Constructing Identities
University of Toronto Art Journal Volume 1 (2008)
Constructing Identities: University of Toronto Art Journal Vol 1 (2008)
This year will mark the inaugural publication of the "University of Toronto Art Journal." The journal publishes selected student papers from the Department of Art's annual graduate conference; the title of this year's conference was "Constructing Identities."
Table of Contents
Great Imaginations: Eugène Fromentin and Artistic Identity Davida Aronovitch
The Artist as Critic: A Parodic Reading of Robert Morris's Writing and Minimalist Sculpture Leanne Carroll
Captivity and Encounter: Thomas Pellow, The Moroccan Renegade Mark Celinscak
Travel, Architects, and the Postwar "Grand Tour" Denise R. Costanzo
The Role of Detective Fiction in the Construction of Turkish Identity David Mason
Who is Picasso? The Question of Picasso's Identity in Brassaï's 1933 Minotaure Photo Essay Alma Mikulinsky
Temptations of the Flesh: A Discussion of Gustave Courbet's Origin of the World Rebecca Weinfeld
1
Great Imaginations: Eugène Fromentin and Artistic Identity By Davida Aronovitch
In speaking of Eugène Fromentin’s painterly skill, contemporary critics consistently invoke the artist’s noble and distinguished character. Moreover, an important extrapolation follows the comment: from his elevated disposition springs his grand artistic ambition. Whatever Fromentin’s own aspirations, his critics would have him consumed with an effort to reach the generic apex of history painting. Comment by
Alexandre Dumas offers a first example. Always a great admirer of Fromentin, Dumas placed the artist both morally and artistically above his colleagues when he wrote that:
“among those who represent the Orient at the Salon [he is] the most true, the most refined and above all the most distinguished…to the highest degree”.1 Critics who saw in
Fromentin such natural nobility sought to coax an elevated ambition out of his artwork.
Paul Mantz commented that “M. Fromentin has always set his sights high; he seeks the elegance…of the most grand ensembles”.2 Again, Fromentin’s artistic identity is predicated on his personal character.
Emmanuel Mickel is apt to note in 1981 that “one of the outstanding characteristics mentioned by most who knew Fromentin well was his aristocratic bearing…his sense of good taste”.3 Even Barbara Wright, who so carefully extricated
Fromentin’s artistic legacy from scholarly neglect, seems to agree that Fromentin had an innate disposition which was reflected in his ambition of history painting which draughtsmanship alone kept him from attaining. But this reading, though in ways compelling, may be somewhat simplistic. While Fromentin’s own commentary certainly reveals both a reverence for the grand ideals of history painting, and a lament over its increasing demise at the hands of genre painting, his grand conception would be applied 2 directly to the landscape, which was invariably his pursuit. The Oriental landscape had activated his imagination even while it demanded precise study in execution. It was in the desert landscape that Fromentin found the greatest impetus for renewal. It is in two painted versions of Au Pays de la Soif, that the tension between figure and landscape, and naturalism and imagination are most effectively resolved.
Certainly, Fromentin had an ambitious vision which he sought to reproduce on the canvas. Imagination, or the capacity of intuiting more than was visually and empirically available, was central to his conception of art. It served to differentiate artist from artisan, and sketch from polished painting. The great artist should not concern himself with burdensome detail, but rather, he must correct his lived observation into works of art which bear the stamp of his prophetic vision. Even as he was first negotiating the brush and palette in 1841, Fromentin was preoccupied with his own deficiency of imagination.
He wrote: “I have no power of invention…I do not have the imagination and the fancy which are worth more than memory”.4 Yet memory, the artist did have, and he would cultivate this faculty as a repository of visual experience that would supplement imagination. For Fromentin, memory was “an admirable optical instrument”.5 He described the artistic process as follows: “in passing though the memory, truth becomes a poem, the landscape a painting. However large or beautiful reality may be…memory ends by surpassing it”.6
Fromentin was not alone on this count. In his review of the 1859 salon, Charles
Baudelaire derides the “cult…of nature…which is not expanded by imagination”.7
Notably, it was around this same time that so many critics saw Fromentin’s personal style crystallized through the liberation of imagination. Charles Clément wrote that “the light 3 was turned on… [Fromentin] reproduces less loyally what he sees”.8 From this moment,
Fromentin’s critics would tirelessly inscribe imaginative symbolism into the artist’s physical and spiritual being.
During his first trip to Algeria in 1846, Fromentin’s “predominant mood was one of visual ecstasy”.9 He was most intrigued by the dazzling and artistically ever-evasive light of the sun. Of his travel through the Sahara desert in 1853 he wrote “I cannot stop dreaming of the light…I have no night”.10 The artist’s “vivacious love of the sun”, 11 as
Théophile Gautier described it, is often transmuted by his critics into an internal and imaginative light. Gautier grafts Fromentin’s preoccupation with light effects onto the artist’s body: Fromentin has “a face which is marked by an eternal stroke of sun…his eye is illuminated”.12
It is perhaps no accident that Louis Gonse characterized Fromentin by the same metaphor of inner luminosity. In his 1881 biography of the artist, the critic described
Fromentin’s “internal fever of the soul…[and] the constantly illuminated torch of his being”.13 Not only does Gonse relate this light to painterly passion or imagination, but he suggests, like Gautier, that this internal brilliance was in fact a result of the exposure to the Orient: “he seemed to have kept the incandescent reflection of the Southern Sun”.14
The light of the Oriental landscape had activated Fromentin’s imagination and come to define his oeuvre as much as his identity.
Yet unbridled imagination was not itself a virtue. In his Salon of 1859 Baudelaire tempers his admiration for imagination with a note that it must be possessed in equal proportion to skill: “the more one possesses imagination, the better one must possess the technique to accompany the former in its adventures”.15 This was Fromentin’s greatest 4 challenge: to balance his admitted deficiency of technical aptitude and with imaginative impulse. A consideration of the relationship between figure and landscape and its own rapport to the hierarchy of genre will prove revelatory.
When Fromentin first apprehensively began to paint, he seemed to have eyes only for the countryside. His first landscapes, such as Olive Forest at Blidah of 1846, are what Christine Peltre has called “scrupulously descriptive”. In the simply rendered near- monochrome landscape, tall willowy trees rise in slender silhouettes above a distant plain. Fromentin wrote of the work: “it is a precise portrait of part of the olive forest at
Blidah. The forest…composed of century-old olive and ash trees, is famous in the military history of the conquest”.16 The tiny figures, barely visible, serve more to show scale of the personified trees than populate the landscape. Wright has noted that
“Fromentin, like most landscapists in the 1840s, had used figures merely as stuffage”.17
But it would soon become evident that this balance was in dire need of reweighting. Fromentin had come to the career of artist late, and he had received only limited training. Gonse commented on this formative absence: “for the drawing of the human figure, in contrast [to the landscape]…long, rigorous, and patient…study is required”. Worse, this “grammatical weakness” could not be corrected by…imagination.18 The artist was continuously plagued by this deficiency; he would often be reprimanded by critics for this ineptitude and his consequent subordination of the figure to the landscape. But Fromentin was determined to improve.
Notwithstanding his declared appreciation for imagination and dislike of detail,
Fromentin would struggle ceaselessly to replicate verisimilitude in figure drawing. On the 5 eve of his second trip to Algeria in 1847, the artist consecrated himself to the improvement of the human form, which he sketched extensively on site.
His efforts did not go unrecognized. In the mid 1860s, Jules Castagnary noted this artistic evolution: “originally, he subordinated the human and beast to the landscape. In progressing…from landscapist, he passed to socialist”.19 Indeed, while Fromentin had managed to draw the figure out more prominently, he failed to infuse his figures with the emotional and imaginative charge he so effectively transmitted through the natural landscape. In his Batteleurs negres dans les tribus, for instance, the cluster of figures appears more as an undifferentiated mass than a series of personal or ethnographic portraits. A grouping of gay drummers and dancers lines the top of rocky hill. Their colourful forms seem mere accessories to the great expanse of sky and the mountainous range which frame the figures from above and below. The inability to assert human presence on the canvas smacked of genre painting, which Fromentin so abhorred and blamed for the demise of history painting. The artist bemoaned this weakness: “[my] conception is dry, inanimate, like wooden dolls. It is missing the freedom, the accent of life…I see pretty and not grand”.20 The resulting effect was the quick descent into anecdote, the trivial.
Fromentin wished to move beyond this cumbersome exactitude. Yet in his consideration of La Curée, which appeared at the Salon of 1863, Maxime Du Camp accuses Fromentin of this very error. Two men sit atop horses, arranged against the sloping line of a rocky escarpment. One rider is poised theatrically with a game bird perched atop his outstretched arm, while two other hunters tend to fallen game afoot. The postures, animals and Oriental garments are rendered in careful, almost staged, detail. Du 6
Camp commented on the painting: “We might reproach [Fromentin] for an occasional lack of unity in execution… His painting La Curée…indicates too much, in the manner that it is painted, what has been done after memory and what after nature; some parts, generally the detail of the clothing, copied exactly, results in a dryness of execution which contrasts the transparency of the other parts… The artist, in his desire to render nature as it is, has suddenly forgotten to render it as it is seen through his dreams and the elegant colorations of his distinguished attitudes”.21 Castagnary also comments on this awkwardness. The staunch realist must have known the incisive power of his slight when he wrote of Fromentin: “all this is still a little too taken up with the picturesque view…the artist searches therein for something seductive, for detail, the joujou”.22 In emphasizing naturalism, the very grand ideal and imaginative prowess to which the artist was so committed, was burdened with detail. Throughout the 1860s, Fromentin sought to renew his aesthetic. As he was himself experiencing a crisis of artistic identity, the art world was precariously suspended on the precipice of great change.
Paul Mantz was one of many critics to draw attention to the dwindling state of art.
He wrote in 1867, not long before Fromentin would start work on Au Pays that “the modern school is abandoning more and more the great summits…it does not believe in noble visions”.23 Fromentin aired similar frustration with the rise of banality central to new modernism:
You frustrate me with your modernity. Certainly, one must paint of his own time…but it must be rendered with material aspects…and accessories as secondary…I was a contemplative, and I went towards the Orient, towards the grand and tranquil…[to] render the last grandeurs of a dying race.24 7
It is not surprising, in light of such pronouncements, that Fromentin’s critics thought him prepared to convert his efforts to the history genre. Gonse wrote on this subject that “Fromentin was only a genre painter, but he would have wanted to be a history painter…he always dreamed of passing from real life and anecdote to ideal life and glory.25 If only he had not lacked the technical ability, continues the critic, he could have reached this certain goal.
But to describe Fromentin’s oeuvre in this way is not only to deal him the greatest insult of genre painter, but also to misread his own ambition. In fact, landscape painting had gained considerable ground in the ever-loosening hierarchy of genres. Castagnary described the increasing complexity and false dichotomy which so rigidly separated landscapists from history or more generally socialist painters interested in representing humanity. It is into this newly opening space that Fromentin looked to insert himself.
Baudelaire, for one, appreciated this nuanced vision “M. Fromentin is neither precisely a landscape nor a genre painter, these two categories are too restricted to contain his free and supple fancy”.26 Not a pure landscapist per se, Fromentin’s grand vision nevertheless found expression in the landscape. Charles Bigot described the vision as “manifesting by form and colour his thoughts, sentiments, and tastes; his character, his philosophy, even”.27
This grand and philosophical ideal that Fromentin sought was simply one of permanence: the artist wrote “of all the attributes proper to grandeur, the most beautiful, in my opinion, is immobility…I have only the serious taste for durable…fixed things”.28
The desert was, in many ways, a perfect manifestation of this aesthetic impulse.
Fromentin described his first glimpse of the massive Sahara desert in the opening pages 8 of Un été dans le Sahara. He called it: “an indefinite plain, as far as sight could stretch…[the] Land of Thirst”.29 In fact, it was in this Land of Thirst that Fromentin found the greatest natural receptacle for his imagination.
It was the physical qualities and proportions of the desert that were central to the appeal it held for the artist. A seemingly endless emptiness, the desert came to stand for a void which could be populated with the artist’s own idealized artistic conception. The large spaces afforded open plains in which to negotiate the nuance of colour in sand and sky, the actual hues of which the artist had invested much time in perfecting. In what the artist called “a huge shapeless thing, almost colourless…nothingness, void”.30 Fromentin would give his own shape, colour, and essence. Unlike man, the desert was a perfect embodiment of solid and unchanging nature.31 Stripped of every unnecessary and cumbersome detail which Fromentin had worked so hard to exorcise from his canvas, the desert was itself the grand idea that he sought. He remarks that this emptiness was the very basis of his attraction: “It is precisely this nudity which encourages me”.32
The desert void also had important symbolic connotations. During his third
Algerian journey, Fromentin wrote of frequent visits to a local cemetery which he also set to canvas in the 1853 painting Enterrement Maure. In the painting, a blazing sun soaks the tranquil scene. Mourners are grouped around a conspicuous earthy mount that draws our attention at the foreground. The related passage reads: “once the hole is made, first the corpse and then the earth was let into it. Ten minutes letter, the grave was filled in and formed no more than the raised part…”33 A similar theme is emerges in Au Pays de la soif. A hostile sun beats down upon a scorched earth, onto which members of a desert convoy have fallen, immobilized. Reddish sand swirls around the twisted bodies of the 9 men, who, scattered about the dunes, will surely perish here in the great void. Like the body of the deceased which is hastily swallowed by the earth, the figures of Au Pays, even as they die, are being covered by the desert dust which collects on their bodies. The land becomes a graveyard: the men, whose ephemeral nature is underscored by expiration in the timeless sand-scape, are rendered as immobile, and silent as the desert itself.
The figures in Au Pays should be noted for another aspect. Gonse had once commented of Fromentin that: “the human form, which he had always painted dressed or draped, irresistibly attracted him, and he wanted to prove to himself that he could…overcome the aptitudes which had enclosed him”.34 In Au Pays, the half-draped figures demonstrate this desire to boldly reveal parts of the physiognomy for which
Fromentin had made several preparatory sketches. The change in the arrangement of the bodies is also indicative of this effort to master their form, while the desperate expressions, reveal the tormented psyche of a man facing death. In this painting,
Fromentin has achieved unprecedented figural emotion, whereby even the agonized contortions of the bodies contribute to the freedom and fluidity that he had himself previously felt absent. Fromentin here asserts mastery of human form to articulate the evolved conception of the landscape that Baudelaire had described.
Accordingly, Au Pays marked a culmination of artistic effort. Gonse, for instance, wrote that “the intensity of effect is brought to a peak…the horrible convulsions of those tortured by thirst, the sparkle of the light which chants death”.35 José Martí one year earlier had in described the painting similarly: “The Country of Thirst is
[Fromentin’s] masterpiece. The darkness of the sky, the gloomy clouds, the whirling sand and the parched air give a frightful expression to those unhappy souls, whose violent 10 contortions and desperate looks reveal the terrible anguish of thirst”.36 Both critics draw attention to the interaction of the figures and the landscape, the expressive and narrative power of which seem to be equal.
The undated painting, often felt to be a sketch for the 1869 work (and never publicly exhibited during the artist’s lifetime), betrays this preoccupation central to
Fromentin’s painting: the heat and light seem inscribed in the surface of the painting. The languid bodies seem to melt into the landscape, the harmonious tones of which create a monochrome effect. There has been much speculation (though it is nowhere confirmed by Fromentin) that this work was based on Théodre Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. In
Géricault’s work, a chaotic cluster of half-draped men drift atop a wood raft, lost in the great expanse of the sea. Their expressions range from frantic to defeated. In addition to the similarities of the pyramidal composition, the paintings share the theme of death by dehydration. In fact, Fromentin did greatly admire Géricault, to whom he devotes high praise in his The Masters of Past Time. Here is surely more evidence for the critics who would like to see Fromentin’s noble character reproduced on the canvas as history painter. But while it was common enough for Fromentin to rework his own compositions, nowhere else does he borrow one from another artist. In the final version, Fromentin has distanced himself from this association, raising suspicion as to whether it had been intentional.
The composition in the two pieces is largely the same, but for the positions of the figures, among other nuances. The most significant alteration in the 1869 version is the colour of the sky, the explanation of which may be found in Fromentin’s likening of the
Saharan landscape to that France. Fromentin’s own early landscapes of France were 11 described as “bare, wide plains of extraordinary luminosity”,37 the recollection of which, it is more than likely, struck the artist in his apprehension of the Sahara desert. In fact,
Fromentin, appreciated those elements of the African landscape and desert which recalled his native France. Henry Houssaye quoted him on this account: “the play of the sky…over the browned plain…the ensemble of the oriental tableau pleased me precisely because of its resemblance with France”. Houssaye appends his own comment that “in
Africa it was still the landscapes of France that seduced Fromentin…where the blue skies, dotted with cloud, extend over the prairie”.38
The patent likeness was compounded by Fromentin’s disappointment with the
Southern sky, as described by Gautier. Though it was promised to reveal an endless blue expanse, the African sky was often in reality a more fiery shade.39 The substitution of the blue tone is then reminiscent of the ‘correction’ Baudelaire had advised landscapists to undertake. Fromentin explained a similar process of imaginative revisitation himself.
Following his experience of a sandstorm and partial blindness, he wrote “later this would make me dream, and perhaps my memory would soften the too raw colours of this tableau”.40 We might take his comment in light of the variation between the versions of
Au Pays. This reading is further supported by commentary from Charles Clément. This critic dubbed Fromentin a colourist, whose “harmony he first sought in monochromy of the canvas…from which he took a great step when he finished by finding it in the diversity and variety of colours”.41 The change of the sky from burnt orange to a grayish blue was at once a likening of the plain to that of a prior vision of France and an aesthetic impulse to soften the effects which he had at first so strived to convey accurately, through the infusion of imagination. 12
Au Pays, then, does reflect Fromentin’s interest to move away from exactitude, to abandon himself to imagination while fore fronting the human figure. Yet unlike history painting, which was premised on action and movement, Au Pays is in ways its antithesis: devoid of motion, sound, and human agency, the most animate aspect of the painting is the desert itself which rises and falls rhythmically consuming its inhabitants. Other than a tenuous link to Géricault’s work, there is little to suggest that this was meant as a history painting, or more surprising still, that Fromentin (his own greatest critic) could have considered himself a history painter. Clément wrote of the artist in 1877: “he is not made for drama, nor for violence either in gesture of in tone…but …he loves the light, and a light equally forceful which envelops his objects gives them their structure and value”.42
Even while Clément asserts Fromentin’s unsuitability to the markers of history painting, he invokes the imagination, the light, that so many others would make evidence for this very ambition. Certainly, Au Pays marks a culmination of the tensions between figure and landscape, imagination and reality. Wright asserts that “this image of the Land of
Thirst lingered in Fromentin’s imagination”.43 Indeed it did; and there is reverberated with a collection of memories which would literally colour the desert land. The painting remains firmly rooted in the landscape which in Au Pays is itself the seat of greatness, imagination, and the negation of detail all essential to Fromentin’s grand ideal, and befitting of his grand persona. 13
1 Alexandre Dumas, L’Art et les artistes contemporains au salon de 1859, (1859) 124, my translation. 2 Paul Mantz, “Salon de 1859,” Gazette des Beaux Arts, (Paris, 1859: Kraus Reprint, 1975), 292, my trans. 3 Emmanuel Mickel, Eugène Fromentin, (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), 13. 4 Eugène Fromentin, Correspondence Eugène Fromentin, Volume 1, Ed. Barbara Wright, (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1995), 239, my trans. 5 Fromentin, Correspondence Volume 1, 231, my trans. 6 Mickel, Fromentin, 33. 7 Barbara Wright, Romanticism and after in France, Volume 5, Eugène Fromentin: A Life in Art and Letters, Ed. Alan Raitt, (Bern: Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, 2000), 226. 8 Charles Clément, “Variétés: L’atelier d’Eugène Fromentin,” Journal des débats, 16 janvier, 1877, my trans. 9 Wright, A Life in Letters, 154. 10 Wright, A Life in Letters, 261. 11 Théophile Gautier, L’Orient, (Paris: C. Charpentier, 1884), 338, my trans. 12 Gautier, L’Orient, 339-340, my trans. 13 Louis Gonse, Eugène Fromentin, peintre et écrivain. Ouvrage augmenté d'Un voyage en Egypte et d'autre notes et morceaux inédits de Fromentin, (Paris: A. Quantin, 1881), 31, my trans. 14 Gonse, Peintre et écrivain, 31, my trans. 15 Charles Baudelaire, “Salon of 1859,” Art in Paris 1845-1862: Salons and Others Exhibitions reviewed by Charles Baudelaire, Trans. and Ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Publishers Inc., 1965), 321. 16 Christine Peltre, Orientalism in Art, (New York: Abbeville Press, 1998), 137. 17 Wright, A Life in Art and Letters, 225. 18 Gonse, Peintre et écrivain, 37, my trans. 19 Jules Castagnary, “Salons (1857-1879,”Écrits sur l’Art: De Diderot à Proust, (1892), 236, my trans. 20 Fromentin, Correspondence Volume 1, 609, my trans. 21 Alexandre Du Camp, “Les Beaux-Arts à l’Exposition Universelle et aux salons de 1863 à 1867,” Écrits sur l’Art: De Diderot à Proust, (1867), 22, my trans. 22 Castagnary, “Salons,” 236, my trans. 23 Paul Mantz, “Salon de 1867,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, (Paris, 1867: Kraus Reprint, 1975), 514, my trans. 24 J.K. Huysmans, L’Art Moderne, in Écrits sur L’Art: de Diderot a Proust, (1883), 28, my trans. 25 Gonse, Peintre et écrivain, 82, my trans. 26 Baudelaire, “Salon of 1859,” 184. 27 , Peintres contemporains, 94, my trans. 28 Fromentin, “Une année dans le Sahel,” in Eugène Fromentin: Oeuvres complètes, Ed. Guy Sagnes, (Éditions Gallimard, 1984), 98, my trans. 29 Eugène Fromentin, “Un été dans le Sahara,” in Eugène Fromentin: Oeuvres complètes, Ed. Guy Sagnes, (Éditions Gallimard, 1984), 18, my trans. 30 Fromentin, “Sahara: Notes et Variantes,” in Oeuvres complètes, 1288. 31 Mickel, Fromentin, 26. 32 Fromentin, “Sahara,” in Oeuvres complètes, 18-19, my trans. 33 Fromentin, “Sahel,” in Oeuvres complètes, 303-4, my trans. 34 Gonse, Peintre et écrivain, 85, my trans. 35 Gonse, Peintre et écrivain, 85, my trans. 36 Martí, “Fromentin,” The Hour (New York, 1880), in On Art and Literature, Ed. Trans. Elinor Randall Philip S. Foner, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982), 85. 37 Wright, A Life in Art and Letters, 21. 38 Henry Houssaye, “Eugène Fromentin: L’Exposition de son Oeuvre à l’École des Beaux-Arts,” Revue des Deux-Mondes, (Paris: Bureau de la Revue des Deux Mondes, 1877), 889, my trans. 39 Gautier, L’Orient, 356, my trans. 40 Fromentin, Oeuvres complètes, 76, my trans. 41 Clément, L’atelier, 1, my trans. 42 Clément, L’atelier, 1, my trans. 43 Wright, A Life in Art and Letters, 264.
1
The Artist as Critic: A Parodic Reading of Robert Morris’s Writing and Minimalist Sculpture By: Leanne Carroll
Begun in 1961, Robert Morris’s minimalist sculptures are polyhedrons made of stock four by eight foot plywood sheets and painted grey. In a 1991 interview, Morris volunteered a telling remark about his major written treatise on this work, his 1966 Artforum essay “Notes on
Sculpture.” He stated that this essay—which has always been read as serious and celebrated as a foundational text for the minimalist movement—was in fact begun as a parody of formalist criticism.1 Taking this remark as my starting point, I will describe how Morris’s writing and sculpture mock Greenbergian medium specificity. Whereas Happenings, Fluxus, and other art practices developing at the time were radical enough not to warrant the attention of Clement
Greenberg and Michael Fried, Morris’s self-constructed identity as ‘serious formalist critic’ was a useful strategy for forcing these critics to disclose their modernist allegiances, with Fried’s
“Art and Objecthood” becoming a highly significant arguing point for a number of artists and critics. I will discuss why the art world was ripe for Morris’s parody and consider the efficacy of the position of artist-critic.
While Morris revealed that his essay “Notes on Sculpture” had begun as a parody of formalist criticism, I submit that evidence of a parodic, mocking tone lingers in the published version. Citing Greenberg and Fried, Morris notes that the intrinsic property that has come to the fore in painting is “the nature of the literal qualities of the support,” and adds, “[i]t has been a long dialogue with a limit.”2 Since sculpture was never involved with illusionism, Morris writes, it “could not possibly have based the efforts of fifty years upon the rather pious, if somewhat contradictory, act of giving up this illusionism and approaching the object.” In sculpture, “space, light, and materials have always functioned concretely and literally.” Morris suggests, then, that 2 literalness and objecthood (terms Fried would take up in his criticism of Morris’s work) are in fact more specific to sculpture than painting. One begins to imagine Morris’s Corner Piece illustrated on the adjacent page as proclaiming: If a literal object concerned with the qualities of the support is what you are looking for, now, this is an object.
Morris then mocks Greenberg and Fried’s persistent interest in historical trajectories and
“comparison with the painting of the past whose quality is not in doubt”:3 Greenberg and Fried went back to Manet to build their narrative,4 and Morris goes back to Tatlin. Constructivism was autonomous or specific, according to Morris, because it referred neither to the figure nor to architecture. Morris points out that this autonomy “was not sustained in the work of the greatest
American sculptor, [. . .] David Smith.” While still, parodically, referring to Smith as “the greatest,” Morris’s identification of Smith’s work as non-medium specific would not have sat well with Smith’s most ardent supporter, Greenberg. Morris is essentially asserting that
Greenberg’s prize sculptor is not a good sculptor based on the critic’s own criteria. Indeed,
Greenberg and Fried both supported the coloured “optical” or “painterly” sculpture of Smith and later Anthony Caro. Morris’s implication is also that Greenberg should support Morris’s sculpture instead, since he follows his statement about Smith with: “Today there is a reassertion of the non-imagistic as an essential condition.” Yet, he adds that “in passing, it should be noted that this condition has been weakened by a variety of works which, while maintaining the non- imagistic, focus themselves in terms of the highly decorative, the precious, or the gigantic.” The reference here is no doubt first to Donald Judd and then to the monumental works by sculptors like Ronald Bladen and Robert Grosvenor with whom Morris would exhibit at “Primary
Structures” at the Jewish Museum two months later.5 Mockingly laying bare the trivial prejudices that result from the systematic nature of medium specificity, Morris goes on to 3 explain: “There is nothing inherently wrong with these qualities; each offers a concrete experience. But they happen not to be relevant experiences for sculpture.”
Morris rejects relief next, stating: “The relief has always been accepted as a viable mode.
However, it cannot be accepted today as legitimate.” This statement, which mimics the authoritative, prescriptive tone of a critic, not only is another dig directed toward Judd, it also contradicts Morris’s own practice; he too created reliefs at the same time that he was building his grey polyhedrons—a fact which further corroborates Morris’s remark that he first wrote this essay as a parody.6 Morris rejected relief because the wall delimits the number of views of the object. Yet, the only sculpture as opposed to sculptural drawing illustrated in the article is
Morris’s Corner Piece. Even it sits in the corner such that only one face is accessible, like a relief.
In another, more straightforward, critique of medium specificity Morris asks, “could a work exist which has only one property? Obviously not, since nothing exists which has only one property. A single, pure sensation cannot be transmissible precisely because one perceives simultaneously more than one as parts in any given situation: if colour, then also dimension; if flatness, then texture.” After eliminating colour as optical and thus “inconsistent with the physical nature of sculpture,” Morris focuses on shape. He promotes “simpler forms which create strong gestalt sensations.” After making some humourously obvious statements about complex, simple, regular, and irregular polyhedrons, Morris notes that sculpture involving unitary forms “often elicits the complaint among critics that such works are beyond analysis.” To retain the semblance of sincerity, which is crucial for eliciting the later responses of Greenberg and Fried, Morris claims that the experience is not simple and relations are not cancelled.
“Rather they are bound more cohesively and indivisibly together,” in a way that makes past 4 sculpture extraneous. Unitary forms also “establish both a new limit and a new freedom for sculpture.” One is free of shape because all information about it is exhausted: “One does not, for example, seek the gestalt of a gestalt.” Yet one is bound to shape because it is “constant and indivisible.” This implies that Greenberg and Fried’s criticism contains its own obsolescence.
Medium specificity leads to the end of criticism: the medium is as specific as it can be and all information is exhausted.
In “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” published the following October, Morris begins by justifying his use of the term sculpture for “the new work.” He dismisses structure since it
“applies to either anything or to how a thing is put together” as well as object since “[e]very rigid body is an object.”7 The retention of the term sculpture is an important strategy, since it places
Morris’s text in a dialogue with Greenberg and Fried, unlike Judd’s more radical approach, which was to term the new work ‘Specific Objects’ and argue that they were “neither painting nor sculpture.”8 Morris also insists in his essay that his works are not conceived as an environment, a point he repeats in a March 1967 interview with David Sylvester.9 James Meyer suggests that Morris’s insistence may stem from a desire to refute the environment-readings of a number of critics as well as to distinguish his work from that of other installation artists (George
Segal, Lucas Samaras, Yayoi Kusama, and Claes Oldenburg) who were, like Morris, associated with New York City’s Green Gallery. Meyer observes that “Morris had flirted with environments before,” such as in his 1961 Fluxus-affiliated Passageway, a corridor which narrows and curves to a point out of reach and sight; “however, he now wanted to be seen as a sculptor.”10
Like so many of Morris’s endeavours, his minimalist sculptures and his texts are art about art (the influence of Duchamp is never far away).11 Morris’s first statement about his minimalist sculptures was written in 1960 and is titled “Blank Form”: “the subject reacts to it in 5 many particular ways when I call it art. He reacts in other ways when I do not call it art. Art is primarily a situation in which one assumes an attitude of reacting to some of one’s awareness as art. [. . .] Blank form is like life, essentially empty, allowing plenty of room for disquisitions on its nature and mocking each in its turn.”12 With this as well as the parodic “Notes on Sculpture,
Part 1” in mind, it seems many statements from Part 2 are so humourously obvious they would not warrant attention in everyday experience but are attended to because the objects are “called art”:
One knows immediately what is smaller and what is larger than himself. It is obvious yet important to take note of the fact that things smaller than ourselves are seen differently than things larger. [L]arge-sized objects exhibit size more specifically as an element. The awareness of scale is a function of the comparison made between that constant, one’s body size, and the object. Properties which are not read as detail in large works become detail in small works.
Art historian James Meyer concludes that “the difference between ‘Blank Form’ and
‘Notes on Sculpture’ is the difference between the neo-dada or Cagean Morris of 1961 and the minimal Morris of 1966.”13 I would suggest, however, that the difference between “Blank Form” and “Notes on Sculpture” is one of strategy, not of intent. In short, Morris’s minimalism is neo- dada keyed to the art world of the late 1960s. Morris’s minimalist sculptures were in fact produced concurrently with and exhibited alongside his neo-dada objects. At a 1963 solo show at the Green Gallery, three minimalist sculptures were surrounded by, for example, a nine by nine inch box which contained a speaker emitting the sound of the box’s own making; a suspended bucket containing water and a circulating pump titled Fountain in reference to Duchamp; a set of eight, grey vials containing Morris’s bodily fluids; three rulers each thirty-six units long but of visibly different lengths; a lead base supporting a ring of keys, each of which is inscribed with a word from Duchamp’s Green Box;14 a Card File of alphabetized index cards listing the steps of its own making under entries such as “Alphabets,” “Cross Filing,” “Delays,” “Deleted Entries,” 6 and “Mistakes”; a printout of Morris’s brain waves recorded while he contemplated himself and sized to correspond to the length of his body; and a box with an I-shaped door which opens to reveal a photograph of the grinning, nude artist in “parodic mockery of the phallic male genius.”15
The Green Gallery was owned by collectors Robert and Ethel Scull, who operated a successful New York City taxicab fleet. “The primary benefit for the Sculls was early access to some of the best new work at prices they essentially controlled”;16 the primary benefit to Morris was a venue for his neo-dada and minimalist art, and the accompanying prestige that exhibiting bestows. As frustration with Greenberg’s dominance mounted, it became popular for new collectors to support ostracized artists, and the New York art world indeed expanded substantially.17 In terms of commercial galleries, the count jumped from one hundred and twenty-three in 1955 to two hundred and forty-six in 1965.18 In terms of collectors, there were approximately two dozen in 1945, 200 in 1960, and over 2,000 by 1970.19 Morris’s work was the first of many minimal art purchases by the Italian industrialist Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, a significant collector of contemporary art in Europe. Morris’s sculptures were displayed in numerous exhibitions on both coasts of the U.S., reviewed extensively, and reproduced in his own art critical essays. He won First Prize at the 1967 Guggenheim International Exhibition, and from 1969 to 1971 he was offered large solo exhibitions at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery, the
Detroit Institute of Arts, the Whitney, and the Tate. These instances of legitimization are significant, since operating within Greenberg and Fried’s purview was an essential condition for launching an effective, parodic critique.
More radical practices lacked this art world legitimization. I submit that it is for this reason that they could not adequately enact an appreciable shift in art critical sensibility. Fried’s 7 dreaded temporal flow and theatricality had in fact already “become a commonplace of avant- garde practice” through John Cage, Happenings, and Fluxus.20 What made Morris’s minimalist sculptures a threat was that they feigned “modernist” visual interest and posed as the proper subjects of medium-specific criticism. Radical practices which were polemically independent from the gallery did not speak Greenberg and Fried’s language and thereby threaten it from within. Morris wrote: “Blank Form is still in the great tradition of artistic weakness—taste. That is to say I prefer it—especially to content (as opposed to ‘anti-form’ for the attempt to contradict one’s taste).”21 Morris’s minimalism is not explicitly anti-art; rather, it operates from within “the great tradition.”
It was not until Fried was thus goaded to react, to footnote a list of artists whose work he deemed degenerate and to codify his position, that an appreciable critical shift occurred.22 Fried’s
“Art and Objecthood” is thus a seminal text. That its primary subject of critique turns out to be a calculated parody—even if unknowingly on Fried’s part—is a crucial and unrecognized reason for its significance. A consciously covert parody produces a different type of reaction than a deliberately radical provocation. In Fried, it created an urgency and a thoroughgoing re- articulation of allegiances; it prohibited a reaction of either blanket dismissal (such as
Greenberg’s essay, “Recentness of Sculpture”), or one more instantiation of ideals (such as
Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting”). Keyed to address Greenberg’s persistent dominance and made possible by changes in the gallery and collecting scene, Morris’s minimalism and its role in
Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” is thus one of the important plotlines in the story of the 1960s backlash against Greenbergian modernism.
After reporting Morris’s recollection that his “Notes” “had begun as a parody of formalist criticism,” James Meyer continues: “Only at [Barbara] Rose’s urging did [Morris] transform the 8 text into a bona fide formal analysis.”23 It struck me as odd that this advice would come from critic Barbara Rose. In her own criticism that year, she pursued non-formalist directions and drifted apart from Michael Fried. I asked Rose whether she recalled “urging [Morris to] transform the text into a bona fide formal analysis.” She responded: “Yes this is true. I urged
Bob to be serious not ironic. His MA thesis was on Brancusi so obviously he could write cogently about sculpture. There was a certain amount of mockery about academic criticism among artists but as an art historian I knew that what Bob had to say about sculpture would be worth reading not as a joke but as a serious text.”24 Thus, it seems Rose’s recommendation to
Morris actually pertained to tone rather than methodology. Her suggestion was that he be
‘serious’, not that he be ‘formalist’, as (Meyer’s phrasing of) Morris’s comment reports. I contend that being “an art historian” does not only suggest that “he could write cogently about sculpture”; it also puts him in a position to see the value of an ironic or parodic strategy. In a
1962 letter to Henry Flynt, Morris stated, “I think today art is a form of art history.”25
With Artforum’s circulation of 15,000,26 and with readily available catalogue and anthology reprints of Morris’s essays, art criticism was clearly a key to making oneself known.
The phenomenon of the artist-as-critic can be seen as an assertion of authority on the part of artists against critics like Greenberg. Morris explained: “I rejected from the beginning the market- and media-driven prescription that the visual should be promoted to a worshipful ontology while the wordless artist, a mute fabricator of consistent artefacts, was forbidden to set foot on theoretical and critical ground.”27
Writing was also a useful way to ensure that one stood out among artists producing similar works in this newly lucrative art world. In style, content, as well as implicit and explicit criticisms, Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture” were produced in negative relation to Judd’s writing. 9
Whereas Judd indicates in his important essay “Specific Objects” that his objects are the most specific, Morris demonstrates in “Notes on Sculpture” that his sculptures are the most
“advanced.” “It was a brilliant move,” Meyer observes: “by the end of the year, one critic could confidently assert that ‘so-called Minimalistic sculpture, essentially a reduction of form to three- dimensional geometricized shapes, is largely an outgrowth of propositions advanced by
Morris.’”28
Whether Morris is deemed a charlatan, as when Peter Schjeldahl remarks that “[i]f he had never lived, the shape of art history since 1960 would be little different”29 and Roberta Smith calls him “an artistic kleptomaniac,”30 or whether he is celebrated for perceiving the evolving art world with an unprecedented acuteness, Morris’s minimal, “blank forms” continue to parade as formalist sculptures in major institutions. Thomas Crow notes in his book The Rise of the Sixties that “[i]n any large European or American city, intrigued audiences in the tens of thousands find themselves drawn to exhibitions of this same difficult art [. . .]. If much of the work on show nevertheless remains puzzling and remote to those without a secure initiation in the ways of the art world, it is because that wider audience lacks a useful explanatory narrative.”31 In the case of
Morris’s minimalism, an explanatory narrative which allows for parody and blankness by recognizing Morris’s role in shaping the work’s reception is highly pertinent. 10
1 James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2001), 155. 2 Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (Feb. 1966): 43. Subsequent Morris quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from page 43 or 44 of this essay. 3 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967), reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 123n4. 4 Greenberg refers to Manet and the Impressionists twice in “Modernist Painting,” as well as elsewhere. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993): 86, 89. 5 David Antin also notes the work toward which Morris’s comments are directed (Antin, “Have Mind, Will Travel,” in Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem [New York: Guggenheim Museum Foundation, 1994], 37). 6 Likewise, although Morris rejected mathematical systems and seriality in his “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” he would, as James Meyer points out, produce serial sculptures himself the following year (Minimalism: Art and Polemics, 159-60). 7 Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” Artforum 5, no. 2 (Oct. 1966): 21. Subsequent quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from page 21 or 23 of this essay. 8 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965), reprinted in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-75 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975), 181. 9 Morris in David Sylvester, “A Duologue: Robert Morris and David Sylvester,” recorded Mar. 1967, in Robert Morris: Catalogue of an Exhibition Held at the Tate Gallery (London: Tate Gallery, 1971), 16. 10 Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics, 162-63. 11 In 1965, Barbara Rose stated: “Morris’s purpose is, I think, obviously enough, to teach or to question certain very basic ideas about art, its meaning, and function.” In 1970, Jack Burnham wrote: “I have felt for some time: that Morris’s sculpture is essentially criticism about sculpture” (Rose, “Looking at American Sculpture,” Artforum 3, no. 5 [Feb. 1965]: 35-36; Burnham, “Robert Morris: Retrospective in Detroit,” Artforum 8, no. 7 [Mar. 1970]: 71). 12 Morris, “Blank Form,” 1960, reprinted in Barbara Haskell, Blam!: The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance 1958-1964 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art; W. W. Norton, 1984), 101. 13 Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics, 162. 14 Duchamp’s Green Box (1934) contains his notes for the Large Glass (1915-23). When Philip Johnson was tardy in his payment for this work, titled Litanies, Morris produced Statement of Aesthetic Withdrawal (1963) which consists of a lead relief of Litanies and a notarized letter withdrawing “all aesthetic quality and content” from the work. Johnson subsequently purchased both pieces and donated them to the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 15 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Wall Labels: Word, Image, and Object in the Work of Robert Morris,” in Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem, 73. 16 Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties (New York: Abrams, 1996), 91. 17 Crow, 91; Jennifer Wells, “The Sixties: Pop Goes the Market,” in Definitive Statements: American Art 1964-66 (Providence: Brown University, 1986), 53. 18 Steven W. Naifeh, Culture Making: Money, Success, and the New York Art World (Princeton: Princeton Undergraduate Studies in History, 1976), 81, qtd. in Wells, 55. 19 Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 155. “Minimalism” became prominent in the media and in fashion as well. James Meyer notes that the opening for “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum was a black tie affair complete with television crews and paparazzi. The July 1966 issue of Harper’s Bazaar identified the “minimal look”: “The New Dazzling Directness. Pure form fashions conveying chic with minimal statement for maximal response. All lines clear; all edges clean” (Harper’s Bazaar 99, no. 3056 [July 1966]: 70; Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics, 13 & 24). 20 Meyer, “The Writing of ‘Art and Objecthood,’” in Refracting Vision: Essays on the Writings of Michael Fried, ed. Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts, and Toni Ross (Sydney, N.S.W.: Power Publications, 2000), 71. 21 Morris, “Blank Form.” 22 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 130n8. 23 Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics, 155. 11
24 Rose, personal email to the author, June 28, 2007. 25 Morris, “Letter from Bob Morris to Henry Flynt, dated 8/13/62,” in Henry Flynt, Down with Art (Fluxus Press: New York, 1968), n.p. 26 Richard Williams, “The Krazy Kat Problem,” Art History 20, no. 1 (Mar. 1997): 174. 27 Morris, “Introduction,” Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1993), ix. 28 Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics, 160. The quote is from Martin Friedman, “Robert Morris: Polemics and Cubes,” Art International 10, no. 10 (Dec. 1966): 23. 29 Peter Schjeldahl, “The Smartass Problem,” Village Voice 39, no. 9 (1 Mar. 1994): 87. Referring to the minimalists generally, Brian O’Doherty states: “And this amalgamated philosopher-artist-draughtsman-aristocrat seems to lead us to an Academy once again, a sort of Platonic Academy—minus Plato.” 30 Roberta Smith, “A Hypersensitive Nose for the Next New Thing,” The New York Times (20 Jan., 1991): H 33-34. 31 Crow, 7.
Captivity and Encounter: Thomas Pellow, The Moroccan Renegade By: Mark Celinscak
…[A] feature of Oriental-European relations was that Europe was always in a position of strength, not to say domination.1 - Edward Said
During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, European powers came into close contact with a number of vibrant and dominant Islamic cultures. The Barbary Coast of North
Africa was an area of particular significance. Due to its proximity to the Mediterranean Sea,
North Africa became a zone of British imperial enterprise. The region was of strategic military importance, and because of the strength and reach of the Ottoman Empire, it was also a rich market for overseas trade. Nevertheless, the expansion of the empire into North Africa had considerable consequences for Britain.
Between 1600 and the end of the eighteenth century there were approximately 20,000
British captives in North Africa.2 Barbary corsair fleets targeted Christian shipping vessels, pillaging the goods and detaining the people on board. Those who had been captured were returned to North Africa and either sold as slaves or imprisoned. While some individuals died in captivity or remained slaves, others managed to acclimatize and enter North African society. A small few were able to escape and return home.
Among those few was Thomas Pellow, an English captive who managed to flee North
Africa and tell his story. This paper will examine Pellow’s experiences before, during, and after his captivity in North Africa. The primary focus will be on his encounters with his Muslim masters, specifically on the ways in which Pellow responded to slavery, the religion of Islam, and Moroccan society in general. Furthermore, his attempt to re-enter British society, more than two decades after his capture, will also be investigated.
This paper will attempt to prove that while Pellow adapted well to Moroccan society by learning Arabic and adopting Muslim customs, his captivity narrative emphasizes Christian and 2 European moral superiority over Islam and speaks of his unremitting loyalty to Britain.
Moreover, Pellow struggled with a perceived loss of religious and national identity as he tried to re-adjust and re-enter British society. Captivity was a predominant experience in European-
Islamic encounters during the early modern period, and as a result, it was the inevitable expense of expanding the British Empire.
A Brief Overview: The Life and Times of Thomas Pellow
According to Pellow’s account, his adventure began at the age of eleven during the summer of 1716 when the Francis—the ship he was traveling on as a deck hand with his uncle, the vessel’s captain, John Pellow, and five other Englishmen—was captured by Salé corsairs just after it had crossed the Bay of Biscay. Two other ships were also commandeered that day, and in total, fifty-two Englishmen were captured and presented to Sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco as prisoners. Pellow was one of the individuals handed over to the sultan, and consequently, he spent the next twenty-three years as a captive in Morocco.
Shortly after arriving in Morocco, Pellow was forced to convert to Islam. He became a
Muslim, learned Arabic, and was assigned a wife from the sultan’s harem, with whom he had two children. He then became a personal slave of Moulay Ismail and had the rare opportunity to experience the court of the sultan, witnessing firsthand his notorious cruelty.
Eventually, Pellow was made an officer in the sultan’s army and participated in three military campaigns. He led other slave-soldiers into battle and once took part in a slave-gathering expedition in sub-Saharan Africa. Pellow made two unsuccessful attempts to escape and was sentenced to death for each; fortunately, he was imparted a reprieve on both occasions. In 1737, at the age of thirty-three, he attempted to escape again.
During this third attempt Pellow was beaten, robbed, and left for dead. Yet, in July 1738, he managed to flee Morocco by boarding an Irishman’s ship. He arrived in England later that summer and made newspaper headlines upon his return. He arrived at his family home on 3 October 15, 1738 and was reunited with his parents. Within two years of his return and with the help of a local editor, Pellow wrote his account. Published in London, his story was entitled The
History of the Long Captivity and Adventures of Thomas Pellow.3 The place and date of his death is unknown.
Pre-Encounter
The Barbary Coast was a term used to refer to the coastal regions of North Africa, which included Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunisia. The latter three were regencies or military provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The term ‘Barbary’ originally referred to the Berbers, a people indigenous to North Africa. The British used the term ‘Barbary’ to denote the entire area of
North Africa, excluding Egypt. Moreover, the term was used to describe a wide variety of people such as Arabs, Berbers, Moriscos, and others.
Morocco was the first non-European country with which Britain had stable diplomatic relations. Yet, while it remained independent of Ottoman rule, Morocco was heavily influenced by it. Furthermore, in the minds of many Britons, Muslims posed a great danger to all of
Christendom. According to scholar G.A. Starr, by the seventeenth century, Barbary was the subject of most Englishmen’s “exotic nightmare” and the Turk and the Moor were represented as
“fabulous villains.”4 Moreover, by the early-to-mid-seventeenth century captivity narratives became a largely Anglophone form of writing, as well as an established and recognized genre.5
“Stories are at the heart,” wrote Edward Said, “of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world.”6 The same could be said about what captives like Pellow wrote concerning the “strange regions” in which they had been imprisoned. After the expulsion of the
Moriscos from Spain in 1609, the number of corsairs rose considerably along with the number of captives. Between 1577 and 1704 there were twenty-two captivity accounts written by former
British captives.7 4 These captivity narratives informed the reader that the Muslim world was something to be feared. Thus, the acts of the Barbary corsairs and the oral and written reports about these acts had a significant bearing upon the British psyche. In particular, Pellow’s parents were well aware of Barbary corsairs and worried about the Moors. Before Pellow was permitted to board the
Francis, his uncle needed the consent of his parents. According to Pellow, his parents had concerns about,
…the Hardships which probably I might, in my so tender years, undergo thereby, and their ominous Fears of our falling into the Hands of the Moors, who were then at open War with us, and had, as they saw by the News Papers, very lately taken some of our Ships; for that it was with the greatest Reluctance and Regret that I obtained their Consent…8
Fear of Barbary was ever-present in Britain in the early modern period. By and large, Europeans were not interested in understanding the Islamic world, and in Britain in particular, most people accepted anti-Islamic rhetoric without closely examining the “fearsome” world of Barbary.9
Encounter Through Captivity
The majority of European captives in North Africa were invariably faced with the prospect of conversion. In the Barbary States it was quite common among the locals to try and convert Christians to Islam.10 Many slave owners attempted to force their captives to renounce
Christianity and become Muslim. According to social historian Robert C. Davis, contemporary scholars in the seventeenth century have suggested that as many as two-fifths of captives in
Barbary converted from Christianity to Islam by the 1630s.11
The Muslim masters working to covert their captives would often resort to brutal physical and verbal abuse. Thus, large numbers of European Christian captives converted in an effort to improve their embattled situations. Once converted, the captive generally could not be forced to endure hard labour or be sent to the galleys.12 Indeed, life was normally better for captives if they abandoned their Christian faith. Nevertheless, many freed captives reported that conversion did not necessarily mean liberty.13 5 Pellow’s experience was similar to many captives of Barbary. Shortly after arriving in
Morocco, Pellow was given by the sultan to one of his favourite sons, Moulay Spha, a callous individual who detested European slaves. After initially refusing to convert to Islam, Pellow was repeatedly and brutally beaten by Moulay Spha. According to Pellow, “My Tortures were now exceedingly increased, burning my Flesh off my Bones by Fire; which the Tyrant did, by frequent Repetitions, after a most cruel Manner.”14 Eventually Pellow submitted to Moulay Spha and converted to Islam. He received forced circumcision and claims he immediately began calling upon God to forgive him.15
Pellow expressed tremendous grief for having to abandon his Christian faith. According to scholar Stephen Clissold, conversion was a momentous decision to make because “the renegade turned his back on his home and family in the knowledge that he would probably never see them again.”16 Pellow was given new clothes and, more significantly, a new identity. He now pledged allegiance to Islam, at least outwardly, and had in turn, ostensibly turned his back on his
Christian heritage.
Once converted, Pellow began to study Arabic and adopt Muslim and Moroccan customs.
In general, most slaves were disinclined to dress in the local style. Pellow originally refused to wear Moroccan dress and was subsequently beaten until he accepted. Nabil Matar has noted,
“Islam overpowered Englishmen by the force of cultural habit.”17 Some captives used language and custom to adapt quickly to their surroundings. It was in the Englishman’s best interest to learn the language and customs of North African society.
Pellow’s ability to master Arabic allowed him to find work as an interpreter when
English diplomats came to Morocco. Nonetheless, during the early modern period, identity was closely linked with language, and language acquisition was regularly associated with cultural assimilation.18 As we will see below, Pellow’s knowledge of Arabic and Muslim customs complicated his attempts to re-enter British society. 6 Despite being absorbed into North African society and adopting the Moroccan way of life, Pellow is remarkable for his insistence on European and Christian moral superiority. Said has noted that a major part of European culture is “the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and culture.”19 It is clear that the majority of captives used their accounts to demonstrate European cultural superiority.
Pellow employs a range of binary oppositions in his work to contrast the law abiding
English against the heretical Muslims. In discussing the differences in governance, Pellow observes:
Here [in Morocco] we may see the dangerous Consequences of ARBITRARY Power, and thank GOD that we are governed by such wholesome Laws … whereby every one is allowed fair Trial in Matters of Life and Death … whereas, those unhappy People who are subject to Arbitrary Tyrants, are To-day rich and great, To-morrow Beggars, often losing their Lives and Estates, all without being heard, or any daring to enquire for why or whereof.20
Pellow continues to describe the pre-eminence of English culture, as well as the sanctity of the Christian faith. He later comments on the “strange” and wicked customs and manners of the Moors. As Paul Baepler has argued, in captivity narratives Africans are commonly depicted as barbaric savages, rarely if ever portrayed as noble or exemplary.21 Despite being part of a
Muslim family, Pellow represents Europeans as culturally and morally superior in his tale.
The History of the Long Captivity and Adventures of Thomas Pellow portrays an
Englishman’s close and tumultuous encounter in Barbary. Pellow’s accounts reinforce the notion that the Muslim world was something to fear. Yet, his account also unwittingly reveals the unique opportunities he was afforded while in Morocco. After converting to Islam, Pellow married, had children, found employment, traveled, fought in important battles, and experienced numerous other ‘adventures’. Despite it all, Pellow chose to represent Islam and Barbary as culturally and morally inferior to Europe.
Post-Encounter 7 Prior to his return to England, Pellow may not have fully understood that he was simply trading being an outsider in one society for another. English captivity was widely considered an insult to the state and a threat to allegiance.22 After more than two decades in captivity, the
Britain that Pellow vaguely recalled had changed. Before he formally arrived on English soil,
Pellow was viewed suspiciously. When the boat he was traveling on pulled into port, he recalls,
“I was denied by the Sentinels, telling me that till they had Orders for my so doing, they would not suffer any Moor to land: Moor! said I, you are very much mistaken in that, for I am as good a
Christian (though I am dressed in the Moorish Garb) as any of you all.”23 Eventually, after proving his identity and completing some official paperwork, Pellow was finally permitted on land.
Large crowds met Pellow upon his return, as people were very curious to see an
Englishman that looked so much like a Muslim. He was aware that the community around surrounding him was deeply apprehensive about his return and speculated about the captivity that changed him. According to Pellow, due to his conversion and Muslim dress he had “no
Doubt but some ill-natured people think of me so even to this Day: I pray to GOD to forgive them, and that it may never be their mishap to undergo the like Trials.”24 To distance oneself from the dishonour of conversion was complicated for the captive. Moreover, as Matar has observed, anxiety surrounding the return of captives implies identity insecurity in England at this time.25
Thus, like other captives, Pellow found it difficult to re-adjust upon returning home. His appearance was shocking to most and not even his parents recognized him when he arrived.
Pellow writes, “I did not know my own Father and Mother, nor they me; and had we happened to meet at any other Place … we should no Doubt have passed each other, unless my great Beard might have induced them to inquire further after me.”26 It is likely that his parents were surprised to hear of his conversion. 8 Upon returning home, most captives gave depositions about their trials. Captives were often eager to tell their story as they attempted to reclaim their national and religious identity.
G.A. Starr has argued that a justification for writing was to reaffirm the captive’s conviction in
Christianity and the English constitution.27 Pellow’s account contains numerous religious analogies, and he describes his experiences using biblical language and imagery. For example, when Pellow first landed, he “fell to my Knees, offering up my most hearty Thanks to Almighty
God, for my so wonderful and miraculous Deliverance, and the Sight once more of Christian
Land.”28 Pellow also frequently pays homage to the equitable and exemplary British legal system. His work reveals an example of a former English captive writing to emphasize his
English national identity and to demonstrate his commitment to the state.
Some captives also took the occasion to condemn Islamic religious practices in their accounts.29 These accounts were written from the perspective of anti-Islamic fear and conflict and, therefore, should be interpreted in this context. Pellow repeatedly states his disdain for
Islam and its practices. He tells the reader of his “utter Abhorrence and Detestation of [Islam]; which, through the ambitious Artifices of cunning and designing Men, hath for so many Ages been so grossly imposed upon them.”30 Accordingly, captivity was a destabilizing force for the budding national identity in England, therefore, captives took the opportunity to undermine
Muslims and speak of the absolute superiority of Christianity in their captivity narratives.31 In doing so, captives hoped to gain the confidence and support of the local community.
Conclusion
One of Said’s central arguments is that Europe and the West as a whole responded to the
Orient from a position of strength, domination, and control.32 Yet, as this paper has attempted to demonstrate, captivity narratives challenge Said’s thesis. Accounts of captivity, like that of
Thomas Pellow, demonstrate that English writers during the early modern period did not and could not write from the perspective of European possession or domination of the Orient. 9 Moreover, during this period, the English associated power with Islam and viewed Muslims as people to be feared.
As Robert C. Davis has observed, by including the Barbary Coast slavery experience into the grand narrative of European imperialism, it changes and complicates our understanding of it.33 The accounts of captivity in North Africa also expand our knowledge of cross-cultural interactions. Significantly, Europeans wrote captivity narratives from a position of susceptibility and limitation.
Thomas Pellow’s narrative declared a loyalty to Britain and a close relationship to the
Christian faith. Yet, the sub-text of his account obscures these declarations. While he claimed his
“Britishness” was always essential to him during captivity, his text undermines this claim. For example, Pellow recounts an episode during his final escape attempt when he was asked to cure some peasants of an eye infection. He did so by rubbing ground red pepper into their eyes, which caused them much anguish. Linda Colley has observed that this was not simply a cruel act; on the contrary, Colley suggests, “it was a standard, Moroccan folk remedy for such ailments. An episode which British readers were encouraged to read as anti-Muslim, anti-Moroccan behaviour on Pellow’s part, demonstrates in reality the extent to which this one-time Cornishman had assimilated Moroccan folkways.”34 Pellow tried to represent himself as a steadfast Briton, yet his narrative demonstrates that this was not the case and proves that his identity had indeed been transformed by his years in Barbary.
Captivity accounts depict Europeans confronting differences in race, religion, and nationalities and are written from positions of susceptibility. During the early modern period
Islam could be neither dominated nor controlled. On the contrary, these stories remind the reader that Islam has long occupied the minds of Europeans and, through captivity and encounter, had a tremendous impact on the culture and climate of Europe. 10
1 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 40. 2 Linda Colley, Captives (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), 44. 3 Thomas Pellow, The History of the Long Captivity and Adventures of Thomas Pellow, in South Barbary. Edited by Josephine Grieder (New York: Garland Publishing, 1973). 4 G.A. Starr, “Escape From Barbary: A Seventeenth-Century Genre,” The Huntington Library Quarterly, XXIX (November 1965), 35. 5 Paul Baepler, “Introduction,” in White Slaves, African Masters, edited by Paul Baepler (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 6. 6 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), xii. 7 Nabil Matar, “Introduction: England and Mediterranean Captivity, 1577-1704,” in Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption, ed. Daniel J. Viktus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 3. 8 Pellow, 5. 9 Giles Milton, White Gold (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 167. 10 Ibid., 84. 11 Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 21. 12 John B. Wolf, The Barbary Coast (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979), 164. 13 Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 26. 14 Pellow, 15-16. 15 Ibid., 16. 16 Stephen Clissold, The Barbary Slaves (New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), 86. 17 Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558-1685, 28. 18 Baepler, 42. 19 Said, Orientalism, 7. 20 Pellow, 103. 21 Baepler, 38. 22 Linda Colley, “Going Native, Telling Tales: Captivity, Collaborations and Empire,” Past and Present, no. 168 (2000), 188. 23 Pellow, 376. 24 Ibid., 16. 25 Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 72. 26 Pellow, 388. 27 Starr, 46. 28 Pellow, 374. 29 For examples see: Edward Coxere, Adventures by Sea. Edited by E.H.W. Meyerstein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945) and William Okeley, Eben-ezer: or, a Small Monument of Great Mercy. (London: Nat. Ponder, 1675). 30 Pellow, 192. 31 Matar, “Introduction,” 36. 32 Said, Orientalism, 40. 33 Davis, 193. 34 Colley, Captives, 96. Travel, Architects, and the Postwar “Grand Tour” By: Denise Costanzo
An American architect observed in an essay that “it is a physical impossibility to
transport buildings as one does paintings. Therefore, to experience the dome of the Cathedral of
Florence by Brunelleschi or the apse and dome of St. Peter’s by Michelangelo, one must be
within the space itself.” To assert architecture’s inherent immobility and three-dimensionality is
largely uncontroversial, but the next sentence is more contentious: “Architects, in order to
explore the problems of contemporary architecture, must necessarily have a specific cultural
background which should qualify them for an appreciation of the valid works of the past.”1
Taken together, these axioms require architects to recognize the authority of select historic monuments and to absorb their lessons through direct phenomenal experience.
It seems only proper that such statements come from a fellowship application to the
American Academy in Rome, established in 1894 to buttress the fin de siècle classical revival known as the “American Renaissance.”2 But this essay dates to 1960, when seeing and
venerating history firsthand was not such an obvious requisite for architects. Its author, Michael
Graves, is now a household name thanks to his populist high-design products for Target stores
(fig. 1). As an architect, he is best known for his historically allusive works of the 1970s
onwards. His prominent career has contributed to the reputation of the post-World War II
Academy as an ‘incubator’ of postmodern historicism, a category in which he is generally
included by critics.3 However, when Graves visited Rome in 1960 he was not a “proto-
postmodernist,” but a modernist. He had just finished his master’s degree at Harvard’s Graduate
School of Design (GSD), famous for its functionalist, neo-Bauhaus orthodoxy, and his earliest
works of the late 1960s reinterpret the 1920s machine-age modernism of Le Corbusier.4 Thus,
1 Graves’s youthful statement of purpose for the Rome Prize introduces a non-trivial question:
why would a modern architect want to go to Rome in 1960?
Graves’s conception of an architect’s necessary background reflects the discipline’s
centuries-old practice of educational travel. His pairing of history and experience argues that
imagery alone cannot convey a building’s full aesthetic content: direct, physical knowledge of
exemplary works is essential for mastery of a spatial and physical medium. What Graves elides, however, is an epistemological gap dividing the precedent-based historicism that drove traditional pilgrimages to Italy, and modern architecture, a movement which claimed validity through supposedly ‘universal’ principles and aesthetics, detached from any specific culture or location.5 The primary task of ‘modern’ architects stood in contradistinction from the Grand
Tour’s raison d’être: no longer called to eloquently apply an eternally valid language of
classicism gleaned from ‘sacred’ sites like Rome, their task was to capture and construct an ever-
changing Zeitgeist.
Accordingly, the gospel of modern architecture was primarily disseminated through the
disembodied, mechanically reproducible media of text, photographs, and drawings. The
movement’s abstract aesthetic of planar walls, machined details and (putative) mass production
facilitated its reduction to two-dimensional imagery and simple compositional formulae. Le
Corbusier summarized his philosophy into only “Five Points” in 1926, while Hitchcock and
Johnson’s book The International Style distilled an aesthetically and ideologically varied
movement into just three stylistic principles.6 Of course, Le Corbusier’s ‘points’ were physically
realized in works such as the Villa Savoye at Poissy-sur-Seine, and The International Style accompanied a tangible event, the Museum of Modern Art’s “Modern Architecture: International
Exhibition” of 1932 (fig. 2). However, the exhibition’s attendees were still exposed to the new
2 architecture through photographs and models, second-hand representations divorced from such phenomenal realities as scale, interior space, materiality, and physical context.7
In addition, those North American architects who might wish to study the movement’s
European precedents firsthand during these years faced many obstacles: the Depression, World
War II, and the Iron Curtain would keep major works practically inaccessible for decades.
Furthermore, many buildings revered by later generations were ephemeral structures constructed
for temporary exhibitions, preserved only through drawings and period photography.8
Importantly, just as portable as images were their human creators. That many of the chief
founders of the Modern Movement had fled Nazi Germany and were living, working, and
teaching in the U.S. from the 1940s to the 1960s further reduced the apparent necessity of
educational travel for American architects—not just to Rome, but anywhere.9
In light of such seismic shifts in architecture’s centre of gravity away from Europe
towards the U.S., it is understandable that some authors have characterized the postwar Academy
as more architectural “exile” than “opportunity.”10 Yet Michael Graves was one of forty young
architects who accepted Rome Prize fellowships between 1947 and 1966.11 Despite its history of
staunch support for classicism in the arts, the Academy had drastically altered its cultural mission after the war to align itself with an ascendant modern architecture.12 Like Graves, most
architecture fellows came from prominent modernist programs, in particular those of Harvard,
Yale, and MIT.13 Among the senior architects involved with the postwar Academy as trustees,
Rome Prize jurors, and architects in residence, the brief residency of Louis Kahn is best known
after decades of critical emphasis.14 But he is part of a fraternity of major mid-century
modernists, including Harrison and Abramovitz, Nathaniel Owings and Gordon Bunshaft of
SOM, Pietro Belluschi, Edward Larrabee Barnes, and Eero Saarinen, among others, all of whom
3 lent the Academy their names, reputations, and time.15 Philip Johnson even orchestrated the
Academy’s transition to modern architecture from behind the scenes while at MoMA in 1947.16
Clearly, the idea of a ‘Rome experience’ had some perceived value for architects young
and old during these years—but what value exactly? The most direct accounts of Italy’s expected
architectural value come from essays like Graves’s, submitted with Rome Prize applications.17 In fact, the portions we heard from Graves’s statement neatly summarize their most common themes: that Italy’s cultural, artistic, and urban traditions are still of instructive value for architects, and that firsthand experience of its monuments—such as the vertigo felt when standing at the rim of the Pantheon’s oculus, which necessarily provides an entirely new, unique, and bodily measure of the building’s scale—is indispensable to fully fathom architecture as a medium (fig. 3).18 Significantly, most applicants ignored Italy’s own Fascist-era modernism and
contemporary scene, primarily framing Rome as a gateway to the haptic experience of history.19
This is quite surprising for a generation inculcated in high modernism, with its emphasis on the aesthetics, sociology, and technologies of the present moment. Yet, although Walter
Gropius had notoriously eliminated architectural history courses from the GSD, history was never entirely absent even during his tenure.20 In fact, one of the most influential architectural
texts of the 1940s to the 1970s is Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, a book that entwined polemic with history, and had direct connections to Harvard.21 A Swiss architectural historian in the rigorous Germanic tradition, Giedion was also a prominent proponent of modern architecture whose writings defined the movement as an embodiment of the spiritual conditions of a new age.22 Nonetheless, his book introduced the notion of architecture as Zeitgeist through
examples drawn primarily from the Italian Renaissance and Roman Baroque.23 Born out of
lectures delivered at Harvard in 1939, this book that married Italian history to the modern cause
4 was fully absorbed at the GSD and every other school. Giedion even taught at Harvard from
1954 through to the early 1960s, when Graves was a student there.24
Giedion’s interweaving of modernist ideology and architectural history was influential in its innovation, and consistent with the general direction of postwar architectural discourse. The boundaries of modern architecture, America’s ‘official’ style during these years, were challenged from many directions, one of which was the reintroduction of overt historical references, as when
Philip Johnson introduced his subversively Miesian Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut via Neoclassicism, the American Colonial vernacular, and the Acropolis in 1950.25 Architecture
as collective and subjective experience enriched by memory came to the foreground just as the
Pax Americana provided the safety and prosperity to travel again.26 New pilgrimages to Western
Europe would resume and redefine a centuries-old practice of measuring today’s architecture
against the past.
Yet creative discovery through travel was already embedded within the modern
movement, as in far earlier avant-gardes. Brunelleschi and Alberti had uncovered the
Quattrocento’s ‘new’ architecture in Rome’s still-buried ruins, and Stuart, Revett, and LeRoy
would find the eighteenth century’s ‘purified’ Neoclassicism in the newly accessible temples of
the Athenian Acropolis.27 For the ‘classical’ tradition, against which modern architects reacted, was an evolving, unstable construct continually reshaped by each generation’s offering of more
precise measurements, alternate reconstructions, and newly discovered or re-identified
monuments. Thus, the search for a more ‘authentic’ architecture had long been an intellectual, a
creative, and a physical journey.
The hunt to replace historically-based architectural sources with radically modern ones
often involved the same practice of exploratory travel and the bodily experience of instructive
5 architectural environments. Dozens of Europeans like Erich Mendelsohn journeyed to
architecture’s future in New York and Chicago during the 1920s.28 In his youth, Frank Lloyd
Wright disdained sponsored study in Paris and instead chose Japan for his first trip abroad in
1905.29 Such revolutionary voyages burnished avant-garde credentials, but the very act of travel
inescapably mirrored one of the academic system’s central methods.
Moreover, traditional destinations and monuments proved irresistible even to those
determined to rewrite architecture’s meaning. By 1910, Wright was overlooking Florence from
Fiesole and absorbing Italy on his own terms.30 Perhaps most influentially, Le Corbusier’s Vers
une Architecture of 1923 forever redefined classical perfection in machine-age terms.31 This book, truly the ‘gospel’ of modern architecture since its publication, documents how its author’s physical experience of the Parthenon, the Pantheon, and Hadrian’s Villa during his youthful
“voyage à l’Orient” shaped his vision of the ‘new’ architecture.32 Le Corbusier spent decades processing these antique sources through his work, which would be consistently animated by the promenade through space that he performed on the Acropolis. His photographs, sketches, and diagrams immortalized but could never substitute for such a bodily experience, beckoning later disciples to literally follow in his footsteps.
The modern tradition as codified and taught at mid-century was punctuated by a sufficient number of such prophetic epiphanies that they constitute an “alternative” Grand Tour
tradition, related but parallel to its traditional counterpart. Le Corbusier began his travels
emulating his own early hero, John Ruskin, who found his ‘true’ architecture in the medieval
Italy marginalized by the academic establishment.33 Louis Sullivan would dramatize his own rejection of the École des Beaux-Arts and subsequent embrace of Rome: fleeing Paris in disgust, he spent two days in the Sistine Chapel, where he found the still-vital heart buried within the
6 corpse of academicism by communing directly with the creative spirit of Michelangelo.34 Even the hyper-mediated International Style exhibition and books were born of pilgrimage: Johnson,
Hitchcock, and Barr had conducted their own ‘alternate’ Grand Tours of European modernism in
1930 to 1931, personally visiting nearly all the buildings and architects they would immortalize
in print.35 Later notorious for viewing European modernism as stylistic connoisseurs to the exclusion of social or political intent, their knowledge was not merely visual, but fully ‘aesthetic’ in the word’s most physical, Kantian sense.
This fact points to an issue arising inescapably from any reference to the Grand Tour: its inherent elitism. It was only Johnson’s great personal wealth that permitted an extended study tour of the new architecture at the height of the Great Depression.36 His American colleagues
could never repeat this experience, nor claim such direct and encyclopedic knowledge of the
major exemplars of the International Style. For Johnson, who had studied classics as a Harvard
undergraduate, such travel provided his only ‘real’ architectural credentials until he entered
design school in 1940. So Graves’s mention of “a specific cultural background” in his Rome
Prize essay is a reminder that the purpose of architectural travel has usually been both knowledge and prestige. The Grand Tour culminating in Italy was always an investment in elite status for its participants, whether young European aristocrats, American nouveau-riches, or aspiring artists in
any medium. As Samuel Johnson knew painfully well from personal experience in the eighteenth
century, “A man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not
having seen what it is expected a man should see.”37 What you saw determined to a great extent
who you were and what you could do. The Beaux-Arts Prix de Rome upon which the American
Academy modeled its own fellowships had always divided a privileged echelon of architects
7 who knew and studied antiquity firsthand from those left behind, determining very different
professional trajectories for each.
By 1960, Rome was no longer viewed as the heart of an eternally valid classical tradition,
but it remained charged with the aura of architectural greatness. For mid-century architects,
Italy’s art and environment promised both the inspiration and the legitimacy—Pierre Bourdieu’s
famous concept of ‘cultural capital’—that would establish their creative judgment as authoritative. To underscore the temporal power of Rome’s reflected glory is not to discount the sincerity of pilgrims like Graves, or denigrate his or anyone’s experience as cynically careerist
strategizing. But it is useful to recognize that exigencies beyond disinterested aesthetic
appreciation drove, and still drive, architects’ determination to refract Rome’s significance
through the lens of modernity.
Graves’s use of the two greatest domes of the Italian Renaissance as examples of
enduringly ‘valid’ canonical works in 1960 is highly significant. These feats of structural
engineering and spatial imagination by acknowledged ‘geniuses’ embodied the heroic modernist
ideal of technologically progressive creative vision. Graves and other Academy fellows generally
defined Italy’s architectural relevance in abstract, highly Giedionesque terms, celebrating its
wealth of expressive and dynamic spaces, harmonic proportions, varied urbanisms, and stylistic
juxtapositions, all issues directly relevant to ‘contemporary practice’. The manner in which
Graves’s drawings x-ray Renaissance ideal geometry, turn baroque ornament into nervous visual
energy, and otherwise abstract the Eternal city through minimally expressive gestures, is clearly a reflection of his own artistic moment, and visibly different from the more classical stability of form and composition characteristic of his later drawing style (fig. 4-7).
8 These efforts to elicit modern meaning from a city of abandoned traditions also reflects
the highly conflicted picture of Rome presented by Le Corbusier. He finds it an overcrowded city
of ‘horrors’, declaring that “Rome is the damnation of the half-educated. To send architectural
students to Rome is to cripple them for life.”38 Yet under the marble, stucco, and putti, he too
found inspiration in pure geometries of daringly engineered concrete, in St. Peter’s embodiment
of the genius of Michelangelo (“the architect of the last thousand years”), and in the controlling
urban visions of the caesars and the popes. Appalled and mesmerized, he states: “The lesson of
Rome is for wise men, for those who know and can appreciate, who can resist and can verify.”39
Le Corbusier’s Rome presents a tantalizing challenge to architects of any generation: do you
have eyes that can see? That can learn from history without being subsumed by its seductively
treacherous surfaces?
In retrospect, Graves’s Rome Prize essay reads like a self-fulfilling prophecy, presciently
indicating the city’s relevance to his own future of historically inspired contemporary practice.
The monumental symmetry, platonic volumes, overt symbolism, and neo-Tuscan colour palette of his signature style indisputably helped ‘re-Italianize’ late-twentieth century architecture. A recent book presenting drawings and photography from Graves’s Academy fellowship is most appropriately subtitled Images of a Grand Tour.40 But was his Grand Tour ‘alternative’,
traditional, or somehow both at once? Graves and the other Academy fellows were among
countless other young postwar architects who journeyed in search of what Joan Ockman has
memorably termed “the shock of the real.”41 That so many chose to construct architectural
identities via the realities and mythologies of Rome is a testament to the city’s continuing role as an altered but still-efficient source and signifier of creativity, cosmopolitan sophistication, and power within modern culture.
9
Published with support from the George Dewey and Mary J. Krumrine Endowment
1 Michael Graves, “Purpose for Applying for a Fellowship in Architecture,” n.d. (1960), Archives of the American Academy in Rome, New York, New York (hereafter AAR). 2 On the early history of the American Academy, see Lucia and Alan Valentine, The American Academy in Rome, 1894-1969 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973); and Fikret Yegül, Gentlemen of Instinct and Breeding: Architecture at the American Academy, 1894-1940 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 3 See, e.g., Yegül’s introductory statements in Gentlemen of Instinct and Breeding, p. 4, and Joseph Giovannini, “The Academy,” Progressive Architecture 75, no. 10 (October 1994): 45-46. 4 For Graves’s background and early work, see Karen Vogel Wheeler, Peter Arnell, and Ted Bickford, eds., Michael Graves: Buildings and Projects 1966-1891 (New York: Rizzoli, 1982). On Harvard and U.S. Architectural education during the postwar years, see Anthony Alofsin, The Struggle for Modernism: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning at Harvard (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002). 5 Brian Ambroziak has situated Graves’s Academy experience within the Grand Tour tradition; see his essay “The Necessity for Seeing” in Ambroziak, Michael Graves: Images of a Grand Tour (New York: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1-14. While he also analyzes Graves’s graphic style in relation to contemporary artists such as Willem de Kooning, he emphasizes continuities, not ruptures, with architectural tradition. 6 See Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, “Les 5 points d’une architecture nouvelle,” Almanach d’Architecture moderne (Paris: G. Crès, 1926) reprinted as “Five Points Towards a New Architecture,” in Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-century Architecture, trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge, MA; The MIT Press, 1970), 99-101; and Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932). 7 Eleven models were displayed at MoMA exhibition, including Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat House, Gropius’ Bauhaus, Frank Lloyd Wright’s House on the Mesa, and Howe & Lescaze’s Cristie-Forsythe housing project. See Terence Riley, The International Style: Exhibition 15 and the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 68 and 201, n. 4. 8 Examples of such ephemeral icons include Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion for the Werkbund Exhibition of 1915, Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau for the Paris Exposition des Arts Déoratifs of 1925, and Mies’ German Pavilion for the International Exhibition in Barcelona of 1929. The reconstruction of the latter in 1986 is a testament to the power of images to keep these structures alive and relevant in the architectural imagination.. 9 Prominent architectural émigrés from the closed Bauhaus in the U.S. at this time included Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. 10 In particular, see Giovannini’s “The Academy,” 45-46; and Russell Lynes, “The Academy that Overlooks Rome,” Harpers Magazine, May 1969, 28-31. 11 Information about Academy fellows is published in Benjamin Kohl, Wayne Linker, and B. Suzanne Kavelman, A Centennial Directory of the American Academy in Rome (New York: American Academy in Rome, 1995). 12 The changes in policy and philosophy at the postwar Academy are discussed briefly in the Valentines’ American Academy in Rome, p. 108-118, and are further analyzed in my forthcoming dissertation, “The Lessons of Rome: Architects at the American Academy, 1947-1966” (The Pennsylvania State University). 13 Of forty architecture fellows, twelve earned their terminal professional degrees from the GSD, eight from Yale, six from MIT, and five from Princeton. Both the predominance of Harvard (30% of the total) and the high representation of these four schools (81% of the whole) are noteworthy. 14 The thesis that Kahn’s brief sojourn at the Academy in 1950-51 fundamentally redirected his creative work began with Vincent Scully’s Louis I. Kahn of 1962 (New York: G. Braziller) and has remained a continuous thread of discussion in Kahn studies ever since. 15 On Harrison, Abramovitz, Owings, Belluschi and Barnes, see their respective entries in Kohl, et. al., Centennial Directory. Documents held by the AAR indicate that Bunshaft served as a Rome Prize juror in 1958-59. Eero Saarinen accepted an invitation to serve as Architect in Residence in 1956, but cancelled at the last minute because of the demands of his practice; see letter dated March 28, 1956, Robert Venturi to Louis I. Kahn, Venturi Scott Brown and Associates Collection, Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, and letters to Warren Platner dated January 16, 1956 and May 22, 1956 in the Eero Saarinen Collection, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. Saarinen came to the Academy as a “notable visitor” ca. 1951.
10
16 Johnson helped arrange for the prominent American modern architect George Howe to serve as the Academy’s first architect in residence from 1947 to 1949. See Laurence Roberts to George Howe, March 4, 1947, George Howe Papers, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Department of Drawings and Archives, Columbia University; see also Philip Johnson to Louis I. Kahn, March 27, 1947, Louis I. Kahn Collection, Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania. Howe’s presence publicly furthered a shift in the institution’s postwar image away from that of staunch Beaux-Arts bastion to one welcoming the cause of modern architecture. 17 These statements are preserved with individual fellows’ application documents at the AAR. 18 Robert Venturi also took photographs from on top of the Pantheon dome; these are held in the VSBA Collection at the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania. 19 For further discussion of the fellows’ interests, see my forthcoming dissertation, “The Lessons of Rome.” A recent study has also argued that despite this overt historical emphasis, Italy’s contemporary architects would exercise an inspirational role in the development of architectural postmodernism: see Martino Stierli’s “In the Academy’s Garden: Robert Venturi, the Grand Tour and the Revision of Modern Architecture,” AA Files 56 (2008): 41-62. 20 Such courses were elective, not required courses for seven of Gropius’ sixteen years at Harvard (1946-1953). See Jill Pearlman, Inventing American Modernism: Joseph Hudnut, Walter Gropius, and the Bauhaus Legacy at Harvard (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 56-57 and 120-121. On Gropius’ complex relationship with history, see Winifred Nerdinger, “From Bauhaus to Harvard: Walter Gropius and the Use of History,” in G. Wright and J. Parks, The History of History at American Schools of Architecture (New York: Buell Center, 1990), 89-98. 21 Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) underwent additions through six editions, from its first publication in 1941 through the final, posthumous edition of 1967. 22 For analysis of Giedion’s writings, see Sokratis Georgiadis’ Sigfried Giedion: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Colin Hall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), and Panayotis Tournakiotis, The Historiography of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 21-49. 23 See the section entitled “Part II: Our Architectural Inheritance,” especially in the third edition of 1954 and thereafter. 24 Giedion was invited to lecture at Yale around 1942 and stayed in the U.S. until December 1945. He returned to teach at MIT in 1951, and came to Harvard in 1953 under Sert. Michael Graves took a course entitled “Urbanism” from Giedion while at Harvard (e-mail communication with author, February 27, 2008). 25 For Philip Johnson’s heterogeneous historic sources for his Glass House, see “House at New Canaan, Connecticut,” Architectural Review 108 (September 1950): 152-160. 26 One symptom of this larger concern is the larger debate about “monumentality” during the 1940s. See, e.g., S. Giedion, “The Need for a New Monumentality” and Louis Kahn’s “Monumentality,” both in Paul Zucker, ed., Architecture and City Planning (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944), and the composite essay “In Search of a New Monumentality: A Symposium,” Architectural Review 104 (September 1948): 117-128. 27 For discussion of Brunelleschi’s (possibly apocryphal) archaeological exploration of Rome see Howard Saalman’s “Introduction” in Antionio di Tuccio Manetti, The Life of Brunelleschi, trans. C. Enggass (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970), 29-31. Whatever its accuracy, this story, repeated by Vasari, still exercises the power of a good myth. David LeRoy first introduced Enlightenment Europe to images of Athenian temples in 1758 with his Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce, followed by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens, vol. 1 (1762), vol. 2 (1788). 28 See Jean-Louis Cohen, “The Moderns Discover America: Mendelsohn, Neutra, and Maiakovsky,” in Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge 1893-1960 (Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture, 1995), 85-103. 29 See Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, 3rd edition (New York: Horizon Press, 1977), 149-152; and Margo Stipe, “Wright and Japan,” in Anthony Alofsin, ed., Frank Lloyd Wright: Europe and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 30 Even Wright would discover his “own” Italy while preparing the Wasmuth portfolios in Fiesole, overlooking Florence, and the spirit of the Tuscan vernacular marks much of his later work. See Anthony Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright—The Lost Years, 1910-1922: A Study of Influence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 41-56. 31 First published in Paris in 1923 by Editions Crès, it was first translated into English as Towards a New Architecture in 1927. Frederick Etchells’ translation of 1931 is the most readily available in reprint editions (New York: Dover, 1986).
11
32 For extended analysis of Le Corbusier’s reception of Rome, see Kurt W. Forster, “Antiquity and Modernity in the La Roche-Jeanneret Houses of 1923,” Oppositions 15/16 (Winter/Spring 1979): 130-153. 33 This is most clearly evident in Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851-1853). Le Corbusier’s early artistic education was heavily Ruskinian, as are his early travel sketches; see H. Allen Brooks, Le Corbusier’s Formative Years (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 34 Louis Sullivan, Autobiography of an Idea, reprint edition (New York: Dover, 1956), 232-236. Although the events Sullivan described occurred in the 1870s, he first published them in 1924, nearly contemporary with Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture of 1923. 35 T. Riley, The International Style, 18. 36 In 1930, Philip Johnson was twenty-four years old, Hitchcock was twenty-seven, and Barr was thirty-two. Philip Johnson’s father was an early investor in the Aluminum Corporation of American (ALCOA), and he transferred his stock to his son at age eighteen. Its value soared a few years later, making Johnson independently wealthy for the rest of his life. In fact, he was never paid any salary for his curatorial position at MoMA. See Franz Schultze, Philip Johnson: Life and Work (New York: Knopf, 1994), 33-34. 37 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 742. Dr. Johnson’s famous aphorism (e.g., also cited by Ambroziak in Michael Graves, p. 6) dates to 1776, when “A journey to Italy was still in his thoughts.” However, Johnson’s travels took him no further than Scotland and France. Two centuries later, similar sentiments are echoed by Nathaniel Owings of SOM, who described his 1958 Academy residency as a palliative for a career spent among better-traveled colleagues: “I had never shaken my feeling of inferiority as a professional. I felt sincerely that only through full involvement in the American Academy in Rome could this block be removed.” The Spaces in Between: An Architect’s Journey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 146-147. 38 Towards a New Architecture, 172-173. 39 Ibid., 173. 40 See Brian M. Ambroziak, Michael Graves: Images of a Grand Tour (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005). 41 Joan Ockman, “Bestride the World Like a Colossus: The Architect as Tourist,” in Architourism: Authentic, Escapist, Exotic, Spectacular (New York: Prestel, 2005), 161.
12
Images
Fig. 1: Michael Graves in Rome, 1961. Courtesy Michael Graves & Associates.
Fig. 2: Installation view of the exhibition "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition." The Museum of Modern Art, New York. February 10, 1932 through March 23, 1932. (IN15.1) Location : The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Photo Credit : Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
13
Fig. 3: Michael Graves, View from the Pantheon Dome, Campo Marzio, Rome, Italy. Courtesy Michael Graves & Associates.
Fig. 4: Michael Graves, “Tempietto del Bramante, Janiculum Hill, Rome, Italy,” May 18, 1961. Courtesy Michael Graves & Associates.
14
Fig. 5: Michael Graves, “Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, no. 3, Campo Marzio, Rome, Italy,” ca. 1961. Courtesy Michael Graves & Associates.
Fig. 6: Michael Graves, “Composite Landscape (Rome),” 1981. Courtesy Michael Graves & Associates.
15
The Role of Amanvermez Avni (No Quarter Avni)1 the “Turkish Sherlock Holmes,” in the Construction of Turkish Identity By: David Mason
A century ago, Ottoman administrators used the term ‘Turk’ as a derogatory term in reference to “the ignorant and uncouth Turkish-speaking peasants of the
Anatolian villages.2” Those referred to as Turks by the administrators would have referred to themselves as Muslims, as ideas of Turkish nationalism were still in their infancy. Intellectuals working on ideas of nationalism vacillated between identities which were not yet fixed at the time.3 The people of Turkey now refer to themselves as ‘Turks’ with pride. Among a number of forces that brought about this change, was the fictional character Amanvermez Avni, the first Turkish detective hero. Avni, the eponymous protagonist of a series of ten stories, bearing the subtitle “The Turkish
Sherlock Holmes,” embodied a number of traits that exemplify a common Turkish identity. These traits include his language abilities, intelligence, cool demeanor, and most significantly, his ability to learn and surpass the capacities of Europeans.
The stories, which were each roughly sixty-four pages long, were written by
Ebüssüreya Sami between 1913 and 1914 and published as mass-market novels. They followed a wave of detective stories translated from English and French into Ottoman
Turkish beginning in 1881 with Ponson du Terrail’s Les Drames de Paris. Although the stories would have had a limited direct readership because the literacy rate at the time was less than ten percent,4 an audience for the stories would have emerged through the coffeehouses of Istanbul and Anatolia. Coffeehouses served as hubs for disseminating information, where literate customers would read newspapers and stories aloud to those in attendance.5 Although no research addresses the popularity of
Amanvermez Avni in the coffeehouses of the period, it is reasonable to partially explain his popularity with the relationship between the coffeehouse and the printed 2 word in Anatolia at the time. That Amanvermez Avni initiated the genre of Turkish detective fiction and inspired the later anonymous imitations, Amanvermez Sabri
(1928) and Amanvermez Ali (1944), indicates its character’s lasting impact on the
Turkish public.
Around the time that Sami wrote Amanvermez Avni, the Ottoman Empire had sustained significant losses. The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 resulted in the loss of most of its European territory. It was during this time of the empire’s decline, accompanied by swirling questions about the future, that the concept of Turkism— hitherto an abstract, largely literary construct—received its first tangible embodiment in Avni, who redefined the meaning of the term ‘Turk.’
Established in 1299 and finally disintegrating after the First World War, the
Ottoman Empire had a history of more than 600 years, (during which time it was, in large part, characterized as the main defender of the Islamic faith). Despite this status, the empire held significant territories in Europe, even besieging Vienna on two separate occasions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A shift in the balance of power between the Ottomans and the European states led to significant territorial losses in the nineteenth century and the Ottomans, recognizing this, began to adopt European ways. These reforms began with military and educational systems, and eventually encompassed all manner of cultural material including music, clothing, and literature in translation.
The period of identity formation began in earnest after both the Serbian
Revolts at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the Greek War of
Independence, which began in 1821 and ultimately ended when independence was officially granted by the Treaty of Constantinople in July 1832. These conflicts and losses, combined with general European encroachment on Ottoman territory, provided 3 the grounds for future Chief Administrative Officer of the Ottoman Empire, Arif
Efendi, to begin to question the future of the Ottoman Empire. In 1822, he suggested that the dangers facing the empire posed three possible options: first, to remain, in his words, “faithful to the command of God and the law of Muhammad…[and] defend to the last what provinces we still retain,” second, withdraw to Anatolia, or third, be reduced to slavery.6 As such, with striking accuracy, Arif Efendi predicted the action
Mustafa Kemal would take in establishing the Republic of Turkey in Anatolia a century later, but in 1822, Arif Efendi counselled the declaration of Holy War and a fight to the end.
The Ottoman administration did not take Arif Efendi’s advice, however, and desiring to secure European assistance against the invasion of Muhammad Ali from
Egypt, they proclaimed the Imperial Rescript in November 1839. In this rescript, the
Ottoman administration outlined their proposed reorganization, and thus, established the period referred to as the Tanzimat, or ‘Reorderings.’ The proposed reforms centered on justice and finance, but the specific change of interest to this writer came into effect with the promulgation of a new penal code in May of 1840, which affirmed for the first time the “equality of all Ottoman subjects before the law.7” These developments met the short-term goals of the empire by securing the support of Great
Britain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia against Muhammad Ali, but they ushered in a period of uncertainty regarding identity.
This new equality did not appeal to the Anatolian Muslims of the empire who had been used to an institutionalized level of superiority over non-Muslims. The
Ottoman Empire was founded as a Muslim empire and non-Muslims were allowed to remain in their lands and live in peace framed by the understanding that they were the minority. This sudden claim of equality in the Tanzimat era discarded the entire basis 4 of the power structure of the empire and Muslim Turks were both confused and frustrated by it.8
Ottomanism, “a common Ottoman citizenship and loyalty, irrespective of religion or origin,9” rested on the political concept of identity promoted by nineteenth- century reformers in the wake of the aforementioned legal changes of 1840. It was an effort made largely by the Ottoman administrators of Istanbul to convince other budding nationalisms to remain part of the empire and to win Anatolian Turks over to the new basis of the empire. The strength of Ottomanism was its concept of identity, which did not necessarily exclude any group in the empire. However, it lacked tangible unifying characteristics and was no match for the nationalism that was embraced by the empire, causing Christians to think of themselves not as Ottomans, but as Greeks, Bulgars, Serbs, and Armenians.10
With the subsequent uprisings in the last quarter of the century by the Bulgars
(1876), the Armenians (1890s), and in Crete (1896-1897), it was clear that fledgling nationalisms could result in the dissolution of the empire. It is at this time that an identity based on religion (Islamism) was gaining support.11 More exclusive than
Ottomanism, Islamism had the stronger foundation of religion on which to construct a concept of identity that would act as a stronger unifying force in the empire. The problem with Islamism was that the Jews and Christians in the empire were completely excluded.
In 1904, in an effort reminiscent of Arif Efendi’s assessment of the Ottoman future, Yusuf Akçura presented another evaluation. Entitled Three Ways of Policy, and sometimes referred to as the ‘Manifesto of Turkism,’ this report assessed the potential for success of both Ottomanism and Islamism. Finding them both to be failures, Akçura presented the alternative of Turkism, which, as focused on the 5
Turkish-speaking population of the empire, presupposes a withdrawal into Anatolia.12
Akçura, thus, came to accept Arif Efendi’s second option, but he did so with the unifying theory of Turkism, which Arif Efendi could not have predicted.
One of the main problems with Akçura’s Turkism was its notion of unity for a people that was based on a term with negative connotations. Yet a reassessment of
‘Turk’ had already begun; poet Mehmed Emin initiated this trend in 1897 with his
Turkish Poems, in which he states: “I am a Turk, my faith and my race are mighty,” and “[w]e are Turks, with this blood and with this name we live.13” This was the beginning of a groundswell and further cultural and historical attempts to re-evaluate the concept of ‘Turk.’ It was vital to the later establishment of the Republic of Turkey as ninety percent of its land is Anatolia. The drive to re-evaluate the term ‘Turk’ was two-fold: first, it aimed to make the Turkish-speaking Muslims of Anatolia see themselves with pride, and second, it strove to encourage the Turkish-speaking
Ottoman administrators both to gain respect for Anatolians more positively and to identify themselves with these people in order to unite against a common enemy: the colonial European powers.14
Discussion of politics had been severely limited under the reign of Sultan
Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) as he imposed strict censorship over the press. This censorship was reduced dramatically after 1908 when writers began, once more, to address political issues. The foreign policies of England, France, Russia, and
Germany attracted a great deal of attention. Seen as being interested only in pursuing their own interests, England, France, and Russia were portrayed as vultures trying to tear apart the empire.15 Germany, without a long, colonial history and with sentiments and policies favourable towards Muslims, was portrayed in a much more positive light.16 6
In this context, Amanvermez Avni made a lasting impression on Turkish detective fiction.17 What was it about Amanvermez Avni that captured the imagination? To begin with, Avni never failed, even when it came to cases or villains that other detectives had grappled with unsuccessfully. Also, like Sherlock Holmes,
Avni was portrayed as a real person: descriptions of his house, surroundings, and the policy he contended with were all accurate reflections of reality.18 Sami also establishes another foundational link between Avni and Sherlock Holmes: Avni’s apprentice, Arif, like Holmes’s friend, Dr. Watson, acts as a vehicle for both revering
Avni and for explaining the detective’s quick observations and razor-sharp reasoning to the reader.19
Prominent in the original title, in a font larger than the one used for the name
Amanvermez Avni, is Avni’s sobriquet, “the Turkish Sherlock Holmes.” By analysing the character of Avni, we can see the type of character traits promoted by Sami as worthy of a ‘Turk.’ In the first story, Sami establishes that Avni reads both Turkish and French newspapers. We later learn that Avni not only reads Turkish and French, but also Greek and Armenian. Furthermore, through Avni’s penchant for disguise, we learn that he speaks each of these languages with the facility of a native speaker. This language ability is extended to Arif, as demonstrated in the second story, The Death of
Kamelya, when the two, together disguised as Greeks, are “walking down the street speaking Greek.20” Then later, in the sixth story, Blue Eye, Avni adopts a second apprentice, Anderya, who speaks Turkish, Russian, and Greek.21 However, back in the second story, Avni’s vast language abilities are circumscribed slightly. In order to catch the murderer who has fled, Avni travels to Constanta, Romania and faces communication difficulties because he does not speak Romanian.22 But again, in the third story, The Winged Carriage, Sami emphasizes Avni’s daily reading of Turkish, 7
French, Greek, and Armenian newspapers, which helps him to obtain vital information he uses for solving crimes.23 This can be seen as an encouragement of
Turkish literacy during a time when it was less than ten percent. Through Avni, Sami also encourages attention to detail in the speaking of Turkish and celebrates those who speak the language politely and with an Istanbul accent: we see an example when
Avni asks a blindfolded witness, “How did he speak?” to which she answers, “Very politely and refined,” after which Avni’s immediate and correct conclusion is that the speaker was from Istanbul.24
Quick observations and correct conclusions are the cornerstone of another of
Avni’s traits: his intelligence. This quality is exemplified early in the first story, The
Burnt Man, when Avni distinguishes himself from the other officers at the crime scene with his poignant observations.25 In the fourth story, The Dark Killer, Avni correctly contradicts the doctor’s findings at the conclusion of an autopsy, which had attributed the death to a blocked artery. He demonstrates that the death was, in fact, a murder by poison, which amazes the doctor and causes him to declare that both Avni and Arif are djinn26 because of their superior intelligence.27 In the eighth story, The
Painter, Avni’s intelligence manifests in a Houdini-like escape. Trapped in a burning building, he directs the fire to a small pile of gunpowder he has positioned under the locked door, blowing the door off its hinges.28
This escape under pressure leads to a discussion of Avni’s cool temper. The fire motif is repeated in The Dark Killer, when arsonists burn down Avni’s house.
During this misadventure, Sami writes that Avni behaved “in a cool-headed manner.”29 Furthermore, throughout the stories, Avni falls into potentially life- threatening traps and, in each and every case, maintains his composure, escapes, and captures the criminal. 8
This is, presumably, why Avni is infamous amongst the administration, the police, and the criminals, boasting an incredible success rate, evident in Avni’s services being specifically requested by the police in two of the stories: Silent Gun and Among the Skeletons. Yet again, in The Painter, Avni is called upon to take on a super criminal named Ligor who has for years confounded both the gendarmerie and the Governor’s Office of Beyo_lu, the traditionally European part of Istanbul. Avni declares that he will capture Ligor within the week and does. In the climax, Sami describes the Avni-Ligor confrontation as follows: “It was a terrific sight: the empire’s most talented detective face-to-face with the city’s most fearsome robber.30”
In the ninth story, Deceased, the criminals, who think Avni is dead, gleefully declare,
“now we can do whatever we want!”31 Of course, faking his death was merely a ploy for Avni to distract and capture the criminals.
Indeed Avni is so successful that other characters in the story compare him to famous European detectives such as Sherlock Holmes and Monsieur Lecoq. The most prominent comparison to Sherlock Holmes is Avni being called “the Turkish Sherlock
Holmes.” Using a European reference is not surprising considering the widespread adoption of European ways—from legal to financial to cultural—during the Tanzimat period. So it is, in a way, natural for Ebüssüreya Sami to refer to his detective hero as
“the Turkish Sherlock Holmes.” But Sami takes this one step further, he portrays
Avni as one who has learned from Europe, much like the empire of the previous century, but who then goes on to surpass Europe’s brightest thinkers. An example of this appears in the first story, The Burnt Man, when the doctor at the crime scene says of Avni, “That man is probably Lecoq’s apprentice!” to which the police commissioner replies, “It looks like he’ll be giving lessons to Lecoq in a couple of years.32” Once again in Blue Eye, the criminal is described as one with a record that 9 would best any of the criminals of Xavier de Montepin or Ponson du Terrail.33 Thus,
Sami cleverly places himself, the fictional criminals, and Avni, who apprehends every said criminal, ahead of the Europeans. In a period in which the term ‘Turk’ referred to one of low intellect, this is a grand statement. Sami is, in effect, saying to the Turks:
“yes, the Europeans have taught us many things, but we have mastered them and now it is our time to surpass them.” This is the message of Amanvermez Avni. It implies that, for intelligent Turks, the ability to master languages and remain cool-headed will bring success. 10
1 The Turkish word amanvermez has no clear equivalent in English. It directly translates as ‘without mercy’ or ‘merciless,’ but does not carry the negative connotation that it does in English. A more fitting translation of amanvermez is “no quarter” and thus an English title that I have proposed is “No Quarter Avni.” 2 Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 1. 3 For a discussion of this fluidity in identity see A. Holly Shissler, Between two empires : Ahmet A_ao_lu and the new Turkey (London; New York: I.B. Tauris New York: In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 4 Yayha Akyüz, Türk E_itim Tarihi (Istanbul: Alfa Basım Yayım Da_ıtım, 1999), 361. 5 For a discussion of the cultural history of Turkish coffee houses see Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and coffeehouses : the origins of a social beverage in the Medieval Near East (Seattle: Distributed by University of Washington Press, 1985). 6 Lewis, Emergence, 325. 7 Ibid, 109. 8 Ibid, 139. 9 Ibid, 326. 10 Nationalist uprisings against the Ottoman Empire that exemplify this trend include that of the Serbs (1804-1813), the Greeks (1821-1830), the Bulgars (1876), and the Armenians (1890s). 11 Cezmi Eraslan, II. Abdülhamid ve _slam Birli_i Osmanlı Devleti’nin _slam Siyaseti, 1856-1908 (_stanbul: Ötüken Ne_riyat A._., 1992), 26-28. 12 Lewis, Emergence, 327. 13 Ibid., 343. 14 With the literacy rate of less than ten percent amongst Anatolians, this author feels that many of these pro-Turk stories and poems were, as assumed with Amanvermez Avni, read aloud in coffee shops of Anatolia, but there is no evidence to support or contradict this. 15 Palmira Brummett, Image and imperialism in the Ottoman revolutionary press, 1908-1911. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 281. 16 Eraslan, 28-30. 17 Üyepazarcı, Korkmayınız Mr. Sherlock Holmes, 178. 18 Ibid, 181. 19 Ebüssürreya Sami, “Yanmı_ Adam,” Amanvermez Avni’nin Serüvenleri 1. cilt, (_stanbul: Merkez Kitaplar, 2006), 23. 20 Ebüssürreya Sami, “Kamelya’nın Ölümü,” Amanvermez Avni’nin Serüvenleri 1. cilt, (_stanbul: Merkez Kitaplar, 2006), 83. 21 Ebüssürreya Sami, “Mavi Göz,” Amanvermez Avni’nin Serüvenleri 2. cilt, (_stanbul: Merkez Kitaplar, 2006), 85. 22 Ebüssürreya Sami, “Kamelya’nın Ölümü,” Amanvermez Avni’nin Serüvenleri 1. cilt, (_stanbul: Merkez Kitaplar, 2006), 103. 23 Ebüssürreya Sami, “Kanatlı Araba,” Amanvermez Avni’nin Serüvenleri 1. cilt, (_stanbul: Merkez Kitaplar, 2006), 122-3. 24 Ebüssürreya Sami, “Körebe,” Amanvermez Avni’nin Serüvenleri 1. cilt, (_stanbul: Merkez Kitaplar, 2006), 122-3. 25 Ebüssürreya Sami, “Yanmı_ Adam,” Amanvermez Avni’nin Serüvenleri 1. cilt, (_stanbul: Merkez Kitaplar, 2006), 21. 26 Djinn are a class of spirits, lower than the angels, capable of appearing in human form. 27 Ebüssürreya Sami, “Kara Katil,” Amanvermez Avni’nin Serüvenleri 1. cilt, (_stanbul: Merkez Kitaplar, 2006), 176. 28 Ebüssürreya Sami, “Boyacı,” Amanvermez Avni’nin Serüvenleri 2. cilt, (_stanbul: Merkez Kitaplar, 2006), 145. 29 Ebüssürreya Sami, “Kara Katil,” Amanvermez Avni’nin Serüvenleri 1. cilt, (_stanbul: Merkez Kitaplar, 2006), 191. 30 Ebüssürreya Sami, “Boyacı,” Amanvermez Avni’nin Serüvenleri 2. cilt, (_stanbul: Merkez Kitaplar, 2006), 115, 118 and 134. 31 Ebüssürreya Sami, “Ölü,” Amanvermez Avni’nin Serüvenleri 2. cilt, (_stanbul: Merkez Kitaplar, 2006), 167. 32 Ebüssürreya Sami, “Yanmı_ Adam,” Amanvermez Avni’nin Serüvenleri 1. cilt, (_stanbul: Merkez Kitaplar, 2006), 22. 11
33 Ebüssürreya Sami, “Mavi Göz,” Amanvermez Avni’nin Serüvenleri 2. cilt, (_stanbul: Merkez Kitaplar, 2006), 21. 12
Bibliography
Akyüz, Yayha. Türk E_itim Tarihi. _stanbul: Alfa Basım Yayım Da_ıtım, 1999.
Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey. London: Oxford University Press, 1968.
Brummett, Palmira. Image and imperialism in the Ottoman revolutionary press, 1908- 1911. Albany : State University of New York Press, 2000.
Eraslan, Cezmi. II. Abdülhamid ve ·Islâm birli*gi : Osmanli Devleti'nin ·Islâm siyaseti, 1856-1908 Istanbul: Ötüken, 1992.
Sami, Ebüssürreya. Amanvermez Avni’nin Serüvenleri 1. cilt. _stanbul: Merkez Kitaplar, 2006.
_____. Amanvermez Avni’nin Serüvenleri 2. cilt. _stanbul: Merkez Kitaplar, 2006.
Üyepazarcı, Erol. Korkmayınız Mr. Sherlock Holmes: Türkiye’de yayınlanmı_ çeviri ve telif polisiye romanlar üzerine bir inceleme, 1881-1928. _stanbul: Göçebe Yayınları, 1997. Who is Picasso? - Brassaï’s 1933 Minotaure photo essay By Alma Mikulinsky
The question of Pablo Picasso’s true identity is a burning issue in art historical research. Picasso is repeatedly reinvented when each Picasso abolishes the previous one:
The formalist Picasso of Clement Greenberg and his followers was replaced by Patricia
Leighton’s left-leaning, politically-oriented Picasso, only to be substituted by the Post-
Structuralist Picasso and so forth. This tendency does not only reflect the changing trends of art history but, to my view, is also crucial to our understanding of the artist himself—Picasso the artistic chameleon. When questioning who the real Picasso is, the answer is whoever we want him to be. Picasso is the perfect surface onto which we project our fantasies.
Picasso’s stylistic diversity is the reason for such divergent interpretations of his work, which allow every scholar to prove the existence of his or her own Picasso. This diversity was explored by Rosalind Krauss in her work on Picasso through the postmodern concept of pastiche and more recently in Elizabeth Cowling’s comprehensive book, Picasso: Style and Meaning.i The conclusion that can be drawn from these reassessments is that the traditional notion of style as a site of coherency and unity is a fictive attribute of the sovereign subject, in the hope of manufacturing a fixed and stable image of the self. In his work, Picasso freely shifts from one style to another, and by doing so he shatters the possibility for a cohesive definition of the self. For this paper, I read Brassaï’s 1933 Minotaure photo essay as an early example of such understandings concerning the nature of identity as a whole that is always larger than the sum of its parts.
Debates concerning Picasso’s identity also existed during the artist’s lifetime.
Picasso’s fiftieth birthday was marked by two events that cemented the aging artist as a painter of the highest caliber—a modern classic, a living ‘Old Master.’ On the 16th of
June 1932, Picasso’s first full retrospective opened at the prestigious Galeries Georges
Petit in Paris with a selection of two hundred and twenty-five paintings, seven sculptures, and six illustrated books. The exhibition presented a comprehensive account of Picasso’s career, defining the stylistic diversity of the artist as a quality, as the ultimate proof of his genius.ii The second event that marked this new stage in Picasso’s reception, and which coincided with the opening of the retrospective, was the publication of the first volume of
Picasso’s catalogue raisonné by the publisher Christian Zervos. The publication of the catalogue raisonné, an honour never before awarded to a living artist, contributed to the marketing of Picasso as the living counterpart to the greatest artists of the past.iii
At the same time that Picasso’s work was gaining its classic status, different groups within the surrealist movement spurred a separate campaign and called Picasso their own: for the surrealists, Picasso was not another link in the art historical chain—an artist whose greatest achievements lay in, and in relation to, the past—but a contemporary artist whose work conforms with the most progressive and radical art of the time. André Breton, in his 1925 Le Surrealisme et la peinture, defined Picasso as the ultimate surrealist painter by his ability to make others see the surreal within the real, the marvelous within the everyday.iv
The renegade surrealists also appropriated Picasso for their own purposes. Picasso dominated Documents, the dissident surrealist journal edited by Georges Bataille, as more works by Picasso than any other painter illustrated the pages of this journal. This culminated in 1930, when a special issue was devoted to the artist with texts by Michel
Leiris, Robert Desnos, and Bataille himself. In Bataille’s essay, Rotten Sun, the author opposes Breton’s emphasis on sublimation through sexual desire, instead insisting on
Dionysian terminology for the understanding of Picasso’s body of work. For Bataille,
Picasso’s paintings generate a similar physical reaction to that of looking straight into the blinding sun, experiences he defines as a form of visual castration.v
The different readings of Picasso’s oeuvre stress the inability to assign a fixed identity to the artist in the 1930s. In this paper, I claim that these conflicting interpretations played a significant role in Brassaï’s 1933 photo essay, published in the first issue of the avant-garde journal, Minotaure. Whereas the declared objective of
Brassaï’s photo essay was to reveal Picasso’s unknown body of sculptural work to the artistic world, my reading sees the goal of the photo essay as representing the inconsistencies in Picasso’s public persona.
My interpretation of the photo essay as an examination of the rift in Picasso’s identity is based on unpublished photographic materials that I uncovered in the archives of the Musée Picasso. In the photo shoot, I argue, Brassaï explored the tensions in
Picasso’s self, which were later downplayed in the final photo essay. Using the unpublished photographs in addition to the published ones for my reading allows me to override the editors’ aims and to better present Brassaï’s original intentions.
The Minotaure photo shoot took place in the winter of 1932 in three locations:
Picasso’s sculpture studio in the barn of his recently-acquired château in Boisgeloup, the artist’s lavish apartment, and his painting studio. These choices of location enhance the rhetoric of revelation as they make public not only the sculptures that were previously unknown to the artistic world, but also the private quarters and working spaces of the artist. By depicting only the private realm, it is as if Brassaï is promising to reveal a ‘real’ Picasso, one that is never fully unveiled. Brassaï oscillates between two alternative answers to the question of Picasso’s identity and represents these two possibilities throughout the photo essay: Picasso as a bohemian who is linked to avant-garde artistic production, and Picasso as a bourgeois, who belongs to Parisian high society, and forms himself and his artwork in the model of past artistic greatness.
The meaning Brassaï assigned to each photo shoot’s location becomes apparent in a comparison between a photograph of Picasso’s apartment—which was edited out of the final photo essay—and another of Picasso’s painting studio. In the making of these photographs, Brassaï exploited the fact that Picasso’s apartment and painting studio were identical in shape and design, as they were located one above the other at 23 rue de la
Boétie. The decision to organize both compositions around an elaborate fireplace with a large mirror above, emphasizes the differences between the studio and the apartment in their use, character, and by extension, representations of their dweller’s personality. In the photograph depicting the apartment, the apartment itself is at the center of attention, especially the high ceilings, bright space, lavish architectural elements, and interior décor. Picasso, his first wife Olga, and the Minotaure publisher, Tériade, are partly reflected in the mirror, and seem miniscule in comparison to the scale of the apartment.
Even Picasso’s work is secondary to the apartment: the monumental Three Women at the
Spring from 1921 is reduced to an element of interior design, by acting as a perfect complement to the lampshades—the folds of the painted garments refer to the lampshades’ shape and design. The photograph therefore depicts Picasso as bourgeois by highlighting his taste, material possessions, and the central place these objects occupy in his life. One can speculate why this photograph was not selected by the Minotaure editors: it would appear in a lifestyle magazine, not an avant-garde journal.
In contrast, the photograph of the studio suggests a completely different Picasso: the studio’s dweller, unlike his bourgeois-double, shuns all middle-class status symbols.
The decorative and architectural traits are overwhelmed by the mess, accumulation of dirt and rubbish, and the excessive collection of peculiar objects. Brassaï is especially interested in trash and obsolete material objects. Junk is central to this photograph: both as an artistic material (the cigarette-box construction on the mantelpiece) and the non- artistic accumulation of trash, which blocks the fireplace. Picasso himself does not appear in the photograph, but he is present through his creation: the paintings, sculptures, and mess, all of which are evidence of his creative process. The studio and its dweller therefore gain bohemian attributes, resulting from a blatant disregard for all that is proper.
In this comparison, the bourgeois Picasso and the bohemian Picasso are described as two separate entities in constant conflict; through their mutual existence they do not eliminate one another but, rather, reinforce one another. By distinguishing between the two Picassos, Brassaï questions the artist’s true identity at the time, but does not offer a unified, singular answer.
Another comparison evident in the photo essay pertains to Picasso’s working methods in which Brassaï exposes once again the inherent tension in the artist’s public persona. In the photograph Picasso’s Palette, three large pots of paint and many squeezed paint tubes litter the floor, which is covered with drips of paint. This testifies to the creative battle previously waged on that very site: an expressive struggle to create the painting that is only partly visible in the photograph. The size of Picasso’s palette does not allow it to be the hand-extension that painters’ palettes usually are, comfortably adjusted to human scale. This colossal expansion of the artist’s tool is fundamental as it is joined by the rejection of an easel and the placement of the painting directly on the floor.
Picasso’s working environment is completely altered by this unconventional, floor-size palette. An entire environment is offered here as a symbol for the artist’s uncompromising, original, and total approach to art production. The chaos Picasso leaves behind is charged with additional meaning when dirt and mess are again read as anti- bourgeois symbols. Therefore, the decision to zoom in on the palette while emphasizing the studio’s disorder functions as a rhetorical act, turning Picasso’s untraditional working methods into proof of his unassailable position within the avant-garde movement.
In the next page of the Minotaure photo essay, Brassaï makes a completely different assessment of Picasso’s working process when he argues that Picasso’s work originates from the legacy of Renaissance art. Brassaï juxtaposes two photographs,
L’étagère and La Fenêtre, and as a result makes a statement concerning the primary position of reality in Picasso’s work. L’étagère depicts a shelf in Picasso’s studio that the artist assembled, where iron and glass objects are carefully organized according to their function: the left side of the shelf is devoted to sculptural objects and the right side is occupied by bottles of varying sizes and shapes. Six out of the eight sculptural objects on the shelf were made by Picasso when he experimented with the welding-iron technique, often described as the most radical of his sculptural practices. The shelf offers a kind of small-scale retrospective, its logic repeating that of the retrospective in Galeries Georges
Petit, mentioned above. The assembled work similarly demonstrates the extent of Picasso’s talent by showcasing his ability to move between different styles, techniques, media, and genres (still life, portraiture, and funerary monuments).
La Fenêtre seems to be utterly different from L’étagère: while the latter presents an indoor space and the objects that occupy it, the former depicts a view from Picasso’s studio window of the city’s rooftops and chimneys with the iconic Tour Eiffel vaguely seen in the background. However, when the two photographs are juxtaposed, an immediate compositional resemblance arises: both photographs share a comparable rhythm caused by the central horizontal division and its articulation by multiple repeated vertical elements. The rooftops become, like the shelf, a surface on which varying upright objects are placed. Another similarity is the resemblance of the shapes of the bottlenecks and caps to the chimneys. Comparing the material, Picasso’s choice of welded iron is similar to the iron construction of the Tour Eiffel, while the tower’s geometric language can be considered a reference to the style of some of the sculptural objects present in his studio as well.
This link between the two photographs repeats the traditional paradigm of artistic mimesis: art as a window to the world, a metaphor first articulated in Leon Battista
Alberti’s 1434 seminal text, De Pictura. Here the window model is didactically exemplified by a view from a specific window and its varied influence on Picasso’s creative process. The photograph of the urban landscape therefore suggests an overly simplistic reading of the shelf, the objects on it, and its organization: Picasso sees,
Picasso does. This set of photographs portrays Picasso’s working methods through
Renaissance parameters and as a result defines the artist as operating according to traditional artistic logic and not as a committed member of the avant-garde. Another example attesting to Brassaï’s intentionally indecisive approach to
Picasso is found in the fourteenth photograph of the Minotaure photo essay, a photograph of Picasso’s sculpture studio in Boisgeloup after dark. Picasso purchased Boisgeloup, the seventeenth century château forty-five miles northwest of Paris, in 1930—a purchase facilitated by his escalating status in the art world, which resulted in a concurrent increase in the value of his work.vi The sculpture studio, located in the château’s barn, reenacted
Bateau-Lavoir—the shabby, unheated, bohemian studio that Picasso occupied in his first days in Paris. In his book, Brassaï writes of his working relationship with Picasso, stating that the artist took pride in his decision not to electrify the barn nor heat it.vii By introducing this photograph, I argue that Brassaï utilized the constructed bohemian traits of the studio in order to portray Picasso in a traditional art historical framework, which identifies the artist simultaneously as an ‘Old Master’ who engages with tradition and an avant-garde artist who violates past traditions and beliefs.
In Boisgeloup After Dark, the physical conditions of a lack of electricity, a single artificial light source, and the crowded organization of sculptures result in a dramatic atmosphere: the heavy shadows create a mysterious effect, as the sculptures appear to be creeping out of the dark. The arrangement of sculptures in this photo creates the impression of no order, no composition, ‘as-found’ by the photographer, as if we are looking at a corner of the studio that was chosen at random. Upon closer inspection, the logic of this apparently arbitrary composition surfaces: the sculptures are arranged in a semi-circle facing the central abstract figure. The clues to the staged nature of the composition are verified through comparison with other photos of the studio and its contents, never before published or analyzed, from which we learn that the sculptures’ position was arranged for this photograph.
As all the sculptures were seen in previous photographs, then glorified for their stylistic innovation, the only novel factor is the light, its manipulation, and most importantly, the resultant chiaroscuro. The dramatic light specifically refers to a long- standing painterly tradition, seen in the work of Caravaggio and his Netherlandish followers, that was characterized by a transition from strong light to complete darkness
(very often with the inclusion of the light source itself within the painting, seen here in the lamp hidden behind the watering can). The reference to this painterly tradition also brings to mind the conventional representation of the Nativity, which, according to the
New Testament, took place at night in a barn with animals. Remembering the biblical allusion and the art historical tradition that emerged from it, the conditions in which the photograph was taken, together with the specific compositional arrangement of the sculptures in semi-circle and the presence of animal sculptures (one can see Picasso’s The
Rooster peeking out from behind the abstract figure), the photograph loses its realistic nature and gains a symbolic overtone. Comparing this photograph to conventional representations of the Nativity scene on a thematic and compositional basis, I believe that the Christian reference plays a central role in understanding the image. The abstract figure gains importance due to its placement at the centre of the semi-circle. All the other sculptures are facing it, as if adoring it, and the nascent abstraction can be compared to the figure of the newly born Christ in the Christian tradition. Such a statement concerning the fundamental role of abstraction in twentieth century art, when delivered through a conventional religious formula, allows Brassaï to present simultaneously the artist’s two identities that were repeatedly constructed throughout the photo essay. On the one hand, this statement distances Picasso’s work from a vanguard framework as it contextualizes the artist as part of a long-standing representational tradition; on the other hand, the construction of the Boisgeloup photograph as a Nativity scene forms a sacrilegious statement that compares the inauguration of a new artistic style to the birth of the
Christian messiah. i Cowling, Elizabeth. Picasso: Style and Meaning, (London, New York: Phaidon, 2002). Krauss, Rosalind. Picasso Papers, (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999), 89-210. ii See installation photos and analysis of the exhibition in Cowling, Elizabeth, ibid, 14-15 and Richardson, John, with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 473-490. Both writers emphasize Picasso’s role as the curator of the show in deciding on the heterogonous hanging of the works, which promoted stylistic diversity instead of chronological consistency. iii This format of Picasso’s catalogue raisonné with its illusion of all-inclusiveness—from the smallest sketch to the largest canvas—was previously solely devoted to past artists whose place in the artistic pantheon was long secure. Zervos’ introductory essay does not directly compare Picasso to the Old Masters, but to God due to his immense creativity. See Zervos, Christian. Pablo Picasso—First volume, (Paris, Cahiers d'art, 1932). iv Breton, André, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). v Bataille, George, ‘Soleil Pourri‘, in, Documents, no. 3 (Hommage à Picasso), 1930, 173-174. vi For an analysis of Picasso and the art market, with special attention to his working relationship with Léonace Rosenberg and his galleries at the time see Fitzgerald, Michael C., Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth Century Art, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. vii ‘I had scarcely finished when night fell, and it was impossible to see anything in the shed any longer. Picasso lit a big kerosene lamp. It seemed that there was no electricity in these outbuildings. He told us then that when he was surprised at work by the dusk he often went on by the light from this unsteady source. He was accustomed to it. As a young man, he had often drawn by the light of a candle stuck in the neck of a bottle.’ Brassaï, Picasso and Co., Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1966, 19.
1
Temptations of the Flesh: A Discussion of Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World By: Rebecca Weinfeld
With its cropped torso and prominent display of genitals, Gustave Courbet’s
Origin of the World (1866) remains one of the nineteenth century’s most provocative paintings. Running from breast to thigh, the image presents a radically abbreviated yet supremely intimate portrait of a woman. Despite the absence of limbs and head, the painting can hardly be faulted for its omissions: what is lacking in anatomy is recuperated in sumptuous detail and rich colour. Her torso is swathed in bright white linen, a dark mass of pubic hair covers her genitals, and her flesh is brilliantly rendered: rosy and so delicately modeled, it is almost palpable.
As befitting a painting of such scandalous subject matter, the work has had a mysterious and complicated history. Never exhibited at the Salon and revealed only to a limited selection of initiates, the image remained largely in private and protective hands, occasionally disappearing from record. Particularly interesting are the conventions of display typically associated with the work: it was often kept concealed behind a curtain or screen, thereby enhancing the drama of its revelation. The painting’s original owner,
Turkish diplomat and chronic gambler Khalil Bey, kept the work in a back room behind a curtain, displaying it for the delectation of choice dinner guests. The painting’s second famous owner, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, hung it in his country home behind a specially commissioned screen. Using a remote control, he would dramatically slide the screen aside, revealing the ‘true’ work of art underneath. Now hanging (uncovered) in the
Musée D’Orsay, the Origin continues to fuel scholarly debate and maintains its enduring grasp on the viewer’s imagination. Flirting with pornography, it straddles traditional art historical categories and ultimately eludes them. 2
Courbet’s contemporaries and current scholars alike have often referred to the painting as a portrait, frequently speculating who the model may have been.1 And yet the
Origin presents a radically abbreviated body whose domination of the picture plane does not allow for any traditional markers of identity: the woman’s face and clothes are absent, the conditions of the room are obscured, and, unlike some of the artist’s most well-known work, there are no overt indications of class or livelihood. Needless to say, this is not a portrait in any conventional sense; nevertheless, questions of identity persist. Rather than argue for the painting’s inclusion in the genre of portraiture, or attempt to reconstruct the figure’s identity, I would like to propose that the image participates in the construction of identity in a rather unconventional manner: by virtue of its virtuosic rendering of flesh and the inclusion of body hair. Using a variety of art historical and medical sources, I will argue that these aspects had specific implications for nineteenth-century viewers, and, whether consciously or not, enabled them to draw certain conclusions about the body, or person, portrayed.
I begin with an account of the painting by Courbet’s contemporary, journalist
Maxime du Camp. Embedded in du Camp’s rightwing attack on the Paris Commune, Les
Convulsions de Paris (1878-1879), is a slightly hysterical passage chastising Courbet for an image so lascivious that it debases the very art of painting. The author states:
“All that one may ask of a man…is to respect the art he professes. He can be lacking in intelligence, in learning, in wit, in politeness, in urbanity, and still remain honorable if he maintains the practice of his art aloft and intact. Now this elementary duty, which constitutes professional probity, Courbet ignored. Courbet, this same man whose avowed intention was to renew French painting, painted a portrait of a woman which is difficult to describe…One sees a small picture hidden under a green veil. When one draws aside the veil, one remains stupefied to perceive a woman, life-size, seen from the front, moved and convulsed, remarkably executed…providing the last word in realism…This man 3
who, for a few coins, could degrade his craft to the point of abjection, is capable of anything.”2
Particularly striking here is du Camp’s hostility, along with his description of the woman as “moved and convulsed,” generally interpreted as sexual arousal. And yet the critic does not explain what it was about the image, which includes neither lover nor narrative element, that led him to perceive arousal and desire. Although he was a known opponent of Realism, I would suggest that du Camp’s disgust stems not from an aesthetic allegiance, but rather from the painstaking rendition of flesh. This element allowed him to draw his conclusions, and experience the work in a particularly visceral way. Keyed to aesthetic and medical discourses that were themselves informed by prevailing hierarchies and social constructs, painted flesh participated in, and in this case subverted, normative social and sexual behaviour. In other words, Courbet’s painted flesh encoded signs of morality, gender, and class identity.
Many of Courbet’s contemporaries, particularly Émile Zola, extolled the virtues of his rendition of flesh. Even those who disapproved of the artist commended him on these grounds: the irate du Camp called the Origin “remarkably executed,”3 and Edmond de Goncourt, who frequently condemned Courbet as indecent, declared himself obligated to make amends to the artist on the basis of his flesh. Associating the Origin with the achievements of the Old Masters, he claimed: “this stomach is as beautiful as the flesh of a Correggio.”4
The reference to Correggio indicates more than the enduring importance of the
Old Masters: it reflects the discursive tradition of painted flesh that existed in artistic practice. According to Diderot, the depiction of the body’s surface was a crucial and demanding task, its mastery essential for an artist’s success. Implying far more than 4 skillful reproduction, a compelling rendition of flesh was necessary to imbue a figure with life and a sense of animation.5 The belief that skin contained the spark of life was born in the Enlightenment, when its conception evolved to comprise a sensitive, communicative membrane, mediating between internal and external worlds. In constant contact with the psychic interior of the body, flesh was the medium through which movements of the soul were manifest on the exterior. According to Claudia Benthien’s excellent cultural history Skin, “the epidermis [developed] into a surface that could bear semantic meaning and on which individuality could reveal itself.”6 In artistic practice, flesh took on a symbolic resonance beyond its formal role of demarcating the body’s limits: it signified life, both carnal and spiritual, and designated the artist as bestower of that life.
Assimilating the implications, both physical and philosophical, of current anatomical advances, artists treated dermal tissue as essential for capturing the shape and essence of a figure. A successful rendition of flesh reflected both aesthetic guidelines, found in manuals such as Charles Blanc’s essential Grammaire des Arts du Dessin, as well as perceptions established in medical treatises. As scientific breakthroughs were absorbed into art academies, artistic notions of ideal beauty began to colour medical convention, creating a shared discursive field. Artists provided images for medical texts shared by students of sculpture and surgery alike, while écorchés and medical models were used as pedagogical tools in both art academies and anatomy labs. Lectures on anatomy were integrated into the curriculum at the École des Beaux Arts, and articles on physiological processes, such as menstruation, began appearing in the journal L’Artist. 5
Yet despite claims to empiricism and the observation of nature, these mutually reinforcing discourses were informed by contemporary social structures and gendered hierarchies. Perpetuating the physical and aesthetic ideal made famous by
Winckelmann—classical (male) proportions and smooth, white flesh—they assigned moral and cultural values to ideal form. Their development transformed the nineteenth- century body into a physical embodiment of social and sexual mores, and flesh was the screen on which these concepts were projected.
According to Robert Nye, whose work provides considerable insight on the evolving construction of masculinity, the codification of bourgeois norms in the nineteenth century led to gendered public and private spheres and biomedical models of the body defined by gender. Each sex was seen as ‘naturally’ suited to particular social roles, and these sexed bodies were conceived as both opposite and complementary. The ideal, virile man was dark, hairy, dry, hot, and impetuous; the ideal woman was delicate, moist, smooth, white, timid, and modest. Because female bodies were considered primarily for child bearing, wife and mother became the normative and healthy roles for nineteenth-century women; meanwhile, the masculine norm was redefined as rougher and more robust than the effete Ancien Regime ideal that preceded it.
Semen, the essence of masculinity, was symbolized by and embodied in a deep voice, large muscles, a full beard, and a ruddy complexion. Female attributes, which consisted of opposing qualities, were believed to be caused by a lack of semen. The amount of semen one possessed, however, was not random, and could be manipulated: prostitutes, who were thought to absorb more semen than proper women, could thus become manly, and exhibit male body traits such as body hair or flushed skin. Similarly, 6 the loss of semen due to excessive copulation resulted in emasculated men, and manifest as a pale, smooth complexion.
These beliefs, imbuing anatomical attributes with social and moral significance, were echoed in art and medical texts. According to Charles Blanc, an ample moustache reflected a manly temperament, investing hair, like flesh, with gendered implications.7
Different flesh tones were used to represent different genders, with female flesh defined by an idealized whiteness and sensitivity.8 Red or flushed flesh implied an exposed and excited physicality, which was considered improper: it represented a sexuality unrelated to fertility and inheritance and born instead of desire, free from the marital bed.9 Echoing these sentiments is an institutional description of the female body from a textbook intended for both art and anatomy students, published in 1823:
“Their exterior forms are always rounder, the muscles smaller, less bulgy and less prominent than in men. The laminate tissue is softer, looser, more abundant, particularly in the abdomen…The skin is fine, soft, unified…(body) hair is rarer, and absent from the areas where it exists in man.”10
Note how these statements set up a dichotomy between the male and female body, stating as medical fact the gendered and idealized attributes cited above.
According to the Histoire Naturelle de la Femme (1803), flesh in particular was the site of gender difference, providing the most alluring part of the feminine: “Some of the most seductive characteristics of women, their charms, are presented to us in the form of the softness, smoothness, polish and sensitivity of their flesh.”11 Descriptions such as these underscore the fact that women were often painted to invite touch and possession.
By providing women with an idealized surface that at once displayed their sensuality yet circumscribed their social role, artists and anatomists fetishized the female form and sought to contain the menace of female sexuality. Thus the artist, by manipulating the 7 way in which skin was perceived by the beholder, determined the virtue of his sitter, and managed the reception of his work. As such, flesh was an instrument of control: through it the artist imbued his painting with life and assured the physical availability of the depicted woman.
The rejection of another painting by the viewing public, John Singer Sargent’s
Madame X, provides a useful case study of these propositions. Sargent’s portrait of Mme
Pierre Gautreau, a society woman with aggressive social ambitions, presents the subject dramatically clad in a black gown and displaying whitish-blue, uniform flesh. Eschewing the perfectly modeled and rosy flesh of the ideal, the idiosyncratic Mme Gautreau tirelessly covered herself with bluish powder—an act that was both a fashionable statement and a measure sometimes taken to disguise symptoms of venereal disease. It was also an act of control: by refusing Sargent the ability to represent her flesh, she asserted ownership of her body. According to Susan Sidlauskas, when Sargent reproduced Gautreau’s violet-tinted makeup, he forfeited her sensuality and painted what critics perceived as a corpse, complete with rotting flesh.12 For the nineteenth-century viewer, Madame X’s painted flesh registered visually as the sign of an immoral woman, impure and possibly diseased.
The ability to determine a person’s character by examining his or her external appearance formed the basis of eighteenth-century theories of physiognomy and phrenology. In the nineteenth century, these theories became increasingly popular; the question of determining the physical characteristics of deviance and criminality was pursued with mounting urgency as fin-de-siècle anxieties about degeneration and weakened national stock infiltrated the public imagination. According to Anthea Callen, 8 class and gender biases underlay these notions of degeneration and physiognomy. Moral and sexual deviance, symbolized by dirt and disease, were associated with the lower classes, and particularly with prostitutes; objects of both desire and fear, they provided pleasure yet threatened contamination. These fears and biases coloured the perspective of the nineteenth-century bourgeois male viewer, for whose delectation the Origin was certainly produced. This fact did not go unnoticed by Freud, who visited Paris in 1885.
Writing to his fiancée, he remarked on the rigid separation of marital sex, denoting normative sexuality and healthy bloodlines, and desire, which was relegated to the realm of prostitution, inciting fears of dirt and disease. The French, he claimed were obsessed with nudity, and suffered from “the cynical separation of sex from conjugal life.”13
With this in mind, it is possible to see why du Camp read the Origin as menacing, and also as a woman aroused. With its sensual flesh, flushed against the white sheets and marked by the inclusion of pubic hair, the Origin clearly departed from the current moral and sexual ideal. Instead, it presented an image as frightening to the bourgeois male viewer as Manet’s Olympia. In Courbet’s painting, the symbols of a virile, healthy, family man were projected onto and transformed into the genitals of a prostitute, hirsute in their rampant sexuality.
De Goncourt’s writing also shows evidence of these associations. About
Courbet’s painting Sleep, the critic wrote: “Here are…two dirty, muddy bodies tied up in the most disgraceful movements of female sensuality and pleasure in bed…”14 The image presents two sumptuously painted nude women intertwined suggestively on a messy bed, surrounded by delicate luxuries: fresh flowers, jewels, and soft linens. Rather than denoting actual mud (there is none to be found in the image), the critic’s use of the term 9 here refers to filth of a different sort, and articulates the fear inspired by the supposed insatiable desire of lower class women and courtesans.
A final word about flesh: I believe it was this element, particularly the visceral experience of flesh, that provided Courbet with the means with which to fulfill, to quote du Camp, “his avowed intention of renewing French painting.” In the Origin, du Camp claimed that Courbet had provided “the last word in realism,” referring most likely to the amount of physiological detail. Courbet had rejected the ideal alluded to in aesthetic and medical treatises, and instead provided a skilled portrait of flesh as flesh, material and tactile. This evocation of the sensuality of flesh was Courbet’s strength (recall Goncourt’s comparison of Courbet with Correggio). According to critic Edmond About, “No one excels more than he at rendering the diverse surfaces of things. His painting, as supple as it is solid, bends to all the requirements for the most complicated executions; color becomes sand or rock, the bark of a tree or the skin of a woman; only the masters can cling so closely to nature.” Again Courbet is linked to the Old Masters, his success based on a compelling rendition of the body’s surface.
The comparison with Correggio is apt, since both artists are renowned for the sensuality and tactility of their flesh. According to Sydney Freedberg, “…Correggio’s handling of surface … inspires in flesh a quasi-erotic magnetism, appealing to the visually experienced quality of touch.”15 It is exactly this “visually experienced quality of touch,” I believe, that Courbet strove to achieve, in order to provide an embodied viewing experience, and thereby amplify the sensual experience of the beholder. An embodied perception of the world, according to Merleau-Ponty, is focused on materiality and tactility, and was apprehended by the projection of an observer’s body into the 10 objects he perceives. Thus, there is a certain reciprocity between the perceiver and the perceived, making embodied consciousness one of lived experience, and not idealized reason.16 Courbet’s focus on flesh and texture, and his rejection of the aesthetic ideal, produces just such an embodied experience. The viewer’s eyes act as hands and grasp the flesh of The Origin viscerally, as he might grasp his own. Whether understood as a projection of the artist’s body into that which he depicts, or as the viewer’s sensation of the object as his own flesh, this type of beholding clearly had an erotic component.
This view is supported by Michael Fried in his seminal book on the artist. In
Courbet’s Realism, Fried describes the ways in which Courbet’s paintings register both the artist’s body and the physical act of painting. In an attempt to suspend his own spectatorhood and defeat theatricality, a condition Fried sees as central to French painting from the time of Diderot onward, Courbet attempted an almost physical merger with the canvas. Examples of this attempted merger include the frequent inclusion of figures in the centre or foreground facing backward, mimicking the actions of the painter, and the inclusion of objects that symbolize palette and paintbrush. Although the Origin lacks these types of figures, Fried maintains that it provides an equally fruitful metaphor for corporeal merger: that of sexual possession. In this way, the painting bridges the distance between viewer and image with a suggestion of the erotic.17 And it was exactly this type of erotic experience that Courbet’s work, as a painting, could afford.
Nineteenth century erotica—regardless of medium—was transformed by the development of photography. Different figurations of the sexual body appeared, followed by new norms of representation. Hyper-illusionist and focused on the genitals, these prints and photographs upped the erotic ante by providing images with more explicit 11 content.18 It is well known that Courbet himself used erotic photographs, prints and even medical images as source material for the Origin.19 By presenting an otherwise unachievable view of the object of desire, framed and frozen for eternity, these images played to the strength of the photographic medium.
Viewed in this context, Courbet’s image appears to assimilate the strengths of both painting and photography, providing a hyperrealist yet sensual image that facilitates an erotically-charged, embodied experience. As photography began to destabilize the world of painting, Courbet’s focus on tactility served to distinguish his work, presenting an image that was at once universal and exceptionally personal. His desire, whether deliberate or not, to occupy this position between photography and painting, is part of what affords the image its elusive quality.
As for the artist himself, one telling anecdote remains. Found in Ludovic
Halévy’s memoirs, the author describes Courbet exhibiting his painting to a group of men:
“L’origine du monde. A nude woman, without feet and without a head. After dinner, there we were, looking…admiring…We finally ran out of enthusiastic comments…This lasted for ten minutes. Courbet, he never had enough of it…”20
Based on this description, we can tentatively ascribe one more layer of identity to this complex image: that of the Courbet himself. As the work’s original viewer and creator, the artist’s gaze is evoked in all subsequent viewings, his touch manifest in the accomplished depiction of flesh. According to Freud, the voyeuristic gaze, so central here, is self-reflexive: viewing the body of another is essentially auto-erotic, the seeking of one’s own body. As such, perhaps the identity of this quasi-portrait is that of Courbet himself, seeking the origin of his creativity within his desire. 12
1 Most believe the sitter was Joanna Hiffernan, a favourite of the painter and lover of artist James McNeil Whistler. 2 Du Camps, quoted in Hertz, p.34. 3 Zola, p.58. 4 Goncourt, p.64. 5 Quoted in Castagnary’s “Salon 1878” in Salons 1857-1879 (Tome Second). Paris: Edition Fasquelle, 1892, p.1098. (“This smooth whiteness, even, without being or pale or matte; this mixture of red and blue that blends imperceptibly; blood, life, this is the colourist’s despair. He who achieves the experience of flesh has had a great success; the rest is nothing in comparison. A thousand painters have died without achieving flesh; a thousand others will die without having achieved it.”) 6 Fend, p.312, 316-19. 7 Garb, p.33. 8 Fend, p.317, 329. 9 Garb, p.126-7. 10 François Chaussier, Planches anatomique à l’usage des jeunes gens qui se destinent à l’étude de la chirurgie, de la médecine, de la peinture et de la sculpture. 1823. Quoted in Fend, p.338, note 52. 11 Fend, p.338. 12 Sidlauskas, p.23-24 13 Nye, p.126. 14 Quoted in des Cars, p.29. 15 Freedberg, p.16 16 Prendeville, p.366-369. 17 Fried, p.210-220. 18 Solomon-Godeau, p.293-296. 19 See the discussion in Laurence Des Cars, De l'impressionnisme à l'art nouveau: Acquisitions du Musée d'Orsay, 1990-1996. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1996. 20 Ludovic Halévy, Trois dîners avec Gambetta, ed. Daniel Halévy, Paris, Grasset, 1929, p.86-87. Quoted in Linda Nochlin, p.80.