Susan Waller is an independent scholar and historian of nineteenth century European art. She holds a BA from Brown University, an MA from Boston University, and a PhD from Northwestern University. Previously, she was on the faculty of the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the University of Kentucky, Lexington. Prior to completing the PhD, she was Curator at the Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and Director of The Baxter Gallery, Maine College of Art, Portland, Maine. Her research focuses on the social history of artists and models in Paris in the nineteenth century.
Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914 examines Paris as a center of internat... more Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914 examines Paris as a center of international culture that attracted artists from Western and Eastern Europe, Asia and the Americas during a period of burgeoning global immigration. Sixteen essays by a group of emerging and established international scholars - including several whose work has not been previously published in English - address the experiences of foreign exiles, immigrants, students and expatriates. They explore the formal and informal structures that permitted foreign artists to forge connections within and across national communities and in some cases fashion new, transnational identities in the City of Light. Considering Paris from an innovative global perspective, the book situates both important modern artists - such as Edvard Munch, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Marc Chagall and Gino Severini - and lesser-known American, Czech, Italian, Polish, Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Catalan, and Hungarian painters, sculptors, writers, dancers, and illustrators within the larger trends of international mobility and cultural exchange. Broadly appealing to historians of modern art and history, the essays in this volume characterize Paris as a thriving transnational arts community in which the interactions between diverse cultures, peoples and traditions contributed to the development of a hybrid and multivalent modern art.
Contributors include Juliet Bellow (Associate Professor of Modern European Art History, American University), Ewa Bobrowska (Associate Program Officer of Research at the Terra Foundation for American Art, Europe), Norma Broude (Professor Emerita of Art History, American University), Emily Burns (Assistant Professor of Art History, Auburn University), Paul Fisher (Associate Professor of American Studies, Wellesley College), Sharon Hecker (independent scholar), Zoë Marie Jones (Instructor, University of Alaska, Fairbanks), Cindy Kang (doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), Laura Karp Lugo (University of Tours, France), Donald McCallum (1939–2013; former Professor of Art History at UCLA), Thomas Rimer (Professor Emeritus of East Asian Languages and Literature, University of Pittsburgh), Nicholas Sawicki (Assistant Professor of Art History, Lehigh University), Richard Sonn (Professor of History, University of Arkansas), and Maite van Dyck (Curator of Paintings, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).
Contents:
Introduction: Strangers in paradise: foreign artists and
communities in modern Paris, 1870-1914, Susan Waller and Karen L. Carter.
Part I Institutions and Networks: The Italian expatriates: De Nittis and Zandomeneghi, Norma Broude
International artists at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris: the case of Edvard Munch (1896 and 1897), Maite van Dijk
‘Earning a living’ in the International Graphic Arts: the Académie
Julian and the teaching of poster design and illustration, 1890-1914, Karen L. Carter
Between Montparnasse and Prague: circulating cubism
in Left Bank Paris, Nicholas Sawicki
Part II Expatriate Communities:
Polish artists in Paris, 1890-1914: between international modernity and national identity, Ewa Bobrowska
Revising Bohemia: the American artist
colony in Paris, 1890-1914, Emily C. Burns
Catalan artists in Paris at the turn of the century, Laura Karp Lugo
Jewish Modernism: immigrant artists of Montparnasse, 1905-1914, Richard D. Sonn
Part III Incomers and Outsiders:
Everywhere and nowhere: Medardo Rosso and the
cultural cosmopolitan in fin-de-siècle Paris, Sharon Hecker
The Sacre ‘au printemps’: Parisian audiences and the Ballets Russes, Juliet Bellow
Gwen John: posing and painting in Paris, 1905-1914, Susan Waller
A path beyond Paris: the evolving art of Sakamoto Hanjirō, J. Thomas Rimer
Part IV Cosmopolitans and Hybridities:
The lost ambassador: Henrietta Reubell and transnational queer spaces in the Paris arts world, 1876-1903, Paul
Fisher
József Rippl-Rónai’s embroideries: crafting Hungarian Modernism in Paris, Cindy Kang
Japanese painters in Paris, 1880-1912, Donald F.
McCallum
Gino Severini’s Bohemian Paris: integrating the Italian artist,
1906-1914, Zoë Marie Jones
Selected bibliography; Index. 288 pages. 978-1-4724-4354-0
Although mastery of the representation of the human figure was central to art making as early as ... more Although mastery of the representation of the human figure was central to art making as early as the fifteenth century in Europe, in the nineteenth-century French imagination the artist's model became identified as a distinct social type and cultural trope. This study of the artist's model in Paris between 1830 and 1870 incorporates three histories: a social history of professional models, a cultural history of models as social types, and an art history of representations of the model in elite and popular visual culture. It takes as its starting point the artist-model transaction: demonstrating that stereotypes of 'the model' that figured in the public imagination were framed both by gender and ethnicity, the book develops a nuanced typology of different types of models
This anthology brings together selections from sixty-one primary source documents artist's letter... more This anthology brings together selections from sixty-one primary source documents artist's letters, journals, and memoirs; critics' reviews; and minutes and reports of artists' societies and schools that illuminate the experience of women artists from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries in the United States and Europe. In addition to material related to the work of such well-known painters and sculptors as Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun, Angelica Kauffmann, Rosa Bonheur, Harriet Hosmer, Cecilia Beaux, Marie Bashkirtseff, Berthe Morisot, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, and Barbara Hepworth, the volume includes material related to the work of amateur artists and women in ceramics and textiles.
This essay reconstructs the history of Salem, “le prince de Tombouctou,” an artist’s model from N... more This essay reconstructs the history of Salem, “le prince de Tombouctou,” an artist’s model from North Africa working in Parisian studios in the later nineteenth century. It traces his trajectory from Algeria, where he served among Indigenous troops recruited by the French to facilitate the subjugation of the colony, to Paris, where he cannily asserted his exotic origins to promote himself within the community of models. Examining intersections between institutional structures of French colonialism and traditions of Parisian studio practice, the essay suggests that tensions between French and Islamic cultural norms may have inflected the representations for which African models posed.
Art and Migration: Revisioning the Borders of Community , 2021
Agostina Segaotri, best known as a model for Vincent Van Gogh, posed in Paris during the Second E... more Agostina Segaotri, best known as a model for Vincent Van Gogh, posed in Paris during the Second Empire and Third Republic. This essay situates her life story and the representations of her produced in Paris within the context of the history of Italian immigration to France and French perceptions of Italy and immigration. It traces the beginning of encounters between French artists and Italian models to Rome early in the century and follows the models’ emgiration from the Italian peninsula to the French hexagon after midcentury. In Paris Italian models became a focus for complex and conflicting ideas about immigration, cultural difference, and modernity that animated French discourse, both textual and visual. In the popular press Italians were represented as alien intruders, but within the Parisian artistic community, the French aesthetic tradition which had long valorized Italian artistic production shaped an alternative and far more positive view. For the immigrants, however, moving across borders to resettle in a foreign culture offered opportunities. The story of Agostina Segatori’s passage and the representations of her and other Italian models produced by artists in Paris illuminates both the perception of ‘Italianicity’ in the French imagination and immigrants’ negotiation of the transnational experience.
Through a case study of the career of Gélon, a model active in Parisian studios in the later nine... more Through a case study of the career of Gélon, a model active in Parisian studios in the later nineteenth century, this essay explores the praxis of the pose as a reciprocal partnership between artist and model and as a métier with links to popular performative traditions. Gélon came to the model stand from the wrestling ring, adapting the strength, flexibility and kinesthetic awareness he developed as an athlete to posing for Salon works. At the Ecole des Beaux Arts, where he belonged to a cohort of modèles profesionnels, he mastered the rhetorical idiom of gesture that undergirded the narrative conventions of history painting and linked academic methods of artistic production to performance traditions such as the theater and tableaux vivants. Gélon’s history suggests how a skilled model’s command of gesture as performative spectacle contributed to the pedagogy and production of artworks within the academic tradition.
Late in his career Auguste Rodin recalled his first encounter, around 1880, with the model Pignat... more Late in his career Auguste Rodin recalled his first encounter, around 1880, with the model Pignatelli, when the Italian spontaneously assumed a pose on the model stand that became the basis of St John the Baptist Preaching. This article explores this episode through an investigation of Pignatelli’s place within the fraternity of Italian models that emerged in Rome early in the nineteenth century and after 1870 established an immigrant community in Paris. It argues that modèles italiens, who had long been valued by French artists for their classical proportions and their command of the gestures that were the foundation of Christian and classical iconography, seemed to provide a connection between nineteenth-century Paris and the Renaissance and antique Rome. Pignatelli’s performance in Rodin’s studio thus typifies the collective bodily knowledge passed down within the community of Italian models and exemplifies their contribution to maintaining iconographic traditions.
In 1896, Alexandre Falguière’s sculpture The Dancer (La Danseuse), was the succès de scandale of ... more In 1896, Alexandre Falguière’s sculpture The Dancer (La Danseuse), was the succès de scandale of the Salon des Artistes Français. While the public wondered whether the nude figure indeed represented Cléo de Mérode, a rising star in the ballet of the Opéra de Paris, art critics reacted with unusual vehemence to the work, labeling it a “modern” body and denouncing it as “deformed” or “damaged.” This essay examines the associations of deformity, femininity and modernity raised in the emphatic critical reception to the work. Through an investigation of the roles of the two principals in the sculpture’s production – the artist and the model – and of the critical reception to the work, it argues that this “modern” body proved troublesome to contemporary viewers, not only because it was seen as the likeness of a public celebrity, but also because the figure’s proportions resonated in complex and contradictory ways within contemporary discourses of dance, art, fashion and anthropology. The product of a collaboration between artist and model, the body portrayed in Falguière’s sculpture embodied not simply an individual dancer, but also changes in contemporary conventions governing feminine behavior – changes that were widely perceived as threatening.
This essay proposes an identity for the model who posed for the male figure in Manet's The Gypsie... more This essay proposes an identity for the model who posed for the male figure in Manet's The Gypsies (1862), which was later separated into three canvases.
This essay examines the role of Cléo de Mérode in the production of Alexandre Falguière’s La Dans... more This essay examines the role of Cléo de Mérode in the production of Alexandre Falguière’s La Danseuse. Exhibited in 1896 at the annual exhibition of contemporary art organized by the Société des Artistes Français, the sculpture was a succès de scandale: art critics suggested–and many viewers certainly believed–that the figure was a direct body cast of the celebrated dancer whose photographs pervaded the Parisian press. Arguing that the attitude of the figure was initiated not by the sculptor but by the dancer, this paper proposes that the praxis of the pose is a process in which the model is not the passive object of the artist’s objectifying gaze, but rather an active participant in generating the work of art.
A recently auctioned nude study by Jean-Léon Gérôme, not included in Gerald Ackerman’s catalogue ... more A recently auctioned nude study by Jean-Léon Gérôme, not included in Gerald Ackerman’s catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, represents one of the artist’s favorite models, Emma Dupont. While nineteenth century nude studies are common, this work has an unusual and exceptional provenance: it belonged to the model’s descendants. A consideration of the paintings for which she posed and an anecdotal history of Emma Dupont suggests that Dupont and Gérôme worked together over a long period. Despite rumors that Dupont was the artist’s mistress, there is no evidence to support this. An analysis of the community of models in nineteenth century Paris, based on statistical evidence and the memoirs of other models, opens the way for more expansive and nuanced consideration of the model’s role within studio praxis in nineteenth-century Paris. This provides evidence for considering the work within the context of Dupont’s and Gérôme’s on-going professional relationship.
Between 1886 and 1902, during the period before his death in 1904, Jean-Léon Gérôme produced a s... more Between 1886 and 1902, during the period before his death in 1904, Jean-Léon Gérôme produced a series of painted and photographic self-portraits depicting himself at work on his sculpture with a nude model. These representations seem to reiterate his mastery by displaying his virtuosity in two media, but this paper argues that the series was simultaneously a response to a crisis in masculine professional identity in which overcompensation served to diffuse Gérôme’s increasing anxiety of lateness.
When Gérôme made his sculptural debut in his mid-fifties the Universal Exposition of 1878, he was at the height of his professional career as a painter. The turn to sculpture complicated his public persona. While on the one hand the initiative extended his artistic identity, on the other it returned him to the bottom of professional hierarchies as measured by official awards. He was simultaneously master and novice. During the subsequent decades, as he received awards for the sculptures he exhibited at the Salon, he reascended the professional hierarchy, but simultaneously, the aesthetic values and official structures on which he had built his career were--from his point of view--subverted, as avant-garde artists whose work he considered degenerate were welcomed into the Musée de Luxembourg and women were admitted into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. As he entered the endgame of his career, the self-portraits provided a vehicle for negotiating the instability of his professional persona and the increasing uncertainty of his legacy. The first works in the series suggest his difficulties in coming to terms with the place of sculpture in his oeuvre; the final painting reasserts his aesthetic values and challenges the modernism that was displacing the traditions to which he belonged.
Chronicles the changes in censorship laws during the Third Republic of France and the methods emp... more Chronicles the changes in censorship laws during the Third Republic of France and the methods employed by photographers to create nudes that would be approved by the censors. Describes the tradition of imitating an academic style in erotic photographs and the politics of class distinction behind the confusing and arbitrarily enforced anti-pornography laws
In 1860s Paris, it became evident that the form of artist-model transaction that predominated wit... more In 1860s Paris, it became evident that the form of artist-model transaction that predominated within academic praxis, calling for a professional model to assume a stationary pose in the artist's studio, was inherently at odds with the Realists' commitment to representing modern life. Casting about for alternatives, Manet replaced professional with proprietary models. While this substitution seemed to embody an alternative Realist studio practice, a close reading of the development of atelier paintings by Fantin-Latour, Whistler, and Bazille demonstrates that it compelled avant-garde artists to negotiate the standards of decorum that governed gender relations in bourgeois culture.
In the 1850s, Jean-Francois Millet and Jules Breton relocated their studios from Paris to the Fre... more In the 1850s, Jean-Francois Millet and Jules Breton relocated their studios from Paris to the French countryside, where they no longer had access to the professional models that posed in urban ateliers. This study examines the evolution of their studio practice within the rural context: it explores their shift from professional to proprietary and peasant models, how the shift inflected the artist/model transaction, and their negotiation of the social structures and standards of decorum of the rural communities in which their studios were located.
The writer examines conflicting constructions of the male model that emerged during the July Mona... more The writer examines conflicting constructions of the male model that emerged during the July Monarchy in pedagogical drawings of the École des Beaux Arts in Paris and in popular prints and caricatures. During the 1830s, the rise of genre historique contributed to a stylistic change within École studies. As a focus on the generalized beau idéal gave way to particularized likenesses of individual models within École studies, the artist-model transaction was transformed from a sustained professional relationship into a brief commercial exchange: Previously a contracted employee of the institution, the model became a contingent hourly worker. This change in his social status in turn generated a new construction of the model as lazy and ineffectual in popular discourses of the 1840s. This stereotype rationalized the change of the artist-model transaction while obscuring the aesthetic and social factors that had effected it.
Morowitz, Laura, and William Vaughan. Artistic brotherhoods in the nineteenth century. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate. , 2000
Explores the homosocial education of the atelier-Ecole system, examining initiation rites (charge... more Explores the homosocial education of the atelier-Ecole system, examining initiation rites (charges or "hazing" of the atelier) and the concours or competition structure of the Ecole. Through the ritual voyeurism implicit in the stripping of new atelier members, and official policies of the Ecole, women were excluded. Demonstrates how these measures comprised an integrated system which produced a dominant masculine profession of the artist in 19th-c. France.
Examines Hosmer's Zenobia (original destroyed; reduced version: Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford), 18... more Examines Hosmer's Zenobia (original destroyed; reduced version: Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford), 1859. In the early 19th c., Zenobia, the queen of Palmyra conquered by the Roman Emperor Aurelian, was a common literary subject, but an unusual one for artists. Hosmer, who was working in Rome, was probably encouraged to undertake her sculpture through her friendship with Anna Jameson (1794-1860), who included Zenobia in her Celebrated Female Sovereigns, 1831. In most literary accounts, Zenobia's defeat was attributed to her pride and vanity, failings often considered particularly feminine; demonstrates that Hosmer depicted the queen as a woman whose wisdom and courage transcended her defeat.
Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914 examines Paris as a center of internat... more Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914 examines Paris as a center of international culture that attracted artists from Western and Eastern Europe, Asia and the Americas during a period of burgeoning global immigration. Sixteen essays by a group of emerging and established international scholars - including several whose work has not been previously published in English - address the experiences of foreign exiles, immigrants, students and expatriates. They explore the formal and informal structures that permitted foreign artists to forge connections within and across national communities and in some cases fashion new, transnational identities in the City of Light. Considering Paris from an innovative global perspective, the book situates both important modern artists - such as Edvard Munch, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Marc Chagall and Gino Severini - and lesser-known American, Czech, Italian, Polish, Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Catalan, and Hungarian painters, sculptors, writers, dancers, and illustrators within the larger trends of international mobility and cultural exchange. Broadly appealing to historians of modern art and history, the essays in this volume characterize Paris as a thriving transnational arts community in which the interactions between diverse cultures, peoples and traditions contributed to the development of a hybrid and multivalent modern art.
Contributors include Juliet Bellow (Associate Professor of Modern European Art History, American University), Ewa Bobrowska (Associate Program Officer of Research at the Terra Foundation for American Art, Europe), Norma Broude (Professor Emerita of Art History, American University), Emily Burns (Assistant Professor of Art History, Auburn University), Paul Fisher (Associate Professor of American Studies, Wellesley College), Sharon Hecker (independent scholar), Zoë Marie Jones (Instructor, University of Alaska, Fairbanks), Cindy Kang (doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), Laura Karp Lugo (University of Tours, France), Donald McCallum (1939–2013; former Professor of Art History at UCLA), Thomas Rimer (Professor Emeritus of East Asian Languages and Literature, University of Pittsburgh), Nicholas Sawicki (Assistant Professor of Art History, Lehigh University), Richard Sonn (Professor of History, University of Arkansas), and Maite van Dyck (Curator of Paintings, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).
Contents:
Introduction: Strangers in paradise: foreign artists and
communities in modern Paris, 1870-1914, Susan Waller and Karen L. Carter.
Part I Institutions and Networks: The Italian expatriates: De Nittis and Zandomeneghi, Norma Broude
International artists at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris: the case of Edvard Munch (1896 and 1897), Maite van Dijk
‘Earning a living’ in the International Graphic Arts: the Académie
Julian and the teaching of poster design and illustration, 1890-1914, Karen L. Carter
Between Montparnasse and Prague: circulating cubism
in Left Bank Paris, Nicholas Sawicki
Part II Expatriate Communities:
Polish artists in Paris, 1890-1914: between international modernity and national identity, Ewa Bobrowska
Revising Bohemia: the American artist
colony in Paris, 1890-1914, Emily C. Burns
Catalan artists in Paris at the turn of the century, Laura Karp Lugo
Jewish Modernism: immigrant artists of Montparnasse, 1905-1914, Richard D. Sonn
Part III Incomers and Outsiders:
Everywhere and nowhere: Medardo Rosso and the
cultural cosmopolitan in fin-de-siècle Paris, Sharon Hecker
The Sacre ‘au printemps’: Parisian audiences and the Ballets Russes, Juliet Bellow
Gwen John: posing and painting in Paris, 1905-1914, Susan Waller
A path beyond Paris: the evolving art of Sakamoto Hanjirō, J. Thomas Rimer
Part IV Cosmopolitans and Hybridities:
The lost ambassador: Henrietta Reubell and transnational queer spaces in the Paris arts world, 1876-1903, Paul
Fisher
József Rippl-Rónai’s embroideries: crafting Hungarian Modernism in Paris, Cindy Kang
Japanese painters in Paris, 1880-1912, Donald F.
McCallum
Gino Severini’s Bohemian Paris: integrating the Italian artist,
1906-1914, Zoë Marie Jones
Selected bibliography; Index. 288 pages. 978-1-4724-4354-0
Although mastery of the representation of the human figure was central to art making as early as ... more Although mastery of the representation of the human figure was central to art making as early as the fifteenth century in Europe, in the nineteenth-century French imagination the artist's model became identified as a distinct social type and cultural trope. This study of the artist's model in Paris between 1830 and 1870 incorporates three histories: a social history of professional models, a cultural history of models as social types, and an art history of representations of the model in elite and popular visual culture. It takes as its starting point the artist-model transaction: demonstrating that stereotypes of 'the model' that figured in the public imagination were framed both by gender and ethnicity, the book develops a nuanced typology of different types of models
This anthology brings together selections from sixty-one primary source documents artist's letter... more This anthology brings together selections from sixty-one primary source documents artist's letters, journals, and memoirs; critics' reviews; and minutes and reports of artists' societies and schools that illuminate the experience of women artists from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries in the United States and Europe. In addition to material related to the work of such well-known painters and sculptors as Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun, Angelica Kauffmann, Rosa Bonheur, Harriet Hosmer, Cecilia Beaux, Marie Bashkirtseff, Berthe Morisot, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, and Barbara Hepworth, the volume includes material related to the work of amateur artists and women in ceramics and textiles.
This essay reconstructs the history of Salem, “le prince de Tombouctou,” an artist’s model from N... more This essay reconstructs the history of Salem, “le prince de Tombouctou,” an artist’s model from North Africa working in Parisian studios in the later nineteenth century. It traces his trajectory from Algeria, where he served among Indigenous troops recruited by the French to facilitate the subjugation of the colony, to Paris, where he cannily asserted his exotic origins to promote himself within the community of models. Examining intersections between institutional structures of French colonialism and traditions of Parisian studio practice, the essay suggests that tensions between French and Islamic cultural norms may have inflected the representations for which African models posed.
Art and Migration: Revisioning the Borders of Community , 2021
Agostina Segaotri, best known as a model for Vincent Van Gogh, posed in Paris during the Second E... more Agostina Segaotri, best known as a model for Vincent Van Gogh, posed in Paris during the Second Empire and Third Republic. This essay situates her life story and the representations of her produced in Paris within the context of the history of Italian immigration to France and French perceptions of Italy and immigration. It traces the beginning of encounters between French artists and Italian models to Rome early in the century and follows the models’ emgiration from the Italian peninsula to the French hexagon after midcentury. In Paris Italian models became a focus for complex and conflicting ideas about immigration, cultural difference, and modernity that animated French discourse, both textual and visual. In the popular press Italians were represented as alien intruders, but within the Parisian artistic community, the French aesthetic tradition which had long valorized Italian artistic production shaped an alternative and far more positive view. For the immigrants, however, moving across borders to resettle in a foreign culture offered opportunities. The story of Agostina Segatori’s passage and the representations of her and other Italian models produced by artists in Paris illuminates both the perception of ‘Italianicity’ in the French imagination and immigrants’ negotiation of the transnational experience.
Through a case study of the career of Gélon, a model active in Parisian studios in the later nine... more Through a case study of the career of Gélon, a model active in Parisian studios in the later nineteenth century, this essay explores the praxis of the pose as a reciprocal partnership between artist and model and as a métier with links to popular performative traditions. Gélon came to the model stand from the wrestling ring, adapting the strength, flexibility and kinesthetic awareness he developed as an athlete to posing for Salon works. At the Ecole des Beaux Arts, where he belonged to a cohort of modèles profesionnels, he mastered the rhetorical idiom of gesture that undergirded the narrative conventions of history painting and linked academic methods of artistic production to performance traditions such as the theater and tableaux vivants. Gélon’s history suggests how a skilled model’s command of gesture as performative spectacle contributed to the pedagogy and production of artworks within the academic tradition.
Late in his career Auguste Rodin recalled his first encounter, around 1880, with the model Pignat... more Late in his career Auguste Rodin recalled his first encounter, around 1880, with the model Pignatelli, when the Italian spontaneously assumed a pose on the model stand that became the basis of St John the Baptist Preaching. This article explores this episode through an investigation of Pignatelli’s place within the fraternity of Italian models that emerged in Rome early in the nineteenth century and after 1870 established an immigrant community in Paris. It argues that modèles italiens, who had long been valued by French artists for their classical proportions and their command of the gestures that were the foundation of Christian and classical iconography, seemed to provide a connection between nineteenth-century Paris and the Renaissance and antique Rome. Pignatelli’s performance in Rodin’s studio thus typifies the collective bodily knowledge passed down within the community of Italian models and exemplifies their contribution to maintaining iconographic traditions.
In 1896, Alexandre Falguière’s sculpture The Dancer (La Danseuse), was the succès de scandale of ... more In 1896, Alexandre Falguière’s sculpture The Dancer (La Danseuse), was the succès de scandale of the Salon des Artistes Français. While the public wondered whether the nude figure indeed represented Cléo de Mérode, a rising star in the ballet of the Opéra de Paris, art critics reacted with unusual vehemence to the work, labeling it a “modern” body and denouncing it as “deformed” or “damaged.” This essay examines the associations of deformity, femininity and modernity raised in the emphatic critical reception to the work. Through an investigation of the roles of the two principals in the sculpture’s production – the artist and the model – and of the critical reception to the work, it argues that this “modern” body proved troublesome to contemporary viewers, not only because it was seen as the likeness of a public celebrity, but also because the figure’s proportions resonated in complex and contradictory ways within contemporary discourses of dance, art, fashion and anthropology. The product of a collaboration between artist and model, the body portrayed in Falguière’s sculpture embodied not simply an individual dancer, but also changes in contemporary conventions governing feminine behavior – changes that were widely perceived as threatening.
This essay proposes an identity for the model who posed for the male figure in Manet's The Gypsie... more This essay proposes an identity for the model who posed for the male figure in Manet's The Gypsies (1862), which was later separated into three canvases.
This essay examines the role of Cléo de Mérode in the production of Alexandre Falguière’s La Dans... more This essay examines the role of Cléo de Mérode in the production of Alexandre Falguière’s La Danseuse. Exhibited in 1896 at the annual exhibition of contemporary art organized by the Société des Artistes Français, the sculpture was a succès de scandale: art critics suggested–and many viewers certainly believed–that the figure was a direct body cast of the celebrated dancer whose photographs pervaded the Parisian press. Arguing that the attitude of the figure was initiated not by the sculptor but by the dancer, this paper proposes that the praxis of the pose is a process in which the model is not the passive object of the artist’s objectifying gaze, but rather an active participant in generating the work of art.
A recently auctioned nude study by Jean-Léon Gérôme, not included in Gerald Ackerman’s catalogue ... more A recently auctioned nude study by Jean-Léon Gérôme, not included in Gerald Ackerman’s catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, represents one of the artist’s favorite models, Emma Dupont. While nineteenth century nude studies are common, this work has an unusual and exceptional provenance: it belonged to the model’s descendants. A consideration of the paintings for which she posed and an anecdotal history of Emma Dupont suggests that Dupont and Gérôme worked together over a long period. Despite rumors that Dupont was the artist’s mistress, there is no evidence to support this. An analysis of the community of models in nineteenth century Paris, based on statistical evidence and the memoirs of other models, opens the way for more expansive and nuanced consideration of the model’s role within studio praxis in nineteenth-century Paris. This provides evidence for considering the work within the context of Dupont’s and Gérôme’s on-going professional relationship.
Between 1886 and 1902, during the period before his death in 1904, Jean-Léon Gérôme produced a s... more Between 1886 and 1902, during the period before his death in 1904, Jean-Léon Gérôme produced a series of painted and photographic self-portraits depicting himself at work on his sculpture with a nude model. These representations seem to reiterate his mastery by displaying his virtuosity in two media, but this paper argues that the series was simultaneously a response to a crisis in masculine professional identity in which overcompensation served to diffuse Gérôme’s increasing anxiety of lateness.
When Gérôme made his sculptural debut in his mid-fifties the Universal Exposition of 1878, he was at the height of his professional career as a painter. The turn to sculpture complicated his public persona. While on the one hand the initiative extended his artistic identity, on the other it returned him to the bottom of professional hierarchies as measured by official awards. He was simultaneously master and novice. During the subsequent decades, as he received awards for the sculptures he exhibited at the Salon, he reascended the professional hierarchy, but simultaneously, the aesthetic values and official structures on which he had built his career were--from his point of view--subverted, as avant-garde artists whose work he considered degenerate were welcomed into the Musée de Luxembourg and women were admitted into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. As he entered the endgame of his career, the self-portraits provided a vehicle for negotiating the instability of his professional persona and the increasing uncertainty of his legacy. The first works in the series suggest his difficulties in coming to terms with the place of sculpture in his oeuvre; the final painting reasserts his aesthetic values and challenges the modernism that was displacing the traditions to which he belonged.
Chronicles the changes in censorship laws during the Third Republic of France and the methods emp... more Chronicles the changes in censorship laws during the Third Republic of France and the methods employed by photographers to create nudes that would be approved by the censors. Describes the tradition of imitating an academic style in erotic photographs and the politics of class distinction behind the confusing and arbitrarily enforced anti-pornography laws
In 1860s Paris, it became evident that the form of artist-model transaction that predominated wit... more In 1860s Paris, it became evident that the form of artist-model transaction that predominated within academic praxis, calling for a professional model to assume a stationary pose in the artist's studio, was inherently at odds with the Realists' commitment to representing modern life. Casting about for alternatives, Manet replaced professional with proprietary models. While this substitution seemed to embody an alternative Realist studio practice, a close reading of the development of atelier paintings by Fantin-Latour, Whistler, and Bazille demonstrates that it compelled avant-garde artists to negotiate the standards of decorum that governed gender relations in bourgeois culture.
In the 1850s, Jean-Francois Millet and Jules Breton relocated their studios from Paris to the Fre... more In the 1850s, Jean-Francois Millet and Jules Breton relocated their studios from Paris to the French countryside, where they no longer had access to the professional models that posed in urban ateliers. This study examines the evolution of their studio practice within the rural context: it explores their shift from professional to proprietary and peasant models, how the shift inflected the artist/model transaction, and their negotiation of the social structures and standards of decorum of the rural communities in which their studios were located.
The writer examines conflicting constructions of the male model that emerged during the July Mona... more The writer examines conflicting constructions of the male model that emerged during the July Monarchy in pedagogical drawings of the École des Beaux Arts in Paris and in popular prints and caricatures. During the 1830s, the rise of genre historique contributed to a stylistic change within École studies. As a focus on the generalized beau idéal gave way to particularized likenesses of individual models within École studies, the artist-model transaction was transformed from a sustained professional relationship into a brief commercial exchange: Previously a contracted employee of the institution, the model became a contingent hourly worker. This change in his social status in turn generated a new construction of the model as lazy and ineffectual in popular discourses of the 1840s. This stereotype rationalized the change of the artist-model transaction while obscuring the aesthetic and social factors that had effected it.
Morowitz, Laura, and William Vaughan. Artistic brotherhoods in the nineteenth century. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate. , 2000
Explores the homosocial education of the atelier-Ecole system, examining initiation rites (charge... more Explores the homosocial education of the atelier-Ecole system, examining initiation rites (charges or "hazing" of the atelier) and the concours or competition structure of the Ecole. Through the ritual voyeurism implicit in the stripping of new atelier members, and official policies of the Ecole, women were excluded. Demonstrates how these measures comprised an integrated system which produced a dominant masculine profession of the artist in 19th-c. France.
Examines Hosmer's Zenobia (original destroyed; reduced version: Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford), 18... more Examines Hosmer's Zenobia (original destroyed; reduced version: Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford), 1859. In the early 19th c., Zenobia, the queen of Palmyra conquered by the Roman Emperor Aurelian, was a common literary subject, but an unusual one for artists. Hosmer, who was working in Rome, was probably encouraged to undertake her sculpture through her friendship with Anna Jameson (1794-1860), who included Zenobia in her Celebrated Female Sovereigns, 1831. In most literary accounts, Zenobia's defeat was attributed to her pride and vanity, failings often considered particularly feminine; demonstrates that Hosmer depicted the queen as a woman whose wisdom and courage transcended her defeat.
This book-length project will examine the emergence of the figure of the modèle moderne in high a... more This book-length project will examine the emergence of the figure of the modèle moderne in high art and popular visual culture. Through an examination of the problematic and praxis of the pose, it will test and contest the prevailing paradigm of the artist/model transaction, which posits the model as the passive object of the artist’s active gaze, and will examine the model as agent as well as icon, as subject as well as object.
Uploads
Contributors include Juliet Bellow (Associate Professor of Modern European Art History, American University), Ewa Bobrowska (Associate Program Officer of Research at the Terra Foundation for American Art, Europe), Norma Broude (Professor Emerita of Art History, American University), Emily Burns (Assistant Professor of Art History, Auburn University), Paul Fisher (Associate Professor of American Studies, Wellesley College), Sharon Hecker (independent scholar), Zoë Marie Jones (Instructor, University of Alaska, Fairbanks), Cindy Kang (doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), Laura Karp Lugo (University of Tours, France), Donald McCallum (1939–2013; former Professor of Art History at UCLA), Thomas Rimer (Professor Emeritus of East Asian Languages and Literature, University of Pittsburgh), Nicholas Sawicki (Assistant Professor of Art History, Lehigh University), Richard Sonn (Professor of History, University of Arkansas), and Maite van Dyck (Curator of Paintings, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).
Contents:
Introduction: Strangers in paradise: foreign artists and
communities in modern Paris, 1870-1914, Susan Waller and Karen L. Carter.
Part I Institutions and Networks: The Italian expatriates: De Nittis and Zandomeneghi, Norma Broude
International artists at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris: the case of Edvard Munch (1896 and 1897), Maite van Dijk
‘Earning a living’ in the International Graphic Arts: the Académie
Julian and the teaching of poster design and illustration, 1890-1914, Karen L. Carter
Between Montparnasse and Prague: circulating cubism
in Left Bank Paris, Nicholas Sawicki
Part II Expatriate Communities:
Polish artists in Paris, 1890-1914: between international modernity and national identity, Ewa Bobrowska
Revising Bohemia: the American artist
colony in Paris, 1890-1914, Emily C. Burns
Catalan artists in Paris at the turn of the century, Laura Karp Lugo
Jewish Modernism: immigrant artists of Montparnasse, 1905-1914, Richard D. Sonn
Part III Incomers and Outsiders:
Everywhere and nowhere: Medardo Rosso and the
cultural cosmopolitan in fin-de-siècle Paris, Sharon Hecker
The Sacre ‘au printemps’: Parisian audiences and the Ballets Russes, Juliet Bellow
Gwen John: posing and painting in Paris, 1905-1914, Susan Waller
A path beyond Paris: the evolving art of Sakamoto Hanjirō, J. Thomas Rimer
Part IV Cosmopolitans and Hybridities:
The lost ambassador: Henrietta Reubell and transnational queer spaces in the Paris arts world, 1876-1903, Paul
Fisher
József Rippl-Rónai’s embroideries: crafting Hungarian Modernism in Paris, Cindy Kang
Japanese painters in Paris, 1880-1912, Donald F.
McCallum
Gino Severini’s Bohemian Paris: integrating the Italian artist,
1906-1914, Zoë Marie Jones
Selected bibliography; Index. 288 pages. 978-1-4724-4354-0
When Gérôme made his sculptural debut in his mid-fifties the Universal Exposition of 1878, he was at the height of his professional career as a painter. The turn to sculpture complicated his public persona. While on the one hand the initiative extended his artistic identity, on the other it returned him to the bottom of professional hierarchies as measured by official awards. He was simultaneously master and novice. During the subsequent decades, as he received awards for the sculptures he exhibited at the Salon, he reascended the professional hierarchy, but simultaneously, the aesthetic values and official structures on which he had built his career were--from his point of view--subverted, as avant-garde artists whose work he considered degenerate were welcomed into the Musée de Luxembourg and women were admitted into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. As he entered the endgame of his career, the self-portraits provided a vehicle for negotiating the instability of his professional persona and the increasing uncertainty of his legacy. The first works in the series suggest his difficulties in coming to terms with the place of sculpture in his oeuvre; the final painting reasserts his aesthetic values and challenges the modernism that was displacing the traditions to which he belonged.
Contributors include Juliet Bellow (Associate Professor of Modern European Art History, American University), Ewa Bobrowska (Associate Program Officer of Research at the Terra Foundation for American Art, Europe), Norma Broude (Professor Emerita of Art History, American University), Emily Burns (Assistant Professor of Art History, Auburn University), Paul Fisher (Associate Professor of American Studies, Wellesley College), Sharon Hecker (independent scholar), Zoë Marie Jones (Instructor, University of Alaska, Fairbanks), Cindy Kang (doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), Laura Karp Lugo (University of Tours, France), Donald McCallum (1939–2013; former Professor of Art History at UCLA), Thomas Rimer (Professor Emeritus of East Asian Languages and Literature, University of Pittsburgh), Nicholas Sawicki (Assistant Professor of Art History, Lehigh University), Richard Sonn (Professor of History, University of Arkansas), and Maite van Dyck (Curator of Paintings, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).
Contents:
Introduction: Strangers in paradise: foreign artists and
communities in modern Paris, 1870-1914, Susan Waller and Karen L. Carter.
Part I Institutions and Networks: The Italian expatriates: De Nittis and Zandomeneghi, Norma Broude
International artists at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris: the case of Edvard Munch (1896 and 1897), Maite van Dijk
‘Earning a living’ in the International Graphic Arts: the Académie
Julian and the teaching of poster design and illustration, 1890-1914, Karen L. Carter
Between Montparnasse and Prague: circulating cubism
in Left Bank Paris, Nicholas Sawicki
Part II Expatriate Communities:
Polish artists in Paris, 1890-1914: between international modernity and national identity, Ewa Bobrowska
Revising Bohemia: the American artist
colony in Paris, 1890-1914, Emily C. Burns
Catalan artists in Paris at the turn of the century, Laura Karp Lugo
Jewish Modernism: immigrant artists of Montparnasse, 1905-1914, Richard D. Sonn
Part III Incomers and Outsiders:
Everywhere and nowhere: Medardo Rosso and the
cultural cosmopolitan in fin-de-siècle Paris, Sharon Hecker
The Sacre ‘au printemps’: Parisian audiences and the Ballets Russes, Juliet Bellow
Gwen John: posing and painting in Paris, 1905-1914, Susan Waller
A path beyond Paris: the evolving art of Sakamoto Hanjirō, J. Thomas Rimer
Part IV Cosmopolitans and Hybridities:
The lost ambassador: Henrietta Reubell and transnational queer spaces in the Paris arts world, 1876-1903, Paul
Fisher
József Rippl-Rónai’s embroideries: crafting Hungarian Modernism in Paris, Cindy Kang
Japanese painters in Paris, 1880-1912, Donald F.
McCallum
Gino Severini’s Bohemian Paris: integrating the Italian artist,
1906-1914, Zoë Marie Jones
Selected bibliography; Index. 288 pages. 978-1-4724-4354-0
When Gérôme made his sculptural debut in his mid-fifties the Universal Exposition of 1878, he was at the height of his professional career as a painter. The turn to sculpture complicated his public persona. While on the one hand the initiative extended his artistic identity, on the other it returned him to the bottom of professional hierarchies as measured by official awards. He was simultaneously master and novice. During the subsequent decades, as he received awards for the sculptures he exhibited at the Salon, he reascended the professional hierarchy, but simultaneously, the aesthetic values and official structures on which he had built his career were--from his point of view--subverted, as avant-garde artists whose work he considered degenerate were welcomed into the Musée de Luxembourg and women were admitted into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. As he entered the endgame of his career, the self-portraits provided a vehicle for negotiating the instability of his professional persona and the increasing uncertainty of his legacy. The first works in the series suggest his difficulties in coming to terms with the place of sculpture in his oeuvre; the final painting reasserts his aesthetic values and challenges the modernism that was displacing the traditions to which he belonged.