Charles Cordier's Ethnographic Sculptures
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Re-Casting Difference: Charles Cordier’s Ethnographic Sculptures Robley Holmes A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Art and Art History). Chapel Hill 2011 Approved by Daniel J. Sherman Carol Magee Lyneise Williams ©2011 Robley Holmes ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii Abstract Robley Holmes Re-Casting Difference: Charles Cordier’s Ethnographic Sculptures (Under the direction of Daniel J. Sherman) Examining Cordier’s nineteenth-century ethnographic busts, I argue that their contemporary exhibition must include the contexts of their creation and early display. Curators in the twenty-first century approach his works as celebrations of visual difference motivated by curiosity and artistic search for beauty. Yet Cordier showed these works in different types of venues, considering the sculptures both artistic and scientific. He worked from live models, traveling to Algeria to make busts of different racial types. Given these issues, discourses of Orientalism, anthropological racial theories, and colonial movement frame my analysis of his choice of non-French subjects, his sculptural process, and his use of multimedia and polychromy. I analyze these works looking at both historical and contemporary displays and aspects of Cordier’s biography, as well as journals and travel guides. iii Acknowledgments I am extremely grateful to Professor Daniel J. Sherman for his guidance throughout this process, and for his clear, intelligent, and thorough critique of my many drafts. I would like to thank Professor Carol Magee for her generosity, patience, and rigor, as well as Professor Lyneise Williams for her help and enthusiasm. iv Table of Contents List of Figures………………………………………………………………….…………vi Introduction: Ethnographic Sculpture………………………………………………..……1 Displaying Cordier………………………………………………………….……..5 Cordier in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries……………………………6 Chapter 1: Orientalism…………………………………………………………………….9 Locating Orientalism in Cordier’s Ethnographic Sculptures…………………….11 French Perceptions of Algeria……………………………………...…………....13 Orientalist Art……………………………………………………………..……..16 Chapter 2: Racial Theories and Anthropology…………………………………………..19 Sculpture and Difference………………………………………………………...21 Multiplicity……………………………………………………………...……….26 Chapter 3: Colonialism……………………………………………………...…...............31 Ordering Algeria…………………………………………………………………35 Chapter 4: The Neutrality of Fine Art…………………………….……………………...39 Museum Display in the Twenty-First Century…………………………………..42 Works by Cordier at the Musée de L’Homme…………….……………….…….45 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….48 Figures……………………………………………………………………….…………...51 Bibliography……………………………………………..………………………………68 v List of Figures Figure 1. Saïd Abdallah……………………………………………………………….....51 Figure 2. Femme Hydriote…………………………………………………………...….52 Figure 3. Juive d’Alger…………………………………………………………………..53 Figure 4. Venus Africaine………………………………………………………………..54 Figure 5 Femmes d’Alger Eugène Delacroix……………………………………………55 Figure 6 Café à Blidah Eugène Fromentin……………………………………………...56 Figure 7 Jeune Grecque…………………………………………………………………57 Figure 8 Jeune Fille des environs de Rome…………………………………………......58 Figure 9 Mulâtresse, prêtresse à la fête des fèves…………………………………...….59 Figure 10 “Types Orientaux”……………………………………………………………60 Figure 11 Chinois…………………………………………………………………...…...61 Figure 12 Chinoise…………………………………………………………………...….62 Figure 13 Arabe d’El Aghouat………………………………………………………..…63 Figure 14 Capresse des Colonies……………………………………………………..…64 Figure 15 Charles Cordier Sculpting African Venus Jacques Leman……………….…..65 Figure 16 Love One Another………………………………………………………….…66 Figure 17 installation view, l’Homme exposé, Musée de l’Homme…………………….67 vi Introduction: Ethnographic Sculpture Charles Cordier’s first ethnographic bust Said Abdallah (1848; Figure 1) portrays the African model Seïd Enkess.1 It includes a significant portion of Enkess’s torso, focusing attention on his elaborate shirt and robes. The detailed embroidery across the chest of Enkess’s garment, framed by folds gathered at the left shoulder, take up more of the overall composition than the subject’s face. The non-French cut of this garment reveals the muscular flesh of Enkess’s neck and chest, in sharp contrast to the austere high collars common in French men’s fashion of the time. Enkess is wearing a soft cylindrical hat with a flourish hanging from it that also contrasts greatly with the tall, rigid top hats common in nineteenth-century France. Beneath it his hair is visible in tightly coiled locks, swept back to show his hairline. This effect, combined with his cleft beard and facial hair, frames the model’s large forehead and mouth and emphasizes the slender shape of his face, prominent cheekbones, and wide nose. The high polish of the bronze, uniform in patina throughout, and the varied textures of embroidery, skin, and hair emphasize Enkess’s visual difference. From an early age I saw Said Abdallah, along with Cordier’s Venus Africaine in a series of small rooms off the main nineteenth-century hall at the Art Institute of Chicago, where they were surrounded by paintings of North Africa and the Middle East. This contextualization left me with a lot of questions, since the museum provided no didactic material to explain the sudden appearance of people of color in this part of the museum. 1Charles Henri Joseph Cordier (1827-1905) By displaying Orientalist works, which frequently depict people of color and Muslims, in side rooms, curators make this type of genre painting and its subjects marginal to the “European painting and sculpture” hung in central galleries, which largely depicts Caucasians. I have since discovered the complexities of the early creation and display of Cordier’s ethnographic sculptures, which reflect nineteenth-century theories of art and racial difference. In this thesis I historicize these works within discourses of Orientalism, anthropology and colonialism, and in the development of theories of contemporary museum display. Cordier’s works reflect the elision of art objects with anthropological racial theories used to justify colonialism, yet their display in contemporary museums does not address these issues, limiting the works to a depoliticized, aesthetic context. Attention to features like hair texture and nose shape was not just the realm of Orientalist artists; European ethnographers in the nineteenth century also used garments and physiognomic features to demonstrate the racial differences by which they categorized humanity into hierarchical racial types. Fine artists were uniquely positioned to collect visual data, and many Orientalists considered their works ethnographic. These works are distinct from portraiture, because they do not represent a particular individual, but an emblem of a geographic space. Cordier’s sculptures were useful for anthropologists as a record of racial difference in a natural history setting because they were visual representations in three dimensions, evoking the types of facial measurements used by ethnographers to determine race. 2 Cordier’s sculpture of Seïd Enkess began a series of bronze and marble “ethnographic” busts depicting people of other races.2 As the series progressed, and as Cordier encountered non-French people in his travels to Algeria, he carved the figures’ drapery out of increasingly lavish and colorful marbles (See Figures 2 and 3). He included copper, enamel, and cabochons in the decoration of these subjects’ clothes. Using dark bronze patination next to bright marble, Cordier used contrast to emphasize and color his sculptures’ skin and hair. In this way, Cordier used multimedia to highlight physiognomic difference, and particularly color difference. He treated French individual subjects in another way during the same period, creating white marble portraits that were all one material and revealed a limited portion of the models’ shoulders and chest. By contrast, he represented ethnic and cultural others in multicolored, multimedia types, informed by nineteenth-century French Orientalism, anthropological theory, and the relationship of each of these to colonialism. Enkess was a former slave who worked as a professional artist’s model in Paris.3 Cordier displayed a painted plaster version of this bust at the Salon of 1848 using the title Saïd Abdallah, of the Mayac Tribe, Kingdom of Darfur.4 By altering Enkess’s last name and locating him by a tribe and kingdom, Cordier made the subject of the work an imaginary representative of a place in Africa, rather than Enkess, a contemporary African living in Paris. This title connects Enkess to Darfur, implying that the model served as an 2Cordier displayed the works at the Universal Exposition of 1867 as “ethnographic.” Edouard Papet, “To Have the Courage of His Polychromy,” in Facing the Other: Charles Cordier (1827-1905), Ethnographic Sculptor, ed. Laure de Margerie and Édouard Papet (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2004), 80-81. 3Cordier met Enkess in the studio of François Rude, who had been Cordier’s mentor for two years. Laure de Margerie, “Chronology,” Facing the Other, 129. 4The 1848 Salon was unjuried. 3 authentic specimen of his place of origin, an example of his racial and geographic type. This typing highlights an important tension in Cordier’s work. By exhibiting this in the Salon, Cordier positions this sculpture as fine art. Works of art are an artifice, an image that stands in for a real person,