Strapless

by Deborah Davis

  Yet it wasn’t just the subject matter of the tableaux that drew large crowds day after day. It was the way in which they were displayed. They were usually full-scale dioramas, and they took advantage of spectators’ basic voyeuristic urges by creating the sensation of spying on real people. The Grévin boasted “reproduction loyal to nature and respect for the truth in the smallest details,” essentially offering peepholes into Parisian life. Some of the displays, such as that of a papal procession at the center the main room of the museum, took the experience one step further by inviting spectators to pretend that they were part of the scene.

  “Realistic” as the Musée Grévin seemed to the thousands who passed through its doors, its showy and cleverly packaged verisimilitude could not compare with that of the spectacles unfolding daily at the Paris morgue, the other hot ticket in town. The morgue offered something the Grévin could only simulate: real bodies of victims of real crimes. The morgue’s popularity was the most extreme manifestation of the obsession with actuality entertainment.

  The concept of looking was even explicit in the name given to the building that temporarily housed the dead. The word morgue derives from the Old French, morguer, which means “to look at fixedly.” The original purpose of having a public place to display corpses was to facilitate identification.

  At some time the morgue evolved from a purely functional municipal building to one of the busiest theaters in Paris. Haussmann had razed the old morgue and built a new one on a site more accessible to the public, centrally located behind Notre Dame. Admission was free and the “show” changed daily, depending on the deaths from the night before. On the surrounding streets, vendors hawking fruit and pastries added to the carnival atmosphere. As many as a million visitors would walk through the viewing rooms each year, horrified or thrilled—or both—by what they saw.

  The most popular corpses were those of children and the victims of unsolved crimes. Celebrities such as Sarah Bernhardt might visit when a body generated considerable publicity, as did that of the four-year-old “Enfant de la Rue Vert Bois,” whose body had been found in a stairwell. Crowds gathered at the morgue, intrigued by the mystery of the dead child, but she was forgotten as soon as the next corpse with a sensational story came along, extensively reported and graphically depicted in the papers.

  While Parisians welcomed reality in their everyday entertainments, they were not as enthusiastic about realistic art. One of the leading objections to Impressionism was that its practitioners simply painted what they saw in life, when they should follow academic principles, embellishing on nature and developing classical themes. Serious art was never to be confused with photography. A painting, be it a portrait, landscape, or historical scene, was to enhance, ennoble, and illuminate its subject. It was not meant to mirror, or in some way expose, reality.

  The Paris Salon supported this aesthetic. The jury selected paintings that upheld the conservative traditions and standards of the academy and that gave French viewers what they supposedly wanted to see. The jury’s choices always included rousing scenes from history, pretty pastorals, classical nudes, and flattering portraits. Portraiture, notably, was not held in high esteem at the academy: it was not taught in the classroom and therefore not taken seriously. Artists were expected to learn how to paint a portrait on their own, or in a private atelier.

  The jury would have preferred to ignore portraits at the Salon, but the paintings were so popular with the public that the judges had to accept them. Salon-goers were opinionated about portraits because they were commonly displayed or reproduced, in drawing rooms, in museums, and in the newspapers, which ran full-page engravings of the most popular, and the most controversial, Salon portraits every year.

  On this particular Varnishing Day, the weather was clear and beautiful. “It would be difficult to dream of a temperature more spring-like or a sky more filled with sun,” L’Événement reported. “The trees themselves appeared to celebrate with their spring verdure.” The chestnut trees that lined the streets leading to the Palais de l’Industrie were in bloom, their pastel colors providing a soft canopy for the socialites outside the immense building. Horse-drawn carriages jammed the streets as one beautiful woman after another arrived. Attendees wore their finest, their outfits commissioned from couturiers months in advance because, it was known, reporters would be recording every detail.

  Ralph Curtis, Sargent’s companion the previous night, was one of the early arrivals. He was in good spirits: Le Gaulois had published a favorable review of Sargent’s painting in its Varnishing Day supplement. The critic Louis de Fourcaud called Madame X “remarkable” and said that it was “of rare distinction and interest.” Hoping that Sargent’s late-night insecurities had been unfounded, Curtis mingled with the crowd on the street. Celebrities, society women, art critics, and flâneurs—boulevardiers alert to the ever-changing spectacle of Paris—ascended the grand staircase.

  Amélie was there, as she was every year. That morning, she had dressed mindful of her reputation as reigning beauty and certain that this year she would get even more attention than ever. Unlike Sargent, she was confident about her portrait. She anticipated that it would draw the envious congratulations of her friends and the praise of columnists and critics. Sargent’s success would be her success; this would be their shared moment of triumph, when Paris would formally acknowledge his talent and her beauty.

  Inside the Palais, socialites and tourists, art dealers and potential buyers breathed the bitterness of varnish and turpentine as they sidestepped ladders and supplies. Artists meanwhile sought to finish their varnishing in the midst of the crowds.

  Dust was everywhere, and despite the pleasant temperature outside, the rooms in the Palais quickly overheated. A few tightly corseted women might faint from the heat. Necks would be stretching in every direction as viewers moved from one room to another, craning to see pictures hung at every level from floor to ceiling.

  The most visible works either were very large, or were hung “on the line,” at eye level, the position reserved for the best entries. Veteran Salon-goers knew that it was impossible to see everything on exhibit—there were thousands of works—and critics and buyers would consult their Salon catalogues for the most promising submissions, and note their reactions to them. Like other attendees, they would be on the lookout for the significant paintings, those that would be praised, discussed, debated, or vilified in impassioned conversations for weeks. The Salon would run its course, but it was in the first hour, or even half-hour, of Varnishing Day that reputations would be established or destroyed.

  Thirty-one salles, or rooms, were dedicated to painting at the 1884 Salon, and more were designated for pastels, prints, sculpture, and architecture. Works were grouped alphabetically by artist, although an oversized painting might end up in a room reserved for larger works. As viewers moved from room to room, they stopped before the latest works by their favorite artists, the successful men who held powerful positions at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In Salle 4, they found two paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme. The more spectacular one, Slave Market in Rome, was a historical scene depicting an ancient slave market. At the center was a beautiful nude woman who covered her face in a gesture of modesty. In his annotations to the Salon catalogue, an American visitor described the nude as “unpleasant.” He was even less impressed by Gérôme’s other entry, Night in the Desert, which he criticized for its “strange, disagreeable light.”

  Salle 8 featured two works by Jean-Jacques Henner, famous for his captivating red-haired, cream-skinned nudes. Crying Nymph showed a female figure who, like the slave in Gérôme’s painting, hid her face in her hands. Henner’s other entry, Christ in the Tomb, dramatically depicted Christ’s semi-naked body.

  Portraits were the big draw in Salle 11. Carolus-Duran’s Portrait of His Excellency M.Z. attracted attention because of the painter’s former successes, but this was not one of his best works. The real sensations in the room were by the French artist Charles Chaplin.
His two portraits of society women were quite similar. Both women wore white low-cut gowns trimmed with feathers. One had the added touch of a silk bow around her neck. Their vacant expressions and familiar poses made the women appear bland and uninteresting, like airbrushed centerfolds. Critics were nonetheless charmed, and they crowned Chaplin as “the foremost painter of feminine elegance of his time.” These were “works of a great artist [who] understands the highest doctrines of art.”

  In Salle 12, another rousing work, Fernand Cormon’s Return from a Bear Hunt, thrilled spectators with its colorful re-creation of a prehistoric bear hunt. In Cormon’s version, the participants were fully clothed, as Victorian-era cavemen were wont to be. In the same room was an enormous painting by the Salon favorite William-Adolphe Bouguereau. The Youth of Bacchus was a classical scene celebrating youthful worshippers of the god of wine. Most of the young men and women in the painting were nude.

  In Salle 14, visitors could view Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier’s Traveling Musicians. They would have been familiar with Meissonier’s work, for he was the most celebrated and successful artist in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  In the next room, Salle 15, Benjamin-Constant’s Les Chérifas indulged the crowd’s insatiable appetite for exotic scenes with a representation of a nude woman and a robed sheik lounging in a luxuriant Arabian Nights setting. And in Salle 17, a few people may have paused to notice The Meeting, a distinctive little work by Marie Bashkirtseff, the artist who had confided her fears about Varnishing Day to her diary. During the early days of the Salon, Bashkirtseff and a companion positioned themselves on a couch near the painting in order to overhear comments from passersby, none of whom suspected the young woman seated nearby as one of the Salon artists.

  Although women were allowed to show their work at the Salon, they were not permitted to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. If they wanted instruction, they had to attend private ateliers with liberal admission policies, such as that run by Rodolphe Julian. An entrepreneurial teacher who operated a number of ateliers in Paris, Julian offered special classes for young women, and he attracted students from the United States, Britain, and in the case of Bashkirtseff, Russia. Carolus-Duran, also known for his progressive ways, taught women one afternoon a week.

  Salle 21, a larger room reserved for oversize works, was dominated by a mural-like painting by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Like Meissonier, Puvis was a household name in France, and one of the country’s most beloved artists. People bought scaled-down replicas of his large murals, copies that he obligingly painted himself. Today, however, as with Meissonier, few know his name.

  Puvis was both popular with the masses and highly regarded by his fellow artists, and Sargent admired his elegant compositions and classical attitude. Puvis’s 1884 Salon submission, The Sacred Grove, depicted the nine muses in a pastoral setting, some with their breasts exposed. Even though the mythological theme would have been familiar, even predictable, the work was not without a fresh appeal: in it, Puvis experimented with space and depth, deliberately creating a flatness that was at once primitive and modern. Georges Seurat, who saw The Sacred Grove before he started working on his masterpiece A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884, may have been inspired by it.

  Unlike Seurat, one American visitor was disappointed with Puvis’s latest work. Beside the entry for The Sacred Grove in his catalogue, this visitor made a notation that began with praise for the “immense canvas that excites my wonder.” But he went on to point out its flaws: “[It is] extremely disagreeable to me in color—absolutely without texture and looking and feeling like faded tapestry.”

  Spectators who had made it to Salle 31, where Sargent’s painting was hung, would have seen enough of the Salon offerings to reach two conclusions: This was not the best year for paintings, and the 1884 exhibition counted a very high incidence of nudes. Marie Bashkirtseff dismissed the Salon as a failure, writing: “There is nothing to see. This mass of painting without thought, without soul, is horrible.”

  As for the preponderance of nudes, Salon attendees were used to seeing artistic renderings of naked women. In fact, they looked forward to them. The nude had been in the Western artist’s repertoire at least since the ancient Greeks invented the art form. Most professional artists in the 1880s would have studied anatomy in school and painted nude models in life study classes, learning the rules that separated art from what might have been perceived as pornography. In an artistic rendition, a naked woman had to be hairless. Her genitals were always smooth and sexless, or discreetly covered with a hand or a piece of cloth. A nude figure in a painting should resemble an ancient statue in its lack of realistic anatomical details. Gustave Courbet, a proponent of realism, shocked viewers by painting nude woman as they really looked, complete with hair, wrinkles, and lifelike bodies. Curiously, anatomical reality in art was apparently a horrifying concept to the same men and women who lined up to see bodies at the morgue.

  In the academic tradition, nude women in paintings could be only historical or mythological figures, or anonymous types. A nude Eve, Lady Godiva, or Arabian princess was acceptable, as were Henner’s playfully erotic nymphs, because they existed in myth or in distant time or space, and were cloaked in classicism or exoticism. Édouard Manet’s Olympia had offended viewers when it was shown at the 1865 Salon because the woman depicted was a contemporary figure—a courtesan, no less, whom some of the painting’s male viewers might have known in an intimate way.

  In The Nude, Kenneth Clark establishes an important difference between “nude” and “naked.” “To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition,” Clark explains. But nude “carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone.” Clark’s distinction works in theory. But nudes were not always as innocent as he suggests.

  Though highly idealized, even the most “classical” nudes must have seemed erotic to Salon audiences. Women in the nineteenth century tended to cover their flesh in public with layers of clothing, from buttoned-up gloves to floor-length hems. Salon exhibitions provided easy access to sexual images that were not part of daily life. And artists knew that their nudes, however sanitized or decorous, were titillating. They placed them liberally in their paintings, often in such settings as forests and courtrooms, where it made no sense for their subjects to be naked. During each year’s Salon, newspapers would print caricatures of the exhibition’s nudes, complete with enormous breasts, vulgar come-hither poses, and lewd captions.

  By the time they reached Salle 31, Salon visitors would have seen every manner of nude—bending, sitting, standing, dancing; viewed from front, back, and side. Four of the most acclaimed artists in 1884—Bouguereau, Henner, Puvis, and Benjamin-Constant—had nude women in their paintings. Yet not one of these works raised an eyebrow, for the artists had been mindful of the conventions regarding nudes.

  Ralph Curtis walked the Salon circuit, looking at paintings and searching for his cousin. All around, he heard people asking, “Where is the portrait of Gautreau?” Finally he saw Sargent in a hallway. He was trying to hide behind a door, to avoid encountering anyone he knew. Without explanation, he led Curtis to Salle 31.

  There was little else of note in the gallery—a few portraits, some landscapes and religious paintings, by artists whose hopes of fame would not be realized. Yet even if there had been another interesting work there, few would have noticed. Anybody who entered Salle 31 had a single purpose: to see the Sargent—or the Gautreau, as they would have called it, for she was more famous than he.

  Midway up one wall, Amélie’s image was almost life-size, and although she faced sideways, looking off to her left, she appeared quite real; she could have been standing in the room. Her hair was arranged in a chignon, with a few tendrils escaping at the nape of her swan neck. The rosy ear and carmine lips were the only spots of color on the canvas. Amélie’s nose was large, as in life, but strangely refined. Her chiseled profile recalled a ca
meo or an ancient coin. A small, indistinct table supported her right arm. A dark background, devoid of detail, made her flesh look even whiter and made her even more dominant within the frame.

  Amélie’s shoulders and arms were firm and sculpted, her bosom high and full under the heart-shaped bodice of her form-fitting gown. A jeweled shoulder strap held the left side of her dress in place, while the other strap had fallen precariously, threatening to release one breast from a plunging décolletage. Amélie’s narrow waist offset the sensual roundness of her bosom and hips. Her sleek and simple gown looks elegant to us today, but its close fit would have suggested to late-nineteenth-century viewers that Amélie was not wearing her petticoat, a crucial piece of underwear that any proper young woman would have worn religiously. Although many society portraits at the time fairly dripped with ostentatious displays of family jewelry, there was little here: a diamond crescent in Amélie’s hair, a subtly glinting wedding ring. There was little in the way of decorative touches to distract from Amélie’s magnificent figure. The lines of her body were so visible, especially in the vicinity of her strapless shoulder, that she might as well have been naked—not nude.

  The public’s judgment was loud, quick, and definite. What a horror, people exclaimed. She looked monstrous and decomposed, some said. The painting was indecent. Amélie’s exposed white shoulders and décolletage—without a breast in sight—disgusted them. And that fallen strap! Was it a prelude to, or the aftermath of, sex? The fact that she was looking away from her audience made her appear blithely indifferent to her shocking dishabille and called attention to her shamelessness. Women were particularly vocal in their disapproval, as if to assert their moral superiority and disparage Paris’s famous beauty.