Hybrid Zones: Representations of Race in Late Nineteenth-Century French Visual Culture

Hybrid Zones: Representations of Race in Late Nineteenth-Century French Visual Culture By Copyright: 2011 Rozanne McGrew Stringer Submitted to the graduate degree program in the Kress Foundation Department of Art History and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Professor Marni R. Kessler, Chairperson ________________________________ Professor Marilyn R. Brown ________________________________ Professor David Cateforis ________________________________ Professor Amy McNair ________________________________ Professor James Woelfel Date Defended: April 7, 2011 ii The Dissertation Committee for Rozanne McGrew Stringer certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Hybrid Zones: Representations of Race in Late Nineteenth-Century French Visual Culture ________________________________ Professor Marni R. Kessler, Chairperson Date approved: April 7, 2011 iii Abstract In this study, I examine images of the black female and black male body and the female Spanish Gypsy by four artists – Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Frédéric Bazille, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – that articulate the instability of racial categories and stereotypes assigned to racialized populations by French artists, natural scientists, anthropologists, and writers between 1862 and 1900. Notably, whiteness – made visible and raced – is also implicated in some of the images I analyze. I look closely at the visual stereotype of the seductive, dark-skinned female Spanish Gypsy and the primitive and debased black male, as well as at representations of the abject black female body. I also consider the construction of “whiteness” as an unfixed and complex notion of French identity, particularly as it applies to the bourgeois white female body. I analyze images in which representations of racial identity seem unproblematic, but I show that these images articulate a host of uncertainties. I contextualize each image through analyses of nineteenth-century French representations of the black person and Spanish Gypsy by modernist and academic artists, nineteenth-century racialist science, French fiction and periodicals, and entertainment spectacles such as the circus and human zoos. My methodology draws primarily on formalism, social history, and postcolonial and feminist theory. In my examination of representations of racial difference in late nineteenth-century French visual culture, I investigate images of racialized bodies specifically through the lens of hybridity, a term employed by nineteenth-century biologists and natural scientists to define the intermixing of races and cultures. The fascination with and fear of hybrid races increasingly dominated the discourses on racial hierarchies and classifications. I explore nineteenth-century notions of racial hybridity through the emerging science of anthropology, but I also expand my study to interrogate iv hybridity as the cross-fertilization of cultures and identity. I consider how these images expand and problematize the meaning of hybridity and its antithetical concept of racial purity. I also demonstrate the paradoxical correspondence and oscillation between the racial stereotype and the culturally dominant power responsible for the stereotype’s creation and perpetuation. My study seeks to illuminate what I see as the hybridity and heterogeneity of racial identity, for the person of color as well as for the “white” European, discretely and subtly disclosed in these images. v Acknowledgements I wish to thank a number of individuals and institutions whose support greatly contributed to the completion of this dissertation. I am indebted to the Kress Foundation Department of Art History and the Humanities and Western Civilization Program at the University of Kansas for teaching appointments while I pursued my degree. The University of Kansas also provided funding for research in France and at museums in the United States. I am extremely grateful to the Kress Foundation Department of Art History for the Tim Mitchell Memorial Art History Award; the Hall Center for the Humanities for the Andrew Debicki International Travel Scholarship in the Humanities; and the Humanities and Western Civilization Program for the Ted Johnson Interrelations of the Humanities and the Arts Award. My research was facilitated by the gracious assistance of the curatorial and library staffs of the Musée Fabre, Montpellier; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Princeton University Art Museum; the Herbert D. and Ruth Schimmel Rare Book Library, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University; the Département des Estampes et de la photographie and Département des Arts du spectacle, Bibliothéque nationale de France; and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. I wish to thank these museums for their generosity in providing me the right to reproduce images from their collections: the Art Institute of Chicago; Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection, Zurich; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Princeton University Art Museum; and Yale University Art Gallery. vi My dissertation committee provided insightful analysis of my work at critical points. I am grateful to Marni R. Kessler, Marilyn R. Brown, David Cateforis, Amy McNair, and James Woelfel for their thoughtful and discerning consideration of my work and the beneficial suggestions they offered. I was fortunate to work with Marilyn R. Brown whose scholarship on the Gypsy and bohemian in nineteenth-century French visual and literary culture was and continues to be an invaluable resource for me. During my doctoral studies at the University of Kansas, I benefited greatly from coursework with David Cateforis, Amy McNair, and Linda Stone-Ferrier. Their seminars were intellectually enriching and shaped my critical thinking. I thank them for their continuing interest in my work and progress. My teaching appointment in the Humanities and Western Civilization Program, directed by James Woelfel, provided me with the opportunity to work with faculty in philosophy, history, European studies, and religious studies as well as with graduate instructors from a number of disciplines. I profited immensely from these exchanges. I am profoundly indebted to Marni R. Kessler who advised and directed my dissertation. Her teaching and scholarship remain models for my work. I appreciated her enthusiastic support for my dissertation topic and our conversations guided me to formulate the questions and issues that have been the focus of my project. Her advice on ways to approach the complexities and ambiguities associated with the images I selected for the dissertation helped me move my inquiries from abstract concepts to fully realized chapters. I am also very grateful for her perceptive analysis of my written work and the constructive feedback that helped me strengthen my arguments. I am a better researcher and writer because of her attention to all aspects of my work. vii Family and friends played a large role in keeping me focused and motivated. The friendship of MaryAnn Cameron, Ursula Clark, Margaret Garrison, Ann Hager, Glenda Koch, Jeff Mack, Ginny Olson, Ruby Shade, and Doretha Williams kept me going throughout the phases of this project. My parents, Pauline and Charles McGrew, my sisters, Diane, Paula, Karen, and Sue, and my brother, Chuck McGrew, always cheered me on and cheered me up and I am very grateful for their love and encouragement. Throughout this journey, my husband, Dave Stringer, offered unwavering support and love. I dedicate this work to him with my enduring respect and affection. viii Table of Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgments v Introduction 1 Chapter One: Mme Camus’s Shadow: Degas and Racial Consciousness 17 Chapter Two: Manet’s Gypsy with a Cigarette: Unfixing the Racial Stereotype 74 Chapter Three: Beholding Beauty: The Black Female Body in Frédéric Bazille’s Late Oeuvre 132 Chapter Four: Masculinity and the Object of Desire in Toulouse-Lautrec’s Chocolat dansant dans un bar 192 Conclusion 242 Bibliography 247 Illustrations 277 1 Introduction The juxtaposition of a black woman and white woman in Frédéric Bazille’s canvas, La Toilette [Figure 1], 1870, at first glance seems to uphold normative nineteenth-century conceptions about the separation and hierarchization of the races. The semi-nude kneeling black woman, attired only in a headscarf and multi-colored striped skirt, attends to the seated light- skinned female nude who is placed at the center of the composition. Standing to the left of the seated nude is a second female servant with dark eyes and hair, and a sallow complexion. Surprisingly, it is the interchange between the kneeling and seated women that especially commands the viewer’s attention. While one might expect to see the white woman depicted as the principal focus of the pairing, her body is rendered as a limp and generalized form. Yet, the body of the black woman is depicted with specificity and not reduced to a racialized type. Indeed, the skin coloration of the seated female nude in Bazille’s image could be characterized as “blank” whiteness1 while Bazille imparts an unexpected radiance to the black woman’s skin. Bazille composed the flesh tones of the seated nude woman from a palette of analogous icy whites which contrasts markedly with the array of luminous hues – warm browns, copper,

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