The Period Eye

Repeating the practice of releasing films from Hollywood’s golden age only at the end of a technology’s life cycle, Universal Studios recently released Lowell Sherman’s She Done Him Wrong (Paramount, 1933) on DVD. The plot centers on Lady Lou (played by Mae West), a hard-headed, tinsel-clad singer of Manhattan’s Bowery district in the 1890s who has climbed to the top of her profession by playing upon the desires and weaknesses of the roughnecks around her. Gus Jordan (Noah Beery, Sr.), owner of a popular saloon and an aspirant to public office, has entered into various shady schemes to keep her in diamonds; Dan Flynn (David Landau) is intent on usurping Jordan by informing the law of these illicit dealings, including a scheme to launder counterfeit bills aided by the spidery Russian Rita (Rafaela Ottiano) and her gigolo, Serge Stanieff (Gilbert Roland). The tale unfolds in a long, close space lined on one side by a high bar and on the other by a buffet surmounted by a large painting of Lou reclining naked on a grassy knoll and lifting her arms skyward. Alternately masked and exposed by the men milling before it, the picture becomes the focus of several discrete conversations about Lou’s beauty and desirability. The chatter subsides as Lou enters through the adjoining concert hall, covered in diamonds and lace and trailed by a liveried coachman piled with packages. Rotating hips and eyes, she entices the handsome Stanieff with some risqué cartes de visite. “Oh, wanna see the pictures?” she purrs. “Hmm, they are wonderful,” he responds, “but…uh…I like best that marvelous painting of you in the bar.” “Oh yeah, I gotta admit that is a flash, but I do wish Gus hadn’t hung it up over the…free lunch.” In this way, Lou colludes in perpetuating the image of a great beauty obtained at high price.

It is rare for an art object to play such a significant, character-enhancing role in the opening frames of a movie, though artifacts were regularly anthropomorphized in films of the 1930s and ‘40s: a portrait ages and disfigures in concert with its referent’s grizzly deeds; a clock ticks away the minutes as a jealous suitor makes his way to a dame’s bedroom with a shotgun; a staircase slows a mute servant’s descent to a dark cellar inhabited by a strangler.

Robert Usher, who served as art director on She Done Him Wrong, probably contracted out the job of preparing a painting of Mae West in the guise of an awakening Venus. Although the picture has little resemblance to her (beyond blond hair, fulsome bosom and hips), it does reference two well-known images from the realm of high art: John Vanderlyn’s Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos (1805-1812) and Giovanni Bologna’s Rape of the Sabine Woman (1583), accessible via period prints, contemporary illustrated books, and travel photos.

Admiring the clear draftsmanship and ancient themes of third generation French neoclassicists while studying in Paris during the Napoleonic period, American Vanderlyn painted Ariadne asleep on a patch of grass at the edge of a stream, the gentle undulations of her body accentuated by the soft folds of an immaculate chiton and scarlet himation, which serve as her bedding, and her hands entwined in dark hair to suggest a state of erotic availability and post-coital ecstasy. At upper right, an opening in the grove reveals diminutive figures at the edge of the island, including Theseus, abandoning the princess who had helped him escape the Cretan labyrinth and now preparing to return to his king-father in Athens. Despite the prestige conferred on the composition by reference to Renaissance precedents, the nude was crafted for the delectation of a bourgeois white male audience and thus reinforced gender prescriptions for passive, exploitable women and active, controlling men; nevertheless, it scandalized viewers on its appearance in New York in 1815, and it did poor business as an Asher B. Durand engraving in 1835.

Whereas Vanderlyn’s painting makes the female the object of male sexual fantasies, Giambologna’s sculpture shows the former resisting the latter’s advances. A transplant to Florence in the second half of the sixteenth century when the late Mannerist style of Michelangelo prevailed, Fleming Giambologna (Jean de Boulogne) aimed at freeing his tightly knit sculptural groups from the linear harmonies and singular viewpoint of much Renaissance sculpture. Three nude figures pulsating with muscular energy are caught in a corkscrew motion: a crouching man covers his eyes in shock as a stronger rival strides over him bearing aloft his wife, crying and flailing in desperation. The work was completed in 1583 and Grand Duke Francesco de’ Medici ordered it installed in the Piazza della Signoria (near Cellini’s bronze of Perseus holding aloft the head of Medusa), where it evoked various abduction narratives—Phineus and Andromeda, Paris and Helen, Pluto and Persephone, and most enduringly, the Romans and the Sabines. In all of these narratives, the woman is an object of exchange between two men, a well-worn metaphor for the conquest of territories and the signing of treaties, but Giambologna permits the woman a measure of physical and psychological resistance, albeit elegant and ineffectual.

It is worth considering how these traditional modes for representing female sexuality may have changed in the early twentieth century. Mae West not only authored the successful Broadway stage play, “Diamond Lil,” but also took advantage of Paramount Pictures’ declining box-office sales to forward her titillating property, to adapt the dialog to a screenplay, to inflect the most innocuous words and movements with sexual innuendo in her performance, and thereby to establish herself as the preeminent vamp and voluptuary of the Great Depression. As Lady Lou comforts Sally Glynne, tempted to suicide after being compromised by a married man: “Men’s all alike, married or single. It’s their game. I happen to be smart enough to play it their way. You’ll come to it.” In other words, a woman’s survival depends on her ability to manage men’s expectations, masking her own desires with agreeable femininity. It is in this sense that the film’s wide-angle view of the saloon painting should be understood: ogled by three men, the nude’s pelvis is blocked by the central figure’s high bowler hat, suggesting both male arousal and forbidden access; similarly, the nude’s heavy eyelids and raised arms simultaneously evoke an inaccessible world of inner thoughts and dreams and a secret lover waiting beyond the picture plane. Thus, the image signifies “Lou” in a way that appeals to the barmen’s view of themselves as the stronger, more potent breed and masks the songstress’ own backstairs intrigues in pursuit of material and sexual gratification. The Hayes Code was enacted soon after to discourage such subversive ideas.

In times of war and recession, audiences tend to look back on their grandparents’ day with a sense of nostalgia. For theater-goers in the 1930s, this meant returning to the gay nineties, which offered the pleasing illusion of material surfeit and gender stability, of ruddy gentlemen eager to prove themselves as providers through equal measures of brain and brawn, of prim ladies sensuously padded and emotionally vulnerable in compliance with his projections. Mae West herself relied on this vision in turning it on its head. In a way she could not have predicted, the cultural pendulum has now swung the other way, towards a frank admission of gender instability: as women consolidate professional and/or domestic gains, men struggle to establish positive and comfortable identities, their own desires and feelings long masked by the duties of “husband and provider” and “benevolent patriarch.” The unapologetically self-aware male is ready to emerge in all his complexity and contradiction.

A torrid drama about New York City’s advertising industry in the early 1960s, Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men (which refers to Madison Avenue and the all-male executive elite) is currently enjoying high ratings on cable television. The series’ popularity is due partly to the storyline, centering on Sterling-Cooper’s attractive but inscrutable creative director, Donald Draper (played by Jon Hamm), partly to the period look, suggesting a post-war consumer culture of sleek sedans, modernist interiors, trim outfits, tobacco, and liquor. In the initial episode of the third season, Don and the firm’s art director, Salvatore Romano (Bryan Batt), fly to Baltimore to clinch the London Fog account; they mark their arrival in the city by taking supper at Haussner’s Restaurant accompanied by two eager stewardesses and a tagalong pilot. The conversation amounts to alcohol-induced foreplay, with Don and Sal posing as shady accountants, Shelley and Lorelei giddily seeking to draw them out, and the captain uselessly questioning the proceedings. Throughout the exchange, Don and Sal have a direct view of twin mid-sized portraits of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette overlaying the red damask walls of the Georgian Revival interior. Shelley says regretfully, “I’m based in New York. I’d always rather be there, but it’s my job to be out of town”; studying his drink, Don replies, “I don’t know, I…uh…keep going to a lot of places and ending up somewhere I’ve already been.” It is a rare instance of candor, alluding to an endless cycle of professional deceit and sexual misadventure, impelled by momentary desire and resulting only in numbness and degeneration.

Far from serving as wallpaper, the state portraits of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette of France were conceived in the late eighteenth century to further French diplomacy around the world. In early 1778 Marie-Antoinette summoned an untried painter, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, to her apartments at Versailles to proceed with a state portrait (or full-length image of the monarch in ceremonial attire) intended for her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. The stakes were high, as the queen had already sat to a succession of talents who proved unable to present the queen’s uneven facial features both accurately and favorably. By the autumn of 1779, Louis XVI’s foreign minister, the comte de Vergennes, commissioned the academician Antoine François Callet to undertake a state portrait of the king that could serve as a model for those to be distributed to foreign courts and embassies. The king also had reason to feel uneasy, for a previous image that had ineptly combined his good-natured expression with authoritarian trappings was met with derision at an official art exhibition.

The procedure for making a state portrait was well established in French academic circles: the artist worked up a compositional sketch for the patron, then filled in the canvas with figure and setting, followed by head sketches from life, concluding with integration of the likeness and various highlights. Vigée Le Brun locates Marie-Antoinette about forty-five degrees to the picture plane, standing in a formal court dress whose oyster silk swags, bows, and pleats are held in place by a mostly hidden network of ribs, stays, and cords. She is placed in a stepped environment, delimited at the right edge by a table draped in red velvet supporting the consort’s diadem and a vase of spring flowers, a gilded cabinet adorned with an allegorical figure of Justice and surmounted with a bust of the king, and at the left by a finely-carved fauteuil upholstered in maroon velvet. The background is closed with two opposed L-shaped devices, a monumental pale violet column and parapet and a great blue-green curtain. That the queen’s gaze is turned to mimic that of the (marble) king suggests that she shares his point of view and is therefore a worthy representative of his justice.

Callet raises Louis XVI upon a dais backed by a massive throne and shaded by a baroque baldachin. The body inclined a little to the left, the king bears up handsomely under the weight of coronation robes of deep purple velvet sprinkled with golden fleur de lys and lined with dazzling white ermine which part to reveal the silken habit of the Order of the Holy Spirit. He is at the axis of two diagonals defined, on the one hand, by the great gold-threaded, bluish drapery and purple train and, on the other, by the embroidered blue footstool, crown, and scepter picked up by the gilded seat incorporating Justice with scales, Greek olive branch (peace, concord), Roman fasces (authority, law), and medieval helmet (force, fortitude). The left background parts in much the same way as the robes of state to reveal a monumental column instead of a leg, a relief of a ship’s prow instead of fur lining. The king, who meets our gaze, has doffed his hat in an elegant gesture of salutation, but the firm manner in which he grasps the scepter suggests that his actions may be authoritarian as well as benevolent.

Completed in late 1778 and mid-1780, respectively, the paintings were not meant to be paired: the foreign ministry at Versailles kept Callet’s original and Vigée Le Brun’s facsimile in house, and their original disposition is unknown; the imperial court at Vienna displayed Vigée Le Brun’s original at the Hofburg and Callet’s copy at the Belvedere Palace. Only the republican delegates of the United States Congress hung their copies (ca. 1783) together in the assembly room, first at New York’s City Hall, then at Washington D.C.’s Capitol, a tribute to the monarchs who aided them in the War of Independence.

In Mad Men the royal portraits reappear as grand format, hand-colored engravings flanking an elaborately carved walnut buffet. Charles Clément Bervic was commissioned by Louis XVI’s superintendent of royal projects, the comte d’Angivillier, to engrave the Callet in 1785, but the compensation offered seemed low compared to that of the marketplace, so he financed the work himself and completed the plate in 1790, at the height of the French Revolution, when the king was alternately hailed as the “Restorer of Liberty” and denounced as “The Glutton of the Century.” His process was slow and meticulous, consisting of systematic application of stippling and curved cross-hatching to forms until they obtained subtle effects of light, shadow, and texture—sumptuous but lifeless. Several of these prints exist in American collections, the most accessible being Louis XVI’s official gift to George Washington at Mount Vernon and to Thomas Jefferson at Monticello.

Barthélemy Roger offered his engraving after Vigée Le Brun’s portrait (then attributed to Alexandre Roslin) through public subscription in 1821, well into the Bourbon Restoration when elaborate tributes to the monarchy seemed politic. Working from a truncated canvas deposited at the Louvre (the aforementioned foreign ministry’s copy?), he opted to translate the pose directly to his plate so that the queen appears reversed in print, as if gazing dutifully at the king who, tradition held, always appeared on the right; the background was simplified to evoke a park-like setting consistent with traditional consort portraits. Roger’s clumsy, heavy-handed technique cannot compete with Bervic’s in subtlety, yet he was successful in offering the ultra-royalist a pleasing illusion of a monarchy untouched by recent, horrific events. These prints can be found today in museums, libraries, and antique print shops.

For those of us with friends and relations who came of age in the early 1960s, Weiner’s sordid teleplay seems a little farcical, especially in light of prevailing social and moral strictures. It might even be asked what role monuments and artifacts came to play alongside consumer goods in shaping metropolitan identity and behavior. The bed-down luncheons and all-night benders surely draw plenty of gapers, yet the repressed desires of a range of characters, from the ambitious secretary to the bored housewife, offer potential for a profound statement on the nature of the human condition. During the Kennedy years, we begin to think, the consumption of culture is always accompanied by a crisis of conscience. What sort of crisis did political portraits provoke?

Karel Riesz’s Isadora, a 1968 biopic about the celebrated early twentieth-century American dancer, has resurfaced on the Internet in recent months. About an hour into the film there is a scene that serves to underscore the determination of Isadora Duncan (played by Vanessa Redgrave) not to marry the great sewing machine heir, Paris Singer (Jason Robards), or any man who would impose restrictions on her ideas and actions. We come upon Singer undergoing fashionable and utterly ridiculous electro-shock treatments in a gilded walnut salon on the upper floor of his English mansion; Duncan interrupts him with news of her immanent departure on a dancing tour; he expresses irritation that she has managed to carry on a collateral affair with a pianist he had hired specifically for his physical repulsiveness. Indignant that the man of wealth cannot recognize “a man of genius, a man whose soul shines through his eyes,” the dancer makes for the door to join her doting accompanist. Turning to descend a flight that closely resembles the Ambassador’s Staircase at Versailles, Duncan delivers the parting blow, “You have the soul of a tradesman,” to which Singer, rising from his chair and dragging the metal braces with him, thunders from the balustrade, “You’ve got the soul of a whore!” Thus, within a few minutes the splendid processional of the French kings is recast as the hollow shell of the American millionaire.

The context for the original Ambassador’s Staircase is more stately and momentous. In 1668 King Louis XIV of France ordered his chief architect, Louis Le Vau, to proceed with the construction of a great “Envelope,” three massive stone walls encasing the royal hunting lodge at Versailles on the garden sides, thus allowing for the insertion of state apartments on the main floor facing the northern and southern exposures. In 1674 François d’Orbay was contracted to execute a grand, rectangular-planned two-storey entryway to the king’s enfilade at the northeast corner of the chateau. This consisted of a single, fan-shaped flight of stairs at the ground floor that mounted perpendicular to a long north wall and then at a mid-way landing divided into two flights hugging either side of the wall until reaching main floor passages at the eastern and western extremities, the whole illuminated by a great rectangular skylight.

As director of the Gobelins workshop, Charles Lebrun provided a decorative scheme reminiscent of Italian baroque palazzi and marshaled a team of marble cutters and joiners, bronze casters, chasers, gilders, and painters to accomplish it. At the lower level, the arcaded approach, stairways, and walls were completely encased in white, green, and russet marble, arranged into geometrical patterns converging at a fountain on the stair landing; at the upper level, marble pilasters divided the long walls into seven bays, the outermost filled with functional doors carved and gilded with trophies, then progressing to faux tapestries of Louis XIV winning key battles against the Spanish and the Dutch, trompe l’oeil scenes of foreign emissaries ogling visitors from a loggia, and finally converging on a gilded niche bearing Jean Warin’s marble bust of the king in antique military garb (north wall) or the arms of France and Lorraine (south). Above this rose a coved, frescoed vault where terms supported an imaginary grid-like superstructure whose interstices were occupied by figures of History and Renown adorning the Bourbon blazon, allegories of the Four Continents, and slaves bound to ship prows adorned with trophies and victories.

Completed in 1678, the staircase was trodden by a succession of heads of state and ambassadors—from Genoa, Morocco, Algeria, Persia, and Siam—on their way to a royal audience in the state bedchamber further on down the enfilade or, more exceptionally, the grand gallery overlooking the water terrace. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Sun King’s great grandson, Louis XV, ordered the vestibule dismantled to accommodate living quarters for his daughter, Madame Adélaide, and it was eventually absorbed into his own private suite.

The baroque monument is therefore unusual among its peers for being known primarily through facsimiles erected by kings, robber barons, and movie moguls in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notable examples include those at Schloß Herrenchiemsee (1875-86), built for Ludwig II near Munich, the Palais Rose (1896-1902, demolished 1969), built for Boni de Castellane in Paris, and the film set of Marie-Antoinette (1937-38), built for Irving Thalberg at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in Hollywood.

Its appearance in Isadora is explained by the circumstance that the photoplay was partially shot at Oldway Mansion, Paignton (Dover), purchased by Isaac Merritt Singer in 1871 and renovated by Paris Singer in the Versailles style around 1904-07. Although the plan of the great hall at Oldway is close to that of the vestibule at Versailles, there are significant differences in the decoration. Two of the blind arcades have been opened, the marble balustrades replaced by gilt iron ones, the cornice made heavier, and the vault higher. Most significant, the central flight of steps converges on a copy of Jacques-Louis David’s monumental Benediction of Napoleon and Crowning of Josephine (1805-08) instead of Lebrun’s segmented tribute to Louis XIV’s military and diplomatic prowess. The result is an entirely new conceit: what the Bourbons fashioned from inheritance, the Bonapartes appropriated by strategy and force, and the Singers acquired though invention and commerce.

In today’s industrialized nations, capital and material assets are still accumulated as guarantors of financial security and signs of professional success. For many media watchers and world travelers, the Ambassador’s Staircase and its derivatives probably register as fabulous wealth, but the original flights served a real ideological purpose in promoting the power of the French king and the splendor of his court. The bourgeois industrialist had to wait until the French Revolution to offer a moral justification, grounded in domestic virtues like merit and thrift, for controlling government and inhabiting such spaces. Appearing at the height of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, Riesz’s staircase scene serves as a potent metaphor for two as yet irreconcilable desires—desire for a life free of financial need and desire for a life free of moral judgment.