDessaignes uses cartoonish, vividlycoloured shapes, as in Silence, this time representing gaping electrical tongs alongside frenzied wires and gears, to depict an open, highlystrung, excitable “woman” against a smoky background. In Grand Musicien, Ribemont-Dessaignes ditches high-voltage eroticism to paint a machine that seemingly floats in space, with a series of pendulums and levers that appear primed to chime. Here, he extracts several shapes from his previous works, such as the zig-zag of the saw in Silence to make a single line, detached from the rest of the machine. He also replicates the hollow, toothy shape and placement of the central gears that appear in Picabia’s most famous machine painting, Machine Turn Quickly (1916-17) and Man Ray’s The Impossibility (1920) as metaphors for sexual excitement.24 Like Silence, Grand Musicien has only an approximate date (circa 1920), but it is rendered in the same style as his other machine paintings of the late 1910s, giving little cause for reassessing this date, unlike Silence. As Ribemont-
Dessaignes and Picabia developed a visual language for depicting mechanical dysfunctionality, Silence fits more closely with these later, more abstracted compositions, choosing shapes, textures, and colors that distill mechanical parts into illogically assembled, collaged cutouts. While Young Woman joins many of Picabia’s works in its use of sexual innuendos, Ribemont-Dessaignes was concurrently interested in exploring themes related to the breakdown of communication, especially from 1919 to 1920. In 1919, he published an array of especially opaque Dadaist poems that revel in communicative dysfunction. Sliding Trombone exemplifies the style of Dadaist poetry Ribemont-Dessaignes pioneered, composed of randomized nouns and verbs arranged in an irreparably broken syntax that allows the poem to elude analysis. “The Crazy Rooster”, published in a 1919 edition of Anthologie Dada, moves through a similarly antipoetic sequence, but ends in the lines “But only rooster, fatal and symbolic submission / And while the chosen ones shake off their duvet / God on a bicycle.”25 In this moment of slight narrative lucidity, RibemontDessaignes admits the rooster’s fatal flaw lies in its submission to its insanity. Earlier in the poem, he writes that the rooster “knows neither nine o’clock nor midnight nor dawn.” Unaware of its sole
23 Alex Goody and Ian Whittington, Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 113-114.; Peter Galison and Caroline A. Jones, Picturing Science, Producing Art, 167-170.; Dawn Ades, “Dada and Surrealism (Åke Fant),” 101. 24 Pepe Karmel, “Marcel Duchamp and Dada in Paris and New York, 1913–1923.”
25 Georges Ribemont‑Dessaignes, “Le coq fou,”in Dada, no. 4/5, ed. Tristan Tzara, Digital Dada Library, International Dada Archive, University of Iowa Libraries (1919).
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purpose, the rooster is reminiscent of the broken machines of RibemontDessaignes’s paintings, silent when it is assumed to signal sound. However, he is not overtly critical of the rooster’s submission to lunacy; he positions God, a heavily criticized concept amongst the staunchly anti-Catholic Dadaists, on a bicycle, a technology lauded and depicted by many within the movement. 26 Roosters, in Christian iconography, also symbolize the denial of Christ, likely included as a tangled reference to technology as a new God. 27 Ultimately, readers leave the poems with no moralizing message, only the knowledge that technological progress has been halted; this noisy machine, the rooster, has been sacrificed at the altar of the illogical. “The Crazy Rooster” would inspire the subject matter of at least one later mechanical work: a sketch called Dieu à bicyclette (God on a Bicycle) (1920), establishing precedence for Ribemont-Dessaignes’ tendency to adapt themes and symbols across mediums. R ibemont-Dessa ig nes continues to incorporate forced
dysfunctionalities and themes of censorship throughout his literary work of the era. It is The Mute Canary, Ribemont-Dessaignes’s 1919 play, that turns from examining the function of silence to those who impose silence upon dynamic forces. The Mute Canary follows three bourgeois characters, one of whom arrives with a caged bird that cannot sing, another who yearns to hunt, and a third who sexually assaults the canary-carrier. 28 An animal initially domesticated because of its strong singing voice, the canary is kept both caged and voiceless in this absurdist play about empty politics and power plays, becoming a symbol for censorship and dominance over natural tendencies. 29 RibemontDessaignes’s treatment of the central, unchurning machine in Silence should be likened to that of the silent canary as both are subjects whose progress has been halted by a backwards world. Thus, a 191920 date for Silence would align well with more than just RibemontD e s sa i g ne s’s later a e st het ic preferences and influences, but also with his thematic embrace of the breakdown of communication that characterized his work at the time. If Ribemont-Dessaignes truly did paint this work in 1919 or later, the general post-war milieu would provide generous context for the painting’s contents and meaning.
26 David Hopkins, “‘Rather Life’: Promoting Dada and Surrealism,”in Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 49-50.; Valentina Di Liscia, “How Artists Have Paid Homage to the Bicycle,” Hyperallergic, 2021, https:// hyperallergic.com/artists-pay-homage-to-thebicycle. 27 Ryan D. Giles, “‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’: Interpreting Anti‑Jewish Imagery in the Poema de Mio Cid Manuscript,”in Bestsellers and Masterpieces: The Changing Medieval Canon, eds. Heather Blurton and Dwight F. Reynolds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 114.
28 Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, “The Mute Canary,” trans. Victoria Nes Kirby, The Drama Review: TDR16, no. 1 (1972): 110–116. 29 Ingvar Svanberg, “The Domestication and Cultural Significance of the Canary,” in Canary Natural History Science and Cultural Significance (2023).
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For decades, scholars chalked much of Silence’s imagery up to Dadaist nonsense, especially regarding the addition of the word “Szegedin,” a word that refers to someone from Szeged, Hungary. “The words included compound the enigma,” the Museum of Modern Art’s website writes of Silence.30 However, given the intentionality in the artist’s work across so many mediums, it is implausible that RibemontDessaignes’s word choice would have been utterly arbitrary. What inspired his mention of Szeged, a city within a country to which there are no records of him traveling? The inclusion of Szeged makes thematic sense if we conclude that Silence was created in 1919 or later. Throughout World War I, Szeged, then the third largest Hungarian city, was not particularly newsworthy. Located 100 miles south of Budapest, there are few reports of political mobilization or industrialization in the area from 1915-1917.31 The war seldom impaired life in Szeged more than other non-central European cities, with Szeged actually seeing a population growth of 3.2% between 1910 and 1920.32 It was not until 1919 that Szeged was enraptured by the political zeitgeist. Amidst the Romanian occupation of the city during the Hungarian-Romanian War, Szeged became a mobilising
center for the right-wing forces led by autocrat Miklós Horthy, who would be installed as the regent of the Kingdom of Hungary for the duration of the interwar period.33 The “Szeged Idea,” also known as “Szeged fascism,”34 emerged at this very moment, resulting in The White Terror, a proto-Holocaust movement that lasted from 1919-1921 in which Horthy’s right-wing militias murdered approximately 1,500 members of the Jewish community, and tracked down, tortured, and injured tens of thousands more.35 Meanwhile, the short-lived governments that ruled Hungary before the installation of Horthy increasingly drew upon the political censorship of the War Surveillance Commission, established during World War I to silence political d issent. 3 6 Decree 5499/1919, “On the Press,” promulgated in 1919, reinstated a legal system for the mandatory authorization of published content after the Hungarian Soviet Republic’s collapse.37 In 1920, the publication of any periodical or newspaper became 33 Tamás Révész, “Post-War Turmoil and Violence (Hungary),” International Encyclopedia of the First World War, March 9, 2023. 34 Michael Mann, “The Hungarian Family of Authoritarians,” in Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 240-241. 35 Béla Bodó, The White Terror: Antisemitic and Political Violence in Hungary, 1919-1921 (London: Routledge, 2019). 36 Tamara Scheer, “One Empire or Two States? Dualism and States of Emergency in Austria-Hungary Before and During the First World War,” First World War Studies 14 (1): 123. 37 Gergely Gosztonyi, “Censorship and Law in Hungary in the Past,” Revista Română de Istoria Dreptului 1 (2021): 43.
30 Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Silence. 31 István Tóth, “Szeged as Hinterland,” in Faces of War, vol. 6 (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2022), 213–230. 32 Hungarian Central Statistical Office, Területi adatok – Csongrád megye, last modified in 2011, https://www.ksh.hu/nepszamlalas/ tablak_teruleti_06.
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dependent on the Prime Minister’s direct permission.38 Under Horthy’s Szeged fascism throughout the ensuing decade, Hungary oscillated between periods of strict regulations on the journalistic profession and total press censorship, eventually aligning itself with Nazi Germany.39 Szeged fascism may have started as a regional sentiment, but very quickly became a matter of both domestic and international importance. It may be that the title of Silence refers to these early silencings of dissent, imposed by a broken political machine. Ribemont-Dessaignes could not have known in 1919 about the global horrors Nazism would inflict, but it would have been clear that strict conservatism and Christian nationalism were deeply affecting both Szeged’s and greater Hungary’s progress in this tumultuous postwar era. While there are no reports of Ribemont-Dessaignes traveling to Hungary, Frenchmen were inherently implicated in this geopolitical situation, and at the very least, thinking critically about broader Hungarian political and military forces during this time, as France had quite recently supported Hungary’s neighboring states to undermine Horthy’s government’s legitimacy during the Hungarian-Romanian war in 1918-1919. 40 Szeged also made international headlines as far as Australia in March of 1919, when
those French troops came into direct conflict with a faction of Horthy’s army, resulting in casualties on both sides.41 If Dadaism was a reaction to the breakdown of communication and technological innovations that made World War I so grossly impactful, it follows that Ribemont-Dessaignes would recall the location of the Great War’s inception, the former AustroHungarian empire. Szeged would have been both a topical choice and resonant with the themes and symbolism he explored throughout the last years of the 1910s. It should be construed as discursively meaningful, then, that the painting is also rendered in the colors of Szeged’s coat of arms. Dada is not pure randomness nor meaninglessness, but an intentional form of nihilism in response to a world that had seemingly stopped operating within the bounds of logic. Ruptured systems and imposed censorship characterized interwar Europe, and only found their way into Ribemont-Dessaignes’s practice after 1917. The style and components of Silence, in the contexts of R ibemont-Dessaignes’s career, Dadaist metaphors and aesthetics, contemporaries, other works, and of World War I and its geopolitical aftermath, becomes maximally coherent if its creation is seen in the context of 1919 to 1920, rather than 1915. Given the development of Ribemont-Dessaignes’s career and the work of his Dadaist
38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 43-44. 40 Béla Bodó, “Paramilitary Violence in Hungary After the First World War,”East European Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2004): 130.
41 “French and Hungarians,” The West Australian, March 30, 1919, https://trove.nla. gov.au/newspaper/article/27600224.
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contemporaries in response to World War I and its geopolitical aftermath, it becomes increasingly obvious that Silence was created in or after 1919, rather than 1915.
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Wandering Women:
The Female Flâneur Through Agnès Varda’s Eyes Maeve Sullivan Edited by Neeharika Kakanuru
Traditionally, the figure of the flâneur is rooted in masculine privilege, a leisurely urban male wanderer with the time and autonomy to observe without being observed, to witness the world without being implicated in its political structures.1 First articulated by Charles Baudelaire and later theorised by Walter Benjamin, the flâneur embodies the detached perspective of the nineteenth-century
bourgeois in the age of modernity: a “passionate spectator” legitimised by gender, race, class, and access to public space.2 Agnès Varda, however, radically subverts and feminises the flâneur in her cinema. They become flâneuses—walking women whose movement through both urban and rural landscapes interrogates dominant narratives by asserting agency and challenging static gender roles. Walking becomes an act of self-definition and survival, directly
1 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (New York: Routledge, 1982), 25.
2 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 25.
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challenging the spatial and social constraints historically imposed on women in France at the end of the Second World War, who, despite enfranchisement in 1944, continued to be confined by social expectations of docility and domesticity. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis notes that Varda “did not come to the cinema with a set of publicly formulated feminist principles,” yet her films enact a profound feminist logic. 3 As Flitterman-Lewis also observes, “It is not merely the act of seeing, or seeing cinematically; Varda is dedicated to examining the feminist dialectic of the woman seeing/the woman seen.”4 This dialectic underpins Varda’s visual language: her camera does not passively gaze, but rather commands and complicates. Varda’s walking women across her oeuvre—Cléo, Mona, and Varda herself—are all caught in the act of re-visioning the world around them. In keeping with Varda’s openness and embrace of ambiguity, her films invite audiences to consider whether freedom is the path these women are subconsciously mapping and if such freedom is ultimately attainable within a patriarchal system. Mobility is central to Varda’s feminist reimagining of the flâneur, or, more appropriately, flâneuse. Her female protagonists walk, wander, and traverse landscapes, from the urban streets of Paris to the rural roads of France. Varda was known
to be an avid reader of modernist literature, and her insistence on active female protagonists was likely informed by George Sand’s 1831 account of a woman attempting to move through the streets of Paris, taking in its spectacle in strides of freedom, but ultimately having to do so dressed in a man’s attire. Sand writes: “I had a ‘sentry box redingote’ made for myself out of thick gray cloth, pants and vest to match. With a gray hat and wide wool tie … No one paid attention to me, and no one guessed at my disguise … I was an atom lost in that immense crowd.”5 Theorist Janet Wolff makes note of how the “disguise made the life of the flâneur available to her; as [Sand] knew very well, she could not adopt the non-existent role of a flâneuse. Women could not stroll alone in the city.”6 Thus, movement for Varda is not merely a narrative device; it forms the foundation of a distinct cinematic philosophy. Varda’s use of handheld, portable camera equipment, a signature of the French New Wave, which she helped pioneer, serves as an extension of her own body, mirroring the physicality and autonomy of the subjects she seeks to foreground.7 By choosing to film on location rather than in the controlled environment of a studio or theatrical staging, Varda ensures that 5 George Sand, Story of My Life, ed. Thelma Jurgrau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 893-94. 6 Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flaneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” Theory, Culture & Society 2, no. 3 (1985): 41. 7 Richard John Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 38.
3 Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 215. 4 Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently, 218.
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the camera moves with the women it portrays, aligning cinematic form with embodied experience. This approach culminates in what she called cinécriture, a fusion of cinema and écriture (writing), through which motion is inscribed into the grammar of feminist filmmaking. 8 This sensibility was shaped by her mentor, Jean Vilar, founder of the Théâtre National Populaire, who hired Varda as the company’s first official photographer and fostered in her a vision of art that was not only accessible and affordable, but fundamentally socially engaged.9 The historical lineage of walking as both artistic expression and political act intensifies the social meaning of Varda’s work. Movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism embraced urban wandering as a form of resistance and revelation. As Nancy Forgione notes, Dadaist excursions aimed to “depict the everyday practices through which human life renegotiated its relation to the city.”10 This tradition evolved with Guy Debord and the Situationist International, whose theory of “psychogeography” reimagined urban drift as a radical strategy for reclaiming space from rigid capitalist city planning. In his 1956 essay Theory of the Dérive, Debord defines the dérive, in other words, aimless drifting, as “a technique of rapid
passage through varied ambiences… letting themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.”11 For Debord, walking allows people to be guided by the emotional and sensory pull of places and encounters rather than by prescribed routes.12 Walking becomes a mode through which fundamental truths are revealed, both in the pressures of the external world and in the internal realities it evokes. It is important to situate Forgione and Debord’s observations within the post–Second World War context, particularly the period from 1944 to 1954, when expectations of women’s roles in society underwent unprecedented transformation. At the end of the war, women in France were granted the right to vote, yet as Simone de Beauvoir argued in 1949, “abstract rights … have never been sufficient to guarantee women a concrete hold on the world: there is not yet real equality between the two sexes.”13 Enfranchisement alone was insufficient to address the deep-seated gender inequalities of French society, as it failed to dismantle entrenched cultural assumptions about women’s roles, which remained tethered to feminine ideals of matrimony and motherhood. Following what Kelly Riccardi Colvin describes as “seventy-five years of masculinist republicanism,” the extension of suffrage amounted to an arguably
8 Carrie Rickey, A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2024), 70. 9 Rickey, A Complicated Passion, 30. 10 Nancy Forgione, “Everyday Life in Motion: The Art of Walking in Late-Nineteenth-Century Paris,” The Art Bulletin (New York, N.Y.) 87, no 4. (2005): 664.
11 Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” Internationale Situationniste, no. 2 (1958): 1. 12 Ibid. 13 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 152.
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“surface-level shift,” rather than a substantive transformation of gender relations. 14 It would take many decades for further breakthroughs in women’s rights to arrive, including the 1965 law that allowed women to work, open bank accounts, and dispose of property without a husband’s consent; legislation in 1967 that legalised contraception; and the introduction of equal pay laws in 1972.15 Varda channels the spirit of exploratory movement but reorients it through attentiveness to the social and historical realities to which she herself was subject. She applied a distinctly feminist lens in a context where “women had extremely limited space in which to operate as political, public subjects.”16 The So-called Caryatids (1984), a documentary commissioned by French television, examines the constrained movement and curtailed freedom of women in public spaces in France. Varda traces the presence of caryatids—female statues, often nude or semi-nude, supporting architectural structures—capturing their stillness and strength through a wandering camera and reflective narration. Invoking Baudelaire, whose poetry she sees as echoing
her reverie on “women in stone,” Varda transforms these statues into metaphors for women’s societal roles: foundational yet decorative, burdened yet overlooked, defined more by surface beauty than structural significance.17 Assuming the role of the flâneur herself, she documents these sculpted figures and the gendered stereotypes they silently uphold within the urban landscape. She contrasts them with a male counterpart, a muscular Atlante supporting a building with one arm. “Male caryatids are called Atlantes,” she observes, “named after Atlas who carried the world on his shoulders. My dad’s the strongest, and my mom’s the prettiest. The statues convey the same message.”18 Male figures, in stone and flesh, display visible effort and strength, while the female caryatid appears poised, decorative, and passive (Fig. 1). Through this juxtaposition, Varda critiques a culture built on entrenched gendered representations—male strength linked to action and burden, female beauty to stillness and display. Her film becomes a quiet yet pointed meditation on how women are cast as both central and sidelined: omnipresent and endlessly observed, yet rarely afforded true agency. Evidently, Varda’s cinema is as attentive to stillness as it is to movement. In her 1975 documentary Daguerréotypes, she turns her lens to Rue Daguerre, the Parisian street she called home, capturing the rhythms
14 Kelly Ricciardi Colvin, Gender and French Identity after the Second World War, 1944-1954: Engendering Frenchness (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 1. 15 Raylene L. Ramsay, French Women in Politics: Writing Power, Paternal Legitimization and Maternal Legacies (New York: Bergahn Books, 2003), 1-2. 16 Karen Offren, “Women, Citizenship and Suffrage with a French Twist,” in Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives, ed. Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan (Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 1994), 152.
17 Varda, The So-Called Caryatids, CineTamaris, 07:37-07:58. 18 Varda, The So-Called Caryatids, CineTamaris, 05:46-06:02.
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Figure 1. Agnès Varda, Les dites cariatides (The So-called Caryatids), 1984, Documentary short film. © 1984 Ciné-Tamaris
of everyday life just steps from her door. Filmed using an extension cord that allowed her to remain close to her newborn, Mathieu, the documentary is shaped by both logistical restrictions and a duty of care. The cord becomes a potent symbol, an “umbilical link,” as Varda describes it. This cord connects her to her child, the neighborhood, and “most women stuck at home,” anchoring her in both domestic routine and communal observation.19 The film centers on small shopkeepers, many of them women, whose lives unfold in routines shaped by their husbands’ trade and labor. One particularly poignant figure is an aging wife living with dementia, who remains firmly situated inside the shop and by her husband’s side as he trades in
perfumery.20 Varda’s camera lingers patiently on the couple, evoking the stillness of a daguerreotype photograph as it documents without intrusion or judgment. While scholars such as Rebecca J. DeRoo interpret the film as a critique of the alienation wrought by modernisation and the consequences of the French woman’s social position, Varda offers a more measured reading. 21 In conversation with Mireille Amiel, she describes her method as “gentle,” eschewing polemic in favor of quiet, observational empathy.22 The result is a film that resists definitive conclusions, instead 20 Varda, Daguerréotypes, Cine-Tamaris. 21 Rebecca J. DeRoo, Agnès Varda between Film, Photography, and Art (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018), 95. 22 Mireille Amiel, Agnès Varda, and T. Jefferson Kline, “Agnès Varda Talks about the Cinema,” in Agnès Varda (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 68.
19 Matt Stevenson, Agnès Varda: Director’s Inspiration (Los Angeles: DelMonico Books/ Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, 2023), 50.
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inviting reflection on the quiet lives it portrays, even as the women remain motionless. This “thesis of immobility” in Daguerréotypes may reflect Varda’s fascination with portraying women who wander, rather than those confined to a shopkeeping bench.23 As Rebecca Solnit observes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking, walking ideally aligns “the mind, the body, and the world.”24 Varda internalises this triad in her work. Her characters’ motion through space mirrors their interna l transformations. In Cléo from 5 to 7, produced in 1962, Cléo’s journey across Paris is both literal and existential. The film unfolds on June 21, 1961, spanning the time between 5:00 and 6:30 in the evening—an ironic title for a period set not for a clandestine romance, but for an encounter with death. The story centres on Cléo, a young actress, as she anxiously awaits the results of a biopsy that will determine whether she has a malignant abdominal tumour. The film traces her movement through the city— from a tarot reader’s apartment to the streets of Paris, stopping at a café, a hat boutique, her residence, and finally embarking on a solitary stroll marked by impromptu pauses and unexpected encounters. At the start, Cléo is an object of the gaze: a glamorous singer consumed by her appearance and the attention of others. After visiting a fortune teller,
she wanders into a hat shop, drawn by the displays. As she tries on a variety of quirky hats, her image is reflected across multiple mirrors, at times interwoven with fleeting views of the street outside.25 The space is designed to be observed from the outside in, forming a kaleidoscopic meditation on Cléo’s self-obsession. By the f i lm’s midpoint, Cléo has symbolically reclaimed her subjectivity. Donning dark sunglasses, she subverts the power dynamic of the gaze; no longer merely observed, she begins to observe.26 She watches rather than performs, and the camera follows suit, adopting her point of view and inviting the viewer into a shared subjectivity that destabilises traditional cinematic voyeurism. Elizabeth M. Anthony articulates this transformation succinctly: “Cléo is the clichéwoman… the whole dynamic of the film lies in showing this woman at the moment when she refuses to be this cliché.”27 The sunglasses function as both a disguise and a lens, tools that allow Cléo to navigate a world that constantly scrutinises her (Fig. 2). Flitterman-Lewis underscores the significance of this shift, noting that Cléo’s evolution from “spectacle” to “active social participant” aligns her with the figure of the Baudelairean flâneur.28 She drifts through cafés, absorbing fragments of conversation, references to the Algerian War, to 25 Varda, Cléo from 5 to 7, Cine-Tamaris. 26 Ibid. 27 Elizabeth M Anthony, “From Fauna to Flora in Agnés Varda’s ’Cleo de 5 à 7,’” Literature Film Quarterly 26, no. 2 (1998): 88. 28 Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently, 200.
23 Amiel, Varda, and Kline, “Agnès Varda Talks,” 66. 24 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 2.
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Figure 2. Agnès Varda, Clèo from 5 to 7, Clèo in sunglasses, 1962, Film still. © 1961 Succession Agnès Varda.
Figure 3. Agnès Varda, Clèo from 5 to 7, Older woman in sunglasses, 1962, Film still. © 1961 Succession Agnès Varda.
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artists like Miró and Picasso, to children, to memories, all while reflecting on the effect her song has on others. Her concern shifts from the performance itself to its social resonance. As she reenters the street, Cléo experiences a doubled vision: across the way, she glimpses an older woman, also wearing black cat-eye glasses (Fig. 3). 29 Their brief acknowledgment suggests a continuum of female experience, a possible future version of Cléo momentarily revealed. The generational gap also suggests that her newfound freedom must not only be embraced but fiercely defended, for time is precious and so too are women’s rights, particularly given that many major laws legalising sexual and political freedoms had not yet been passed. In this moment, the street of their encounter, in the spirit of Debord’s dérive, becomes a psychogeographical space, shaped not only by urban design but by memory, emotion, and the shared struggle of women seeking the freedom long enjoyed by their male counterparts. Varda, fond of ambiguous endings in her films, presents Cléo as no longer consumed by vanity but instead accepting the uncertainty of her cancer prognosis and, more broadly, her inevitable mortality. “My fear seems to be gone. I seem to be happy,” she tells the soldier named Antoine she met earlier in her wanderings, who accompanies her to the doctor’s visit.30 The choice of dialogue—Cléo “seemingly” finding happiness—is vague and hints at something elusive, 29 30
yet offers a sense of promise for optimistic audiences as the credits roll. For those more cynical, however, happiness remains indefinite, or even frighteningly unattainable. Varda further complicates and radicalizes mobility in Vagabond (1985). She raises the question: What are the consequences when a woman keeps walking, leaving the city of Paris behind, venturing into the countryside along an endless road in search of belonging? One might argue that this journey ultimately leads her to discover that freedom is an illusion. Mona, the titular vagabond, is a modern-day flâneur who walks not to contemplate but to escape. Her journey, in contrast to Cléo’s, does not lead to hinted enlightenment, but rather to oblivion. The film opens with her death, her body found frozen in a ditch, and retraces the events that led her there.31 This reversal of the classic narrative arc, death preceding life, compels the viewer to confront the journey that led Mona to her ultimate demise. As Sandrine Bonnaire, who plays Mona, interprets: “Everything Mona does is suicide … She wants freedom, but, in fact, she’s walking toward death.”32 Her wandering is not romantic or in search of a final destination of enlightenment; it is an act of defiance, but also of detachment. The freedom she seeks may be a slow erasure, a selfimposed exile from society’s rules, relationships, and expectations. One of the film’s most striking images shows Mona emerging from 31 Ibid. 32 Stevenson, Agnès Varda: Director’s Inspiration, 131.
Varda, Cléo from 5 to 7, Cine-Tamaris. Ibid.
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Figure 4. Agnès Varda, Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond), Woman walking along a shoreline, 1985, Film. © 1985 Ciné Tamaris - France 2 Cinéma.
the sea, a visual echo of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (Fig. 4).33 The allusion suggests mythic purity and rebirth, a sharp contrast to the film’s bleak trajectory. The scene is quickly undercut, however, by two young men watching from afar, casually discussing how easy it would be to exploit a woman travelling alone.34 Mona’s journey is punctuated by such moments of vulnerability. She is constantly surveilled and, at one point, targeted by a man in the woods; her silenced screams leave little ambiguity about the horror that follows.35 Throughout the film, Mona is watched but not truly seen. Interviewees comment on her body, her smell, her indifference, reducing her to physical impressions rather 33 34 35
than recognising her personhood.36 She is both hypervisible and invisible; she is ever-present, yet rarely understood. Seen through the lens of the traditional flâneur, Mona is not free to roam and observe at will; the female flâneur, as suggested by Varda, is inevitably targeted and singled out, her presence inherently marked by suspicion and danger. Still, Varda allows space for tenderness. When Mona gently touches the cheek of a farmer’s daughter or caresses the breast of a statue, we catch a glimpse of the vulnerability beneath her hardened exterior, a persistent, if often suppressed, yearning for connection that dictates her wanderings (Fig. 5).37 These quiet gestures echo what Nathalie Sarraute called “tropisms,”
Varda, Vagabond, Cine-Tamaris. Ibid. Ibid.
36 37
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Figure 5. Agnès Varda, Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond), Mona caressing a statue, 1985, Film. © 1985 CinéTamaris - France 2 Cinéma.
the subtle, inner movements that resist articulation.38 Varda’s cinema, like Sarraute’s prose, attends to the unspoken. Beneath Mona’s silence is a profound emotional texture. Her refusal to narrate her own story, her rejection of psychological exposition, forces the viewer to remain attentive, to read gestures, silences, and absences as forms of meaning. Despite major advancements during the filming of Vagabond, such as the election of President François Mitterrand and the 1983 Roudy Law, which sought to codify workplace gender equality, as well as the permanent legalisation of state-reimbursed abortion, Varda nevertheless foresees the long road that still lies ahead for women in their fight for equality. Through an emphasis on close attention, the solidarity that
emerges between younger and older generations of women becomes once again unmistakable, as they navigate terrains in which their identities are permitted to be visible and free. In The Story of an Old Lady, a threeminute homage Varda created to showcase the older actress featured in Vagabond, we learn that Marthe Jarnais, who plays Aunt Lydie, had spent her entire life working as a maid.39 She shares with Varda the irony of playing someone in a position of authority, the kind of woman who gives orders rather than takes them herself. 40 Her role in Vagabond is especially powerful in scenes with Sandrine Bonnaire’s Mona; the two women share a memorable moment of laughter, which Varda describes as a gesture 39 Varda, The Story of an Old Lady, CineTamaris. 40 Ibid.
38 Nathalie Sarraute, Tropisms and The Age of Suspicion (London: Calder & Boyars, 1967), vi.
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of connection that brief ly unites “the rich lady and the poor girl,” dissolving the boundaries of class and age.41 For Marthe, that laughter becomes a form of poetic justice: a small but resonant act of reversal, a moment of quiet revenge against a life shaped by domestic labour. The film suggests that while we may strive for freedom, societal structures persist in shaping our lives. Mona’s wandering and Marthe’s reflections both highlight the difficulty of living outside the norms imposed by society across generational divides. Echoes of Cléo from 5 to 7 reverberate in this moment, signifying a shared sentiment of solidarity. Yet Varda reminds us that even within those constraints, brief moments of connection—being seen, embracing joy—can carry great significance. They offer not absolute freedom, but something equally vital: the freedom for women to connect with one another in their shared struggle, eye to eye. Varda prompts a thoughtful re-evaluation of what it truly means to be free in French society as a woman. Is freedom merely the absence of restriction, the ability to move through space unhindered? Or does it reside in something more elusive: in moments of authentic human connection that transcend expectation? Perhaps true freedom lies in remaining open to feeling, even when that openness brings discomfort or risk. The female flâneur must remain mindful of this in her movements as she takes bold steps into the unknown.
In Varda’s hands, walking becomes a feminist methodology. As Hermon Bashiron Mendolicchio describes, it serves as “a metaphor of our constant tension between standing and moving: one foot on the ground, the other f lying in the air.”42 Walking is thinking, as Nietzsche and Rousseau once claimed, but for Varda, it is also f ilmma k ing, witnessing, and resisting. Her female flâneurs traverse not only physical terrain but also ideological landscapes, navigating the expectations of femininity, class, and narrative. Sometimes they are seen, sometimes they are overlooked, but they are always in motion. The contrast between Cléo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond reveals the breadth of Varda’s vision; in the former, the flâneuse discovers herself through visibility and reflection, while in the latter, she dissolves into anonymity. Movement remains essential in both. Where Varda’s camera lovingly centres Cléo in smooth, attentive tracking shots, Vagabond adopts a more erratic, unstable gaze. Mona often lingers at the edge of the frame, appearing only to disappear; she enters scenes already in motion, lags behind, or vanishes altogether as the camera moves forward without her. Her marginality is both literal and symbolic. She exists outside the familiar cinematic roles reserved for women, neither lover, nor victim, nor heroine. Mona is, in 42 Hermon Bashiron Mendolicchio, “Walking. The Creative and Mindful Space Between One Step and Another,” Walking Art / Walking Aesthetics, December 2018, https:// walkingart.interartive.org/2018/12/hbmwalking.
41 Agnés Varda, The Story of an Old Lady, (03:31).
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many ways, unclassifiable. While Cléo’s perspective gradually aligns with her internal gaze, Mona’s is fragmented, refracted through the testimonies of others. The very structure of Vagabond, a patchwork of recollections, dislocates Mona from narrative coherence; she is remembered, misunderstood, and misquoted. Unlike Cléo, whose gaze is returned, Mona is rarely afforded such visual reciprocity. She becomes a spectral presence, half-seen, halfremembered. In this way, Vagabond interrogates the cultural mechanisms through which women are both memorialised and erased. For Varda, freedom is not a final destination but a continuous negotiation. As she explained in conversation with Mireille Amiel, her dual role as documentarian and feminist involves blending observation with critique.43 This engagement with reality reflects the principles of Brecht’s “alienation effect,” which Varda drew inspiration from—an effect that discourages emotional immersion and instead fosters a more intellectual, critical engagement with the story. 44 There are no clear answers as to what drives each woman to walk in her films, or what final destination they seek; this is left for the audience to interpret. As Susan Hayward argues, “to reproach Varda for lack of depth in characterisations is to miss the point.”45 Rather than offering easy
answers, Varda urges viewers to depart with questions of their own— to walk, reflect, and consider what it means for a woman to imagine herself as a flâneur. U lti mately, A g nès Va rd a reimagines the flâneur—the “man of the world,” as Baudelaire conceived him—not as a figure of detached male leisure, but as a resilient walking woman.46 Her cinema charts not just paths through cities and fields, but the contours of feminist possibility. Through her flâneuses, women who search and resist, Varda maps a geography of female experience that spans public streets and internal landscapes. These women do not drift in anonymity; they walk with intention or rather, with an openness to genuine connection, with each step marked by agency and rebellion. Varda offers not a romanticised notion of freedom, but a radically situated one: freedom as the ability to move, to witness, to feel seen. In doing so, she reshapes both cinematic form and feminist thought, inviting us not merely to observe her characters, but to walk alongside them and ask: What kind of world are we moving through, and who gets to move freely within it?
43 Amiel, Varda, and Kline, “Agnès Varda Talks,” 64. 44 John Willett, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 37. 45 Susan Hayward, “Varda’s Cinematic Language, A New Mythology for Women? Some
Considerations on L’une chante, l’autre pas,” Centerpoint, 3 (1980): 174. 46 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 25.
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Abbott Thayer and the Chagrin of the Camoufleur
Jack Teehan
Edited by Robert Zabin
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In contrast to contemporaneous naturalists such as Theodore Roosevelt, the early camouf leur Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849– 1921) maintained that art itself could function as a form of scientific proof, positioning artists as uniquely capable of perceiving beyond the constraints of conventional scientific thought. This essay examines the motivations underlying Thayer’s increasingly embattled claims— claims that grew more extreme in response to sustained rejection from the scientific community— and argues that mysophobia and agoraphobia, or rather fears of disease and public space, operate as organizing topoi throughout his oeuvre. Like many American artists of his generation, Abbott Thayer is difficult to place. Born to a Boston Brahmin family, Thayer spent his childhood at the foot of Mount Monadoc, New Hampshire, a region to which he would later return in adulthood.1 As a young man, he experimented with taxidermy under the tutelage of his father William Thayer, a prominent doctor and naturalist, and he showed his initial interest in art by making watercolor sketches of birds and other animals.2 At eighteen, Thayer relocated to Brooklyn to study painting at the Brooklyn Art School and the National Academy of Design under Lemuel Wilmarth where he met
his first wife Kate Bloede. In 1875, Thayer and Bloede moved to Paris, where Thayer studied at the École des beaux-arts with Henri Lehmann and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Here Thayer met his longtime collaborator and close friend American artist George de Forest Brush. 3 Thayer and his wife had three children during the early years of their marriage, two of whom died in the early 1880s. This may have been one of the causes for the subsequent illness of his wife, who underwent mental and physical deterioration and died in a hospital in 1891. Thayer was shattered by his wife’s illness. After her death he married Emmeline Buckingham Beach, and returned to Mount Monadoc, New Hampshire where they had three children: Mary, Gerald, and Gladys. Eccentric and opinionated, Thayer grew more so as he aged, and his family’s manner of living reflected his strong beliefs: the Thayers typically slept outdoors yearround in order to enjoy the benefits of fresh air, and the three children were never enrolled in school. The children often posed for their father. Thayer is perhaps best known for his Rodinesque depictions of his children as angels in works like Caritas (1894–95) and My Children (1897). For the remainder of his life, although he continued to paint and teach, Thayer was preoccupied with the study of protective coloration, of which the most notable consequence was the publication of an ambitious and controversial volume on
1 Roy Behrens, “The Theories of Abbott H. Thayer: Father of Camouflage,” Leonardo 21, no. 3 (1988): 291. 2 “William Henry Thayer, M.D. Obituary” in Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, January 27, 1898.
3 Behrens, “Theories of Abbott H. Thayer,” 292.
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Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, first published in 1909. 4 Thayer’s 1897 portrait My Children (Mary, Gerald, and Gladys Thayer) (Fig. 1) demonstrates his integration of nascent theories of camouflage into the visual language of late nineteenthcentury academic painting. The portrait was not intended to convey particular religious content, but its composition and elaborate frame recall Italian Renaissance altarpieces showing the Virgin Mary with saints. Elements such as the laurel wreath, classicized drapery, and phantom wings formed by the contours of the foliage against the sky align her with Athena-Nike, the ancient winged symbol of victory and protection. In the end, this image, so filled with allusions to the art of the past, presents Thayer’s vision of his children, the human spirit at its cleanest and noblest: the expression of love, strength, and beauty embodied in the ideal and eternal feminine. Furthermore, his portrait of his three children takes the visual language of virginal purity and transposes it onto his nascent conceptions of “concealed coloration.” As a protocamoufleur, Thayer paints his two younger children as blending into the background. Although typical chiaroscuro is employed to render their faces, their garments are colored and shaded in such a way that their bodies cannot be articulated from the landscape behind them, leaving only their faces discernable, scatterings of yellow lines tracing their contours and destabilizing their continuity of form. As such, they 4
Figure 1. Abbott Handerson Thayer, My Children (Mary, Gerald, and Gladys Thayer), ca.1897, Oil on canvas, 219.1 x 155.1 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Gift of John Gellatly. Image courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C..
become one with their surroundings, protected from predators. Perhaps it is unsurprising that Thayer, whose children from a previous marriage died just fifteen years prior, would be visually invested in the presentation of protection from disease and predators. Much of Thayer’s oeuvre can be described in these manichean terms: disease versus health, predator versus prey. This sense of opposition is ingrained into Thayer’s rendering of form with such a precise emphasis on chiaroscuro, of erotic displays of light and shadow. In 1896, the same year he painted My Children, Thayer published a series of essays in The Auk, the official publication of the
Ibid.
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American Ornithological Society, regarding his observations on the principles of design in mimesis, an animal’s resemblance to another animal, plant, or inanimate object in their surroundings. Thayer’s 1896 article “The Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration” hypothesized that the coloration of an animal serves as a form of protective camouflage which makes it appear to “cease to exist at all.”5 He noted that the employment of strong arbitrary patterns of color helped to conceal animals by destroying their “continuity of surface.”6 For example, the dark green head of a mallard duck allows the bird to fade into the shaded wood or dark water, even as the body remains light and beige.7 The impact of this phenomenon is that the animal begins to coalesce with the background, drawing the viewer to look right through the animal. Thayer’s law was extrapolated from his observations of the natural world, not as a scientist but as a painter. He felt that his artistic gifts could enable him to innovate in camouflage in a way no zoologist could.8 Abbott Thayer was steadfast in his belief that art itself could be used as scientific proof, that he and his fellow artists were uniquely capable of seeing beyond the strict limitations imposed by scientific thought. Key to Thayer’s law of concealing coloration was his articulation of “countershading” or the simple observation
that the superior structures of many animals were shaded darkest, while the inferior surfaces remained lighter.9 The supposed impact of this phenomenon was the counterintuitive diffusion of natural light dispersed over the body of an animal, causing confusion to a predator. According to Thayer, “The completeness of an animal’s concealing-coloration depends upon his wearing samples of all the characteristic details of his background.”10 The impact of this coloration was not that an animal would resemble a specific stump or a tree but instead cease to exist visually. Countershading removed the telltale signs of solidity because the animal “mimicked” an empty space.11 This visual principle finds its parallel in chiaroscuro, stark, painterly contrasts of light and dark to indicate threedimensional space. Countershading inverses this principle, shading a three-dimensional object with a pattern that contradicts the gradation produced by sunlight and causes the object to appear flat. Before Thayer’s intervention, the debate over the reason behind protective coloration was between environmental influence or through Darwinian natural selection. The established mechanism among naturalists for explaining concealed coloration hinged on environmental factors impacting the animal, a credible explanation given it had
5 Abbott Thayer “The Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration.” The Auk 13, no. 2 (1896): 125. https://doi.org/10.2307/4068693 6 Thayer, “Protective Coloration,” 126. 7 Thayer, “Protective Coloration,” 127, 8 Thayer, “Protective Coloration,” 124.
9 Thayer, “Protective Coloration,” 127. 10 Thayer, “Concealing Coloration,” The Auk, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Jul., 1912), 431. 11 Sharon Kingsland, “Abbott Thayer and the protective coloration debate,” Journal of the History of Biology 11, 227 (1978).
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been long known that many reptiles, amphibians, and fish could change color to match their backgrounds. Insects and other invertebrates were observed to take on the colors of their food, and among birds, the ability to change feather color through judicious feeding was well known to animal dealers. 12 The debate in the late nineteenth century was whether natural selection was uniquely responsible for protective coloration or whether animals were responding to environmental factors, such as light radiation, humidity, or temperature.13 Scientists such as J. A. Allen at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard observed that the quality of a sheep’s wool was directly related to climate. Using specimens from the museum, he noticed that when a f lock was transplanted, changes to fleece texture occurred simultaneously across the whole flock.14 When taken to a hot climate, Allen remarked that they would “rapidly acquire a coarser and coarser fleece, till, in a few generations, it nearly loses its character of proper wool, and becomes simply hair.”15 Although Darwin’s theory of evolution was widely accepted at this point, his more radical stipulation of natural selection of favorable traits was still not yet widely accepted.16
Allen believed that the theories that attributed change in coloration to generations of artificial breeding still lacked the evidence to indicate that all types of coloration were adaptive in some manner. 17 The divergence in theories and the wealth of explanations led Thayer to create a universal law of protective coloration that reduced this body of opinion in his eyes to a consistent framework by explaining that all coloration in the animal kingdom should be interpreted as adaptations for design for concealment. Writing in a letter to American ornithologist and naturalist William Brewster, Thayer exclaims his incredulity at the scientific community’s opposition to his new universal law: I suppose I am piqued by the slowness of people’s perceptions of this most wonderful thing. ... I actually thought that it would be like touching a match to a hay rick, the way the zoologists would see this, when you think that it is the protection of the whole animal kingdom in general. As far as I can see, it is one of a very few universal laws that have been discovered.18
Thayer’s proposed universality of protective coloring is perhaps best demonstrated in the illustrations for his subsequent book titled Concealing Coloration in the Animal
12 Kingsland, “Abbott Thayer,” 224. 13 A. E. Verrill, “Nocturnal Protective Coloration of Mammals, Birds, Fishes, Insects, Etc,” The American Naturalist 31, no. 362 (1897): 102. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2452743. 14 J.A. Allen, “The Evolution of Species Through Climatic Conditions,” Science 22, no. 569 (1905): 667. 15 Allen, “Evolution of Species,” 668. 16 Kingsland, “Abbott Thayer,” 224.
17 Ibid., 225. 18 A. H. Thayer to William Brewster, October 15, 1899, Archives of Comparative Zoology, BBr 65010.1 (1–15).
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Figure 2. Abbott Handerson Thayer, Red Flamingoes, study for book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, ca. 1905-1909, Oil on wood, 23.5 x 28.1 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Gift of the heirs of Abbott Handerson Thayer. Image courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C..
Kingdom, published in 1909 by his son Gerald H. Thayer. This work, which expanded on the ideas of concealed coloration expressed in his eponymous article, posited that all animals, even the most conspicuous ones, were colored with the intention of fading into their natural environment so that “the spectator seems to see right through the space occupied by an opaque animal.”19 The most controversial of his examples was his explanation of the flamingo.
Thayer’s study Red Flamingoes (Fig. 2), painted for the production of the book, shows crouching flamingos painted in a bright orange hue that matches the sunset behind them. He argued that even brightly colored flamingos would vanish during dawn or dusk, meaning predators would not be able to distinguish between the brightly colored feathers and the warm tones of the sky.20 This example served to illustrate his point that matching the background did not always mean coalescing with what
19 Abbott Thayer and Gerald Thayer, Concealing-coloration in the animal kingdom, The Macmillan Co., 1909, 3.
20
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happens to be behind the animal, but instead matching a potential background, “presenting such an experience as the beholder’s eyes would naturally expect to see in such a situation.”21 Perhaps even more specious than his example of the flamingos was Thayer’s illustration of a peacock in the woods (Fig. 3). Thayer maintained that the lavishly decorated plumes of peacocks were a mechanism of defensive coloration, for the eye of the observer, predator or prey, would skip over the patterns and fail to see the hidden animal.22 His illustration showed the plumes blending in with the spotted light of the underbrush, ocelli mimicking the sunlight streaming through the overstory onto the wood. While this painting demonstrates Thayer’s principle of disruptive patterning, it also demonstrates the increasingly tenuous nature of his claims in arguing that an animal as conspicuous as a male peacock is primarily employing mechanisms of camouflage instead of mate attraction or intimidation of predators. The scientif ic community writ large found Thayer’s claims outlandish. Theodore Roosevelt took particular umbrage with Thayer’s ideas. Riding the coattails of his second presidential term, Roosevelt remained a prominent figure in American public life, especially within debates surrounding the natural world. He wrote extensively
Figure 3. Abbott Handerson Thayer, Richard S. Meryman, Peacock in the Woods, study for book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, 1907, Oil on canvas, 114.9 x 92.4 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Gift of the heirs of Abbott Handerson Thayer. Image courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C..
in a widely publicized literary debate known as “the nature fakers controversy.” A few years earlier, naturalist John Burroughs had published an article entitled “Real and Sham Natural History” in the Atlantic Monthly, attacking popular writers of the day such as Ernest Thompson Seton, Charles G. D. Roberts, and William J. Long for their fantastical representations of wildlife. Roosevelt supported Burroughs’s criticisms and published several essays denouncing the booming genre of “naturalistic” animal stories as “yellow journalism of the woods.” Roosevelt was positioning himself against speculative exaggeration in the natural world. He framed Thayer
21 Ibid., 146. 22 Alexander Nemerov, “Vanishing Americans: Abbott Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Attraction of Camouflage,” American Art 11, no. 2 (1997): 77.
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as one of these sentimentalists. The former president popularized the negative term “nature faker” to describe scientific writers he found to be incredulous.23 Roosevelt and Thayer exchanged numerous fervid letters, and Thayer often invited Roosevelt to his New Hampshire home to discuss his ideas. Roosevelt, in turn, always declined, at one point writing: “There is no earthly use for any honest seeker after truth to visit your laboratory, as you call it, until you are willing to face certain elementary facts.”24 Roosevelt took particular issue with Thayer’s example of the flamingo’s red color, writing “there are probably ten thousand occasions, or many more, when this coloration is of the most highly advertising quality.”25 The nature of the relationship between these two men indicates that their argument concerned more than just coloration, that they disagreed on the artist’s place within the realm of naturalism.26 Roosevelt felt that artists like Thayer had no place in this purview of scientists, and Thayer was desperate for recognition of a noticed phenomenon he felt
to be revolutionary to the field, so desperate that he was unwilling to hear criticism of his ideas.27 Theodore Roosevelt argued that Abbott Handerson Thayer’s claims about animal invisibility bordered on the absurd. After all, Roosevelt noted, anyone who had spent time on the veldt—as he had—could spot zebras or giraffes from miles away. He also questioned the visual evidence in Thayer’s book, suggesting that the paintings and photographs had been selectively arranged, or even manipulated, to support the theory.28 Thayer, unsurprisingly, did not let the criticism pass quietly. He fired back in a series of rebuttals published in professional journals. What followed was an extended exchange of letters in which both men, with a kind of stubborn and increasingly bitter patience, tried to dismantle the other’s argument.29 Thayer was steadfast in his belief that art itself could be used as scientific proof, that he and his fellow artists were uniquely capable of seeing beyond the strict limitations imposed by scientific thought. In addition to Roosevelt’s rejections of the increasingly outlandish nature of Thayer’s claims, much of the Western scientific community repudiated
23 Gerald Carson, “Roosevelt and the ‘nature fakers: The Rough Rider rode roughshod over writers who took liberties with Mother Nature’s children,” American Heritage Magazine 22, no. 2 (1971). 24 Nemerov, “Vanishing Americans,” 56. 25 Roosevelt qtd. in Nemerov, “Vanishing Americans,” 57. 26 Juliet Lamb, “Teddy Roosevelt Weighs in on the Evolution of Camouflage.” JSTOR DAILY, 17 March 2016 and Hannah Rowland, “From Abbott Thayer to the Present Day: What Have We Learned about the Function of Countershading?” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 364, no. 1516 (2009): 522.
27 Nemerov, “Vanishing Americans,” 77: “Thayer’s definitions of display… were at once too primitive and too modern to fit the model of moral realism Roosevelt sought to enforce. They were too primitive in their emphasis on filthy bodies and, by extrapolation, filthy viewingdisplay and viewing as ineradicably primal and fetishistic.” 28 Nemerov, “Vanishing Americans,” 56. 29 Ibid., 56, 58.
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theories of concealed coloration for their distinctly unmasculine tone. The mark of concealment all but announced an unmanly desire to hide instead of fight. The cost was a loss of identity, an affront to the chivalrous ideal of masculinity. To disappear, to conceal oneself among the background is markedly unmasculine, a coward’s refusal to engage. Indeed, there is a certain erotic drama of revelation and concealment engrained in Thayer’s philosophy, no doubt underscored by the fact that all of the animals he chose to paint to illustrate this point were male.30 Peacock in the Woods epitomizes the eroticized logic of visual display that runs through much of Thayer’s work. When the reader first opens the book to the title page, the peacock only faintly emerges beneath a protective sheet of translucent tissue, a veil that obscures the bird in much the same way the white drapery shrouds Thayer’s winged women in Caritas.31 Printed directly onto this tissue overlay is Thayer’s careful explanation of the peacock’s supposed invisibility. The placement of the text itself becomes another layer of concealment: its words scatter across the page in such a way that they further obscure what is arguably the most conspicuous bird imaginable, hiding it not only beneath the gauze-like paper but within the very language meant to reveal it. Abbott Thayer’s interest in concealed coloration is intrinsically tied to Anglo-American turn-of30 31
the-century concerns about disease, contagion, and urban development. Born in Boston, a rapidly developing metropolis, Thayer suffered a harrowing childhood battle with cholera. Coupled with his mother’s frequent bouts of dysentery, Thayer deeply internalized a certain kind of nineteenth century agoraphobia. 32 To complicate matters, this period saw the emergence of germ theory. In contrast to an earlier notion of contagion, based on odiferous miasmas, the new view proposed that invisible microorganisms were the carriers of disease. In response to a seemingly insurmountable biohazard of “uncontrollable filth,” Thayer’s family, like many white Americans, left the cities in pursuit of the rural and pastoral.33 In the late 1880s one of Thayer’s students, Mary Amory Greene, built a house and studio for the Thayer family on her land in Dublin, New Hampshire, and in 1901 the family settled there permanently. Many of Thayer’s artist friends lived nearby, such as Richard Meryman and George de Forest Brush, and the Thayer family frequently entertained prominent visitors such as Edward Waldo Emerson and Samuel Clemens.34 In Abbott Thayer’s work Monadock in Winter (1904), the mountain rises impressively near the property once occupied by Abbott Thayer at Dublin, New Hampshire. Similar 32 Ibid., 35. 33 Ibid., 36. 34 From the guide to the Abbott Handerson Thayer and Thayer Family papers, 1851-1999 (bulk 1881-1950), Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Ibid., 79. Ibid., 78.
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to Emerson, Thayer was profoundly attracted by the mountain, spending many hours on its wooded slopes studying the flora and fauna of the region. The artist preferred to paint Mount Monadnock during the early morning hours when its peak was struck by sunlight. He emphasized the distant drama of the rising sun by leaving the foreground of the canvas broadly painted and cast into shadow. The artist’s distinctive violet and green tones in this area convey a sense of extreme stillness and cold. While perhaps the most vivid of his works, there is a distinct and cloying sense of isolation rendered by the human relation to the mountain. There is something compositionally valent about this work and Whistler’s nocturnes or the British tonalists: a collapse in form that precedes abstract expressionism. One is reminded, through the inclusion of a much smaller sapling among a forest of giant fir trees and the banks of snow that dominate the composition, that nature is wild, vicious, and inhospitable, but at the same time pure, virginal, and untouched. This approach is mimicked by the light: an early dawn, mountain peaks not yet penetrated with the light of the sun. We see the world through Thayer’s eyes, a brief glimpse at a perfect, uncontaminated world. Forms blend together, the trees assume the color of their surroundings. There are no footsteps, there are no pawprints. No trace of pollution to be found. As Elizabeth Lee suggests, disease is an organizing topos for Thayer’s oeuvre. He navigated and soothed his anxieties about illness and urbanization through
representations of purity in his work.35 That the artist is not visible in any of his landscapes underscores that position: Thayer finds comfort in concealment. Trained under JeanLéon Gérôme, Thayer mobilizes an Orientalist visual logic in which both spectacle and spectator are absorbed into the viewer’s gaze; the spectator, never present within the image, is displaced onto the viewer, just as the artist himself remains absent—a dynamic that, in the context of camouflage, collapses the boundary between observer and observed.36 Thayer’s depiction of the serene mountain is necessarily predicated on his anxieties around disease and urban life. Thayer’s deep desire for an ordering principle behind concealed coloration reveals Thayer’s distaste for chaos and desperation for the domination of nature through Enlightenment principles of propriety. That the scientific community, particularly Theodore Roosevelt, held his innovations in concealed coloration in such low regard indubitably caused Thayer’s retreat from public life. While Thayer’s seclusion from public life prevented him from advancing his ideas in the scientific community, fellow painter and confidant George de Forest Brush took up the mantle of his design philosophy. The pair had filed a 35 Elizabeth Lee, “Therapeutic Beauty: Abbott Thayer, Antimodernism, and the Fear of Disease.” American Art 18, no. 3 (2004): 33, 34. https://doi.org/10.1086/427531 . 36 See also Linda Nochlin,”The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society, 34. Harper & Row, 1989.
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patent in 1899 for countershading for military purposes, using the design principle as a means to reduce the visibility of a ship.37 Ship camouflage became particularly important in the wake of the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor during the Spanish-American War the year prior. Discussions between Brush and the Navy continued until they were halted in 1911.38 George Brush’s son, Gerome, continued working on promoting camouflage and once again approached the U.S. Navy six years later, intent on getting them to adopt a new visual language, dazzle camouflage, in preparation for the First World War. He succeeded, and by October of the following year more than a thousand ships in the fleet were painted with dazzle patterns.39 Thayer and Brush’s ideas also gained traction across the Atlantic, where British artist and naval officer Norman Wilkinson sought to distort, not conceal, the size, speed, and course of a ship through the employment of dazzle painting. 40
Dazzle painting, contrary to modern camouf lage, broke up the visual plane by employing the techniques of countershading in contrasting black and white lines to confuse the viewer, intersecting in a way that would obfuscate the contours of the ship (Fig. 4). Edward Wadsworth, a fellow naval officer and painter, oversaw the dazzle painting of over two thousand British ships in one year. With the success of the British program, Wilkinson worked with the British navy and Gerome Brush to develop dazzle plans for an additional thousand U.S. ships.41 Wadsworth, as a partisan of Vorticism, an English syncretism of Cubism and Italian Futurism, was deeply informed by the artistic movements surrounding him. The Cubist influence is perhaps best illustrated in Wadsworth’s 1919 oil painting Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool, in which the broken forms and muted color palette of the work seem reminiscent of nascent cubist works. Wadsworth paints the ship freshly painted in dry dock, the scale of the vessel dwarfing the men below as the dazzle ornamentation causes it to blend in with the sharp lines and angles of the dock behind it, just as how Duchamp’s composition blurs movement and hides form through conical and cylindrical abstract elements. Dazzle camouf lage is the application of the visual tenets of cubism applied to warfare. Both predicate themselves on the
37 George de Forest Brush and Abbot Thayer, 1899. Process of Treating the Outside of Ships, etc., For Making Them Less Visible. US Patent 715013, filed 3 June 1899. 38 Roy H. Behrens, “On Visual Art and Camouflage.” Leonardo, Vol. 11, (1978) pp. 203-204. 39 Behrens, “On Visual Art.” p. 203. 40 Norman Wilkinson, A Brush With Life, (London: Seeley, 1969), 79. “On my way back to Devonport in the early morning, in an extremely cold carriage, I suddenly got the idea that since it was impossible to paint a ship so that she could not be seen by a submarine, the extreme opposite was the answer–in other words, to paint her, not for low visibility, but in such a way as to break up her form and thus confuse a submarine officer as to the course on which she was heading.”
41 Claudia Covert, “Art at War: Dazzle Camouflage,” in Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Fall 2007), p. 51.
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Figure 4. USS West Mahomet, ca. November 1918. Photograph from the Bureau of Ships Collection in the U.S. National Archives. Image courtesy of Naval History and Heritage Command.
destruction of the natural form, to mangle and sew it back together into something destabilizing, familiar but unrecognizable, multiple planes collapsing into each other. If Thayer failed to convince the scientific establishment of the universality of his law of concealed coloration, the afterlife of his ideas suggests that the painter’s eye nonetheless reshaped the visual logic of modern warfare. What zoologists dismissed as speculative fantasy became, in practice, a design principle. The transformation of Thayer’s theories into dazzle camouf lage marks a curious reversal: an aesthetic theory born from pastoral observation a nd persona l a nx iet y about contamination ultimately became a tool of industrialized war. In this transition, the painter’s role was not to perfectly describe nature but to
reinterpret its visual strategies. In the end, Thayer’s insistence on concealment, whether in animals, landscapes, or bodies, reveals less a universal law of nature than a deeply personal visual ideology structured by fear and desire. His paintings do not simply describe the world; they attempt to reorder it, to produce a purified field in which threat, contamination, and even the artist himself can disappear. In this sense, his project both draws upon and resists the dominant frameworks of nineteenth-century positivism and rationalism: while he seeks a totalizing, universal law in keeping with their drive towa rd s ystemat i z at ion, h i s reliance on artistic perception as proof ultimately destabilizes their empirical foundations. If his scientific claims failed to convince, it 79
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is because they demanded a collapse between observation and projection, transforming camouflage from an adaptive strategy into an aesthetic of erasure. Yet this very excess proved generative. In its afterlife, Thayer’s logic of destabilized form and fractured perception migrated from the pastoral to the battlefield, where invisibility became not a retreat from modernity but one of its defining visual tactics. Camouflage, in this sense, operates as a form of containment: of bodies, of anxieties, and of vision itself. What Thayer could not secure as scientific truth, he nonetheless realized as a powerful and enduring way of seeing—one in which to look is always, already, to risk losing sight.
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Short-Form Academic Papers
Feminist Abstraction and the Construction of Female Identity in Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Head Audrey Wang
Edited by Annelise Johansen
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Head (1920) occupies an ambiguous position within the history of modern sculpture (Fig. 1). Neither a realistic sculpture nor a purely abstract form, the work resists categorization, hovering between object, mask, and sculpture. Dada was an avant-garde movement that emerged during World War I, characterized by a rejection of traditional artistic conventions, rationality, and aesthetic hierarchy, expressed through absurdity, chance, and anti-art practices. Prompted by the devastation of the war and disillusionment with bourgeois values, Dada sought to expose the perceived irrationality of modern society and to challenge the cultural systems that, in its view, had made such violence possible. 1 Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Head should be understood within the context of her experimentation with Zurich Dada, a strand of the movement that emphasized abstraction, rhythm, and structured formal experimentation alongside its anti-rational aims.2 Yet despite increasing scholarly attention, the work is still most often discussed in terms of hybridity, rather than as a sustained feminist intervention within a male-dominated avantgarde. This essay moves beyond Anne Umland’s and Nell Andrew’s insights by arguing that the Head should also be understood as a feminist challenge to the hierarchy
Figure 1. Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Head, 1920, Oil on wood with glass beads on wire, 9 1/4 in high. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, (artwork © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn).
between fine and applied art, rather than simply as an example of Dada abstraction or experimentation. 3 By foregrounding the simplified geometric construction of Head, this paper explores how female identity is constructed and controlled through systems of visual legibility and social expectation. Taeuber-Arp’s Head is a painted, wood-turned sculpture that blurs the line between abstraction, puppet, portrait, and performance object. The egg-shaped wooden head is
1 H. H. Arnason and Elizabeth Mansfield, History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography, 7th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2013), 213. 2 Ibid.
3 Anne Umland, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and New Art, Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Head (New York: Museum of Modern Art); Nell Andrew, “Dada Dance: Sophie Taeuber’s Visceral Abstraction,” Art Journal 73 (2014): 12–29.
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mounted on a slender cylindrical stem with a double-cone base. Its “skin” is fragmented into regular, symmetrical rectangles, which are painted in muted red-brown, greyblue, light and dark grey, and black. These fragments are abstract and do not represent specific facial features. Similarly, the painted surface is smooth and refined, recalling the precision of textile design rather than the expressive modeling of traditional sculpture. On both sides of the upper part of the head are two decorative items woven from iron wire and strung with beads. The one on the left is flower-shaped, and the one on the right is spiral-shaped, introducing a handmade quality that resists a mechanistic form. Thus, TaeuberArp’s Head is a sculpture that abstracts facial features, concealing identifying characteristics. One of the leading figures of Zurich Dadaism, Taeuber-Arp was a pioneer of abstract art. She was a multidisciplinary artist, practicing dance, textile, interior design, and painting. Taeuber-Arp was born on January 19, 1889, in Davos, Switzerland, and enrolled at the Stauffacher-Schule in St. Gallen in 1904 to study drawing and design with a focus on the textile industry.4 As a result, this influence can be traced back to her formative training in textiles, which left a lasting mark on her work. This feature is evident on the Head’s face, where geometric shapes are painted with great precision. Scholars such as Anne Umland
and Nell Andrew have exposed that Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Head is deliberately difficult to classify, moving between sculpture, design, and abstraction. In Sophie TaeuberArp: Head, Umland emphasizes how the work challenges traditional boundaries between fine and applied art. In Head, Taeuber-Arp presents textile design and puppetry as fine art despite these media commonly being classified as applied art.5 She notes that its wood-turned form, painted surfaces, and beaded elements draw on techniques associated with craft and decorative practices, an area closely tied to Taeuber-Arp’s own training but often undervalued in early modernism. 6 Rather than presenting a recognizable portrait, the Head refuses to be identified, aligning with Dada’s broader rejection of stable categories. At the same time, Umland indicates that Taeuber-Arp’s integration of craftbased techniques into abstraction reveals the gendered hierarchies that shaped early twentieth-century modernism, in which women’s artistic labor was frequently confined to the decorative arts. By combining these two representative forms into a single sculpture, Taeuber-Arp forces viewers to confront the undervaluing of decorative arts. Hence, Umland views the Head as part of Dadaism’s interest in moving beyond surface likeness to explore more universal modes of resemblance. Regarding the identity of this sculpture, Umland also suggests, “Its beaded accessories likely identify the head as female.
4 Hoch et al., Sophie Taeuber-Arp (London: Tate Publishing, 2021), 13.
5 6
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One wonders if it, too, might be a parodic portrait or even an enigmatic self-portrait created as a partner for Portrait.”7 Nell Andrew expands this understanding by connecting Taebuer-Arp’s visual work to her experience as a dancer and performer at the Cabaret Voltaire. In “Dada Dance: Sophie Taeuber’s Visceral Abstraction,” Andrew argues that movement, rhythm, and bodily presence were central to TaeuberArp’s approach to abstraction. 8 By following Laban’s school of dance, which emphasized analyzing and structuring human movement through rhythm, geometry, and spatial dynamics rather than narrative or expressive gesture, Taeuber-Arp invoked a symmetry that brought plasticity of geometric abstraction to each of her media, making her forms meet in a partnered dance of perception, creating hybrids of vertical-horizontal, figure-ground, form-dissolution, and part-whole.9 Andrew recognizes that TaeuberArp applied the knowledge she learned about Laban’s school of dance to her sculptures, as the school visualized dance dynamics as geometric symbols.10 The Head’s mask-like face, stripped of emotion and identity, resembles Taeuber-Arp’s performance masks on the stage, suggesting that the Head should be understood not as a passive object of viewing but as a geometric surface
intended to be worn and activated in performance. Andrew further confirms that “...the new dance would help Taeuber expunge the ideologies of power that monitor the human body.” 11 From this perspective, the Head is an embodiment of a dance. Its mask-like appearance recalls the artist’s choreographed dances and costumed appearances, in which the body itself was abstracted according to labanotations. Therefore, Andrew suggests that rather than identifying with Dada’s mysticism or the mimicry of dehumanization in the face of industrialism, consumerism, and war, Taeuber-Arp regained the authenticity of the body.12 Although Anne Umland and Nell Andrew’s writings demonstrate how the Head is understood as a hybrid and experimental work, neither scholar fully addresses the sculpture as a feminist intervention within a male-dominated avantgarde, nor do they examine in depth how gendered divisions of labor shaped both Taeuber-Arp’s practice and its later reception. While Umland acknowledges the marginal status of applied arts and Andrew highlights Taeuber-Arp’s unconventional influences, the gendered implications of this marginalization remain largely unexplored. Fields central to TaeuberArp’s career, such as design, craft, and dance, were historically undervalued for their association with women’s artistic labor. Therefore, they have not been sufficiently considered in how the Head engages with the conventions of sculpture itself.
7 Ibid. 8 Andrew, “Dada Dance: Sophie Taeuber’s Visceral Abstraction,” 13. 9 Ibid., 24. 10 Ibid., 18.
11 12
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This paper adopts a feminist art-historical approach by drawing on the work of Cindy Nemser and Josephine Withers, whose scholarship emphasizes the structural conditions that shape female artists’ practice and reception. In “Art Criticism and Female Artists,” Nemser argues that female artists are systematically excluded from continuous critical participation not because of a lack of innovation, but because their work is classified as inferior to the maledominated modernist narrative.13 This viewpoint comes from art history and art criticism, which look upon women as “either the receiver or preserver of life rather than its creator,” thus “ anything she does originate is believed to come out of a ‘passive, unconscious’ kind of creativity.”14 Art criticism, in her view, does not merely evaluate art but actively constructs hierarchies that obscure women’s contributions. This dynamic is particularly evident in the tendency to interpret women’s work as applied art whenever it intersects with that of male artists, reducing their authorship to having been inf luenced by men rather than as original. Such art criticism fundamentally hinders independent development for female artists and denies them the freedom to express their creativity. Josephine Withers also studies the positioning of female artists in art history, distinguishing between
women as expressive subjects and as art producers. In “Artistic Women and Women Artists,” Withers points out that women’s artistic labor has historically been confined to the applied arts, which are considered less intellectual than painting or sculpture.15 Withers specifies that “the teaching of drawing and painting tended to be lumped with embroidery, lace-work, dancing, and music–– sure indication that they were intended as female accomplishments rather than male training.” 16 Consequently, art criticism naturally classifies applied art as women’s domain, while fine art is men’s. Nemser and Withers jointly shift attention from merely reading works as formal experiments to analyzing how art categories, labor divisions, and critical discourse structure visibility and exclusion. Applying this method to Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Head enables the work to be understood not merely as an abstract or mixed-media object, but as a conscious intervention that challenges the gender hierarchy of the modernist avant-garde. Taeuber-Arp integrates the marginalized stereotype of women’s applied art into sculpture and fine art within traditional consciousness, thereby blurring the boundary between fine and applied art. The geometric shapes drawn on the Head’s face can be understood through Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s training and professional experience in textile
13 Cindy Nemser, “Art Criticism and Women Artists,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 7, no. 3 (1973): 74. 14 Nemser, “Art Criticism and Women Artists,” 75.
15 Josephine Withers, “Artistic Women and Women Artists,” Art Journal 35 (1976): 330. 16 Withers, “Artistic Women and Women Artists,” 330.
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design, a field that fundamentally shaped her visual language. The flat colors, distinct and precise divisions, and rhythmic repetitions evoke the logic of weaving patterns. It can be associated with the textile artworks of Taeuber-Arp, such as the VerticalHorizontal Composition (1916) (Fig. 2). The Vertical-Horizontal Composition interlocks vertical and horizontal bands of muted red, blue, yellow, black, and white, forming a tightly organized grid. Small rectangular and square units repeat across the surface to create a flat, rhythmic pattern without a central focal point. In this mode, form emerges through the structure of modular units rather than illusory depth or expressive modeling, similar to the Head’s geometric facial pattern, in which the Head’s skin is also composed of these small flat geometric units. Taeuber-Arp’s adoption of ordinary textile design to create fine art, she “not only embraced the stereotype but introduced a few refinements of her own.”17 By translating the logic of textiles onto the sculpture’s faces, TaeuberArp challenged art criticism’s failure to recognize traditionally feminine crafts as legitimate art forms. This connection is important not only artistically but also socially. Taeuber-Arp incorporated drawing and painting with beaded earrings and textile design, reflecting that feminine accomplishments actually position art forms as equal to rigorous artistic training for men.18
Figure 2. Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Vertical-Horizontal Composition, 1916, Colored pencil, gouache, and pencil on paper, 9 13/32 x 6 21/32 in. (artwork © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
As Cindy Nemser and Josephine Withers argue, patriarchal art criticism marginalizes female artists, labeling their work as ‘decorative’ or ‘secondary’ and separating it from the discourse of modernist innovation. From this perspective, the geometric abstraction of the Head reuses women’s artistic labor as a source of modernist form. Moreover, a comparison between Taeuber-Arp’s Head and Giorgio de Chirico’s Le Muse Inquietanti (191618), underscores how abstraction can either reinforce or challenge the gendered hierarchies between fine and applied art, as identified by Cindy Nemser and Josephine Withers. In Withers’ terms, de Chirico’s Le Muse Inquietanti exemplifies a tradition where “the object of [women’s] instruction is to make her
17 Ibid., 331. 18 Withers, “Artistic Women and Women Artists,” 330.
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more pleasing and ornamental.”19 In Le Muse Inquietanti, de Chirico depicted three faceless, mannequinlike female figures whose simplified bodies are composed of rigid contours. One stands on the left side of the canvas, with a classical sculptural body. Another chubby Muse sits on a block in the middle. The third, likely a sculpture, is in shadow on the far right, with her hands raised in front of her chest, looking to the left as if she is about to speak. The Muses’ black, oval heads lack facial features, rendering them anonymous and silent, while their draped garments recall classical sculptures without granting the figures any sense of agency. Set against a stark architectural backdrop of arches, towers, and an empty plaza, the muses appear isolated and frozen as allegorical objects rather than subjects with autonomous consciou sne s s. By cont ra st , Taeuber-Arp’s Head demonstrates that women’s artistic labor is marginalized by critical discourse. While the sculpture similarly rejects expressive facial features, its geometric fragmentation and muted palette do not monumentalize the female form for male contemplation: the fragmentation disrupts the face’s unity, and the muted palette minimizes visual emphasis, thereby preventing the figure from being read as an idealized object of contemplation. In this way, it resists the monumentalization of the female form within a male-centered visual framework. Unlike de Chirico’s 19
Muses, which are embedded in a traditionally male fine arts medium, Taeuber-Arp’s Head draws on the applied arts, which Nemser and Withers believe are systemically undervalued. Therefore, de Chirico’s abstraction aestheticizes women’s passivity, while Taeuber-Arp’s abstraction reveals this mechanism. If the Head emerges from Taeuber-Arp’s engagement with Zurich Dada, its radical abstraction demands a further question: why does Taeuber-Arp remove gender markers from the face? This demands a critical strategy for rethinking the construction of female identity within modernist visual culture. By refusing expressive features traditionally used to encode gender, emotion, and individuality, TaeuberArp disrupts the expectation that women’s bodies must remain visually legible and effectively available. Rather than erasing gender, the Head reconfigures it by abstracting the female figure in ways that resist legibility within traditional visual codes of femininity. By denying the viewer access to recognizable markers of gendered identity, TaeuberArp transforms abstraction into a strategy that challenges and unsettles normative expectations of how female subjects should appear. So, if the Head is regarded as a sculptural portrait of a woman’s head, then the geometric shapes that make up the face can be interpreted as a dissection of female identity. Rather than presenting a clear subject, Taeuber-Arp breaks the face into abstract planes that resemble machine-like components, producing an image that feels detached, ordered,
Ibid., 330.
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and impersonal. The face is organized into a well-defined color plane: one side is soft reddish-brown, the other a cold grayish-blue. These divisions impose an abstract sequence, breaking the face down into discrete units. The nose protrudes into a rigid trapezoidal block, while the eyes are simplified to a single semicircle, losing their ability to express emotion. This cold precision can be understood as a visual reflection of how women’s identities have historically been constructed by external social forces rather than articulated by women’s inner individualit y. Societ y’s expectation that women should be gentle, virtuous wives and good mothers is an emotionless, cold demand. Handcrafted earrings with a rough texture symbolize women’s self-reconstruction away from contemporary life, as it “was thought to provide access to a more instinctive inner consciousness.”20 The rigor of geometric, machine-like shapes contrasts with the warmth of handcrafted beaded earrings, highlighting that although the female identity is outwardly machine-like, the Head still retains a feminine charm. Through this precise visual language, the Head is not a portrait of an individual woman but of the social forces within women. The abstraction by Taeuber-Arp is controlled, and its rectangular color blocks are vertically symmetrical. The Head’s geometric shapes do not imply movement in space; instead, they convey containment. This difference is crucial: the fragmentation of 20
Cubism, the early use of abstract geometric patterns, was usually for analytical or optical purposes, while the geometric deconstruction in Taeuber-Arp’s work operates conceptually, exposing identity as something assembled according to strict social patterns. For instance, the decorative wire elements curl from both sides of the Head, contrasting the strict geometric shape without softening it. This cautious balance between rigidity and decoration highlights the work’s uniqueness within modernism. Taeuber-Arp does not use abstraction to analyze viewpoints and objects, but to demonstrate the coordination that can exist in abstraction. In this way, the Head establishes a unique position in modernist abstraction, using geometry not to explore perception but to criticize the means by which female identity is visually constructed and constrained. The Head’s primitive color palette further engages with the social construction of female identity. These soft, muted colors reduce visual intensity and avoid strong contrast, creating a restrained and subdued presence. This sense of restraint can be read as reflecting how female identity has historically been limited and controlled within both society and the art world. TaeuberArp used a palette of natural tones— red, gray, blue, and black—but rendered them in muted, desaturated hues. Even white is softened to a grayish tone, producing a f lat, restrained visual effect rather than a bright or expressive one. Instead of simply expressing color, the pictorial plane becomes a mechanism of
Umland, Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Head, 13.
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control and regulation, reinforcing the sense that identity is shaped by external norms. In early twentiethcentury art criticism, female artists were often described as instinctive, decorative, or primitive.21 TaeuberArp’s restrained palette can be interpreted as embracing rather than passively accepting these labels. The Head’s surface is composed of color blocks; there is no facial contour, and all facial features are removed except for the simplified nose and one eye. The strict division of colors reduces complexity and promotes order. Each facial area becomes a discrete unit, resulting in a generalized face rather than a specific individual. From this perspective, the Head suggests that personal characteristics are eroded under a system that values consistency over individuality. Therefore, the soft color palette and the divided surfaces work together to transform the portrait into a reflection of the flattening and standardization of female identity in traditional art criticism. The Head is not only an example of the early modernist experiment but also a sharp critique of the system that has constructed, regulated, and rejected female identity and artistic labor throughout history. By employing geometric abstraction, soft colors, and the logic of textile design, Sophie Taeuber-Arp reveals how women convey clarity on avantgarde art through simplification, standardization, and marginalization in patriarchal visual culture. Through
the feminist frameworks of Cindy Nemser and Josephine Withers, the sculpture reveals how modernist abstraction is shaped by gender hierarchies that privilege certain media, authorial forms, and visible patterns. In contrast to the male avant-garde, which often reduced women to symbolic images, TaeuberArp used abstraction to avoid emotional identification, challenge the conventions of portraiture, and treat traditionally feminized forms of labor as sources of intellectual and creative work. Therefore, the Head should not be understood as an edge or a mixed-media object, but rather as a feminist intervention that challenges the hierarchy between fine and applied art.
21 Nemser, “Art Criticism and Women Artists,” 77.
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Heterodox portrayals of nudity in the 19th century: Unveiling Édouard Manet’s Olympia and Paul Gauguin’s Manaò tupapaú (Spirit of the Dead Watching) Jesus Talón-Bueno Edited by Robert Zabin
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Both Manet’s Olympia (1863) and Gauguin’s Manaò tupapaú (Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892) challenge the conventions of the nineteenth-century classical nude by rejecting its idealization and deification of the body. Instead of presenting passive, mythologized figures that celebrate beauty, Manet confronts the viewer through the model’s direct gaze, flattened composition, and provocative inclusion of symbols; while Gauguin destabilizes the tradition through the exoticized setting, spiritual symbolism, and a totemic presence that transforms the nude into a site of psychological unease. Both produce heterodox nudes that resist the academic canon through formal and symbolic strategies which either externalize sexuality as social confrontation or internalize it as bodily tension and gender ambiguity. Manet’s Olympia depicts a confidently reclining nude woman on a bed (Fig. 1). Olympia lies regarding the viewer directly, implicating the spectator as a patron or voyeur. She poses on a divan with disheveled sheets and a white pillow, wearing nothing but a black ribbon around her neck, a gold bracelet on her wrist, Turkish slippers on her feet, and a silk flower. At the foot of the bed is a black cat, and to the side, a Black servant who brings her a bouquet.1 While the servant and cat recede into the dark background, Olympia’s pale accessories stand out against it, intensifying the contrast with
Figure 1. Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, Oil on canvas, 130.5 x 190 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France. Image courtesy of the Musée d'Orsay.
the whiteness of her body. Unlike the softly illuminated and idealized bodies of traditional academic nudes, her nudity appears almost lifeless, flat and stripped of the sensual vitality expected in the genre.2 Behind her head is a green curtain drawn back as if theatrically framing a spectacle. In this respect, the painting differs from its predecessors in representation, but not in subject matter. Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) depicted a reclining goddess, and Francisco Goya painted a fashionable Madrileña in The Naked Maja (c. 1797-1800). Manet’s subject depicts a Parisian prostitute from the nineteenth century.3 While the academic nude had long legitimized its erotic content by cloaking it in allegory, Manet presents his subject without excuse, standing in stark contrast to more traditional European painting. Almost thirty years after Manet’s Olympia, Gauguin produced a 2 Lee Wallace, “Gauguin’s Manao Tupapau and Sodomitical Invitation,” in Sexual Encounters: Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities (Cornell University Press, 2003), 125. 3 Wallace, “Gauguin’s Manao Tuapapau and Sodomitical Invitation,” 125.
1 T herese Dolan,. “Fringe Benefits: Manet’s Olympia and Her Shawl.” The Art Bulletin 97, no. 4 (2015), 409.
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similarly provocative representation in Manaò tupapaú (Spirit of the Dead Watching) (Fig. 2). In this work, Gauguin depicts a reclining nude of a young Tahitian woman named Teha’amana, who was thirteen years old at the time and living with Gauguin as his self-described “native wife” while he was in his forties. 4 The power imbalance embedded in their relationship–colonial, sexual, and generational–provides an unsettling undercurrent to the image. Teha’amana lies face down on a bed, her body pressed tense into the mattress with fear.5 Compositionally similar to Olympia, Gauguin “took with him a photographic reproduction of Olympia and had it to hand in 1892 as he produced Manaò tuapapaú.”6 Like Olympia, Teha’amana’s legs are crossed, though in this work in a gesture that reads as protective. She gazes at the viewer with wide dark eyes, her face partially obscured by her hand and flowing dark hair. She is turned away, concealing her sexuality from the viewer rather than presenting it. Unlike Manet’s Olympia, whose direct stare confronts the spectator with confidence and awareness, Gauguin’s figure offers neither seduction nor invitation; instead her expression conveys vulnerability and apprehension.
Behind the young woman, in a corner, stands a figure rendered entirely f lat, unmodulated black, echoing the compositional position of the black servant in Manet’s painting, but differing in symbolic function. 7 It remains ambiguous whether this presence represents what is physically happening behind her, or if it is an embodiment of her fear. The black drapery and the mauve-toned background, punctuated by small flashes of white light, intensify the atmosphere. These flickering shapes, suggestive of spirits or birds in motion, convey a sense of psychological unrest. Their agitation appears to ripple outward into the surrounding space, creating the impression that the pictorial space itself is unsettled by the figure’s presence. Gauguin, himself a leading figure of the symbolist movement, transforms the environment into a psychic extension of the figure’s emotional state, enacting the Symbolist tradition of correspondences between inner emotion and the natural world.8 B ot h repre s ent at ion s , charged with sexual undertones and provocative intent, articulate the two opposing visions of artists who are responding to the traditional representation of nudity in European portraiture by reimagining the female nude. Manet depicts agency through a prostitute who presents herself with a hint of disdain towards the viewer. Olympia’s body remains upright, her hair carefully arranged after her
4 Abigail Solomon Godeau, “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism,” Art in America 77, no. 7 (1989), 321. 5 Jean-François Staszak, “Primitivism and the other. History of art and cultural geography,” GeoJournal 60, no. 4 (2004): 353–64. 6 Wallace, “Gauguin’s Manao Tuapapau and Sodomitical Invitation,” 126.
7 Ibid., 128. 8 Staszak, “Primitivism and the other. History of art and Cultural geography,” 354.
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Figure 2. Paul Gaugin, Manaò tupapaú (Spirit of the Dead Watching), 1892, Oil on jute mounted on canvas, 73.02 x 92.39 cm. A Conger Goodyear Collection. Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York. Image courtesy of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
toilette,9 reinforcing her composure and control. Her gaze, selfpresentation, and even her modesty of one hand covering her anatomy in the gesture of the Venus Pudica, are all deployed with an awareness of being seen, drawing attention to what is superficially concealed and inviting the viewer into an erotic encounter. By contrast, Gauguin’s work evokes a sense of exposed vulnerability and retreat. Teha’amana is face-down, her torso twisted, her hair strewn in
serpentine strands behind her hand. While Olympia faces the viewer assertively, Teha’amana gaze appears involuntary, her attention arrested by an unseen presence behind her. The two female nudes also diverge in how their poses embody their femininity and agency. Teha’amana’s sense of vulnerability is grounded in the physical evidence of her body: her torso is pressed into the mattress, her face half-buried in the pillow as if recoiling from what lies behind her, turned away from the viewer. Her disheveled hair, gathered beneath her head rather than flowing down her back, suggests a sudden turn of the body, as if she
9 The term toilette refers to the act of grooming or personal preparation, a subject frequently depicted in nineteenth-century academic painting, as seen in works such as Degas’s Woman at her Toilette (c. 1884).
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had quickly twisted and withdrawn. Olympia’s carefully arranged hair and feminine proportions reinforce a performance of femininity, however, they are stripped of warm idealization. Teha’amana’s tense posture, averted gaze, and disturbed hair materialize a state of fragile, possible post-coital vulnerability, feminine in a disturbing passivity. Like Olympia, Teha’amana, also conceals her sexuality. She is rendered with a powerful back, large hands, and hips which are noted as common characteristics of the “Polynesian body” as Gauguin describes it in his book Noa Noa.10 These distortions are consistent with Gauguin’s broader primitivism aesthetic, in which anatomical proportions are untethered from academic naturalism. Nevertheless, the androgynous quality of this representation may, as Shanice Wolter suggests, connect to the Tahitian concept of the mahu– a third gender in Polynesia that embodies a fluid, balanced combination of male and female spirits. 11 Olympia’s body, while flattened by Manet’s handling of paint, remains legibly feminine. Both nudes also adopt a crossed-leg position, though the reading of the crossing differs significantly. The crossing of Olympia’s legs appears deliberate and self-possessed, part of a performance of erotic agency, while Teha’amana’s gesture is withholding. The liminality of her
gender destabilizes the viewer’s erotic position. While the Teha’amana appears notably frightened, the source of her fear remains ambiguous. Could it be directed towards the spectral presence in the background of the painting, or toward an implied, unseen sexual partner?12 A dark, looming figure in the background, rendered with simplif ied contours and unmodulated color, may represent the tupapaú, or spirit of the dead, referenced in Tahitian belief.13 Unlike the rigid hieratic stillness of the spirit figure, three abrupt flashes of light punctuate the purple background. The contrast between the immobile, monumental presence of the totem and the dynamic, flickering explosions of light heightens the atmosphere of unease, reinforcing the uncertainty surrounding the subject’s fear: whether it stems from an external apparition or from human implications remains unseen and left open to interpretation. The presence may represent fear itself, giving visual form to an emotional state, rather than serving only as narrative illustration. Although Gauguin wrote about Teha’amana’s fear of spirits, recent scholarship has indicated that the fear may also be a reflection of the colonial and sexual power dynamics that were present in their relationship.14 Any one explanation is undermined by the painting’s oscillation between
10 Godeau, “Going Native,” 321. 11 Shanice Wolters, “Confronting Colonial Imaginings of Tahiti: An Examination of Painted and Photographed Representations of Māhū and Raerae,” ARTiculate 4 (2023), 37.
12 Wallace, “Gauguin’s Manao Tuapapau and Sodomitical Invitation,” 131. 13 Ibid., 128. 14 Staszak, “Primitivism and the other. History of art and cultural geography,” 357.
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psychologica l projection and supernatural symbolism. The depictions of both models in Manet’s Olympia and Gauguin’s Spirit of the Dead diverge from the conventional and academic, breaking the traditional representation of classical nudes. Manet’s portrayal of a prostitute contrasts with Gauguin’s depiction of an androgynous figure intertwined with supernatural fear that embodies a sensuality charged with disquiet. Where Manet’s provocation is rooted in the social realities of contemporary Paris, Gauguin’s divergence from the European tradition is inseparable from the colonial contexts of his time in Tahiti. His representation of Teha’amana is inflected by the primitivist fantasy of the “exotic” other–a Western projection onto non-Western bodies and cultures that exoticizes, eroticizes, and subordinates them simultaneously. The painting thus operates within a colonial framework in which the Tahitian body becomes a site of European fascination and appropriation, rendering Gauguin’s departure from academic convention not simply a formal innovation but an act embedded in unequal relations of power.15 Analyzing both artworks reveals distinct formal and psychological contrasts. Manet presents sexuality as an explicit social exchange between the figure and the viewer. In Spirit of the Dead Watching, by contrast, Gauguin embeds sexuality within the figure’s bodily tension and emotional t ra nsm i s sion, produci ng a n 15
atmosphere of psychological pressure rather than open confrontation. This contrast ref lects two distinct artistic visions. Manet’s modernism exposes the social realities of sexuality in the contemporary city, foregrounding the dynamics of looking and exchange between a prostitute and her presumed patron. Manet’s modeling, though antiacademic in its flatness, retains a naturalistic anatomical legibility with spatial grounding and consistent lighting. What appears external in Manet thus becomes internal and psychological in Gauguin. Gauguin’s primitivist aesthetics, consistent with a late nineteenthcentury movement that eschewed academic naturalism in favor of nonWestern visual languages, expressive color, and simplified form, serve to formally reinforce this instability. Teha’a ma na’s ha nd s app e a r disproportionately large, her torso appears elongated, and her spatial depth is compressed into flattened planes of saturated blue, yellow, and violet. Instead of being anatomically coherent, the background figure is stylized and resembles what Gauguin would have considered “savage or at least exotic.”16 Gauguin’s nude becomes psychologically opaque, spatially unstable, and symbolically charged in contrast to Olympia’s physical clarity and social directness. These representations depart from idealized visions of the nude, instead embracing a dismantling of Western tradition that reflects 16 Staszak, “Primitivism and the other. History of art and cultural geography,” 354
Ibid., 354.
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the modernist impulses of the artist’s respective motivations. When considered together, these paintings reveal two shifts within modern art in the representation of the female nude. Manet’s realism and Gauguin’s psychologically charged abstraction mark different stages in this transformation. In this lineage, Manet begins to f latten the pictorial plane and expose the constructed nature of the nude, while Gauguin pushes these formal disruptions further, infusing the image with symbolic and psychological ambiguity. Manet’s figure asserts her presence through a direct, self-possessed gaze and an unapologetically corporeal sensuality. By contrast, the figure in Gauguin’s painting embodies a more ambiguous fusion of fear and eroticism, where bodily tension and psychological unease replace overt confrontation and carry tinges of Tahitian mythology. Olympia presents sexuality as immediate and confrontational, stripping away mythological allegory to reveal social transaction and a gaze returned. Gauguin strips away social clarity and reveals a nude caught between fear, femininity, and supernatural presence. Together, these works disrupt the orthodox conventions of the classical nude, albeit in different ways, rejecting idealization in favor of a raw and unsettling representation that reframes sexuality as both immediate and psychologically complex.
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