The Period Eye

For many people who came of age in the twentieth century, initially a broad disk of black vinyl and then a compact disc of silvery plastic came to signify “music” in analytical and pleasurable senses. Visiting a music store or megastore-with-books-and-records was a regular ritual involving the perusal and sampling of albums, the exchange (and sometimes the defense) of alternative tastes with customers and sales clerks, the assembling and ordering of a personal collection by soloist, ensemble, and musical genre. I cannot help thinking that the tactility of these round recording units, protected by striking paper, cardboard or plastic containers, added something to their identity and mystique as music, to be judged in terms of authenticity of interpretation, depth of expression, and currency of rhythm. Call it a simple case of the “Twentieth-Century Blues,” but I lament the demise of this ritual.

I was cleaning out my hallway closet last weekend when I came upon a curious collection of sixteen compact discs masquerading as a single vinyl album and dated to 1997. Tinted a dull, metallic gold with white writing against black bands, the fourteen-inch square cardboard container was printed in checkerboard fashion with sixteen miniature album covers and inscribed, “Forever Classics: The Very Best Picture Discs,” offering “Over 19 Hours Paying Time On 16 CDs.” When opened, the folder revealed four vertical rows of four quarter-pockets, each nestling discs, the surface of which featured the composer’s last name hovering over a detail of an “old master” painting, the disc colored to match the printed thumbnail portrait of the composer beside it. Presumably this design was intended to initiate middle class consumers into the world of classical music, to be passed around the household in admiration of a bargain or venerated as a diptych of the most renowned seventeenth- to nineteenth-centuries composers.

Indeed, the Prism Leisure Corporation of the north London borough of Enfield had expended so much effort to make the musical selections seem abundant and chromatically appealing that an organizing principle for the recordings was difficult to detect. But on scrutiny of the playlist on the back of the folder, it became apparent that the outer rows of discs were devoted to concertos and symphonies from Vivaldi to Dvorak and the middle rows to violin and piano concertos from Mendelssohn to Grieg. As an art historian, my interest is in the apparent randomness with which the designer had paired these recent performances with old master paintings. Does a Nicolas Lancret harvesting idyll really sum up the intensity of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” a Jacob van Ruisdael cloudscape with windmill increase the drama of Brahms’ “Violin Concerto”?

The anomaly I wish to focus on here is that between the blue-tinted “STRAUSS: Favourite Waltzes” label and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s violet-blue Le Moulin de la Galette (1876) detail of young middle class men and women slowly dancing and calmly conversing out-of-doors. The text and music (“Blue Danube Waltz,” “Viennese Bonbons,” and “Vienna Blood”) work upon the image to suggest a Viennese biergarten rather than a Parisian café-restaurant. Why did the commercial designer select the Renoir instead of a Wilhelm Gause or another exponent of genre painting at the Düsseldorf or Vienna art academies? The property of the Musée d’Orsay, Le Moulin de la Galette is not only one of the most well known Impressionist paintings but also one of the most affordable to reproduce—hence its appearance in countless art history textbooks.

A canvas measuring roughly four by five and three-quarter feet presents the illusion of a meeting at a café with a large courtyard for dancing on a Sunday afternoon in summer. Even with the seeming arbitrary cropping of people, seating, and verdure, the picture is fairly well organized to either side of a diagonal extending from upper right to lower left. A figural pyramid in the center foreground serves as a pivot point between the two fields: a woman attired in deep blue leans over her younger sister garbed in a pink and gray stripe as she converses with an unidentifiable man in dark brown. The green bench acts as a line of separation between the unwed female and her chaperone and the male conversant in the foreground and between the dance floor at left and the seating at right. The painter has orchestrated a careful balance of warm and cool tints—pinks and yellows, blues and violets—to reproduce the effect of sunlight piercing the spindly trees overhead and casting mottled lights on skin and hair, straw and silk hats, muslin and wool garments, pavement and chairs throughout. Like Claude Monet, Renoir had learned a valuable lesson about knitting together objects of different forms and textures via a careful repetition of lights and shadows. Yet somehow the painting reveals itself as an accumulation of vignettes: of dancers who move formally, of those who embrace or kiss, and those still who can only watch dejectedly from the sideline. Parisian leisure during this period, Renoir would have it, consists of the rather wholesome habit of friends and acquaintances gathering at one of several music halls to exchange news and caresses.

Among the most interesting scholarship on Impressionism is that which seeks to explain the canvases in terms of their social significance. Mayer Shapiro, Robert Herbert, and others have pointed out that artists tended to incorporate signs of transformative industry into otherwise peaceable landscapes, of concentrated labor into boisterous bars and cabarets. Renoir devotes the top fourth of his scene to yellow-green treetops mingling with white lampstands and chandeliers and in this way admits the necessity of gas lamps for night illumination. But amid the whirling and mingling of patrons in the bottom three-fourths there is no sign of the garçons and verseuses who staffed such establishments. Did Renoir mean to imply that the people who frequented this establishment in the as yet undeveloped, windmill-dotted area around Montmartre themselves constituted a kind of working class, or that his artist and writer friends and paid working-class models could be assembled at this less fashionable locale for the purpose of communicating the joys of Parisian dance halls in general? I suspect the latter.

This stagey painting, the result of a structured composition and self-conscious poses, has none of the profundity of, say, Edouard Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881-82), where the melancholy barmaid Suzon challenges us to contemplate the realities of her existence. T. J. Clark in particular has written cogently about Manet’s determination to acknowledge the transformation of the Parisian café in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The earliest cafés tended to assume the character of the proletarian, prostitute, or petit bourgeois workers of their neighborhood, and especially in times of political crisis the frequenters shared radical ideas and listened to ribald songs. But during the aristocratic phase of the Third Empire, these watering holes and popular chanteuses were cleaned up, “sanitized” to promote the illusion that bourgeois respectability and upward mobility available to all French. Manet represented his tightly corseted but expressionless verseuse standing behind a marble bar set with an assortment of alcoholic beverages and a mirror with a disjointed reflection behind to suggest the reality of her existence as one regularly propositioned by men unable to distinguish her hourglass figure from the bottled wares for sale. He thus produced a profound commentary on the nature of the bourgeois who reduces human relations to commodity bartering.

Renoir refused to acknowledge these deeper, more insidious social realities. He entered an undistinguished suburban dance hall at the moment other seedy cafés were being converted into fashionable establishments and transformed it into a place of universal merry-making, untroubled by questions of political conflict, economic disparity, and gender inequality. In this way, Renoir helped to transform the rough-and-tumble culture of modern Paris to accord with the new national myth of innocence and respectability. In a strange way, Strauss’ confident, gay melodies seem appropriate to Renoir’s musicians and dancers, for in this modern city, everybody is intoxicated with the prospect of being something other than they are.

There are few foods that, when properly stored, withstand spoilage so well as hard tack candy—unless you count that 1400-year old cheese found in an Irish bog in 1987. Whether consumed in lozenge, cane, or lollipop form, boiled and molded sucrose requires the action of the tongue, saliva, and heat to wear it away, conveying a sensation of fruit or mint, raising blood glucose levels, and stimulating hyperactivity. An added attraction is that it can be willfully manipulated to intensify or prolong the flavor, although there are adverse side effects, including belly ache and depression in the short term and tooth decay, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease in the long term. These sweets present a certain contradiction, at once slight and colorful in aspect yet potent and even dangerous in effect.

Upon returning from a trip to Seattle, the office administrative assistant heralded me with a present. Handing me a sucker, she declared, “It’s Marie-Antoinette!” I was delighted to receive a white hollow tube supporting a flat, molded head consisting of a face reminiscent of American plastic dolls of the 1940s and a coiffure recalling French powdered wigs of the 1770s. This cherry-flavored Head Pop was one of legions created and distributed by Archie McPhee & Co., an offbeat novelty shop located in the Wallingford district of Seattle. Orange Abe Lincoln and watermelon Sigmund Freud pops are also popular fare. I had always recoiled from such mass-produced retrospective products as being in the same category as glass-eyed Victorian dolls and rubber Howdy Doody puppets. Yet the edible head of the last queen of France held special resonance because its royal referent had been decapitated in Paris on 16 October 1793. What does it mean to consume this doll’s head with historical awareness?

In late eighteenth-century political culture, the lifeless lollipop oscillated in signification between an honorific effigy on a pedestal and a grisly trophy on a pike.

With regard to the former signification, the sculptor Louis-Simon Boizot perhaps did the most during Louis XVI’s reign to establish the illusion of Marie-Antoinette as a sober, dignified physical presence. Successively pupil of Michel-Ange Slodtz, fellow of the French Royal Academy in Rome, academician at the Royal Academy in Paris, and director of ateliers at the Royal Porcelain Manufactory at Sèvres, he produced a series of portrait busts of the queen in plaster and translated them into marble for court patrons like the foreign minister Vergennes (1781) and biscuit porcelain for foreign visitors like prince Kourakin (1782), who displayed them prominently in gilded salons as an official sign of the sovereigns’ authority and regard.

The Seattle confection bears the greatest resemblance to the Vergennes quarter-length due to the blank stare and the highly piled coiffure. At three feet by one foot nine inches, the bust is an officious and idealized rendering consisting of an elongated oval visage with almond eyes, aquiline nose, and prominent lower lip, the hair pulled back from the face and set into an elaborate pile incorporating a pearl diadem, a satin pouf, and a spray of roses; a cascade of curls provides a transition to the long neck and prominent bosom, accentuated by a low bodice trimmed with pearls and lace, the whole tied with a velvet wrap embroidered with fleur de lys and lined with ermine. Contemporaneous viewers were not impressed, as the critic Denis Diderot remarked at the Salon, “This bust is of a mean form, the eyes were done without spirit. Some [of the] details are praiseworthy.” Boizot must have been more comfortable molding soft paste, for the Kourakin bust is a much better likeness, startlingly animated in countenance and fluid in form. That the queen approved of the sculptor’s renderings of her may be construed from the circumstance that he was permitted to produce so many different versions (grouped into four main types) in marble and biscuit between 1774 and 1785 and that she commissioned him to produce a pair of marble busts of the king and her brother, Austrian emperor Joseph II, in 1777.

Despite the formal appearance of such sculptures, scores of genre painters and printmakers from the mid-1780s employed the image of the royal bust in wholesome family narratives to suggest that the king and queen were respected and beloved parents to the professional, merchant, and artisan classes. For example, Pierre-Alexandre Wille painted scenes of emotionally affected fathers sending off sons to fight in the American war, in one of which the patriarch simultaneously gestures to a bust of Louis XVI and hands a sword to the soldier, an invocation to self-sacrifice for the king-nation. Etienne Aubry, who catered to a middle class taste for scenes of ruddy, contented parents attentive to well-fed, rambunctious children, made a drawing of a family of laborers embracing busts of the king and queen, adapted by L. Pauquet for an etching. These images made the monarchs seem at once tangible and accessible, worthy of veneration and capable of sympathy.

As to the latter signification, the Jacobins (or radicals) who dominated the National Convention (or republican government) ordered the transfer of Marie-Antoinette to the Conciergerie Prison in August 1793. Acting upon mostly outrageous accusations of subversive behavior in the press, the Revolutionary Tribunal tried her and found her guilty of treason (that is, of conspiring to foment civil war at home and seeking the intervention of powers abroad) on 14 October. She was transported in an open cart to the Place de la Revolution and executed by guillotine two days later, her head displayed to the crowd before being dumped with the body in a mass grave at the cemetery of La Madeleine. Most renderings that survive from the period are anonymous and rudimentary prints of the “Widow Capet” being carted to or standing upon the scaffold, although one painting shows the executioner striding forward bearing her head aloft on a pike while a torrent of blood flows from her trunk.

A witness to this event chose to render the unfortunate woman in all the gore of her final moment: Anna Maria Grosholtz (Madame Tussaud). Although Grosholtz had been apprenticed to Parisian waxworks exhibitor and Jacobin supporter Philippe Curtius from the mid-1770s, she was imprisoned and slated for execution under the “Reign of Terror”; a high-placed family friend spared her life and thenceforth she found it politic to make plaster death masks of revolutionary “martyrs” and “enemies,” including Marat, Fouquier-Tinville, and Robespierre, which could then serve as models for wax effigies. Curtius, who had established two cabinets de cire –one for royalty and statesmen at the Palais-Royal and another for criminals on the Boulevard du Temple, died in 1794, leaving her the entire enterprise. An ill-timed venture to display around thirty heads of royals and revolutionaries at the Lyceum Theater in London during the Napoleonic Wars prevented her from returning to France, so she toured the collection through Britain and Ireland, reaping profits. Some of Tussaud’s work is still on display at her Baker Street establishment, where she settled in 1834. Slightly askew on posts inexplicably mounted to the wall, Louis XVI’s and Marie-Antoinette’s youthful features and smooth complexions seem at odds with the blood-spattered necks and roughly shorn hair. Still, there is something uncomfortable about beholding such effigies, not only because the softly lit and colored surfaces provide the illusion of animate nature, but also because tabloids, pulp novels, carnival rides, and motion pictures have “normalized” the supernatural. Indeed, a large segment of popular culture operates on the presumption that the viewer’s imagination will supply to the eyes movement and malevolence where they do not exist.

Notwithstanding the macabre content of such fare, toy and candy manufactures have seized upon the idea of the decapitated or floating head to market costumes and confections to children, an enterprise that is most lucrative around Halloween. The Internet boasts scores of high- and low-end “Marie-Antoinette” disguises, modern fantasies of the queen in a blood-drenched white gown carrying her head or in a plunging bustier, mini-skirt, long hose, and high heels—almost all outgrowths of the marketing campaign accompanying Sophia Coppola’s Marie-Antoinette (2006). Indeed, the marketplace’s insistence on highlighting the queen’s well-developed sense of fashion has had the disadvantage of overshadowing her patronage of portraits, interiors, and gardens.

The royal lollipop is unique in merging the appearance of a vintage five-color plastic toy with the sweetness of freshly made cherry confection. The consumer is startled by the item’s strange appearance and tantalized by the box top’s invocation to “Let them eat…CANDY!” Yet there is no guarantee that every consumer will respond as directed since he or she brings to the exchange varied experiences and desires. As Toni Morrison has evocatively written in The Bluest Eye (1970), a poor African-American girl growing up in small town Ohio during the early 1940s may well interpret a candy wrapper bearing the design of a blond-haired, blue-eyed child as both an alienating sign of the rights and privileges reserved for whites and an inviting covering for a magic concoction that would allow her to look and act like them. Thus, to the paternal patriotism the French bourgeois might have felt in contemplating the queen’s idealized bust, the macabre humor American consumers might register in consuming her decapitated head, may be added the alienation that the politically and economically disenfranchised might feel in gazing upon her pale pallor.

When you think about it, a deck of playing cards has a tactility and design like nothing else: the small, stiff paper panels with glossy sides, the faces inscribed with a number or letter and the equivalent in hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs and the backs intricately colored and patterned. To grip a deck with backs upward is to suggest numerological and symbolic randomness; to spread a hand is to engage in ordering and valuation; to draw and discard, to throw down money or chips at intervals is to conjecture a hand’s value in relation to others’. There are consequences to manipulating cards.

Shortly before passing away a few years ago, my grandmother gave me a fancy double deck of playing cards manufactured by the Piatnik Company of Vienna. I can still see her sitting in a heavy padded armchair before a large walnut card table overhung with an enormous swag lantern and instructing her grandchildren in the games most conducive to filling a holiday afternoon. Although she was very patient in teaching us variations of go fish, poker, and rummy, she never tried to introduce us to her personal favorite, contract bridge, perhaps because it necessitated great concentration, dependable partners, and a heavy purse. Like her scotch and sodas and slightly risqué jokes, bridge seemed to us an adult ritual that belonged to those who made it through the Great Depression.

The letter cards of this deck—the king, queen, and jack—seem peculiarly suited to my aesthetic sensibilities: each bears an aristocratic likeness adapted from a famous early modern French portrait. The “court of diamonds,” for example, is represented by busts of Henri IV and his second wife, Marie de’ Medici, after full-lengths by Frans Pourbus the Younger, and Cardinal Richelieu after Philippe de Champaigne. All the figures are swathed in generous draperies that make the fusion between their upright and inverted aspects appear seamless and are colored with brilliant primaries against a pale yellow ground. However, the designer’s determination to adhere to baroque pictorial illusionism instead of conventional flat patterning lends the personages a strange palpability that seems almost monstrous—like Siamese twins bending backwards.

The decision to model the figure of the jack of diamonds on Champaigne’s portrait of Cardinal Richelieu was probably motivated by the circumstance that so many copies are held in public collections (e.g. National Gallery, London; Louvre, Paris; National Museum, Warsaw). All of these copies are based on a slightly smaller lost original painted in 1635 for the Galerie des Hommes Illustres (or Gallery of Famous Men) at the Palais Cardinal (now the Palais Royal), Paris. Never reluctant to parade his power and achievements, the cardinal had commissioned the painter to fill his gallery with twenty-six full-length, over life-size portraits of great men of France spanning Abbé Suger to Louis XIII. Because this series was engraved shortly after completion, we know something about the appearance of the cardinal’s first portrait, which the London copy most closely resembles.

A native of Brussels, Champaigne was familiar with the grand format portraits of the Flemish masters. His Richelieu mimics the pose of Van Dyck’s Genoese clientele of the 1620s: a solitary figure draped in an elaborate vestment consisting of an ermine stole, a voluminous red cappa magna (or mantle), a white rochet (narrow-sleeved, lace-edged over-garment), and a red cassock extends one hand to motion the way with his biretta (four-crested cap) and employs the other to gather up the folds of his ponderous garment. The head is a study of the effects of long working hours upon a fifty year-old administrator: gray hair, flaccid flesh, and lined eyes are meticulously rendered to suggest probity and vigilance. The white linen collar, the pale blue ribbon of the Ordre de Saint-Esprit, and lace-edged surplice, lend the form textural variety and signify that the individual is currently engaged on secular matters. The habit is drawn and modeled in a way that seems hard, even brittle at the edges yet fluid on the surfaces, not unlike late Mannerist sculptures. Rendered from a low viewpoint, the figure appears to be composed of solid geometries: the lines of recession intersect with the folds of the garment to demarcate at least four triangular units secured by the right hand. Richelieu’s satisfaction with the portrait can be assumed from the large number of copies in circulation, some of which show the left hand repositioned to assume a florid rhetorical gesture—of the kind that appears on our playing card.

The designation of Richelieu as the third member of the royal suite is especially interesting in light of his political ties to Marie de’ Medici and Louis XIII. Armand Jean du Plessis was educated in Paris, became Bishop of Luçon in 1606, served as Secretary of State to Marie de’ Medici and her protégé Concino Concini until the latter’s assassination in 1617, was recalled by Louis XIII to negotiate peace with her after a disastrous civil war, and was made Chief Minister to the king in 1624, a position he retained (along with the new title of duc de Richelieu) until his death nearly twenty years later. His principle contribution to the state consisted of centralizing the French monarchy at home by limiting the resources of rebellious nobility and increasing its strength abroad by pursuing diplomatic alliances meant to frustrate Austro-Spanish hegemony. Yet the Bourbons never completely trusted him and the nobles and commons downright despised him. Marie de’ Medici regarded Richelieu’s service to her son as a threat to her own influence while Louis XIII repeatedly questioned his minister’s draconian and brutal methods.

It is significant that by the early seventeenth century the knave of diamonds had acquired a bad reputation in France and England as a worthless fellow or an evil omen. The French expression “Il est un valet de carreau” (“He is a knave of [floor] tiles”) suggested a “man of the pavement” or loiterer who sought to take advantage of passers-by; the English epithet “scurvy knave” suggested a sea-faring rascal (in the diamond import business?) who brought his illness back to port to infect inhabitants. Both epithets seem readily applicable to a vigilant minister navigating the “ship of state.” Political personages and state functionaries were first ridiculed on playing cards during the French Revolution, when satires and caricatures flooded the Paris and London markets. Our contemporary card follows this tradition in raising an unfavorable comparison between Richelieu and the n’er-do-well: both had an ominous gaze, were bearded, and sported a deceptively elegant “hook,” the cardinal’s curled finger being similar to the knave’s halberd with its serpentine flourish. In a strange twist, the graphic designer gave the queen and her allies a belated, symbolic form of revenge they could never have afforded in life, the cardinal’s double hook at once persuading the great and ensnaring the weak.

But then my grandmother, who was affectionately known as “queen of the card table,” would have said that whatever “hand” I was dealt in life, it was in my interest to make work enjoyable and to take leisure seriously.