Picturing Evolution and Extinction ; Regeneration and Degeneration in Modern Visual Culture 1443872539, 9781443872539

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Picturing Evolution and Extinction

Picturing Evolution and Extinction Regeneration and Degeneration in Modern Visual Culture Edited by

Fae Brauer and Serena Keshavjee

Picturing Evolution and Extinction: Regeneration and Degeneration in Modern Visual Culture Edited by Fae Brauer and Serena Keshavjee This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Fae Brauer, Serena Keshavjee and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7253-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7253-9

FOR OUR CHILDREN —

MARCUS, LARA, ADAM AND JURA

NADIR AND DEVIN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... ix Contributors .............................................................................................................................. xi Introduction ...............................................................................................................................xv The Janus Face of Evolution: Degeneration, Devolution and Extinction in the Anthropocene Fae Brauer Chapter One ................................................................................................................................1 Allegorizing Extinction: Humboldt, Darwin and the Valedictory Image Sarah Thomas Chapter Two ..............................................................................................................................19 Fernand Cormon's Cain: Man between Primitive and Prophet Isabelle Havet Chapter Three ............................................................................................................................41 Mouths that Bite: Rabies and Louis Pasteur's Public Face Mary Hunter Chapter Four ............................................................................................................................61 “La Vie renaissant de la mort”: Albert Besnard’s “Non-Miraculous” History of Creation Serena Keshavjee Chapter Five ..............................................................................................................................83 “All for one and one for all”: Evolution and Organicism in the Art of Emile Gallé and the Ecole de Nancy Jessica M. Dandona Chapter Six ..............................................................................................................................107 Regenerating the “Man-Beast”: Embodying Brutishness in Fin de Siglo Spanish Art Oscar E. Vázquez Chapter Seven .........................................................................................................................127 Becoming Simian: Devolution as Evolution in Transformist Modernism Fae Brauer Chapter Eight ..........................................................................................................................157 Beauty and the Beast: Imaging Human Evolution at the Moscow Darwin Museum in the 1920s Pat Simpson Chapter Nine ...........................................................................................................................179 Nerves Liquefy: Dada’s Challenge to Evolution Peter Mowris

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Table of Contents

Chapter Ten .............................................................................................................................193 Regenerative Tanning: Pigmentation, Neo-Lamarckian Eugenics and the Visual Culture of the Cure de Soleil Tania Woloshyn Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................217 Visual Cultures of Hope and Fear: Degeneration and the Threat of Dehumanization Serena Keshavjee Bibliography compiled by Sylvie Boisjoli ............................................................................223 Index compiled by Elspeth Broady .........................................................................................248

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book began its life at the 38th Annual Conference and Bookfair of the Association of Art Historians in 2012, held at The Open University from 29-31 March 2012. There, all of the contributors to this book í as well as Anthea Callen í gave excellent papers which engendered vibrant and stimulating discussions. For so generously supporting this conference session, we would like to thank the Conference Convenors, Carol Richardson, Piers Baker-Bates and Veronica Davies, as well as the Conference Administrator, Cheryl Platt. For contacting us about the prospect of publishing these papers as a book with Cambridge Scholars Publishing, we would like to thank its Author Liaison Director, Carol Koulikourdi. For transforming the manuscript into a published book, we would also like to thank the Typesetting Manager at Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Amanda Millar, for the invaluable printing expertise provided, and the Commissioning Editor, Samuel Baker, for the wise counsel readily given. For designing such a spectacular cover and for amending the cover text so patiently, we would like to also thank the Designer, David Luscombe. For her wealth of knowledge and close scrutiny of the text to compile the Index, we would like to thank Elspeth Broady. For turning our references into a coherent Bibliography, we would like to thank the Bibliographer Coordinator, Sylvie Boisjoli. For organizing the biographical information, we would like to thank Alexandra Kroeger. For undertaking some general research for this book, we would like to thank Emily Doucet. For funding Sylvie Boisjoli, Alexandra Kroeger and Emily Doucet, we would like to thank the Social Science Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). For invaluable guidance with the research, we would also like to thank Liv Valmestad, Architecture and Art Librarian, University of Manitoba and Alexandra Büttner, Bibliotheca Laureshamensis, Univeritatsbibliothek, Heidelberg. For providing welcome funding for the research and writing of much of this book, we would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), UK; Australian Research Council (ARC); British Academy; Wellcome Trust, Social Science Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds Québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture. For their incisive scrutiny of each chapter of this book and for their invaluable appraisals of them, we should like to thank our excellent team of expert peer reviewers: Professor Oliver A. I. Botar, University of Manitoba, School of Art; Associate Professor Maria P. Grindhart, Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design, Georgia State University, Atlanta; Dr. Laura Karp Lugo, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne; Professor Barbara Larson, University of West Florida; Professor Marsha Morton, Pratt Institute History Department, Brooklyn, New York; Assistant Professor Martha Lucy, Drexel University, Westphal, College of Media, Arts and Design; Associate Professor Russell McGregor, James Cook University College of Arts, Society and Education; Professor John Milner, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, and Dr. Gavin Parkinson, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. For their generosity with access to archives, artwork and illustrations, we would like to thank Martine Gagnebin and the Rollier family; Chris Lyons, Librarian, Osler Library of the History of Medicine, Montréal; ADAGP, Paris; DACS, London 2013; SORDRAC; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Archives Charmet; Art Gallery of South Australia; Art Resource, New York; Bibliotheca Laureshamensis, Univeritätsbibliothek, Heidelberg; Bibliothèque National de France; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie; British Museum of Natural History Archive; Centre national des arts plastiques, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, France, CNAP; Collection Musée de Vannes, Vannes; Conservatoire numérique des Arts et Métiers, CNUM; English Heritage Down House Archive; Geelong Art Gallery, Australia; Institut Pasteur í Musée Pasteur, Paris; Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Harlan E. Moore Charitable Trust Fund; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée de l'École de Nancy; Musée départemental de Oise, Jean-Louis

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Acknowledgements

Bouché; Musée d'Orsay; Musée d'Orsay Documentation; Musée Lorrain, Ville de Nancy; Musée Picasso, Paris; Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona; Photographers: Calveras / Mérida / Sagristà; Muséum National d'histoire naturelle, Jardin des Plantes, Paris; National Gallery of Australia; National Gallery of Victoria; New York Historical Society; Réunion des Musées Nationaux (RMN); Sorbonne Nouvelle, Salle des Autorités; The State Darwin Museum, Moscow; State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Jean-Christophe Doërr, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne; Wadsworth Atheneum; Wellcome Library, Wellcome Trust, London and the Kirk Warren Studio. We would like to thank our universities and other institutions for their steadfast support of all the contributors to this project. Fae Brauer would like to thank The University of New South Wales Art and Design National Institute for Experimental Art (NIEA) and the University of East London School of Arts and Digital Industries and the Centre for Cultural Studies Research (CCSR); Jessica Dandona would like to thank The Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Isabelle Havet would like to thank the University of Delaware; Mary Hunter would like to thank McGill University; Serena Keshavjee would like to thank the University of Winnipeg; Peter Mowris would like to thank The University of Texas at Austin; Pat Simpson would like to thank the University of Hertfordshire School of Creative Arts; Sarah Thomas would like to thank Birkbeck College, University of London, and Kingston University; Oscar E. Vázquez would like to thank the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Tania Woloshyn would like to thank McGill University, the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick and the Wellcome Trust, London. For their groundbreaking research, outstanding ideas and brilliant essays, we would like to thank wholeheartedly our contributors. While it has not always been an easy or simple journey from the Association of Art Historians' Conference to publication of this book, it has certainly been a very exciting and rewarding one due to the wonderful work of our contributors. Their readiness to discuss the ramifications of their ideas and their openness to consider elaborations and refinements have enabled us to work as an harmonious, cooperative and productive team from start to finish. Last but by no means least we would like to thank our nearest and dearest: Our families and friends for supporting us throughout this journey with their constant love and affection. Fae Brauer and Serena Keshavjee

CONTRIBUTORS

Fae (Fay) Brauer is Professor of Art and Visual Culture at the University of East London Arts and Digital Industries Centre for Cultural Studies Research (CCSR) and Associate Professor in Art History and Cultural Theory at The University of New South Wales Art and Design National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA). Her research explores interdisciplinary intersections between modern art, visual culture, occulture, science and medicine, as well as the cultural politics redolent in art and cultural institutions as demonstrated by her books, Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre (four times nominated for Best Book of the Year); The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms and Visual Culture (nominated for Best Book of the Year in Art, Literature and Science by The Royal Society) and Art, Sex and Eugenics, Corpus Delecti (awarded Best Book Anthology of the Year in 2009 by the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand). Her forthcoming books include Regenerating the Body: Modernist Biocultures, NeoLamarckian Eugenics and the Fitness Imperative; Solidarist Species: The Art and Science of Transformism; Politicizing Cubism: Criminality, Degeneracy, Sexualities and War; Canvasing Perversion: Picasso, Science and Medicine, and Unmasking Masculinity: Imaging Hysterical Men in Virile France. Jessica M. Dandona is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Her publications include “La Lorraine Artiste: Modernity, Nature, and the Nation in the Work of Émile Gallé and the École de Nancy,” in Place and Locality in Modern France (eds. Philip Whalen and Patrick Young, 2014) and “Écriture Artiste: Inscription as Ornament in a Finde-Siècle Vase by Émile Gallé”, which is being considered for publication by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, Italy. Following her PhD dissertation from the University of California at Berkeley on Emile Gallé and the Ecole de Nancy, her research has focused upon the relationship between Art Nouveau and theories of nationhood in fin-de-siècle France, with a particular interest in the conceptualization and articulation of national identity through scientific discourse. Her current work on a book about Gallé, regionalism, and evolution entitled Nature and the Nation in Fin-de-Siècle France: The Art of Emile Gallé and the Ecole de Nancy is under contract with Ashgate. Isabelle Havet is the Sewell C. Biggs Fellow, University Dissertation Fellow, and Lecturer at the University of Delaware. Her doctoral dissertation at the University of Delaware, “Beneath the Surface: Representations of Subterranean Space, 1850-1900,” explores the role of depictions of underground and submarine territories in the definition of social space and new aesthetic codes during the Second Empire and Third Republic in France. She has recently been awarded a Fulbright Grant and a Research Fellowship in Material Culture Studies, supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities to research Félix Nadar’s photographs of the subterranean infrastructure of Paris and the emergence of “underground landscape.” Mary Hunter is Assistant Professor in Art History at McGill University. Her book, Facing Medicine: Visualising Medical Masculinities in late nineteenth-century Paris (Manchester University Press) is forthcoming in 2015. Her other publications, including “Effroyable Réalisme’: Wax, Femininity and the Madness of Realist Fantasies,” Canadian Art Review (RACAR) (vol. 33, no. 1-2, 2008) focuses upon the intersections between art and medicine. Her current research project examines experiences of waiting in fin-de-siècle France. Her essay, Chapter Three, in this book has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC).

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Serena Keshavjee teaches modern art and architecture at the University of Winnipeg in Canada. Her research focuses upon the confluence of art and science in fin-de-siècle France. Her articles addressing the importance of Lamarckian evolution in France include: “Natural History, Cultural History, and the Art History of Elie Faure,” Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide (vol. 8, issue 2, Autumn 2009) and “Eugène Carrière and Auguste Rodin and the Natural Laws of Making Art,” Cantor Arts Centre Journal (vol. 5, 2006-7). In 2009 Keshavjee edited a special volume of Canadian Art Review (RACAR) on “Science, Symbolism and Fin-de-Siècle Visual Culture,” (no. 34, vol.1, 2009). Keshavjee’s chapter, ““Cristalliser leur pensée’: Emile Gallé’s Pasteur Vase and the Aestheticization of Scientific Imagery in fin de siècle France”, is due to be published in the book, Symbolist Origins of Modern Art (eds., Michelle Facos and Thor Mednick) for Ashgate Publishing in 2015. Currently she is completing her SSHRC supported book project examining attitudes towards science, nature and art provisionally entitled The Transformist Aesthetic. While completing research for this project, Keshavjee was assisted by an SSHRC-funded research grant. Peter Mowris is an independent scholar. His highly-awarded PhD dissertation at The University of Texas at Austin, under the supervision of Linda Dalrymple Henderson, has led to articles, conference papers and most recently, the book chapter on Max Ernst’s microbe paintings in the Ashgate Publishing volume, Surrealism and Nature (eds., Gavin Parkinson and Stephanie Taylor) and The Most Fantastic Movements, on the critical reception of physiological psychology in the context of Dada and Surrealism. His forthcoming book with Ashgate Publishing, The Subversive Uses of Nerve Psychology and Dada in Surrealism, is on the roles of anarchism and humour in the early twentieth century avant-garde. Patricia A. Simpson is Reader in Social History of Art and Research Tutor at the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire. She has published extensively on Soviet art and culture in journals such as Russian Review, Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Sculpture Journal, including “Liberation and Containment: Revisualising the Eugenic and Evolutionary Ideal of the Fizkul'turnitsa in 1944”, International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 28, nos. 8-9, May-June 2011. She has also contributed chapters on eugenics and Darwinism in Soviet visual culture in Art Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti (eds., Fae Brauer and Anthea Callen (Ashgate Publishing, 2008) and The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms and Visual Culture (eds., Fae Brauer and Barbara Larson (University Press of New England, 2009). Presently she is preparing the book, Art and Evolutionary Biopolitics: The Case of the Moscow Darwin Museum. The chapter in this book is based largely on research funded by a British Academy Small Grant 2010-2011. Sarah Thomas is a Lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London and at Kingston University in England. Most recently she has published on the art history and museology of the British Empire, the role and particularities of the itinerant artist, and the iconography of slavery. Major publications include: The Encounter, 1802: Art of the Flinders and Baudin Voyages (Art Gallery of South Australia, 2002); “Slaves and the Spectacle of Torture: British Artists in the New World, 1800-1834”, in World Art and the Legacies of Colonial Violence (ed., Daniel Rycroft, Ashgate Publishing, 2013), and journal articles including “The Spectre of Empire in the British Art Museum,” in the Museum History Journal (January 2013). In 2013 she was the recipient of a Cultural Engagement Fellowship from the University of Oxford, during which time she worked with Tate Britain on their proposed exhibition for 2015-2016 on the subject of Art and Empire. She has recently completed a PhD thesis entitled “Witnessing Slavery: Travelling Artists in an Age of Abolition” at The University of Sydney.

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Oscar E. Vázquez is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign. He also holds a professorial position there with the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese and with the Center for Latin American Caribbean Studies. He has published essays in anthologies including Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place (eds. Eleanor M. Hight and Gary Sampson (Routledge, 2002) and Early Modern Visual Allegory. Embodying Meaning (eds. Cristelle Baskins and Lisa Rosenthal (Ashgate Publishing, 2007). His essay examining theories of parody in light of critical views of the devolving quality of painting in fin de siglo Spain, “Apropiación, anti-apropiación y parodia en la pintura española a finales del siglo diecinueve”, was published in Apropiarse del arte: impulsos y pasiones, ed. Olga Sáenz (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2012). His book, Inventing the Art Collection: Patrons, Markets and the State in Nineteenth-Century Spain was published by Pennsylvania State University Press, in 2001. Currently his new book, The End, Again. Degeneration and Visual Culture in Modern Spain, is under press review. Tania Anne Woloshyn is a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick. With Anne Dymond, she co-edited a special issue of RIHA journal, “New Directions in Neo-Impressionism” (July 2012). Her most recent publications include ““Kissed by the Sun”: Tanning the Skin of the Sick with Light Therapeutics, c.18901930”, A Medical History of Skin: Scratching the Surface (eds. Kevin Siena and Jonathan Reinarz, 2013), and “Patients Rebuilt: Dr Auguste Rollier’s Heliotherapeutic Portraits, c.1903-1944”, in Patient Portraits, A Special Issue of Medical Humanities (June 2013). While completing the research for this project, she was a SSHRC-funded Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History & Communication Studies, McGill University. Her books, Soaking-up the Rays: The Visual Culture of Light Therapeutics, 100 years in images, and Critical Concepts in the Visual Culture of Medicine: Art and Medical Histories at the Crossroads, are forthcoming.

INTRODUCTION THE JANUS FACE OF EVOLUTION: DEGENERATION, DEVOLUTION AND EXTINCTION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE FAE BRAUER

Living amidst the sixth mass extinction in the Holocene epoch, endangered species and the loss of biodiversity have become everyday news.1 Since the advent of industrial capitalism and global warming, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have increased at an alarming rate. With the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air is now higher than it has been in the last million years with a deleterious impact upon the survival of 140,000 species ranging from the Panamanian Golden Frog to the Sumatran Rhino. With this carbon dioxide absorbed by our oceans, their pH levels have been lowered and marine life destroyed, the Caribbean Monk Seal being officially declared extinct in 2008. Due to ocean acidification, coral reefs that were once perceived as threats to human survival, particularly during Captain James Cook's voyages, are now identified as so “inherently fragile” that they are threatened to the extent that they may become extinct by the end of the 21st century.2 With the current rate of anthropogenic mass extinction estimated to be astronomically higher than any of the five previous periods of mass extinctions in the history of the earth,3 President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Peter Raven has predicted dire ramifications: We have driven the rate of biological extinction, the permanent loss of species, up several hundred times beyond its historical levels, and are threatened with the loss of a majority of all species by the end of the 21st century.4

Like many other scientists working in this field, Raven identifies the culprit as human. As Stephen J. Gould exclaimed in 1980, “We are doing it to ourselves”.5 So distinctive has humandriven extinction become since the Industrial Revolution, particularly with the burning of fossil fuels during the Atomic Age, that in 2000 Nobel Laureate, Paul Crutzen, in collaboration with biologist, Eugene Stoermer, proposed that it signified a new era in the Holocene that needed to be designated by the term, Anthropocene.6 Inherent to human evolution as conceived in terms of industrial and technological progress, extinction then appears as its flip-side in the Anthropocene, if not, as I have entitled this essay, its Janus face. Inscribed as rampant, the concept of this sixth mass extinction and the Anthropocene is integral to a paranoiac discourse of ecological disaster and a culture of catastrophism, which seems to have been grafted onto the discourses of nuclear extermination from the end of the Cold War.7 The accelerating rate of climate change and ecological damage encompassed by the concept of the Anthropocene has ignited a dystopian culture concerned with destruction, loss and the end of animal-animal and human-animal species, alongside memory, mourning and melancholia.8 Epitomized by the doomsday clock devised to calculate the end from unchecked climate change and the nuclear arms race, the apocalyptic dimensions of this culture are not dissimilar to the phobic cultures of degeneration, devolution and extinction that circulated a century ago through parts of Europe in response to the theories of Charles Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck, as well as those of Paul Broca, Camille Flammarion, Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Huxley, Félix Le Dantec, Cesare Lombroso, Charles Lyell, Bénédite-Augustin Morel, Louis Pasteur, Edmond Perrier, Elisée Reclus, Rudolf Steiner, Hippolyte Taine, Wilhelm Wundt, and others explored in this book.9

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Degenerating Bodies, Doomed Races and Cro-Magnon Men

Figure I.1 No. 1, François, 34 years old, and no. 2, Joseph, 22 years old, arrested intellectual development, B. A. Morel, Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l'espèce humaine (Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1857) Plate 1. Public Domain.

One of the earliest to theorize how evolution was Janus-faced was Darwin. In On the Origin of Species, he clearly stated how extinction comprised the other face of natural selection: The extinction of species and of whole groups of species, which has played so conspicuous a part in the history of the organic world, almost inevitably follows on the principle of natural selection ... Extinction and natural selection ... go hand in hand. 10

Exactly how this happened niggled him throughout his life. Just before he died in 1881, Darwin voiced his concern that a deep understanding of the causal conditions still remained conspicuously absent in scholarship. “I have realized over the last twenty-five years that the key gap in our thinking is the nature of extinction”, he confessed.11 Rather than extinction being sudden, as proposed by such catastrophists as Georges Cuvier, Darwin regarded it as slow but sure. “Species and groups of species gradually disappear, one after another”, he explained, “first from one spot, then from another, and finally from the world.”12 A staunch proponent of Gradualism, like his close friend, the Uniformitarian geologist, Charles Lyell, Darwin not only disputed the sudden disappearance of a mass of species during the Cretaceous and Palaeozoic periods but also considered that it arose from ignorance infested with cataclysm paranoia. “So profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being”, he wrote, “and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!”13 In On the Origin of Species, this extinction of species was posited by Darwin as the inevitable outcome of natural laws mostly pertaining to “natural selection”, and from its fifth edition in 1869, his concept of “survival of the fittest”. “The inhabitants of each successive period in the world's history have beaten their predecessors in the race for life, and are”, he explained, “insofar, higher in the scale of nature.”14 While the disappearance of “species” or “inhabitants” unable to compete “in the race for life” was also conceived as a natural process that occurred gradually, in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin theorized how the intervention of humans into evolution could lead to mass

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extinction, as verified by the outcomes of colonization, particularly the impact of Western imperialism upon indigenous people. Once his theories were correlated with the accumulating evidence of decline and degeneration, they helped to shape a discourse and culture of catastrophism around the fin-de-siècle of the nineteenth century comparable in many ways to the discourses of catastrophism of the sixth mass extinction around the fin-de-siècle of the twentieth century. The formation of this discourse and culture by first publication of On the Origin of Species until 1930 forms the chronological framework of this book. This period has been aptly called “the golden age of Lamarckism”, as will be revealed in many of its chapters and its Conclusion.15

Figure I.2 Forty-seven Photographs of criminals, with a mask in the centre; Cesare Lombroso, L'Uomo Delinquente, Turin: Fratelli Bocca Editori, 1889, Volume I, Table XIII. Wellcome Images L0030261.

Just before the first publication of On the Origin of Species, a wide range of European evolutionary scientists, criminal anthropologists and medical psychiatrists had begun to notice a profound paradox: Although European science, economies and indeed civilization appeared to be progressing, more and more individual illnesses and pathologies were reported. Two years after Bénédite-Augustin Morel provided plentiful documentation in both image and text of cretinism in

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low-lying areas of France in 1857,16 (Fig. I.1) Cesare Lombroso did so in Lombardia.17 Morel's images and Lombroso's photographs with measurements of the hollowness in skulls of notorious criminals in Italy, as demonstrated by his illustrations for L'Uomo Delinquente (Fig. I.2), was seized upon as a link between criminality and atavism, and as an explanation for the increase in criminality.18 Following the Western concept of the transparent body in which its exterior was presumed to be a reflection of its interior state, both Morel and Lombroso searched for tell-tale marks of this devolution upon the outer body.19 Morel detected them in squint eyes, harelips, webbed fingers, flat palates, twisted limbs, distorted ears and asymmetries in the two halves of the face and cranium. Since these marks seemed to leave an indelible stain that betrayed their devolution, Morel called them “stigmata” and linked them to the condition he called “degeneration”.20 Published two years before publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Morel defined this condition in his Traité des dégénérescences physiques as: “A degeneration and morbid or sickly deviation from a primitive or normal type of humanity.”21 At its most extreme, this deviation meant that a particular social group, tribe or race would no longer be able to propagate and would therefore be doomed to extinction. To regenerate France, Morel postulated a Lamarckian solution of breeding out “dégénérescence héréditaire” through judicious procreation. Nevertheless after the FrancoPrussian War and the Commune, his successors were far less optimistic. By the end of the French Commune, the first volume of Darwin's The Descent of Man had been translated.22 In the chapter devoted to extinction, “On the Races of Man”, Darwin acknowledged that had it been long speculated that races had undergone partial or complete extinction following plagues, famines or such natural catastrophes as hurricanes and volcanic eruptions. Yet he pointed out that extinction did not arise solely from cataclysmic events or environmental change. The survival of the Terai at the foot of the Himalayas and the Fuegians at the southern-most tip of America í whom Darwin had encountered on his Beagle voyage í revealed a facility amongst diverse races to withstand environmental conditions hazardous to their existence.23 Elaborating his theory of “natural selection”, Darwin deduced that extinction mostly followed from competition between tribes and races, the fittest being the ones that survived. Their fitness did not just depend upon their good health and vigour, but their fertility, their numbers, and most of all upon what Darwin called “the grade of their civilization”.24 It was due to these factors that Darwin considered those he called “modern civilized nations” had been able swiftly to overcome the indigenous peoples of Australia and New Zealand. “When civilized nations come into contact with barbarians,” he explained, “the struggle is short.”25 However, the two most potent of all causes of extinction were, he claimed, “lessened fertility” and “ill-health”.26 “Decreasing numbers will sooner or later lead to extinction”, he warned.27 This “doomed race” theory seemed to be only corroborated by the impact of Western colonization upon indigenous peoples, such so-called “vanishing races” as the Australian Aborigine and the New Zealand Maori appearing to fulfill Darwin’s prophecy that technologically advanced civilizations had a fatal impact upon so-called “inferior” ones. The pictorial articulation of this “doomed race” theory is unravelled in the first chapter of this book by Sarah Thomas. Scrutinizing the allegorical paintings of indigenous peoples painted in the middle of the nineteenth century by Eugene von Guérard in Australia and by Albert Bierstadt in North America, Thomas reveals that both of these academically trained painters were aware of the urgency of capturing these races before it was too late. Following the ways in which the indigenous people depicted by these painters had been mythologized as “doomed to die”, Thomas points out that they were either conspicuously absent from their paintings of the American and Australian landscape or submerged within deep melancholic shadow, as if on the verge of disappearing through self-extinction rather than through bloody conflicts and colonial agency. Locating these paintings as “poised on the cusp” between the theories of Alexander von Humboldt and Darwin, Thomas concludes that they “actively participated in the type of extinction discourse that ultimately - if often unwittingly served to justify the unparalleled global decimation of indigenous peoples in the colonial era.”28 At the same time, the propensity of European nations to evolve was being closely scrutinized, particularly after the Franco-Prussian War.

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Since “survival of the fittest” seemed to be demonstrated by the Franco-Prussian War, it was the first world conflict to be interpreted in Darwinian terms.29 Although Mary Hunter points out in Chapter Three that Louis Pasteur believed France's defeat was largely due to the lack of State support for science and technology, the cause was linked by France’s population demographer, Dr. Jacques Bertillon, to its waning fertility, declining birthrate and decreasing numbers.30 Following The Descent of Man, the defeat was also directly linked to the unfitness of French soldiers, as well as their lesser numbers, by comparison to the greater “vigour” and “good health” of German soldiers.31 In Darwinian terms, Prussia had proven to possess a higher “grade of civilization”.32 By no means was this anxiety dissipated with the formation of the Third Republic, most French conscripts being found unfit for military service.33 Not only did this generate a crisis in masculinity and virility but it also compounded a widespread diagnosis of the French race as a spent force.34 When France’s defeat at the hands of the Germans was diagnosed through Darwin’s theories articulated in The Descent of Man, it was easy for commentators to conclude that France showed all the requisite signs of a civilization in decline as confirmed by the Commune.

Figure I.3 Eugène Girard, La femme émancipée répandant la lumière sur le monde, 1871; lithograph reproduced in Series J. Lecerf, No. 4. Musée Carnavalet, Paris.

The analogies often drawn between the violence under the Commune and the bloodshed during the Reign of Terror in the First Republic revealed a deep-seated fear of a barbaric regression. While the mass culture of the Commune was identified with the degeneracy of wild animals and hysterics, those male Communards deemed responsible for this regression were bestialized, as illustrated by the fate of the notorious Realist painter, Gustave Courbet who, as Director of Art, was held responsible for the dismantling of the Vendôme Column.35 Female communards, particularly the notorious “petroleuses”, fared no better, being satirized as hysterics ready for hospitalization or indeed asylumization at Salpêtrière.36 Given the large numbers admitted to the Salpêtrière Neurological Clinic by Jean Martin Charcot from the beginning of the Third

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Republic,37 they were also stigmatized as irrational, sexually depraved and hysterical, as illustrated by Eugène Girard’s cartoon (Fig. I.3). Portrayed as screaming while running with their hair raised and their eyes ablaze, Girard’s “petroleuses” or “emancipated woman” as he ironically calls her, is literally following the pun of the title, throwing light on the world. Since this visual culture reinforced sensationalist press reports of the Communard’s transformation of Paris into a veritable inferno, they were instrumental in spawning a fear of savage depravity, barbaric destruction, degeneration and devolution. None theorized this fear more articulately than the philosophical naturalist who lectured on “natural selection” at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Hippolyte Taine. In his six-volume history, The Origins of Contemporary France, Taine linked this era of insurrection and barbaric regression to a deep national malaise: Self-destruction and racial degeneration.38 In his endeavour to explain this upheaval in Darwinian terms, Taine surmized that those French citizens who had become intoxicated with the fervour of revolution had devolved much further back through the stages of evolution to the most savage state of all “ape-like creatures” notorious for their plundering; i.e. the baboon.39 As Taine writes: From the peasant, the labourer and the bourgeois pacified and tamed by old civilization, we see all of a sudden spring forth the barbarian, and still worse, the primitive animal, the grinning, sanguinary, wanton baboon, who chuckles while he slays and gambols over the ruin he has accomplished.40

As he found no difference between them and the invaders of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, Taine dramatically concluded that “the Huns, the Heruli, the Vandals and the Goths will come neither from the north, nor from the Black Sea; they are in our very midst.”41 Following the legacies of Darwin and Georg Hegel, Taine insisted that it was time for his generation to judge itself according to “race-milieu-moment”: Its own time, its environment and most of all, its fitness as a race.42 They had to try to fathom whether the violence committed during times of insurrection, when each was prepared to choke, stab and dismember their neighbours, had emanated from either a mob mentality theorized as crowd psychology by Gustave Le Bon, or from a far deeper malaise. Scrutinizing how France had performed as a race from the 1789 revolution until the 1870 Commune was essential, according to Taine, in order to ascertain whether through hereditary factors the French race was destined to devolve to its bloodthirsty Gallic roots. In light of research published by Paul Broca into polygenism and the evolution of the French brain, and most of all by Darwin about the struggle for life in On the Origin of Species, Taine’s generation had to assess whether they were even capable of evolving as a race. The ramifications of Taine's theory upon the picturing of atavism after the Commune is explored in the second chapter of this book by Isabelle Havet. There she reveals how and why Fernand Cormon’s monumental painting, Cain, substantially departs from the Biblical narrative to convey the Janus face of evolution (Fig. 2.1) and disrupts the forward-moving progression captured in Thomas Huxley’s illustration of the evolution from gibbon, orang-utan, chimpanzee and gorilla to man (Fig. I.4) Painted in the aftermath of la semaine sanglante that ended the Commune, when thousands of French men and women slaughtered one another, the depiction of Cain murdering his brother would have struck a dissonant chord within French collective memory. Cormon's referencing of such bloody battles signalled man’s potential to revert to barbaric, violent behaviour against even the closest of kin. Havet elucidates the reasons why Cormon rejected Christian morality in order to show that rather than fleeing from the wrath of Jehovah, the first murderer and his progeny appeared in primordial lands, as if emerging from their nebulous animal past. In seeming to depict the generations spawned by Cain at different stages of evolution, Cormon was denounced for violating the so-called natural order and reducing painting to an “an anthropology lesson”. Yet although the bodies appear bestialized as “simian types”, Havet points out they are far removed from the diagrams of either Thomas Huxley or Paul Broca showing Homo sapiens and primates evolving gradually from a common ancestor (Fig. I.4). Rather than representing the progressive stages of human evolution from the least-evolved Neanderthal to the most-evolved Homo sapiens, Havet considers that the range of physiognomies captured by Cormon in a jumble of bodies and craniums conveys the “infinitely variable” process of transmutation and the imminent possibilities

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of devolution. These possibilities seem to be embodied in the double identity in which Cormon inscribed Cain: He is either a solitary wanderer excoriated from his community due to his manic destructiveness, as signified by the right-hand side of the painting, or he is a prophetic leader like Vercingétorix (Fig. 2.7) able to unify a community and to facilitate its racial evolution through Solidarism, as signified by the youngest member of the tribe on the lap of its mother í a paleskinned, golden-haired child.

Figure I.4 Waterhouse Hawkins, Frontispiece, Thomas Huxley, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (London: Williams and Norgate, 1863); Public Domain.

Cormon's anthropological details seemingly respond to the French mania for excavating its prehistory from France's Stone Age as well as Broca's craniometrical classifications of French evolutionary brain types. Yet the juxtaposition of Cormon's Stone and Iron Age artefacts and tools, with diversely evolved craniums and physiognomies, ultimately engages, according to Havet, Taine's insistence that French citizens reassess their potential to evolve as a race í not just in light of Darwinian models of history but Neo-Lamarckian ones in which environmental and hereditary factors prevail. With Cain displayed when full-amnesty for Communards was being heatedly debated in the Chambre des Députés, spectators at the 1880 Salon were then faced with the choice of adhering to one of the two evolutionary models in which Cormon inscribes Cain.43 They could degenerate and devolve to the “primitive” bloodthirsty Gallic warrior pictured separated from his tribe who, like Cain, was prepared to destroy his brother and who, like the Communards, would be exiled from their homeland for doing so. Alternatively they could evolve and regenerate the French race through Neo-Lamarckian collaboration and cooperation. With the prospect of devolution, degeneration and extinction looming large, regeneration seemed to be France's only hope of survival, particularly as theorized by Neo-Lamarckian evolutionists. Hence although Darwinian evolutionary theory has been privileged in much of the literature on this period, such historians of science as Peter Bowler, Richard Burkhardt, Pietro Corsi and Robert Richards, as Serena Keshavjee stresses in Chapter Four and as I establish in Chapter Seven, have long shown that the dominant evolutionary theories at this time were drawn from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

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“The power of life”: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Neo-Lamarckism During the Moral Order Regime that followed the Commune when “Church, Monarchy and Military” were extolled and Creationism taught, the publication and education of evolutionism was banned in France, as is elaborated in Chapters Three, Four and Seven.44 While French translations of The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals had been published in 1873, as well as a new edition of Lamarck's Philosophie Zoologique, it was not until 1876 that Darwin's The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants was translated. Between 1878 and 1882, it was followed by The Fertilization of Orchids by Insects, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom, Cross Fertilization of Flowers, Different Forms of Flowers, The Power of Movements in Plants, and Insectivorous Plants.45 For such French scientists as Alfred Giard, Marie-Yves Delage, Felix Le Dantec, Jean de Lanessan í the close associate of Pasteur í and Perrier, The Descent of Man provided a valid theory to account for France’s defeat, its declining natality and escalating degeneracy.46 At the same time, as I argue in Chapter Seven, Darwin's later work provided important tools to determine evolution and regeneration of the French race, especially when fused with the theories of Lamarck to forge Neo-Lamarckism.47

Figure I.5 Léon Fagel, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck: “A Lamarck / Fondateur de la doctrine de l'evolution”, 1908, bronze sculpture on sandstone plinth, Place Valhubert entrance of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Public Domain.

When the Jardin du Roi was reorganized during the French Revolutions and became in 1793 the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Lamarck was appointed as a professor and asked to analyse the organisms of invertebrates. On the basis of this research, he rejected Georges Cuvier's concept

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of extinction arising from cataclysmic geological events and instead developed a model of gradual evolutionism that Corsi has aligned with Charles Lyell's uniformitarian principles of geology.48 Lamarck also developed his theory on the spontaneous generation of life through the influence of the natural environment. From his investigations of the production of the simplest forms of life in nature, he deduced that all other forms of life could be produced and altered by nature in terms of organic mutability and organic diversity. As he put it in 1802: Once the difficult step of admitting spontaneous generation is made, no important obstacle stands in the way of our being able to recognize the origin and order of the different productions of nature.

To account for organic diversity, Lamarck developed a two-pronged theory of Transformism, entailing first “the power of life” to generate a greater complexity in the evolution of species through the dynamics of vital fluids, and second, the use and disuse of organs in relation to the environment and the ways in which their use could become habits or acquired characteristics that could be inherited.49 “Great alterations in the environments of animals lead to great alterations in their needs, and these alterations in their needs necessarily lead to others in their activities”, Lamarck explained. “Now if the new needs become permanent, the animals then adopt new habits which last as long as the needs that evoked them.”50 Hence instead of the structure and diversity of species being the result of Darwin's “natural selection”, “survival of the fittest” or “sexual selection”, Lamarck held that they arose from habit, which had in turn emanated from adaptation to the environment, as Lamarck explained: It was not the body and its parts that give rise to habits, to the way of life of animals, but on the contrary it is the habits, the way of life and all the influential circumstances that have with time established the form of the bodies and the parts of animals. With new forms, new faculties have been acquired and little by little nature has arrived at the state where we see her now.

Due to the constant transmutation of species within their environments, Lamarck was sceptical about widespread extinction having occurred in the earth's history.51 At the same time, given his acute awareness of the increasingly deleterious impact of humans upon nature by 1817, this did not prevent him from foreseeing mass extinction: “One would say that man is destined to exterminate himself after having rendered the globe uninhabitable.”52 During his lifetime Lamarck well recognized the possibilities of devolution, particularly as he envisaged that the transmutation of species could lead to the downfall of “perfect” organisms and trigger a degenerative spiral.53 While he theorized how organs could be strengthened through use to become distinctive characteristics, he also recognized the converse of this theory that when weakened due to disuse, they could disappear. Although the inheritance of beneficially acquired characteristics or traits could facilitate the regeneration of species, Lamarck acknowledged that the inheritance of negative traits could lead to their degeneration. Hence instead of evolution and extinction comprising the Janus face of Lamarckian theory, regeneration and degeneration did so, as was well recognized by Neo-Lamarckians. In fusing this aspect of Lamarckism with Darwin's theories of extinction, Neo-Lamarckians considered that while degeneration could lead to the extinction of a race, conversely regeneration could lead to their evolution, particularly through the inheritance of positive traits or beneficial characteristics.54 Instead of this occurring through competition between individual and diverse species, Neo-Lamarckians stressed that this could only happen through their harmonious association and cooperation. When the figure of Cain pictured by Cormon is then placed within this discursive formation of Neo-Lamarckism, it may then be read also as an allegory of the French Republic poised between rivalrous destruction and Solidarist cooperation. In striking such an uplifting note amidst the cacophony of catastrophist discourses, the Lamarckian concept of regeneration proved enormously appealing in France as elsewhere. As Richard Burkhardt explains: The idea of the inheritance of acquired characters had great breadth of appeal in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. This appeal cut across both national and

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disciplinary boundaries, and it drew support from philosophical and social considerations as well as scientific ones... The Lamarckian position was supported in England, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Russia, and the United States by embryologists, paleontologists, physiologists, bacteriologists, and plant geographers. It seemed to fit well with the embryologist’s assumption that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, with the paleontologist’s fossil sequences that seemed to display the accumulated effects of use and disuse, with the physiologist’s interest in causal rather than statistical relationships, with the bacteriologist’s understanding of the bacterium’s adaptation to environmental change, and with the plant geographer’s data on the geographic variation of forms.55

Through Darwin, Lamarck was chauvinistically reinstated by French scientists as the “greatest” of all evolutionists who had guided Darwin.56 So highly esteemed did his theories become in France through Darwin that paradoxically they lead to what Peter J. Bowler has called “The Eclipse of Darwinism”57, a term which Mark A. Largent has modified as an “interphase”.58 In France, as Stuart M. Persell surmizes, “Darwin vindicated the lost Lamarck.”59 This was crystallized by the inscription, which can be glimpsed in Fig. I.5 on the statue of Lamarck commissioned by Perrier and erected in 1909 outside the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle: “Founder of the doctrine of evolution”.60 Yet those who developed Neo-Lamarckism, according to Stephen Jay Gould, “reread Lamarck, cast aside the guts of it (continuous generation and complicating forces) and elevated one aspect of the mechanisms – inheritance of acquired characters – to a central focus it never had for Lamarck himself.”61 A fusion of Lamarck’s 1809 treatise, Zoological Philosophy with Charles Darwin’s evolutionism, the new Lamarckism entailed the transmutation of species through cultural intervention and environmental action.62 As distinct from the competitiveness and rivalry inherent in Darwin's theory of “survival of the fittest” that appeared in his 1869 publication of On the Origin of Species, Lamarck’s Transformism struck a quixotic chord amongst Republican Progressists and Solidarists striving for cooperation rather than competition, altruistic association rather than egotistical rivalry and the transmutation rather than elimination of low forms into higher species.63 In its emphasis on association, cooperation and the need for individuals to cohere in social groups like a natural organism, this new interpretation of Lamarckism justified Republican Solidarism. While Lamarck was mythologized as having conceived a Solidarist vision, his theory of Transformism was highlighted as an evolving culture in which humans could control evolution by controlling the environment. Neo-Lamarckism then seemed optimistic in its prospects for change, democratic in its applicability to all and Republican in confirming the need for health and social reform corroborated by Lamarck’s oft-quoted statement in his Power of Life: “… movements, which constitute active life, result from the action of a stimulating cause that excites them.”64 Offering a theory explaining how psychological changes of habit, physiological reuse of organs and recontrol of the environment could lead to biological evolution and cultural transformation, Neo-Lamarckism was latched onto by French Radical Republicans as a positivist justification for their programmes of secularization, scientificization and corporeal regeneration. “Between 1870 and 1940”, concludes Michel Morange, “many of the most influential French biologists were neo-Lamarckian.”65 By 1890, such Neo-Lamarckians as de Lanessan, Delage, and Giard reigned within the faculties of the Sorbonne, as they did at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle and the Chambre des Députés, as illustrated by Lanessan's election in 1881, from whence they lobbied vigorously for expansion of the scientific establishment.66 Despite a challenge to its viability posed by August Weismann in 1883, and the apparent validation of germ plasm heredity in 1900 by the rediscovery of Mendel’s Laws, Neo-Lamarckism in the form of Transformism remained the dominant model of evolutionary regeneration throughout most of the Third Republic.67 As Laurent Loisen elucidates, French Neo-Lamarckism was driven by a specific project í that of rendering the Transformist hypothesis scientific, particularly through “experimental transformism”.68 The direct effect of the environment and the inheritance of acquired characteristics found support not just in the research of scientists, naturalists, zoologists, physiologists, physicians, obstetricians, but also biologists and such microbiologists as Louis Pasteur, the subject of Chapter Three, whose students included Le Dantec. The more the French race seemed to degenerate and the more the Republic seemed to be in crisis, the more Lamarck seemed to be

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extolled as a benevolent evolutionist and regeneration asserted as a national imperative, as illustrated by Le Dantec's articles on Neo-Lamarckism regularly published in La Revue blanche and La Revue de Paris from 1897. Yet, as indicated by the numerous countries listed by Burkhardt, by no means was France the only nation in which Neo-Lamarckism was avidly pursued. As Pat Simpson also exposes in Chapter Eight, Neo-Lamarckism was integral to the discursive formation of evolution and regeneration in both pre and post-Revolutionary Russia, a statue being commissioned from Vasilii Vatagin in 1921 on the subject of Blind Lamarck and his Daughters (Fig. 8.3).

“The dusk of nations”: Rampant Degeneration at the fin-de-siècle In the wake of France’s military defeat and the social turmoil generated by the Commune, Valentin Magnan, the psychiatrist of Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir, had psychopathologized degenerescence. In his nosological system of classification, Magnan had distinguished far more types of pathological degeneracy than Morel, ranging from the Agoraphobic and Arithmomanic to the Onomatomanic and Zoomanic. Far from conceding the possibility of regeneration, let alone the prospect of countering the prospect of degeneration through breeding, Magnan considered that the reverse had happened, particularly as he found pathological degenerates generally procreated with one another, leading to “the reproduction of certain types even more defectuous”.69 Capturing the fears of many, the discourses of degeneration shifted from those of individual pathologies to the social types identified by Magnan and finally to a societal disorder. By the last third of the nineteenth century, degeneration became what Daniel Pick calls “the condition of conditions”, used to explain every physiological, pathological, social and political disaster.70 A kaleidoscope of new medico-psychiatric taxonomies and sociological paranoia, by the fin-de-siècle degeneration purportedly encompassed alcoholism, cretinism, dwarfism, hysteria, neurasthenia and syphilis; agoraphobia, algaphobia, arithmomania, claustrophobia, coprolania, dipsomania, exhibitionism, kleptomania, necrophilia, nosophilia, nosophobia, nymphomania, ononamatomania, pyromania, pyrophobia, syphilaphobia and satyriasis, suicide, poverty, strikes, criminality, anarchism, feminism, decadent literature and Modernist art.71 With escalating depopulation and rampant degeneration documented in most Western nations, the prospect of their devolving to the point of extinction was regarded as imminent by the fin-de-siècle. This festering paranoia was articulated most dramatically, if not neurotically, by the German physician based in Paris, Max Nordau. Significantly the first of five books in Nordau's treatise, Entartung, first published in 1892 and immediately translated into English as Degeneration (1895), was entitled “Fin-de-siècle: The dusk of nations”.72 His choice of this metaphor was designed to indicate that Western nations were in the twilight zone of their evolutionary cycle. This was signified by the disposition of Europeans Nordau encountered at the fin-de-siècle exuding what he described as “a compound of feverish restlessness and blunted discouragement, of fearful presage and hang-dog renunciation”.73 Nordau found it was also characterized by a mood in metropolitan cities that was palpable to “the impotent despair of a sick man, who feels himself dying by inches in the midst of an eternally living nature blooming insolently forever.”74 Championing the publications of Lombroso, particularly L'Uomo delinquente (Fig. I.2) – not insignificantly translated in English as The Born Criminal í Nordau found this morbidity manifest by the huge increase in criminality.75 In light of the treatise on Psychpathia Sexualis by Richard von Krafft Ebing, he considered it also manifest by the prevalence of sexual fetishism.76 Following the neurological research into hysteria by Charcot and particularly J. Roubinovitch's work on male hysteria,77 Nordau considered that it was also demonstrated by the increasing numbers of male and female patients at Salpêtrière diagnosed as neurasthenic and hysterical. “Degenerates, hysterics, and neurasthenics are not capable of adaptation”, he declared. “Therefore they are fated to disappear.”78 Yet more than anything else, Nordau found this degeneracy manifest by the incessant craving for novel and decadent sensations at the fin-de-siècle inflamed by avant-garde artists.

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Those chapters of this book that focus upon degeneration deconstruct this specious argument. The prospect of France's rapid devolution was only exacerbated, as Hunter reveals in Chapter Three, by such seemingly incurable diseases as Rabies and their links to pathological degeneracy, particularly as those bitten by mad dogs were invariably reported as having been transformed into convulsive beasts that foamed at the mouth. Its impact upon women was also meant to turn them into sex addicts. Due to these symptoms of bestiality and hyper-sexuality, Hunter demonstrates how Rabies was perceived as yet another signifier of degeneration in France spawned within the “sick” modern city. This was why, Hunter argues, when Louis Pasteur identified the Rabies microbe and found its cure in 1885, he was pictured at the 1886 Salon by Léon Bonnat (Fig. 3.1), Albert Edelfelt (Fig. 3.2) and Laurent Lucien Gsell (Fig. 3.3) as the rational man of science and saviour of humanity able not only to help rescue the world from extinction but also able to regenerate the French race. Even though, as Hunter illuminates, paradoxically the fear of Rabies was always far greater than its actual threat, the phobia of dehumanization and becoming animal was not just prevalent in France but, as Oscar E. Vázquez reveals in Chapter Six, it was also rampant in fin de siglo Spain. Just as France's defeat by the Prussians left a searing scar on the French psyche, so Spain's defeat by America in the Guerra hispano-estadounidense left the Spanish nation profoundly shocked and humiliated, particularly once America claimed indefinite control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippine Islands. Amidst dismay and disillusionment, the Generación del 98 was formed. This group of novelists, poets and philosophers was critically analysing the moral political and cultural crisis ensuing from this disaster when Carles Mani y Roig embarked upon the sculpture, Els Degenerats (The Degenerates) Fig. 6.1 – the focus of Chapter Six. Like Havet who illuminates in Chapter Two how Cormon's Cain may be construed as an allegory of the French Third Republic caught between two evolutionary poles, Vázquez reveals how Mani's sculpture may be read as an allegory of the Spanish nation facing degeneration and devolution at the fin de siglo, particularly in light of the Spanish translation of Nordau's Degeneration and its publication in 1902. Rather than Mani conveying the degeneration of his couple through their devolution to a previous human evolutionary state, like Cormon's picturing of Cain as Cro-Magnon man, Vázquez points out that in keeping with Mani's original title for this sculpture, Embrutecimiento í meaning both brutalization and stultification as well as the act of becoming an irrational animal í they have been dehumanized as simian. The slumped postures and stupefied listlessness of Mani's couple seem comparable to the males chosen by Morel to illustrate degeneration (Fig. I.1). Yet drawing upon the American studies of Neurasthenia conducted by George Beard, as well as those done by Gilles de la Tourette in Paris and Vicente Otis y Esquerdo in Spain, Vázquez considers these characteristics as symptomatic of this nervous disorder. Yet while both Mani's figures appear to suffer Neurasthenic exhaustion and melancholy, they also seem impotent without courage or willpower. Vázquez points out that this was exactly the definition of degenerates and mad people in 1900 provided by the physician Mateo Bonafonte, head of the Zaragoza asylum in Spain. Far from this condition being isolated to particular cases in Spanish asylums, Vázquez reveals that once aligned with increasing awareness of Spain's depopulation, the entire nation was psychopathologized as suffering from a “collective aboulia” that had left it lifeless “without a pulse”. Placed within this discursive framework, Vázquez concludes that Mani's simian humans were intended to signal the danger of the Spanish population devolving to bestial states. That the representation of simians was not always meant to be devolutionary is revealed in Chapters Seven and Eight. In Chapter Eight Patricia Simpson explores the evolutionary significations triggered by the simians depicted in Vasilii Vatagin's 1926 sculpture displayed in the Moscow Darwin Museum, Ages of Life-Age Variability in Orang-utans (Fig. 8.2). In pre-Revolutionary Russia, Simpson points out that discourses of degeneration, triggered by Morel's treatise, were as prevalent as they were in fin de siglo Spain. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Simpson reveals that official discourses were predominantly utopian to propel evolution under socialism to New Soviet Person. Nevertheless with low standards of living

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alongside rampant Typhus, Cholera, Dysentery and Syphilis, Bolshevik anxieties about degeneration continually festered, particularly in relation to the survival of socialism. Since lice propelled Typhus affected over 6.5 million people between 1918 and 1920, Simpson points out that this was the medical context for the notorious remark attributed to Lenin by Health Commissar Nikolai Semashko: “Either socialism will defeat the louse or the louse will defeat socialism.”79 With art assigned an official role in developing New Soviet Person, Simpson explores how the anthropomorphised poses and facial expressions of the simians in Life-Age Variability in Orang-utans (Fig. 8.2) were designed to be paired with those of humans in his Ages of Life-Age Variability in Humankind (Fig. 8.1) in order to signify the superiority of humans over apes as “social animals”. As distinct from the smooth skin of Vatagin's Homo-sapiens, the rough surface of the apes was meant to signify their link with raw nature. Nevertheless Simpson perceives that they differ significantly from Vatagin's 1917-1918 sculpture, Enraged Gorilla (Fig. 8.8). In depicting the orang-utans in harmonious association with one another, Simpson deduces that Vatagin endeavoured to convey their potential to evolve, particularly through Soviet Darwinian and Lamarckian concepts of cooperation. As signified by the robust baby foregrounded in Ages of Life-Age Variability in Humankind (Fig. 8.1), from this cooperation the healthy Soviet New Person would be generated, just as Cormon pictured how the healthy French Republican citizen would evolve nearly half a century earlier. Ending on this point Simpson does not embark upon the ways in which Modernism became branded as devolutionary, degenerate and decadent in the Soviet Union, particularly from the start of Josef Stalin's forced collectivization in 1928. However, Vázquez does briefly explore the conflation of Modernism with degeneration by considering how the devolution embodied by Mani's simians may also be read as a critique of the degenerate and primitive state of Spanish avant-garde art that was not far removed from Nordau's attack upon Modernism.

“Sexual psychopaths” and “Canal dredgers”: Modernism as Degeneration Dissecting the anxieties festering around the concept of degeneration and how they appeared to be manifested by the visual arts is seminal to this book, especially as so much of Nordau’s proof of societal decay came from looking at fin-de-siècle avant-garde French artists. Nordau notoriously described the avant-garde gambits of French Modernists as: .... the curious style of certain recent painters – ‘impressionists’, ‘stipplers’, or ‘mosaists’, ‘papilloteurs’ or ‘quiverers’, ‘roaring’ colorists, dyers in grey and faded tints - becomes at once intelligible to us if we keep in view the research of the Charcot school into visual derangements in degeneration and hysteria.80

Nordau likened the Realists and Naturalists, as epitomized by Émile Zola, to the “sexual psychopaths” documented by Krafft-Ebing. Although Zola decried physiological and pathological degenerescence, those bearing signs of Morelian “stigmata” being stereotyped in his RougonMacquart novels as genetically immutable, nationally noxious and ultimately self-extinguishing, his novels were likened by Nordau to “canal dredging”.81 Zola himself was characterized by Nordau as having become so obsessed with olfactory sensations that he had atavized to the state of a sexual pervert with the bestial instincts of a dog.82 Although in his later editions of Degeneration, Nordau ventured into the twentieth century and acknowledged criticisms made of his thesis, particularly from those that maintained that “degeneration and hysteria are the products of the present age”, Nordau doggedly insisted that such neuroses were the result of “vast fatigue”.83 Appearing far more fixated than the avant-garde artists Nordau decried, the very possibility of fin-de-siècle artists picturing many of the forms of degeneration that he attacked, let alone pathologically identifying with them to see beyond the spectacles masking the “sick city”, was never acknowledged. Although Albert Besnard's use of primaries was lauded by contemporary critics for their luminosity, Nordau denounced “the screaming yellow, blue and red” of Besnard’s colours that can be seen in the illustrations of his Sorbonne murals in Chapter Four by Keshavjee (Figs. 4.1, 4.3, 4.5 and 4.6). Despite the fact that

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Nordau beecame a foounding mem mber of thee Salon d’A Automne in ncepted to sshow avantt-garde art, including Art Nouveaau, he also spurned s thiss movementt, as Dandon na reveals iin Chapter Five. F Althouugh the Sym mbolists werre perturbedd, in the worrds of Sharo on Hirst, byy “a queasy, sickening feeling thaat all was not n right, th hat things w were in decaay and that one could nnot fit into one’s own surroundinngs”,84 Norddau ranked them as thee leading deegenerates in i Paris. In hhis chapter devoted to Symbolism m, Nordau likened l the Symbolist ppoets to thee neurologiccal and hystterical patieents treated by Charcoot at Salpêtrrière and dismissed thiis movemen nt as “nothin ng less thann a form off mysticism of weak-m minded andd morbidly emotional e ddegeneratio on.”85 Far frrom recognnizing the Symbolists’ S attempts aat exposing degeneracy y in a moribuund society y, Nordau maintained: m They do not link us too the future, bu ut point backw wards to timess past. Their word w is no ecsstatic propheccy, but the senselesss stammeringg and babblin ng of derangeed minds, and d what the ig gnorant hold tto be the outtbursts of gushing,, youthful vigoour and turbullent constructiive impulses are a really noth hing but the coonvulsions an nd spasms of exhauustion.86

This is eelaborated in i his con nclusion in which No ordau finally concedees the prob bability of regeneration in the twentieth t ceentury, partticularly aft fter degenerrates have bbecome exttinct. “The hysteria oof the preseent day will not last”,, he forecasst. “People will recovver from their present fatigue. The feeblle, the deg generate wiill perish.””87 Just as degenerattes would extinguish a art would suffer the same fate. ““The aberrattions of art themselvees, so he preedicts that avant-garde have no fuuture”, he declared. d “T They will diisappear wh hen civilized d humanityy shall have triumphed 88 over its exxhausted conndition.”

Figure I.6 B Bastida y Soroolla’s Sad Inh heritance, 18999, oil on can nvas, 210 × 285 2 cm., Banc ncaja Collectio on, Valencia. Public Dom main.

Howevver, as so many books on o twentiethh-century Modernism, M including thhis one, testtify, avantgarde art did just the t oppositte, flourishiing rather than dwindling in thhe twentietth century.

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Furthermore many avant-garde artists focused upon degeneration in their artwork. Neither Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch nor Pablo Picasso shied away from depicting the “stigmata” of syphilis. Viewed from this perspective, their imaging of degeneracy was not far removed from such realist paintings, known to Picasso, as Bastida y Sorolla’s Sad Inheritance (Fig. I.6), awarded at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, in which children “stigmatized” with blindness, Leprosy and Polio were juxtaposed with the healthy seaside bathers of Valencia to signal how they were harbingers of Western decline and racial extinction. Paradoxically what Nordau then failed to fathom was the ways in which paranoia over the danger of devolution that he expressed so sensationally was, in fact, betrayed by the very art and literature that he so denigrated. He also failed to comprehend why so many avant-garde artists championed the “primitive” as a healthy conduit to regeneration, rather than as a manifestation of their own degeneration.

Devolution as Evolution: Anticolonialism, “Primitivism”, Naturism and Animalism One of the prime theoretical underpinnings in the second half of this book arises from the need felt by many artists, writers and intellectuals at the fin de siècle to devolve í as viewed in Social Darwinist terms í in order to be able to go forward and evolve creatively and naturally in communion with other species. That this was not necessarily viewed by them as a backward step but more as a side step or a transgression to a different evolutionary route than the one pursued by anthropocentric industrialists, technological capitalists and investment colonialists, is testified by their explanations. Deeply disturbed by human-driven extinction, resource exploitation, mounting pollution and ecological devastation of the Anthropocene, as well as the anthropocentric divide between what Jacques Derrida calls “the beast and the sovereign”, they sought different models of evolution.89 Instead of arboreal, genealogical, teleological and hierarchical evolutionary theories concerned with origin and selection, they sought those that were lateral and rhizomatic, able to explore symbiotic alliances, transspecies affiliations, symbiogenesis and co-evolution, as offered by a range of Neo-Lamarckians. Since the environment was seminal for Neo-Lamarckians to propitious evolution, their quests for devolution as re-evolution invariably entailed quests for environments alternative to the “sick city” from peasant communities to indigenous colonies where they could grow physiologically, psychologically and creatively. Alternatively they isolated themselves within the “sick city”, recreating “primitive” enclaves within their studios with the help of folk or tribal cultures. By the fin-de-siècle when the rural way of life seemed most threatened by encroaching industrialization, the peasant became increasingly mythologized as non-degenerate and uncorrupted by metropolitan materialism. Posited as an antidote to the pretentiousness of slick “sick city” dwellers, peasants were esteemed for their authenticity, humility and sincerity. As distinct from the transience and impermanence of modernity, the peasant was valued for their rootedness to place. Igniting the “cult of going away” from the rampant degeneracy of the “sick cities” of Europe, artist communities mushroomed in remote parts of Britain, France, Hungary, Russia and Scandinavia with eighteen organized groupings of artists in peasant villages or rural communities in Germany alone by 1900, most notably at Worpswede.90 Hence while the character of Des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À Rebours locked himself away from the “sick city” of Paris to indulge his fetishes, Paul Gauguin found “something savage and primitive” amongst the “rustic superstitious simplicity” of the Breton villagers in Pont-Aven where he could throw off the shackles of progress and feel himself to be in a primal state.91 Propelled by the Anarchist Communism, Solidarism and Transformism of Reclus and Kropotkin, as well as the heliotherapy associated with the Côte d’Azur, Paul Signac settled in Saint-Tropez. Committed to Regionalist Solidarism and Transformism while conceiving of nature as an endless source of renewal, Emile Gallé refused to work in Paris, as revealed in Chapter Five. Instead he explored new forms of art and botany in his native city of Nancy, the capital of Lorraine, where he could monitor the

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symbiotic evolution of the local plants and insects in nature. Posited in a binary to the oppressive and repressive cultures of technologically industrialized cities, nature became inscribed as a raw and primal antidote to civilization and superficiality, a vitalizer of energy rather than a crucible of neurasthenia, a source of regeneration rather than degeneration that could be both emotionally and creatively liberating. Hence the quest for reparation of man's severed relationship with untrammelled nature was for Rainer Maria Rilke, a means of seeking something meaningful in the midst of uncertainty.92 For Friedrich Nietzsche, a return to nature and to primitive communities did not represent a turning back but “an ascent” in terms of progress into “the high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness where great tasks are something one plays with … .”93 For the Anarcho-Communist French geographer, Reclus, examined in Chapters Five and Seven, nature needed to be reconceived as an ecology of place able to guide human habitation without the destructive interventions of capitalism or centralized governments. So significant were “les forces de la nature” for Besnard, as Keshavjee shows in Chapter Four, that in his Sorbonne mural, La Vie renaissant de la mort, (Figs. 4.2-4.6), he endeavoured to convey the same Transformist concept of the “life-force” in nature that vitalists and scientists were codifying before 1900. In order to activate Transformism, nature was also microscopically scrutinized by the Ecole de Nancy at the fin-de-siècle, as Jessica Dandona points out in Chapter Five, particularly the mutation of plants to more complex species. The chapters that follow elaborate this nexus between nature, renewal, regeneration and indigenous people. During the “scramble for Africa” and France's colonization by investment launched in 1885, when indigenous colonized people seemed most vulnerable to extinction, they were also mythologized, if not exoticized in ethnographic museums and human zoos as subjects of Eurocentric projection.94 Since the so-called “civilizing mission” was connected to the brutalization and exploitation of indigenous people, ranging from slave labour to sexual abuse and contamination by the venereal peril, it had become better known in France as the “syphilizing mission”. In their rejection of colonial imperialism and indigenous exploitation, such Modernists as Picasso sought to become uncivilized and separate themselves from any taint of capitalism. Rather than travelling to remote sites in order to become a “modern barbarian” like Gauguin, they gravitated to the so-called “primitive art” of non-Western people, particularly that of the indigenous tribes of the Congo. Despite the Eurocentric curatorial framing of their primitive woodcarvings and tribal objects within ethnographic collections, for many Modernists they seemed the opposite of an unevolved or inferior state of creativity. As an antidote to Academic art, positive empiricism and rationalist materialism, tribal objects resonated, according to Picasso, “against everything” and embodied instinct, intuition, raw experience, spontaneity, sincerity and intense emotion, intensively expressed.95 So powerful did they seem when Picasso apprehensively entered the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, “all alone in that awful museum with the masks ... the dusty mannequins”, he vividly recalls experiencing an epiphany.96 In his book, Primitivism in Modern Painting, it was Robert Goldwater who gave this cult the name of “primitivism”.97 In highlighting the significance of black art and culture to white Modernism, Goldwater openly acknowledged that despite this Eurocentric term, he was reacting against the colonial myth of “the white man’s burden” which he found had coloured the Western study of art.98 By contrast to the 1984 exhibition at MOMA entitled Primitivism in Western Art in which “primitivism” was posited by its curator, William Rubin, as a “western phenomenon”, Goldwater may then be regarded as a Postcolonialist before Postcolonialism.99 Goldwater opposed, as he put it, “the generally disdainful opinion of primitive peoples which prevailed throughout the nineteenth century, and which, if it originated in the theory of evolution, was influenced by and useful to colonial programs.”100 Hence Goldwater argued that the subtext of Modernism is “primitivism” with Gauguin’s search for primitive sources and societies providing the groundwork for Picasso, leading to his incorporation of African tribal sculpture and Iberian masks into Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.101 Yet groundbreaking as Goldwater’s treatise was, particularly given its publication date of 1938 when he married Louise Bourgeois, he did not explore an interdisciplinary model of art and discourses to consider how Primitivist Modernism emerged

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amidst specific naturalist and zoological theories of evolution which were not Neo-Darwinist in France at that time but Neo-Lamarckian. He did not consider how “Primitivism” emerged during the politics of Anarcho-Communism and the Radical Republican politics of Solidarism, let alone the philosophy of Henri Bergson, which was so dominant at that time that his followers reportedly clambered up ladders outside the College de France Amphitheatre merely to hear his lectures. Although Goldwater pursues the ways in which “Primitivism” transgresses the Eurocentric colour line, he did not pursue how this quest may have also entailed transgressing the anthropocentric boundary between animal and Homo sapiens. Rather than pursue the “Primitivist” trajectory, as so many scholars have done since Goldwater's Primitivism in Modern Art, or unravel how this “expressive fallacy”, as Hal Foster calls it, constituted an aestheticized recoding,102 each chapter of this book explores the dialectical interplay of evolution and devolution, degeneration and regeneration in modern visual cultures at different spatio-temporal junctures between 1860 and 1930. The initial chronological parameter is marked by the fact that all 1,250 books of On the Origin of Species were sold within days of their publication on 24 November 1859 leading to its second edition of 3,000 copies on 7 January 1860. The last parameter is marked by the International Hygiene Exhibition that opened in Dresden in 1930 with photographs of muscular, Nordic bodies glowing with good health and didactics stressing the need for sexual selection and physical culture to regenerate both mind and body.103 As many of the chapters of this book reveal, what was perceived by Creationists and colonial imperialists as a regression from human progress measured in terms of “survival of the fittest” Darwinism was conceived as the opposite by those who aligned themselves with such alternative political ideologies as Anarcho-Communism, Socialism and what Dandona identifies in Chapter Five as “Organicist Solidarity”. This is why plants and insects became as seminal to Gallé, as animality became for other artists in France and Russia, as is shown in Chapters Seven and Eight, particularly the possibility of re-evolving as simian. The more wildlife and raw nature seemed to be threatened at this time, particularly during the “scramble” for African natural resources, the more they also become mythologized, as is revealed by this book. The wanton destruction of African nature and wildlife by ivory traders and European game-hunting parties í President Theodore Roosevelt sending as many as 10,000 carcasses from his African Safari in 1910 to the Smithsonian Institution í aroused widespread anxiety over the gradual extermination of apes, elephants, zebras and tigers.104 Yet the ruthless extraction of skins, hides, horns, plumes and ivory was coterminous with the plundering of the natural environment for its resources, the French Congo being divided among forty-two private companies to extract raw materials whilst ivory and rubber were forcibly obtained in the Belgian Congo through the brutal subjection of the indigenous peoples.105 So intense was the alarm over extinction and environmental degradation by 1900 that the First International Conference on the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa was held at the British Foreign Office. That year the International Congress on Botany was also held at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, as mentioned in Chapter Five. Given the importance of the environment to French Neo-Lamarckian scientists, intensified by the study of Ecology as a science in France from 1879, they vigorously denounced ecological devastation and stressed its relationship to species extinction. From his position as Director of the Muséum National de l’histoire naturelle, Perrier initiated State-funded research on how to protect endangered species while Alfred Giard, from his position as Chair for the Evolution of Organized Beings, launched an activist ecological programme to study the devastation caused by the startling increase in the hunting of wild animals, the extensive excavation of mineral resources, the expansion of man-made farming land and the heavy exploitation of the North Sea fishing grounds.106 Like other Neo-Lamarckian ecologists, Giard conceived of unspoiled nature as a state of “biological equilibrium” which once violated, produced many of the problems facing wild life, modern agriculture and the fishing industries.107 In the science of equilibriums that Giard promoted called éthologie, the balance was to be restored by imitating nature through such strategies as replacing chemical pesticides with parasitic fungi that were able to castrate insects detrimental to the natural evolution of plants and animals.

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The concern to study animals and plants in their own dwelling places, particularly to understand how organisms interacted with each other and their environments, led to the emergence of place-based research across Europe at zoological stations, Giard’s biological station established at Wimereux in 1874 being one of the first.108 Even though the concern for plant and animal welfare extended well back into the nineteenth-century, as revealed in Chapter Seven, it was not until 1903 that the first refuge for animals was created in France. Hence the more that animals, plants, indigenous people and peasants seemed to be endangered, the more measures for their examination and protection seemed to arise and the more they were extolled as a primitive stage in the earth’s evolution before the advent of degeneration and corruption under the guise of “civilization”. Paradoxically at the very moment when animals were identified as endangered species in France their “colonies”, as Perrier called them, were inscribed as evolutionary models for Homo sapiens to emulate, as demonstrated in Chapter Seven, particularly primate colonies.

Picturing Regeneration: Organicism, Spontaneous Generation, Eurythmics and Heliotherapy Visual cultures of regeneration became as dominant in the twentieth century as the picturing of degeneration was in the nineteenth-century. Arising largely from Transformism, one of the ways in which regeneration was configured as the origin of life was, as Keshavjee explains in Chapter Four, through Lamarck's theory of spontaneous generation.109 Developed from his 1802 treatise on Hydrogeology, Lamarck's concept that organisms could arise from the dynamics of fluids constantly shaping the earth and generating tenuous membranes around a molecule were explored by Besnard in his monumental mural in 1896, La Vie renaissant de la mort (Fig. 4.1). Commissioned by the Radical Republic for the Chemistry Amphitheatre in the new Sorbonne, Keshavjee argues that in this mural triptych, Besnard scientifically subverts the Biblical story of Genesis by picturing its non-miraculous beginnings through the lens of new chemistry. Although Adam and Eve are represented on the far right, the Crucifixion does not feature in the centre. Instead a dying mother is depicted, as Keshavjee points out, suckling a healthy baby under a huge primordial sun (Fig. 4.5). In her incisive decoding of the regenerative power of putrefaction, Keshavjee unravels how her red hair seems to continue to grow while the vital fluid from her breasts seems to flow into a waterfall, depicted in the first panel, and into a river shown in the last one (Fig. 4.3), linking the organic cyclical processes of death and resurrection with the chemical process of degeneration and regeneration, as theorized by Perrier. In so doing, Keshavjee deduces, through the observations of art critic, Camille Mauclair that Besnard endeavoured to regenerate the very processes of chemistry in a Transformist aesthetic í an aesthetic that Gallé developed in a different way. How Organicism and Transformism became the premise upon which Léon Bourgeois built his political theory of Solidarism is explored in Chapters Five and Seven. As Dandona explains in Chapter Five, the qualities of cooperation and interdependence to be nurtured by the politicocultural ideology of Solidarism were equivalent to those being pursued by decorative artists at that time, particularly by Gallé and the Ecole de Nancy. During the divisiveness of the Dreyfus Affair, the Organicist Solidarity conveyed in the decorative artwork by Gallé was, as she argues, a seminal device to aid the unification of the French nation, particularly with the Alsatian regions that had been annexed to the German Empire in 1871. At the same time Dandona stresses the significance of Gallé's studies of polymorphism in flowering plants and his aesthetic revelations of how organisms in France and specifically Nancy undergo cellular mutation through their adaptation to their environment. Epitomized by Gallé’s drawings of orchids (Figs 5.1-5.3), they reveal how new species can arise, following Darwin, and how it was therefore possible to regenerate the nation both aesthetically and environmentally. While scientifically theorized by the Transformist zoologist who became Director of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in 1900, this was also pictured in different ways by what I have called, in Chapter Seven, Modernist Transformism.

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Following Lamarck's theory of transmutation, Perrier explored how “low forms” were not annihilated in “the struggle for existence” despite this having been the way in which Darwin's “survival of the fittest” had been translated in France. Through association and cooperation in what he called Les Colonies Animales, Perrier found that they could be transmuted into higher species as illuminated by such minute organisms as monera (Fig. 4.11) and sponges (Fig. 7.2). From the power generated by this Law of Association, Perrier deduced that higher organisms could then evolve from the simplest to most complex forms of life as epitomized by simians. Providing the scientific premise of Bourgeois' Solidarisme, this ideology and political policy was most clearly articulated in Bourgeois’ 1896 book, Solidarité in which he argued that mutual obligations and cooperation, rather than laissez-faire capitalism and individualism, were fundamental to evolution of a harmonious and just society, as illuminated by “animal colonies”. At a time when animal welfare was being proselytized by the Radical Republic and “animal colonies” posited as aspirational, Picasso frequented the Jardin des Plantes at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle at night where he pretended to be a monkey. Although tribal cultures have long been historicized as the catalyst for Picasso's “primitivism”, he did not visit the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro until four years later. Hence, as I argue, animalism well preceded this encounter for Picasso, as it did for and seminal for such Modernists as Kupka, Rousseau and Dufau. At a time when Monkeyana was prevalent in popular visual culture (Figs. 7.5 and 7.6), Picasso's and Kupka's desire to become more simian than human may then be regarded as part of a quest for devolution. In primate states (Figs. 7.7 and 7.8), they could become more in contact with their instincts and raw animality, spontaneity and playfulness, which seemed to have been lost by “the civilizing mission” – frequently satirized as “the syphilizing mission” í in which humans were clearly demarcated from animals. Following the uncanny inversions that occurred in response to anticapitalism, anticolonialism alongside the discursive and cultural formations of “primitivism”, devolution signalled a form of re-evolution. While Chapter Seven demonstrates how Modernist Transformism illuminated devolution as re-evolution and regeneration through interspecies performativity, particularly by “becoming simian” before the First World War, the last two chapters reveal how during the First World War and its aftermath, when so many soldiers lived with mutilations and traumas, regeneration entailed forging new symbioses between the body and the environment í to the extent that the body became inscribed as the locus for desperately needed evolution. It was during the greatest slaughter ever known, with the greatest number of neurological disorders ever diagnosed, particularly shellshock, that regeneration of consciousness through the movements of the body became so crucial for Wilhelm Wundt, Emile-Jacques Dalcroze, Rudolf Steiner and Rudolf Laban. In politically neutral Switzerland, Peter Mowris examines how Wundt’s physiological psychology of nerve development, premised upon the laws of thermodynamics, was welcomed as a means of changing motor habits and forging new neural pathways, particularly when pursued through the eurhythmics of Dalcroze. Far from being focused upon the individual as in Freudian psychoanalysis, Wundt's physiological psychology was wedded to his concept of Volkerpsychologie, as Mowris explains in Chapter Nine, in order to generate a psychological evolution of society that would entail more harmonious, pacifist and productive workforces. Through groups performing eurhythmic exercises (Fig. 9.1) and moving in harmony with nature (Fig. 9.2), Mowris reveals that Dalcroze considered neural stimuli would pass through their bodies to forge new neural pathways able to achieve Wundt's psychological evolution. So concerned did Dalcroze become with psychological evolution that, as Mowris reveals, he considered neural regeneration should become a national duty, which he extolled to his students. “Let us ... assume the responsibility which nature puts upon us, and consider it our duty to regenerate ourselves,” he declared; “thus shall we help the growth of a more beautiful humanity.”110 For Steiner, this regeneration of society might save it from the mechanized Armageddon of the First World War. As close as he was to both Dalcroze and Steiner, Laban considered that the regeneration of society, as Mowris points out, would best transpire through dance, particularly “free dance”, as explored by his students, including Sophie Taeuber, at Monte Verità in Ascona and in Zurich.

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Through its incorporation of chance, spontaneity, improvisational movement and vocalization, Laban regarded “free dance” as best able to alter nerves in unexpected ways, particularly through its sparking of uncanny vibrations. Locating Zurich Dada within these regenerational praxes of the neural body, Mowris then argues that instead of replicating the neurasthenic and degenerative consequences of shellshock like Berlin Dada, Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Marcel Janco turned to Laban and by extension Steiner and Wundt. Collaboratively deploying chance, spontaneity, improvisation, shock, surprise, nervous irritation and sensationalist excitation as neural stimuli in their performances at the Cabaret Voltaire, Mowris concludes that the Dadaists did so not only to alter the nerves of their audiences in unexpected ways but also to jolt them into recognizing how modern warfare had wrought mass human extinction and ecological devastation on a scale that had far surpassed natural catastrophes. This may be why heliotherapy through suntanning was so fervently embraced after the War, as a new form of Neo-Lamarckian eugenics able to revitalize the impotent traumatized body of veterans while fertilizing the sexual organs of women.

Figure I.7 Hugo Höppener, “Fidus”, Lichtgebet (Prayer to the Light or to the Sun), 1890-1894. Public Domain. Figure I.8 Poster and Booklet Cover, “Reichs Gesundheitswoche : Ein Merkbüchlein für Jedermann” (Berlin: Reichsausschuss für hygienische Volksbelehrung, 1926): Gesundheit ist Lebensglück (Reich Health Week: An Information Booklet for Everyone, Reich Committee for Hygiene Education: Health is Happiness). Public Domain.

Today suntanning without protection is frequently associated with skin cancer and perilous melanomas. At the beginning of the nineteenth-century, a suntan was shunned by the ruling classes as devolutionary due to its proximity to the dark skins of degenerate races and the discoloured pigmentation of the outdoor labouring classes. Public nudity was taboo. By the end of the nineteenth-century, the opposite had ensued. The embrace of naturism, nudism, ecology, organic

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farming, vegetarianism and abstention from alcohol and tobacco in the fin-de-siècle Lebensreform í Life Reform Movement – as an antidote to the toxic city, entailed an idolization of the sun and the imperative to bare the body to solar energy. While the first Freikörperkultur opened in Essen in 1898, the first sunlight and fresh air sports baths opened in Berlin three years later. Naked bathing was practiced in the lakes by Worpswede, Motzener See, on the North Sea and Baltic Coast with the first public nudist beach being established some twenty years later in Weimar Germany on the Island of Sylt.111 Nude air bathing was practiced everyday by Anarchist geographer and vegetarian, Reclus, well into his seventies, albeit in the privacy of his back garden. To enhance his health and receptivity to colour, from 1894 Kupka exercised daily in nude air-baths,112 as did his fellow student, Hugo Höppener, best-known as “Fidus”. Inspired by their teacher in Vienna, Karl Diefenbach, a pioneer of nudism, “Fidus” produced the series from 1890 capturing sun-worship entitled Lichtgebet: Prayer to the light or to the sun (Fig. I.7), which became an icon of the Lebensreform.113 Diefenbach was in turn integral to establishment of the cooperative vegetarian, sun-bathing colony at Monte Verità in 1900 that became, as Mowris points out in Chapter Nine, the place where Laban’s troupe performed their “free dance” nude in nature, as illustrated by Fig. 9.3. With Dr. François Chiaïs theorizing the need for pigmentation from the sun to cure patients in 1907, as Tania Woloshyn reveals in Chapter Ten, this was also occurring in France well before the First World, although it became far more prevalent after it. During “straightening-up”, as Kenneth Silver calls the Rappel à l'ordre in post-war France, suntanning became intrinsic to Neo-Lamarckian eugenics and national regeneration, as Woloshyn demonstrates.114 In transforming the body through its adaptation to the environment, heliotherapy seemed to dovetail perfectly with Transformism which, as Woloshyn succinctly surmizes, “spoke equally to fears of racial degeneration as to desires for racial regeneration”.115 Exoticized if not eroticized by the visual cultures of the cure de soleil, as revealed by the illustrations in this last chapter and for the cover of this book, Woloshyn unravels how heliotropism and particularly phototropism were posited as therapies capable of healing such scourges as tuberculosis, cancer, lupus and rickets, even menstrual disorders, while stimulating sexuality. Falling between the delectable and the salacious, epitomized by the nude photographs of Dr. Oscar Bernhard's female patients (Figs. 10.8 and 10.9) and the bare-breasted sunbaker etched by Dunoyer de Segonzac (Fig. 10.7), the visual cultures of suntanned subjects examined by Woloshyn reveal how they were perceived as embodying sexual virility and ripeness for healthy procreativity, which Adolphe Pinard called “puericulture”.116 Following Neo-Lamarckian “puericulture”, as Woloshyn concludes, these suntanned bodies were then expected to pass on their healthy physiognomy to their progeny, in order to compensate for France's loss of two million during the First World War and to achieve racial regeneration. The visual and medical cultures in this final Chapter, like those in the other Chapters, then expose how the threat of degeneration, devolution and extinction, constantly lurked as a galvanizing force for regeneration and how they functioned as a dialectic. Only through direct performative contact with nature did Dalcroze consider that the pupils in his school at Hellerau could regenerate and develop “a more beautiful humanity”, as Mowris elucidates in Chapter Nine. Only through direct engagement with nature and particularly animalism, as I argue in Chapter Seven, did some French Modernists before the First World War, including Picasso, endeavour to defuse the fear of devolution and pursue interspecies models of subjectivity to achieve Bergson's “creative evolution”. Only through direct exposure to nature after the First World War, particularly the pure sunlight of the Côte d'Azur, as Woloshyn demonstrates, could the French hope to regenerate their physiology and sexuality, as signified by the image on the cover of this book of a suntanned woman in a bathing costume greeting the rays of sunlight with open arms. Had Mani's simian bodies been less morose and slothful, Vázquez conjectures in Chapter Six how his sculpture could have signified an instinctual force filled with the “raw energy, aggressive force, sexual prowess” desperately needed to overcome neurasthenic degeneration.117 Even though unmediated contact with nature appeared to entail “becoming simian”, as explained in my Chapter Seven, or “becoming Arab or Negro”, as elucidated in Woloshyn’s Chapter Ten, what this book exposes is that from around 1890 until 1930 this transmutation did not necessarily

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signify atavism. Even corporeal decomposition and organic decay by 1890, as Keshavjee reveals in Chapter Four, was posited as regenerative, as signified by the continual lactation of the rotting female corpse pictured in Fig. 4.5 and the baby feeding from her black-green breast. The source of this regeneration and indeed the first life in the chemical laboratory of the primeval earth, imaged by Besnard, was for Camille Flammarion and so many other scientists at this time, the sun. This is why it is pictured as so dominant in scale and luminosity in Besnard’s mural, as in regenerative visual cultures that followed, particularly after the First World War. Even though the natural therapies that Woloshyn unravels in France and Switzerland were not officially incorporated into Reich Health Week (Reichsgesundheitwoche) held in Weimar Germany in 1926, it was promoted with an image on the poster and booklet of a black muscular man, as illustrated by Fig. I.8, not the golden suntanned, androgynous, pre-pubescent, Aryan body of Fidus’ Lichgebet (Fig. I.7). Arms upraised in a laudate to the sun as the source of health and happiness, like the woman in the Roger Broders’ poster highlighted in Chapter Ten and reproduced on the cover of this book, this man’s body is also silhouetted by sunrays as golden and as penetrating as those depicted in Broders’ tourist poster promoting the perennial sunshine of the Côte d’Azur.118 Over the golden aube of the sun in the Reich Health Week poster are written the very words that seem to be conjured by Broders’ image: “Health is happiness”.119 Yet with the deeply suntanned bather shown poised on the tips of her toes in an outstretched pose, the healthdriven happiness in Broders’ poster, as Woloshyn so imaginatively illuminates, appears both heliotropic in the quest to reach the sun and phototropic in seeming to grow towards the sun. Hence while this book opens with the picturing of Australian and North American indigenous people as “doomed races” inspired by the first publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, it closes with the quest some seventy years later for a regenerative suntan as dark as their skins. That the discourses of ecological catastrophism and knowledge of the Anthropocene are by no means endemic to this Sixth Age of Mass Extinction but hark back to first publication of On the Origin of Species, if not before, is also demonstrated by this interdisciplinary book. Following Darwin's concept of evolution as Janus-faced, its ten chapters explore the dialectical interplay of evolution and extinction, degeneration and regeneration in modern visual cultures in Australia, America, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Spain and Switzerland at significant spatio-temporal junctures between 1860 and 1930. By unravelling the significations of “picturing” the deep-seated dread of alcoholism, cholera, dysentery, syphilis, tuberculosis, typhoid, rabies and rickets alongside phobias of dehumanization, animalism, criminality, hysteria, neurasthenia, impotency and ecological disaster, each chapter makes an original contribution to this new field of scholarship. By locating these discourses and visual cultures within the “golden age of NeoLamarckism”, it is also the first book to explore in depth how regeneration was pictured as the Janus face of degeneration able to facilitate evolution through the inheritance of positive characteristics in propitious environments. In striking such an uplifting note amidst the dissonant cacophony of catastrophism, it reveals why the modern art and Neo-Lamarckian science of Transformism proved so appealing in France as elsewhere, and why visual cultures of regeneration became as dominant in the twentieth century as the picturing of degeneration had been in the nineteenth-century. By contrast to Nordau's debasement of avant-gardism as degenerative í a debasement that reached its apogee in Nazi Germany with the Degenerate Art Exhibitions – this book highlights the paradoxical inversion of devolution as re-evolution and the regenerative potential ascribed to art, particularly when avant-garde. It illuminates how avant-garde or “primitive” artists were those posited as best able to unleash instincts, emotions, intuition and what Bergson called l’élan vital – the enduring life force – that seemed to propel “creative evolution”. It reveals how Modernist Transformism, as manifest by Besnard, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Dufau, Gallé, Kupka, Picasso, Rousseau and Taeuber was conceived as a regenerative aesthetic and how Bergson, Dalcroze, Laban, Steiner and Wundt, like so many other theorists and artists explored in these chapters, celebrated the arts as the highest level of manifestation of the collective will and the conduit to a regenerated mind and body in Europe. This is why this book ends with Wundt’s

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conclusion that the most effective way to ameliorate degeneration and extinction and to achieve its Janus face may ultimately be through art and other modern visual cultures. I wish to thank Justin Fleming and Serena Keshavjee for their close readings of this Introduction and their invaluable contributions to it.

Notes 1

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2014); also refer Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind (New York: Doubleday Publishers, 1995). 2 Alistair Sponsel, “From Cook to Cousteau: The Many Lives of Coral Reefs”, Fluid Frontiers: Exploring Oceans, Islands, and Coastal Environments, eds. John Gillis and Franziska Torma (Cambridge, UK: White Horse Press) pp. 139-161; also refer Alistair Sponsel, “From Threatening to Threatened: How Coral Reefs became Fragile”, History of Science Society Annual Conference (Chicago: 2014). I am grateful to Professor Sponsel for so generously sharing this scholarship. 3 E. O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) estimated that if the current rate of human disruption of the biosphere continues, one-half of Earth's higher lifeforms would be extinct by 2100. 4 Peter H. Raven, as quoted by Rebecca Sato, “The Extinction of Animal and Plant Species: The Planet's First-ever Mass Extinction Precipitated by a Biotic Agent: Humans”, Global Research, 9 May 2013. 5 Stephen J. Gould, “Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?”, Paleobiology (vol. 6, no. 1, January 1980) pp. 126-127. 6 P. J. Crutzen and E. F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene’”, Global Change Newsletter (41, 2000) pp. 17–18. Stoermer is credited with inventing the term, Crutzen with popularizing it. While disputed by stratigraphers, it has appeared in over two hundred peer-reviewed articles and is the subject of the new academic journal entitled Anthropocene. 7 A catalyst for this shift appears to have been the seminal article proposing an extraterrestrial cause for the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction of dinosaurs by L. W. Alvarez, W. Alvarez, F. Asare, H. V. Michel, “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction: Experimental results and theoretical interpretation”, Science (208, 4448, 6 June 1980) pp. 1095-1108. Following evidence of a large asteroid found off the coast of Mexico, on 4 March, 2010 a panel of 41 scientists concurred that the impact of the Chicxulub asteroid triggered the mass extinction. 8 Roy Scranton, “Learning how to die in the Anthropocene”, The New York Times: Opiniator, 10 November 2013; Margaret Ronda, “Mourning and Melancholia in the Anthropocene”, Post45, 6 October 2013. 9 Created in 1947, The Doomsday Clock has been at five minutes to midnight since 2012, according to Kennette Benedict in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, due to these threats posed to the persistence of human life. 10 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1859); On the Origin of Species (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) p. 384. 11 The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, edited by his son, Francis Darwin (1st pb. 1887; vol. 2, University Press of the Pacific, 2001). 12 Ibid., pp. 317-318. 13 Ibid., p. 73. Devoting two chapters to the incompleteness of the fossil record, Darwin was sceptical that it could corroborate his theory, let alone the catastrophist model of extinction. 14 Ibid., p. 345. 15 Sander Gliboff, “The Golden Age of Lamarckism, 1866-1926”, Transformations of Lamarckism: From Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology, eds. Snait B. Gissis and Eva Jablonka (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, 2011) pp. 45-55. 16 B. A. Morel, Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l'espèce humaine (Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1857). 17 Cesar Lombroso, Ricerche sul cretinismo in Lombardia (Milano: Gazzetta Medica Italiana Lombardia, 1859). 18 Cesar Lombroso, L'uomo delinquente (Milano: 1876); L'Homme criminel (Paris: 1887). 19 Fae Brauer, “The Transparent Body: Biocultures of Evolution, Eugenics and Scientific Racism”, A History of Visual Culture: Western Civilization from the 18th to the 21st Century, eds. Jane Kromm and Susan Benforado Bakewell (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2010) pp. 89-103. 20 Fae Brauer, “The Stigmata of Abjection: Degenerate Limbs, Hysterical Skin and The Tattooed Body”, ibid., A History of Visual Culture, 2010, pp. 169-183. 21 B.-A. Morel, Traité des dégénérescences physiques : Physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l'espèce humaine et des causes qui produisent ces variétés maladives (Paris: Libraire de l'Académie impériale de médecine, 1857) p. 5: ... une dénérescence et une dérivation maladive du type primitif ou normal de l’humanité. 22 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 24 February 1871); Charles Darwin, La descendance de l'homme et la sélection sexuelle, trans. J.-J. Moulinier (Paris: C. Reinwald et Cie, Libraires-Éditeurs, 1872).

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Ibid., 1871, p. 211. Ibid., p. 212: The grade of their civilization seems to be a most important element in the success of competing nations. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., p. 213: The most potent of all the causes of extinction, appears in many cases to be lessened fertility and illhealth. 27 Ibid., p. 222. 28 Sarah Thomas, “Allegorizing Extinction: Humboldt, Darwin and the Valedictory Image”, Chapter One, in this book. 29 J. Weiss, Conservatism in Europe 1770-1945: Traditionalism, Reaction and Counter-Revolution. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977) p. 107: The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was the first conflict to be interpreted in Darwinian terms. Both Prussians and Frenchmen drew appropriate conclusions. Had not Prussia prevailed because she knew the value of patriotic collectivism, class unity and authoritarian guidance from above? After the Dreyfus Affair and until the Republic proved its capabilities in the First World War, the French Right insisted that Republican democracy and left-wing theories of class reinforced those weaknesses, which ultimately caused nations and races to succumb in the struggle for survival. 30 Dr. Jacques Bertillon, La Dépopulation de la France: Ses conséquences - ses causes mesures à prendre pour la combattre (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1911). 31 Robert A. Nye, “Degeneration, Neurasthenia and the Culture of Sport in Belle Epoque France”, Journal of Contemporary History (tome 17, no. 1, January 1982) pp. 51-68. 32 Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871, p. 212. 33 Nye, “Degeneration, Neurasthenia and the Culture of Sport in Belle Epoque France”, 1982. After medical examinations of conscripts in 1872, 30,524 out of 325,000 were reported to have feeble constitutions; 16,000 were regarded as infirm, mutilated or suffering from heria, arthritus or rheumatism; 18,000 were less that 5ft 2 (1.45 m) inches high; 9,100 had flat feet; 7,000 had impaired vision or respiration. Hence 109,000 were pronounced medically unfit for service at the age of 20. 34 Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honour in Modern France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); Christopher E. Forth, “La Civilisation and its Discontents: Modernity, Manhood and the Body in the Early Third Republic”, French Masculinities: History, Politics and Culture, eds. Christopher E. Forth and Bertrand Taithe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) pp. 85-102; Fay Brauer, “Flaunting Manliness: Republican Masculinity, Virilized Homosexuality and the Desirable Male Body”, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art (Volume 6, Number 1, 2005) pp. 23-42. 35 Fae Brauer, Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013) p. 21. 36 Ibid., pp. 21-22. 37 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (1st pb. Paris: Éditions Macula, 1982; Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2003). 38 Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporain, 1871-1890 (Paris: Librairie Hatchette, 18751893); Hippolyte Taine, The Origins of Contemporary France. The Ancient Regime, The Revolution, The Modern Regime; ed. Edward T. Gargan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974). 39 Ibid., p. 127. When the baboons in Abyssinia plunder a garden … . Darwin refers to Brehm, Thierleven, B.i.s.76. 40 Ibid., Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporain, 1877, p. 124. 41 Ibid. Taine acknowledges the source of this quote as Mallet-Dupan, “Revue Politique de l’année 1791”, Mercure de France, 4 January 1792. 42 Ibid., p. xvii, quoting André Chevrillon, Taine : formation de sa pensée (Paris: Plon, 1932) pp. 399-400. 43 For more on the relationship of Cain’s painting and others at the 1880 Salon to the need for full-Amnesty and repatriation of the Communards, refer Fae Brauer, ““Turquet's 'Turkey”: Ending the Salon”, Painting for the Salon/Peindre pour le Salon, 1791-1881, eds. James Kearns and Alister Mill (Berne and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015) pp. 399-420. 44 Brauer, Rivals and Conspirators, 2013, pp. 25-49. 45 Joy Harvey, “Darwin in a French Dress: Translating, Publishing and Supporting Darwin in Nineteenth-Century France”, Chapter 18, The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, vol. 2, eds. Eve-Marie Engels and Thomas F. Glick (London and New York: Continuum Books, 2008) p. 371. Late in 1877, the publisher Reinwald had written to Darwin explaining: Current complications of our government and parliament force us to defer this publication [Different Forms of Flowers] to a more tranquil moment. Des différentes formes de fleurs dans les plantes de la même espèce translated by Édouard Heckel, Professor of Botany, Marseilles Faculty of Science, was published in 1878. 46 J.-L. de Lanessan, Le Transformisme, évolution de la matière et des êtres vivants (Paris: Octave Doin, 1883). 47 Stuart M. Persell, Neo-Lamarckianism and the Evolution Controversy in France, 1870-1920 (Lewiston, Queenstown, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999) p. 4: Lamarckian biologists … dominated major scientific institutions in Third Republic France. 48 Pietro Corsi, “The Importance of French Transformist Ideas for the Second Volume of Lyell's Principles of Geology”, The British Journal for the History of Science (Vol. II, Tome No. 39, 1978) pp. 221-244. Corsi convincingly argues that Lyell's Principles were highly influenced by Lamarck's Philosophy of zoology, or a general 24

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view of the structure, function and classification of animals published in 1822 by Scottish Naturalist, John Fleming. 49 Jean Baptiste Lamarck, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (Paris: 7 vols., 1815-1822); Zoological Philosophy: An Exposition with regard to the Natural History of Animals (The Classics, 2013): Nature, in producing in succession every species of animal, and beginning with the least perfect or simplest to end her work with the most perfect, has gradually complicated their structure. 50 Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy: An Exposition with regard to the Natural History of Animals, trans. Hugh Elliot (London: MacMillan and Co., 1914) Vol. I, pp. 107-108. 51 Ibid.: If there really are lost species, it can doubtless only be among the large animals that live on the dry parts of the earth; where man exercises absolute sway, and has compassed the destruction of all the individuals of some species which he has not wished to preserve or domesticate. Hence arises the possibility that animals of the genera Palaeotherium, Anoplotherium, Megalonix, Megatherium, Mastodon, of M. Cuvier, and some other species of genera previously known. 52 Jean Baptiste Lamarck, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (Paris: 1817) p. xxxiii; as quoted by Jan Sapp, Genesis: The Evolution of Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) p. 274. 53 Richard Burkhardt, The Spirit of System: Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977) pp. 130-137. 54 Persell, Neo-Lamarckianism, 1999, p. xiii: Neo-Lamarckism could be distinguished from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck while simultaneously containing one of his main conceptions that physical characters can be acquired from environmental influences and that they may become heritable and evolve new species over time. 55 R. Burkhardt, “Lamarckism in Britain and the United States”, The Evolutionary Synthesis, eds. E. Mayr and W. Provine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) p. 346. 56 Persell, Neo-Lamarckianism, 1999, p. 56: “Notre immortal Lamarck”; refer also Madeleine Barthélemy-Madaule, Lamarck the Mythical Precursor. A Study of the Relations between Science and Ideology, trans. M. H. Shank (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982). 57 Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore, Maryland and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1983) pp. 111-117. 58 Mark A. Largent, “The So-called Eclipse of Darwinism”, Chapter 1, Descended from Darwin: Insights into the History of Evolutionary Studies, 1900-1970, eds. Joe Cain and Michael Ruse, American Philosophical Society (Vol. 99, Part 1, 2009) pp. 1-21. Given the dynamic research conducted on Darwinism until 1930, particularly in America as Largent emphasizes, he deduces that the term “eclipse” is “inappropriately deterministic”. He acknowledges Paul Farber as the source of the term that he proposes should replace it: “Interphase”. Deriving from cellular division, Largent explains that while the “interphase” appears a resting period, it is a time when vital activity takes place that is necessary for future developments. 59 Persell, Neo-Lamarckianism, 1999, p. 12. In her translation, L’Origine des espèces au moyen de la selection naturelle, ou la Préversartion des races favorisées et la lutte pour la vie (Paris: P., Guillaumin et Cie, Victor Masson et Fils, 1862) Clémence Royer also emphasized “la lutte pour la vie” and “la concurrence vitale”. 60 Edmond Perrier, “Lamarck et le transformisme actuel” (Paris: Imprimerie National, 1893); cited Centenaire de la fondation du Muséum d’histoire naturelle, 1993, p. 670: “Fondateur de la doctrine de l’évolution” ; Félix Le Dantec, Lamarckiens et Darwiniens : Discussion de Quelques Théories sur la Formation des Espèces (Paris: F. Alcan, 1899). 61 Stephen Jay Gould, “Shades of Lamarck”, reprinted in The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1980) p. 77. 62 Goulven Laurent, La naissance du transformisme : Lamarck entre Linné et Darwin (Paris: Vuibert/Adapt, 2001). 63 Ibid. 64 Burkhardt, The Spirit Of System, 1977, p. 152. 65 Michel Morange, “What History tells us XXII. The French neo-Lamarckians”, Series (DOI 10.1007/s12038-0100058-7). 66 Persell, Neo-Lamarckianism, 1999, p. 179. A freemason, as well as a scientist close to Louis Pasteur, de Lanessan remained a politician for thirty years. As he explained in Le Transformisme, quoted by Persell: The scientist must occupy himself with politics in order to render the social state as perfect as possible. I have written this book in order to popularize a doctrine that all scientific research must be used to ameliorate the human condition. 67 Félix Le Dantec, “Les Neo-Darwiniens et l’hérédité des caractères acquis”, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger (44, 1897) pp. 449-475; for Le Dantec and Neo-Lamarckian Eugenics, refer Fae Brauer, “Eroticizing Eugenics: The Body Stripped Bare during French Sexual Neoregulation and Neo-Lamarckism”, Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, eds. Fae Brauer and Anthea Callen (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008) pp. 97-138. 68 Laurent Loison, “Le projet du néolamarckisme français (1880-1910)”, Revue d’histoire des sciences (Tome 65, 1, Janvier-Juin, 2012) pp. 61-79. 69 V. Magnan and P. Serieux, Les dégenérés: Etat mental et syndromes épisodiques (Paris: Rueff et Cie, Éditeurs, 1895): ... la reproduction certaine de types plus défectueux. 70 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 71 Fae Brauer, “Dégénéréscence”, Dictionnaire du corps, ed. Michela Marzano (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2007) pp. 278-285.

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Max Nordau, Entartung (Berlin: Carl Duncker, 1892); Max Nordau, Degeneration, trans. from the Second German Edition (London: William Heinemann, 1895). Three editions were published in 1895: First, February 22 1895; Second, March 4 1895; Third, March 22 1895. The book was dedicated to Cesare Lombroso, Professor of Psychiatry and Forensic Medicine at the Royal University of Turin, who Nordau calls “his dear and honoured master”. 73 Ibid., 1895, pp. 2-3. 74 Ibid., p. 3. 75 Cesare Lombroso, L'Uomo delinquente : studiato in rapport alla antropologia alla medicina legale ed alle discipline carcerarie (Milano: Hoepli, 1876); L'Homme criminal. Criminel-né –fou moral. Épileptique. Étude anthropologique et médico-légale (Paris: Félix Alcan, Éditeur, 1887); Criminal Man (Duke University Press, 2006). 76 Richard von Krafft Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis. Eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (Stuttgart: Verlag Von Ferdinand Enke, 1886). 77 J. Roubinovitch, Hystérie mâle et Dégénérescence (Paris: J.-B. Ballière, 1890). 78 Nordau, Degeneration, 1895, p. 540. 79 N.A. Semashko, Health Protection in the USSR (London: Victor Gollancz, 1934) p. 39. 80 Ibid., p. 27. 81 Nordau, Degeneration, 1895, pp. 502-503: The unhealthy predominance of the sensations of smell in his consciousness, and a perversion of the olfactory sense which makes the worst odours, especially those of all human excretions, appear to him particularly agreeable and sensually stimulating. ... Smellers among degenerates represent an atavism going back, not only to the primeval period of man, but infinitely more remote still, to an epoch anterior to man. Their atavism retrogrades to animals amongst whom sexual activity was directly excited by odiferous substances, as it is still at the present day in the muskdeer, or who, like the dog, obtained their knowledge of the world by the action of their noses. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., p. 537. 84 Sharon Hirst, Symbolism and Modern Urban Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) p. 24. 85 Nordau, Degeneration, 1895, Book II, Chapter, III, p. 144. 86 Ibid., p. 43. 87 Ibid., p. 520. 88 Ibid. 89 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign (2 vols.); eds. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud; Séminaire: La bête et Ie souverain (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2008) trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009). I am grateful to Professor John Joughin for bringing this text to my attention. 90 Gill Perry, “Primitivism and the ‘Modern’”, Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century (Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 1993; 1994) pp. 8-10; also refer Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991). 91 Ibid., p. 18. 92 Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (1903; Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1929); Letters to a Young Poet transl. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993). 93 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1895); The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1982) p. 552. 94 Alice L. Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950 (Cornell University Press, 2013). 95 As quoted in André Malraux, Picasso's Mask, trans. June and Jacques Guicharnaud (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976) pp. 10-11. 96 Ibid.: I understood what the Negroes used their sculptures for ... All fetishes ... were weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits again, to help them become independent. ... I understood why I was a painter. ... Les Demoiselles d'Avignon must have been born that day. 97 Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Painting (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 98 Ibid., “Introduction”, pp. xviii-xx. 99 Siegline Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 100 Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Painting, 1938; 1986, p. 16. 101 Ibid., pp. 63-103. In Part III, Goldwater identifies Gauguin and the School of Pont-Aven, as well as the Fauves, with “romantic primitivism”. 102 Hal Foster, “The Expressive Fallacy”, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1985) pp. 59-77. 103 Fae Brauer, “Making Eugenic Bodies Delectable: Art, “Biopower” and “Scientia Sexualis”, Introduction, Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, eds. Fae Brauer and Anthea Callen (Aldershot and Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, 2008) p. 3. Since Race Hygiene Societies and Freikörperkultur are outside the purview of this book, refer Lorettan Gascard, “The Proper Peep: Conflicting Female Ideals under German National Socialism”, Chapter Six, Art, Sex and

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Eugenics: Corpus Delecti (2008) pp. 189-208; Uwe Heyll, Luft und Licht. Die Geschichte der Naturheilkunde in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2006); Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 104 Fred Pearce, “Why Africa's National Parks are Failing to Save Wildlife”, Yale Environment 360 (19 January 2010). 105 Bernard Gibibl, “German colonialism and the beginnings of international wildlife preservation in Africa”, GHI Bulletin Supplement 3 (2006) p. 133. To consider how this was conveyed by fin-de-siècle art and culture, refer Debora Silverman, “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism”, Part I, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 01/2011; 18(2):139-181. DOI: 10.1086/662515. 106 Raf de Bont, Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) p. 104. On p. 12, Raf de Bont explains that Giard defined his ecology as “the science dealing with the habits of living beings and their relations, both with each other and the cosmic environment”. 107 Ibid., pp. 104-105. Giard achieved renown for his research into the relationship between host and parasite in both plants and animals, using the term “parasitic castration” to define sexual changes in the host as a result of the parasite. 108 Ibid., pp. 71-96. 109 Lamarck, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertebres, 1815-1822; Zoological Philosophy, 2013: The rapid motion of fluids will etch canals between delicate tissues. Soon their flow will begin to vary, leading to the emergence of distinct organs. The fluids themselves, now more elaborate, will become more complex, engendering a greater variety of secretions and substances composing the organs. 110 Jaques-Dalcroze, “Address to Students”, Der Rhythmus 1 (1911), repr. and trans in The Eurhythmics of JaquesDalcroze (London: Constable & Company, 1917) p. 29. 111 Matthew Jefferies, “Lebensreform: A Middle-Class Antidote to Wolhelminism?”, Chapter Five, Wilhelminism and Its Legacies: German Modernism, Imperialism and the Meanings of Reform, 1890-1930, eds. Geoff Eley and James Retallack (Berlin and London: Berghahn Books, 2004; 2008) pp. 91-96. 112 František Kupka, 1871-1857: A Retrospective (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1975) pp. 45, note 40: I have discovered for myself the sensations of splendid sensitivity to color, aroused exclusively by hygienic care. After my morning shower, I exercise, summer and winter, entirely naked in the garden. It is also a manner of hardening the body. It is like a prayer with which 1 turn to the rising sun, the great fireworks in the beautiful seasons accompanied by birdsongs, my entire body penetrated by the fragrances and the rays of light. Thus I experience magnificent moments, bathed by hues flowing from the titanic keyboard of color. Also refer Fae Brauer, “Magnetic Modernism: František Kupka's Mesmeric Abstraction and Anarcho-Cosmic Utopia”, Utopia: The Avant-Garde, Modernism and (Im)possible Life, eds. David Ayers, Benedict Hjartarson, Tomi Huttunen and Harri Veivo (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2016). 113 Ryan Kurt Johnson, “Anatomy of an icon: Fidus’ Lichtgebet, Experiments in Modern Spiritualities, and the Aesthetics of the Body in fin-de-siècle German Culture”, Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy and the Arts in the Modern World (Amsterdam: 25-27 September 2013). Johnson identified the framing of this image as both anthroposophical and theosophical with the yellow disc at the top symbolizing the sun in relation to the Naturist cult of evolution and renewal through the natural sciences while the blue lotus flower at the bottom signified spiritual evolution enhanced by the rhythm of the frame with triangular crystals pointing inwards and outwards. Johnson argues that the “religious aura” attained by Fidus’ Lichtgebet amongst the Deutsche Jugendbewegung, particularly from the Erste Freideutscher Jugendtag on Hohe Meiȕner that he attended from 11 and 12 October, 1913, arises from it not just seeming Monist and Pantheistic but from it having ““embodied” the spiritual potential of the natural human body in an open-ended fashion that allowed people to project their own spiritual experiences into the work. Indeed, Fidus ingeniously incorporated a formal devise into the artwork, leaving the figure in three-quarter profile toward the numinous embrace of nature, whereby the onlooker would be forced to project him or herself and his or her own spiritual experiences into the work in order to complete its cultic effect.” 114 Kenneth Silver, Esprit de corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War (Princeton University Press, 1992). 115 Tania Woloshyn, “Regenerative Tanning: Pigmentation, Neo-Lamarckian Eugenics and the Visual culture of the Cure de Soleil”, Chapter Ten of this book, p. 190. 116 Fae Brauer, “Eroticizing Lamarckian Eugenics: The Body Stripped Bare during French Sexual Neoregulation”, Chapter Three, Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, 2008, pp. 97-138. 117 Oscar Vázquez, “Regenerating the “Man-Beast”: Embodying Brutishness in Fin de Siglio Spanish Art”, Chapter Six, p. 122 of this book, with reference to Rae Beth Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 1875-1911: Vernacular Modernity in France (Farnham, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009) p. 97. 118 The genealogy for this figure may be traced to Der Mensch, the huge male sculpture mounted on a plinth at the First International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden in 1911. Muscular, perfectly proportioned, Nordic featured with arms upraised, the laudate he made was to a new god as indicated by the inscription clearly incised on the plinth: “No wealth equals you, O health.” The Racial Hygiene and Reich Health exhibitions that followed culminated in the International Hygiene Exhibition at the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in 1930 and the Wonder of Life Exhibition in Berlin in 1935. In both, der Mensch again greeted visitors on the poster and as Transparent Man (gläserner Mensch);

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refer Fae Brauer, “The Transparent Body: Biocultures of Evolution, Eugenics and Scientific Racism”, A History of Visual Culture, eds. Jane Kromm and Susan Benforado Bakewell (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2010) pp. 89-103. 119 “Reichs Gesundheitswoche : Ein Merkbüchlein für Jedermann” (Berlin: Reichsausschuss für hygienische Volksbelehrung, 1926): Gesundheit ist Lebensglück.

CHAPTER ONE ALLEGORIZING EXTINCTION: HUMBOLDT, DARWIN AND THE VALEDICTORY IMAGE SARAH THOMAS By the mid-nineteenth century, a body of paintings had been produced in several continents which allegorized a phenomenon widely held to be true: that “savage” peoples across the imperial world were sadly but ineluctably doomed to extinction.1 While the causes of this apparent state of affairs were hotly debated, the presumption itself was profoundly flawed.2 The paintings of indigenous peoples shown in deep shadow silhouetted against a sky at sunset, by Eugene von Guérard in Australia and Albert Bierstadt in North America, are the focus of this essay. They served as elegiac valedictions that highlighted the power of nature in determining racial destiny. Poised at the cusp between the competing world views of Humboldt and Darwin, they actively participated in the type of extinction discourse that ultimately—if often unwittingly—served to justify the unparalleled global decimation of indigenous peoples in the colonial era.3 As will be revealed, both itinerant artists were engaged in a Humboldtian project, with the empirical observation of a unified and harmonious natural world at its core. Paradoxically however, it will also become clear that the underlying message of this remarkably cogent group of paintings was profoundly Darwinian or, as shall be explained later, “Darwinistic”, portraying a vision of indigenous peoples whose apparent inability to adapt to the harsh reality of imperial occupation would ensure their demise. Thus while on the surface the paintings appear to show humanity in total harmony with nature, in fact what they presage is a much harsher world, one which Darwin famously introduced in his epochal book of 1859, meaningfully titled in full, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. While Darwin’s theory of a brutal struggle for survival may not be immediately apparent in these mournful eulogies, and indeed may not have been fully comprehended or even accepted by the artists considered here, in their equation of indigeneity with what will be argued was a prelapsarian past, the paintings served to confirm Darwin’s warning that adaptation was essential to survival, and that species which do not change will become extinct.4 By mid-century many people were genuinely confounded by the rate at which indigenous populations across the New World were declining, without convincing physical causes to explain it. Even the young Darwin in the mid-1830s had written in his journal that as well as the “several evident causes of destruction” of the Aboriginals, there seemed “to be some more mysterious agency at work.”5 Many put the mystery down to the work of God. Yet Darwin himself acknowledged that: “Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we find the same result ...”.6 There were numerous causes for the decline of indigenous peoples, and as Patrick Brantlinger, Henry Reynolds and others have pointed out, many such causes were not at all mysterious: They were the result of violence, warfare and genocide.7 They were also the result of infectious diseases which, though not well understood, devastated populations. At the same time it was widely held that the state of “savagery” itself was selfextinguishing.8

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The particular group of mid-century paintings that is the focus of this essay had a powerful message: That uncivilised races were on an inexorable collision course with ordained destiny.9 In his study of the “doomed race theory” as it pertained to the Australian Aboriginals, Russell McGregor has pointed out that the development of the expectation of extinction in the nineteenth century coincided with a growing acceptance that Aboriginal people were incapable of becoming civilized.10 While nothing, it was widely believed, could alter this path of history, artist eyewitnesses such as von Guérard and Bierstadt felt they had a moral obligation to record this primitive past before it was extinguished. In this sense their mission had much in common with the broader aims of anthropologists and ethnographers of the day, and this was particularly so in Germany at mid-century. The ethnographer Adolf Bastian, for example, followed in Humboldt’s footsteps by spending 25 years of his life travelling the globe on expeditions—scrupulous observation, he believed, was the key to understanding humankind, and to this end he became an avid collector of ethnographic objects.11 Such travellers—artists and ethnographers alike—were driven, at least in part, by a sense of urgency. This theme of the “vanishing primitive” is pervasive, according to historian James Clifford, the very term “traditional” to describe a society in itself implying a rupture with the past: [P]opulations are regularly violently disrupted, sometimes exterminated. Traditions are constantly being lost. But the persistent and repetitious “disappearance” of social forms at the moment of their ethnographic representation demands analysis as a narrative structure.12

1859 was a seminal year which saw both the death of the renowned explorer and natural scientist Humboldt and the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. It was also the year in which German-born American artist, Bierstadt, made his first expedition to the American West, with the intention of sketching scenes for a series of large paintings of the subject. Having only recently returned from a period of study at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, Bierstadt was anxious to witness for himself the kind of American wilderness that his great rival, Frederic Church, was then painting to great acclaim. After managing to secure a place on Colonel Frederick West Lander’s government expedition to the Rocky Mountains, over several months Bierstadt produced numerous detailed landscape and figure studies. On his return, he settled in New York City and began to paint a series of virtuosic landscapes that would soon earn his reputation as one of America’s leading landscape painters. The works included intimate scenes of Indian life such as Indian Encampment, Shoshone Village (1860) (Fig. 1.1) and Toward the Setting Sun (1862) (Fig. 1.2), culminating in the monumental canvas, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, (1863) (Fig. 1.3). While Bierstadt was encountering the American West, over ten thousand miles away in colonial Victoria and New South Wales another Düsseldorf-trained landscape painter, von Guérard, was on a distant expedition of his own. He too was making sketches which would subsequently be worked up into major oil paintings; these oscillated between commissioned views of homesteads in cultivated country, and scenes of wilderness that reveal more than a passing resemblance to the contemporaneous paintings of Bierstadt and his Hudson River School peers in North America.13 Like Bierstadt, von Guérard specialised in scenes of wild nature. If figures were there at all— whether white or indigenous—they were on the whole small and seemingly inconsequential.14 Yet two years earlier he had produced a major work in which the human element appeared to take on a heightened significance, and which remains distinctive within his prolific oeuvre: It was entitled Stony Rises: Lake Corangamite (1857) (Fig. 1.4).

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Figure 1.1 Albert Bierstadt, Indian Encampment, Shoshone Village, 1860. Oil on millboard. New York Historical Society.

Figure 1.2 Albert Bierstadt, Toward the Setting Sun, 1862. Oil on paper mounted on canvas. Wadsworth Atheneum.

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Figure 1.3 Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1863. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Figure 1.4 Eugene von Guérard, Stony Rises, Lake Corangamite, 1857. Oil on canvas. Art Gallery of South Australia.

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Here were two landscape painters trained at the Düsseldorf Art Academy working in remote regions of the New World, who in the late 1850s and early 1860s turned their attentions, if only momentarily, to creating melancholy eulogies to the indigenous people they were encountering on their travels. The similarities between such paintings as Stony Rises and Towards the Setting Sun are compelling, despite being produced in geographically and culturally disparate sites. The major allegorical device in each work is, of course, the setting sun, which provides not only a romantic golden glow across each skyline but also serves to throw both foregrounds, including their occupants, into deep shadow. As this essay will argue, the dying light signalled the demise of an entire people. That these are paintings with allegorical weight is supported in several ways. Von Guérard’s original title was not the geologically and geographically descriptive, Stony Rises, Lake Corangamite, but rather the more poetic, An Australian Sunset.15 In his essay “On Ethnographic Allegory”, Clifford reminds us of what allegory actually is: “A story in which people, things and happenings have another meaning, as in a fable or parable: Allegories are used for teaching or explaining.”16 This latter point is crucial, for while the paintings served several purposes—not least to satisfy the demands of colonial art markets—in the end both von Guérard and Bierstadt were in the business of creating mythic pictures which engaged with some of the profound dilemmas of the imperial age. Von Guérard’s painting therefore was not just any sunset, but an Australian one, and the significance of his original title is heightened when one realises that a federated “Australia” would not exist in any real sense until 1901. The paintings also contain other symbolic references to death and decay. In the Australian example, the skeletal form of a dead tree pierces the glowing sky to the left. It has also been suggested that the young blackwood trees may be reminiscent of Roman pines commonly associated with European cemeteries, thus signifying the proximity of death.17 A prominent dead tree also appears in Bierstadt’s Towards the Setting Sun, and the bare bones of a buffalo are seen in his much larger canvas, Sunset Light, Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains. The association of the setting sun with the passing of indigenous peoples was not only being made visually at midcentury, but was also expressed in words, such as those of the American artist-explorer John Mix Stanley, who in the 1850s and 1860s toured his own travelling Indian gallery in an effort to document this perceived demise. He wrote that his ambitions had been to visit “those regions where the nature and habits of the Indians are found in their greatest purity and originality ... a people silently retreating or melting away from before the face of civilization like exhalations from the sunlight.”18 Despite the fact that von Guérard and Bierstadt worked within a Humboldtian tradition which valued careful observation from nature, these paintings were not simple transcriptions of specific places and peoples. Rather, it will be observed that they were based loosely on a wide range of scenes witnessed and experiences lived. Both artists were, after all, highly attuned to market demands, and were eager to please potential patrons by presenting scenes that were both aesthetically appealing and familiar. In fact it could be argued that the paintings were simply idealised pre-contact views painted for burgeoning colonial art markets. Stony Rises, Lake Corangamite, after all, depicts a placid family scene in which a father returns from hunting to the delight of a young child. Certainly this would suggest self sufficiency, harmony with nature, an assured future. However, what this essay will argue is that such paintings also reflect the profound ambivalences which characterised the colonial imagination. These paintings are in many ways idealised views, but their allegorical message is one which resists this reading, and foregrounds instead widespread anxieties around race and sovereignty. In other words, they are examples of what W. J. T. Mitchell has evocatively termed the “‘dreamwork’ of imperialism”.19

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Bierstadt and the “picturesque facts of Indian life” Early in his trip to the American West, Bierstadt penned a letter to the journal, The Crayon in which he first commended the “beautiful” scenery with its “silvery streams” and “mighty perpendicular cliffs”, before turning his attentions to the indigenous inhabitants. They were, he claimed, “kindly disposed to us” although “naturally distrustful”. He went on to write about their encroaching extinction: The manners and customs of the Indians are still as they were hundreds of years ago, and now is the time to paint them, for they are rapidly passing away; and soon will be known only in history. I think that the artist ought to tell his portion of their history as well as the writer; a combination of both will assuredly render it more complete.20

Thus while Bierstadt’s ambition was to pursue a career as a landscape rather than a figure painter, he was nevertheless an enterprising entrepreneur, and quickly recognised that his direct encounters with the exotic “Red Men” of the West provided opportunities he could exploit for a curious white audience. Engaging in what I will argue was a form of “salvage ethnography”, he set about making careful and detailed sketches of the native Americans from life.21 Bierstadt was by no means the first North American artist to embark on such an exercise. In fact as Brantlinger has pointed out the theme of the dying Indian had pervaded American culture since the end of the American Revolution. “For more than half a century [after it]”, he explains: Independence Day orations employed the elegiac trope of the dying Indian to celebrate the creation and progress of the new Republic. Even as the citizens of the new nation rejoiced in their new rights, freedom, and radiant future, the dying Indian became the object of national sympathy and mourning. The world of savagery—noble, perhaps, but still savage—was passing away into darkness; the world of white civilisation and progress, with its vanguard in the new United States, was emerging into the full light of day.22

In literature the seemingly ineluctable demise of the American Indian had also become a well established theme in popular literature of the period, most famously in James Fenimore Cooper’s romantic novel published in 1826, The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757. Set during the Seven Years’ War, decades before Bierstadt’s first visit to the frontier, the book did much to promote the myth that the Mohegan people had all but vanished by the early nineteenth century.23 The book soon made its way into art, as witnessed by Thomas Cole’s painting, Scene from "The Last of the Mohicans”, Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Tamenund (1827). Perhaps an even more significant precursor to Bierstadt’s paintings of American Indians can be sourced in the work of two artists who had already made far more dedicated artwork in their focussed attempts at “salvage ethnography” than their Hudson River School successors. The Canadian artist, Paul Kane, and the American, George Catlin. Kane had embarked on journeys to remote parts of the Canadian and North American West in the latter half of the 1840s, returning home to Toronto after each trip armed with hundreds of detailed sketches and notes which he later developed into oil paintings and a book, Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America. Published in the very year that Bierstadt embarked on his own expedition to the West, the book met with both critical and popular acclaim.24 In its preface the artist clearly expressed his pathos over the disappearing aborigine: All traces of his footsteps are fast being obliterated from his once favourite haunts, and those who would see the aborigines of the country in their original state, or seek to study their native manners and customs, must travel far through the pathless forest to find them.25

Many reviewers confirmed what they understood as the urgency of Kane’s project: One must make haste to visit the Red Men ... Their tribes, not long since still masters of a whole world, are disappearing rapidly, driven back and destroyed by the inroads of the white race ... Their future is inevitable ... The Indians are doomed; their fate will be that of so many primitive races now gone.26

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Kane had in turn been deeply impressed by the work of his American contemporary, George Catlin, whose paintings of Indians he had seen in London in 1843.27 He too had published a popular memoir of his adventures, Letter and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians (1841). Like Bierstadt, Kane and Catlin focussed on a pre-contact vision of the American West, one which appeared to ignore the reality that native Indians were being forced, often brutally, to adapt to life in a rapidly developing colonised world. Thousands were being killed, while many others were dying from European diseases. As several scholars have noted in recent years, while “total extinction did not happen, it almost happened.”28 Outbreaks of violence were integral to frontier life, and indeed it was one such event that had instigated Lander’s expedition to the Rocky Mountains. In 1857 a group of Mormons and American Indians had attacked and killed a group of 128 Arkansas emigrants. Subsequently known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and thought to have been fuelled by anti-Mormon sentiment, it was this conflict which led to the Overland Trail being re-routed by Lander, Chief Engineer of that division of the Trail. Lander was advised to survey an alternative route and to placate the Indians who had lost trading opportunities. Bierstadt accompanied him, keen to see the West for himself. The New Bedford Daily Mercury announced his departure for the Rocky Mountains, for the declared purpose of studying “the scenery of that wild region, and the picturesque facts of Indian life.”29

Figure 1.5 Artist unknown, War Dance-Indian Department [arranged by Albert Bierstadt]. Wood engraving, from Harper’s Weekly, VIII, no. 382, April 23 1864. The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.

In addition to numerous sketches, Bierstadt returned from the West with numerous stereoscopes and ethnographic artefacts, and it was not long before he had begun to exploit his interest in, and first-hand experience of, Indian life. At New York’s Metropolitan Fair in 1864, for example, he was asked to organise an “Indian Department” for the amusement of visitors. He arranged for a tableau vivant of nineteen American Indian performers to recreate those in the foreground of his painting which was also hung at the Fair, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (1863), in which Indians were shown carrying out essential tasks such as preparing food and hides.30 In reporting on the enormously popular event, even providing an illustration (Fig. 1.5), Harper’s Weekly stressed their dispossession:

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In the Fourteenth Street Building Bierstadt’s Indian Wigwam has been constantly crowded by visitors desiring to study the habits and peculiarities of the aborigines. Several entertainments have been given daily by the Indians. Our Sketch represents a War Dance, as given on several occasions to the intense gratification of all spectators. Historically, no feature of the Fair has greater interest than this in which the life of those who, only a little while ago, held undisputed possession of our continent, is reproduced by a handful of the once absolute tribes for the pleasure of the pale-faced race, whose ancestors pushed them into obscurity and historical oblivion.31

The reporter’s use of the past tense here suggests that by this time “historical oblivion” was already considered a fait accompli for North America’s Indians.

Von Guérard’s Stony Rises The same was true in the Australian colonies, where a vigorous debate as to whether or not the Aboriginals could be civilised was fought throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century. Barron Field for example, Judge of the New South Wales Supreme Court, claimed confidently in 1825 that “the Australian will never be civilised”.32 He questioned whether the “decay or extermination of the simple race of Australia should be the gradual end of our colonization”, and that if it was then perhaps, “better that their name should pass away from the earth”.33 His view was elaborated in romantic verse too: Yet deem not his man useless, But let him pass, —a blessing on his head! ... May never we pretend to civilize, And make him only captive! Let him be free of mountain solitudes; And let him, where and when he will, sit down Beneath the trees, and with his faithful dog Share his chance-gather’d meal; and, finally, As in the eye of Nature he has lived, So in the eye of Nature let him die!34

The Polish explorer, Paul Strzelecki, was highly critical of the colonial missionaries who were attempting to “civilise” Aboriginals by introducing them to what he believed was a religion completely irrelevant to their own society. Despite taking a strongly humanitarian view however, he too ultimately believed that they had “… the sentence of extinction stamped indelibly upon their foreheads.”35 Atrocities on the Australian frontier were at their most intense during the 1830s and 1840s, with punitive expeditions conducted during the 1850s; clashes between colonists and Aboriginals began soon after settlement in 1788, and continued for over 150 years.36 While frontier violence is not overtly apparent in the oeuvre of von Guérard, it is nevertheless an underlying subtext in Stony Rises: Lake Corangamite. Austrian-born von Guérard had been lured from Düsseldorf by the Victorian gold-rush, as well as the prospect of discovering exciting new prospects to paint. His art training at the Academy had fostered a keen interest in geology, and he was particularly fascinated by the lie of the land around the Stony Rises in Victoria’s Western District, through which he travelled in March and April 1857.37 He produced several pencil sketches of the subject, none of which appear to relate directly to the finished oil. Indeed while the sketch shown in Fig.1.6 is loosely reminiscent of the scene in the finished painting, scholars have pointed out that not only are there no monoliths of this magnitude in the region, but neither are there any sketches which relate directly to the painting.38 This is highly unusual in the context of von Guérard’s oeuvre: Here was a painter whose Humboldtian training emphasised the fundamental significance of empirical observation; even his grandest of studio oil paintings are known for their overall fidelity to actual places. What scholars have also pointed out is that the country around the Stony Rises is considered to have been of particularly sacred significance to the region’s first inhabitants, the Gulidjan people, and that in the 1840s, it had been the site of

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considerable bloody conflict between them and the European occupiers.39 By the time von Guérard was passing through only sixteen Gulidjan were said to be still alive, none of whom lived in the bush, but rather worked on local sheep and cattle stations.40 Indeed by the time the artist was traversing this part of the country, frontier violence in the area was a thing of the past.

Figure 1.6 Eugene von Guérard, Stony Rises Near the Pirron Yallock Creek at Millner’s Station, 1857. Pen, ink and wash. National Gallery of Victoria.

While von Guérard was primarily a painter of landscapes, in his early years in Australia he had tested the still young colonial art market in Melbourne by producing a group of genre paintings of Aboriginals, including Aborigines Met on the Road to the Diggings (1854) (Fig. 1.7).41 Highly unusual within the artist’s oeuvre, this narrative painting shows two gold-diggers bartering for a possum-skin cloak, one on his knees. While the abolition of slavery across the British empire had formally ceased in 1838, many contemporary viewers would surely still have recognised the bold inversion here of the popular and enduring abolitionist motif of a chained supplicant slave.42 Painted three years before Stony Rises, this work shows none of the foreboding symbolism of the later example; rather, the light and airy scene presents an optimistic vision of cultural exchange and harmony. Here an Aboriginal family is portrayed as healthy, fertile, industrious and friendly: A robust and harmonious future for all seems assured. Despite this, we know from one of von Guérard’s diary entries the same year that this painting was executed, that he was not only aware of Aboriginal decline, but that he was under no illusions about its cause. On 16 March 1854 he wrote: This morning I saw a miserable group of eight Aborigines, clad in the most ludicrous odds-and-ends of European wearing apparel, and nearly all in a drunken condition. It is sad to see how the poor creatures are demoralised by the white man’s influence.43

Von Guérard’s words reveal his sympathy for the Aboriginals’ plight, a factor which adds poignancy to his elegiac painting three years later. Not only presaging the extinction of a people, the allegorical Stony Rises may be also deciphered as an expression of personal sympathy and cultural loss.

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Figure 1.7 Eugene von Guérard, Aborigines Met on the Road to the Diggings, 1854. Oil on canvas. Geelong Art Gallery.

Humboldt’s ReisekĦnstler While Bierstadt missed von Guérard by only one year on his arrival in Düsseldorf in 1853, both artists were trained at the city’s internationally renowned art academy during a period when German interest in the New World was flourishing. Such excitement was generated largely by the publication of the first two volumes of Humboldt’s great book, Cosmos, in which the author had singled out a privileged role for landscape painters, which was to record nature in all its glorious detail “on the spot”. In his view, the painter needed to observe with the detached eye of a scientist. “Why may we not be justified in hoping”, he asked, that landscape painting may hereafter bloom with new and yet unknown beauty, when highly-gifted artists shall oftener pass the narrow bounds of the Mediterranean, and shall seize ... the living image of the manifold beauty and grandeur of nature in the humid mountain valleys of the tropical world? ... It is only by coloured sketches taken on the spot, that the artist, inspired by the contemplation of these distant scenes, can hope to reproduce their character in paintings executed after his return.44

Humboldt’s exaltations thus encouraged the rise of a new type of landscape painter: The ReisekĦnstler or travelling artist, whom he urged to travel beyond Europe to all corners of the globe.45 Frederic Church, Bierstadt’s great rival, was Humboldt’s most ardent American disciple, and his decision to travel to South America in search of tropical scenery was a direct answer to the great scientist’s clarion call to landscape painters. As Mary Louise Pratt has pointed out, Humboldt “reinvented” South America as nature personified. 46 Yet for him nature was not simply the raw data that could be recognised, collected and classified as Linnaeus had envisaged half a century earlier. Rather, Humboldt’s conception of nature was of dramatic and abundant spectacle that had the power to overwhelm human rationality. It was a deeply romantic vision, one which embraced Edmund Burke’s conception of Sublime nature as both Godly and awe-inspiring. Long after the publication of Burke’s famous aesthetic treatise a century earlier, the Sublime had continued to permeate European landscape painting and its New World manifestations.47 Artists such as Cole, Church, Bierstadt and others in North America, Ferdinand Bellermann, Eduard Hildebrandt and Johann Mauritz Rugendas in South and

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Central America, and Nicholas Chevalier and von Guérard in Australia and New Zealand, were all in search of Sublime landscape subjects as they travelled. Such artists tended to paint nature as a powerful and imposing force, one that was ultimately indifferent to the specks of humanity which were so often shown to inhabit it. There are many paintings by Bierstadt and von Guérard that fit comfortably into this trope. As an example, the latter’s well-known North-east View from the Northern Top of Mount Kosciusko (1863) (Fig. 1.8) shows two scientists, Georg von Neumayer and his assistant Edward Brinkmann taking barometric readings in the Australian Alps, dwarfed by the majestic and ancient rock formations extending below them.48 Bierstadt’s allegorical Sunset Light, Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains (1861) is another example of this type of Sublime vision, with its sombre Indian figures overshadowed by a dazzling celestial Rocky Mountains backdrop. Yet despite both works subscribing broadly to the tenets of Sublime landscape painting, there is a significant distinction between the manner in which the German scientists and native American subjects are portrayed. The scientific gentlemen, poised with their measuring instruments in hand, are depicted reacting to the scene before them not only by recording information, but also by gazing in wonder at the great and Godly spectacle laid out before them. The indigenous Americans on the other hand almost disappear into the foreground shadows: They are undifferentiated from nature, unable to react to the landscape around them because they are an integral part of it. Yet it is a group of rather gentler and less virtuosic paintings that is my focus here, specifically allegories of indigenous extinction which subscribe more closely to the aesthetic category of the Picturesque than that of the Sublime. Melancholic visions such as von Guérard’s Stony Rises and Bierstadt’s Indian Encampment, Shoshone Village tend not to emphasise nature’s wildness and its capacity to inspire awe. These brooding and highly romanticised scenes of indigenous peoples facing the dying light of their existence do not, on the face of it at least, portray the Darwinian sense of struggle.49 They appear to present the contrary: self-sufficiency and harmony with nature. As in Sunset Light, the native Americans are again an implicit part of nature, indistinguishable from it: Here there is only nature, a world in which plants and animals of all kinds appear to live together in total unity. Nevertheless the symbolic aspects of these particular works is far more pronounced, and it is their allegorical significance—what they imply rather than what they show— that serves to undercut their Humboldtian sense of unity and harmony. As will be observed shortly, it is these paintings’ foreboding message of inexorable decline that alludes to a new Darwinian reality in which “extinction and natural selection ... go hand in hand.”50 Understandably, art historians have focused their attention on Humboldt’s impact on nineteenth-century landscape paintings: As we have seen for the most part human figures, if they are there at all, are humbled specks which serve, as they had for centuries, to provide a sense of scale and individual focus for the eye. Yet rather than accept this Eurocentric art-historical commonplace, which tells us much about the endurance of a Claudean artistic tradition and nothing about the role of art within the broader rubric of imperialism, it is important to note the virtual absence of indigenous peoples in these paintings and what that in itself might reveal. Clearly such a line of enquiry would yield fascinating insights and merits further consideration, although it extends far beyond the focussed remit of this essay.51 Given the scholarly attention long devoted to Humboldt’s understanding of the physical world, it is perhaps not surprising that it is only recently that his impact on the course of racial science and American abolitionism in the early nineteenth century has been seriously considered.52 Yet according to Laura Dassow Walls, he was the only major scientist during the nineteenth century to argue consistently, for six decades, that “race” was not a biological category. As he declared in Cosmos: While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men. There are nations more susceptible of cultivation, more highly civilized, more ennobled by mental cultivation than others, but none in themselves nobler than others. All are in like degree designed to freedom.53

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If, then, it is the allegorical aspect of these mid-century “dying light” paintings which undercuts their adherence to an exuberant and totalising Humboldtian world view, nudging them closer towards a Darwinian paradigm characterised by winners and losers, then we should look a little more closely at allegory and its purpose.

Figure 1.8 Eugene von Guérard, North-east View from the Northern Top of Mount Kosciusko, 1863. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Australia.

Ethnographic Allegory If we are to accept Clifford’s assertion that the broad purpose of allegory is to instruct, we must then ask what was the message—both intended and perceived—of these paintings? First of all it is important to note that in their own time, they were not generally interpreted as pre-contact scenes as they might have existed immediately before European settlement; rather the clock was pushed much further back to an ancient era before The Fall. Clifford has pointed out that this was a common device prior to the rise of secular anthropology, and that Biblical or classical allusions are plentiful in early New World imagery.54 Contemporary critics in Australia certainly understood this, seeing not only the landscape as primeval, but also its original occupants. This is illustrated by the way in which leading Melbourne critic James Smith described another of von Guérard’s paintings: “The lords of creation are represented by a couple of Aborigines ... whose appearance, while it gives life to the scene, is not out of harmony with the primeval appearances of nature with which they are surrounded.”55 This distinction between pre-contact and prelapsarian periods may seem immaterial—surely the point is the subjects’ apparent timelessness, their lack of engagement with European settlers, and their message that indigenous peoples were in harmony with nature, if not inseparable from it. Yet as Russell McGregor has noted, the mid-century practice of pushing back the temporal limits for the existence of the earth and its people not only made a chronology based on the Bible increasingly untenable, but so too did it legitimise the emergent “science” of anthropology.56 Both von Guérard and Bierstadt were profoundly aware of their privileged role as artistobservers working “on the spot” in remote regions. As we have seen they responded to market demands for paintings of white settlers’ properties and cultivated land, particularly in the case of von Guérard, and in both cases for landscapes of untamed wilderness. But their face-to-face

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encounters at mid-century with indigenous peoples, who were visibly suffering the dire effects of contact, prompted them to produce these mournful laments for a mythical ancient past. Such redemption could most readily be expressed in allegory, which in Clifford’s words, “violated the canons both of empirical science and of artistic spontaneity”. 57

A Darwinian Shadow As a young naturalist, Darwin idolised Humboldt, whom, he wrote, “like another Sun illumines everything I behold”.58 Despite this reverence, Darwin’s radical vision with the struggle for survival at its core was profoundly at odds with the harmonious and unified natural world presented by his mentor. Yet I do not wish to argue that Darwin’s work had an immediate or even direct impact on the allegorical paintings of von Guérard and Bierstadt, for while their familiarity with Humboldt most likely stemmed from their training at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, history does not furnish us with a similarly useful connecting thread from the Englishman, Darwin. In fact the date of Stony Rises two years prior to the publication of Origin mitigates against a neat and compelling argument for direct Darwinian influence. Nevertheless, it is well known not only that Darwin had been quietly reworking his field notes since the 1830s, but perhaps more pertinently, that he drew on a myriad of existing theories about the natural world. His ideas were, in the succinct words of Ted Benton, “formed, constrained and enabled by the wider discourse of earlynineteenth-century natural history”.59 Peter Bowler, among others, has pointed out that the Darwinian revolution began well before Darwin was even born.60 In acknowledging this, David Bindman has noted the difficulties of pinpointing Darwinian influence with precision, and he provides a nuanced semantic distinction: ... between the “Darwinian” (deriving from Darwin’s own writings), and the “Darwinistic”. “Darwinistic” ideas may pre- or post-date Origin: they are ideas which were commonly attributed to Darwin, but whose connection with his opinions might be indirect or even oppositional, given the widespread acceptance of theories of evolution before he published Origin. 61

In this light I wish to propose a “Darwinistic” reading of the mid-century “dying light” paintings under discussion here; that while they cannot be directly traced to the impact of Darwin’s revolutionary book, they nevertheless belie concerns which were central to mid-nineteenth century scientific discourse, and which by the end of the century would come to be closely associated with Darwin; namely, the inevitable extinction of “savage” races when pitted against “civilised nations”. Darwin had been pondering the problem of racial origins since the 1830s, when they were a prominent concern for ethnologists.62 Yet it would not be until 1871 with the publication of his second major book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, that he dared to address the explosive issue of human evolution. Some forty years after his return from the New World on H.M.S Beagle, Darwin was at pains to try to understand the declining numbers of indigenous peoples across the colonised world. “When civilised nations come into contact with barbarians”, he wrote: the struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race. Of the causes which lead to the victory of civilised nations, some are plain and simple, others complex and obscure. We can see that the cultivation of the land will be fatal in many ways to savages, for they cannot, or will not, change their habits. New diseases and vices have in some cases proved highly destructive; and it appears that a new disease often causes much death, until those who are most susceptible to its destructive influence are gradually weeded out; and so it may be with the evil effects from spirituous liquors ...63

While Darwin thus recognised that native peoples seemed to be disappearing rapidly once in contact with “civilised nations”, he warned against ascribing a single cause to this dire state of affairs.64 He went on to give several examples of decimated populations (including those of Tasmania and other Australian colonies), and cited a range of independent speculations as to why numbers continued to shrink at such alarming rates.65 Stony Rises and Indian Encampment, with

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their dark message of irreversible decline, seem in many ways to presage Darwin’s subsequent thesis in Descent. Some thirty years after Bierstadt first visited the American West and produced his allegorical paintings of the region’s original inhabitants, he painted a final major work, The Last of the Buffalo (c1888). This painting returned to an earlier theme of impending extinction but it was stated this time, not merely implied. Here however it was not the American Indian who was seen to be doomed to extinction, but rather the buffalo, which since the 1870s had suffered a rapid decline in numbers as a result of excessive hunting—buffalo robes and tongues (considered a delicacy) were highly valued by the colonial market. By the time Bierstadt produced his canvas, the plight of these animals had become the subject of an ardent conservation campaign.66 Concern for dwindling animal populations was becoming increasingly prominent during this period of intense colonisation.67 Yet ironically (although not surprisingly), it was not the white man who was seen to be the culprit here, but rather the indigenous Indians whom Bierstadt portrayed as the aggressive perpetrators of a heinous crime. As Nancy K. Anderson has already noted, the painting was in fact a “masterfully conceived fiction that addressed contemporary issues”.68 While Plains Indians did indeed hunt the buffalo for their own purposes (it was their primary source of food), in fact the widespread slaughter (by colonists) was vigorously encouraged by army officers whose role was to subdue hostile Indians, and who discovered that the most effective means of achieving this was to starve them by eliminating the buffalo. By the time Bierstadt painted his canvas, not only were the animals almost extinct, but most of the Indians who had not already been slaughtered themselves had been sent to reservations. Bierstadt shows the Indians using lances, bows and arrows rather than the colonist’s rifle, yet his title refers unambiguously to contemporary and highly divisive issues. 69 It is instructive to compare The Last of the Buffalo, painted long after the publication of Darwin’s Descent, with George Stubbs’ Horse Attacked by a Lion from a century earlier. With its dramatic reference to species’ innate drive for self-preservation, Stubbs’ vision was profoundly Burkean, reflecting a philosophy which, as Barbara Larson has pointed out, would influence Darwin’s theory of species transformation a century later.70 Yet in Bierstadt’s post-Darwinian vision, “man” has entered the ring and is battling for his own heroic supremacy—yet not with his colonial oppressors, but rather with the very animals which, ultimately, had kept him alive for centuries. Furthermore, the American Indian has stepped out from nature’s shadows and inhabits not a mythical ancient past, but a modern world in which nature is no longer in harmony. Rather than engaging in the kind of redemptive exercise of “salvage ethnography”, Bierstadt recasts his Indian subject in the role of ferocious warrior: No longer was he to be pitied, he was now a figure to be deeply feared.

Perpetuating Imperialism’s Fantasy The mid-century allegorical paintings which have been the primary subject of this essay demonstrate a profound engagement with history in a period which was undergoing rapid paradigmatic change. Steeped in Humboldtian science, they also expressed some of the revolutionary ideas and anxieties which were central to intellectual discourse in the mid-nineteenth century. Presaging a dark and mutable Darwinian world in which the struggle for survival is key, these paintings were intimately bound to the twin ideologies of imperialism and racism. While they did not attribute agency in this seemingly fatal state of affairs—there was no attempt to explain the mysterious demise—their melancholic ambience expressed mourning for such inexorable loss. In this way they offered solace, sending a message that resistance to this sad yet seemingly inevitable state of affairs was fruitless. In thus yielding to the inevitable, the paintings’ consoling message ultimately, if indirectly, contributed to the perpetuation of colonial atrocities around the globe. They exemplify Brantlinger’s conception of “proleptic elegy”. As he writes: “the mourning and moralizing doomster loses his or her sense of personal inadequacy in the grand apocalypse of nations, empires or races. Nothing can be one’s personal fault if everything is falling

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to pieces.”71 Components of imperialism’s “dreamwork”, they subscribe to Mitchell’s vision of “utopian fantasies of the perfected imperial prospect and fractured images of unresolved ambivalence...”.72

Notes I would like to thank Dr Ruth Pullin, Dr Philip Jones and Professor Michael Rosenthal for reading and commenting upon early versions of this essay. Dr Pullin was the co-curator of the major exhibition Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2011. 1

Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880-1939, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997). 2 Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 3 Ibid. 4 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859) pp. 109-110. 5 Charles Darwin, Jounal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Countries Visited by HMS Beagle, Under the Command of Captain Fitzroy (London: Henry Colburn, 1839) p. 520, cited in McGregor, Imagined Destinies, p. 15. 6 Darwin, Journal of Researches, p. 520. 7 Henry Reynolds, Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989). 8 Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, p. 2. 9 McGregor, Imagined Destinies. 10 McGregor, Ibid., p. 13. 11 H. Glen Penny, “Traditions in the German Language” in Henrika Kuklick, A New History of Anthropology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) p. 85. Bastian’s massive collection of ethnographic artefacts subsequently entered the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, today one of the largest museums of its type in the world. 12 Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, p. 219. 13 A ground-breaking exhibition mounted in 1998 explored some of the remarkable similarities between American and Australian landscape painting of the nineteenth century; refer Andrew Sayers and Elizabeth Johns, New Worlds from Old: Nineteenth Century Australian and American landscapes (Canberra and Hartford, Conn: National Gallery of Australia and Wadsworth Athenaeum, 1998). 14 There are exceptions to this in von Guérard’s ouevre, largely a group of works painted in 1854 in which the human figure dominates. For further information see Ruth Pullin, Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2011) p. 112. 15 Ron Radford has suggested that the title change may well have been in order to attract a wealthy local buyer for the painting. See his “Eden before the White Serpent” in Daniel Thomas (ed.), Creating Australia: 200 Years of Art, 1788-1988 (Sydney: International Cultural Corporation of Australia, 1988) p. 80. 16 Definition from Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary, 2nd ed. Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, p. 205. 17 Radford, “Eden”, p. 80. Scholars have pointed also to the creeping intrusion of the European blackberry bush in the lower left corner of the painting as yet another ominous symbol. One should be wary here though, as Philip Jones has noted, as it would not be until the twentieth century that the foreboding symbolism of this pestilential plant was widely appreciated, and it would be a further decade until the rise of the Acclimatisation movement (email to the author, 13 February 2013). 18 John M. Stanley, “Petition”, 1852, cited by Brian W. Dippie, Catlin and his Contemporaries: The Politics of Patronage (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990) pp. 282-83. 19 W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) p. 10. 20 The Crayon, September 1859, p. 287. Cited in Gordon Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West (New York: Harrison House, 1988) p. 73. 21 James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory”, Chapter 11, James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986) pp. 205-28. 22 Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, p. 46. See also Klaus Lubbers, Born for the Shade: Stereotypes of the Native American Indian in United States Literature, 1776-1894 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994). 23 Fenimore Cooper confused two distinct groups of people, the Mohegans and the Mahicans. For more on the history of the Mohegan people see Michael Leroy Oberg, Uncas, First of the Mohegans (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2003). 24 Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: the Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pump, 1992) p. 22. 25 Paul Kane, Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1859) p. vii.

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Francis, Imaginary Indian, p. 23. Francis cites J. Russell Harper, Paul Kane’s Frontier. Including Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971). By the late nineteenth century, developments such as the arrival of the railroad did much to encourage immigration and tourism to the ‘West’ on a grand scale. Yet the opening up of the region had started much earlier in the century, inspired in part by the work of artists such as Kane and Catlin. 27 Francis, Imaginary Indian, p. 17. 28 Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, p. 46. The author cites recent books to substantiate this claim: David Stannard’s American Holocaust and Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide. 29 January 17 1859, cited in Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt, p. 63. 30 Ellwood Parry, The Image of the Indian and the Black Man in American Art: 1590-1900 (New York: George Braziller, 1974) p. 116. 31 Harper’s Weekly, VIII, no. 382, April 23, 1864, p. 260; cited in Parry, Image of the Indian, p. 116. 32 Barron Field, “On the Aborigines of New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land”, in Barron Field (ed.), Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales (London, 1825) p. 196. Cited by McGregor, Imagined Destinies, p. 8. 33 Barron Field, Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales. By Various Hands ... (London: J. Murray, 1825) p. 228. Cited by Michael Rosenthal, ‘Soldier, Settler, Artist: the Australian Watercolours of Edward Close’, unpublished essay, 2012. 34 Field, “On the Aborigines”, pp. 228-229; cited by McGregor, Imagined Destinies, p. 13. 35 Paul Strzelecki, “Physical Description of New South Wales”, p. 348. Cited by McGregor, Imagined Destinies, p. 17. 36 Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006) p. 10. The extent of the conflict between European settlers and indigenous Australians has been hotly contested for over a decade, although most scholars of note now accept Reynolds’ estimate in the book cited here of a minimum of 20,000 Aboriginal frontier deaths. 37 Tracey Lock-Weir, “Stony Rises: Lake Corangamite”, in Ruth Pullin, Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2011) p. 118. 38 Ruth Pullin, “Eugene von Guérard: A Journey Through Victoria’s Western Plains’ in Lisa Byrne, Harriet Edquist, and Laurene Vaughan, Designing Place: An Archaeology of the Western District (Melbourne:Melbourne Books, 2010). 39 Harriet Edquist, “Stony Rises: the Formation of Cultural Landscape”, in Byrne et al, Designing Place, pp. 62-77. See also Tracey Lock-Weir’s entry on Stony Rises, Lake Corangamite in Ruth Pullin, Eugene von Guérard. Nature Revealed, pp. 118-19. 40 Thomas, Creating Australia, pp. 80-81. 41 Candice Bruce, “Aborigines Met on the Road to the Diggings”, in Pullin, Eugene von Guérard, p. 112. 42 Am I not a man and a brother?, c. 1787, was famously reproduced as a ceramic seal by Josiah Wedgwood for the Society of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and reiterated in innumerable printed forms thereafter. There is a considerable body of literature surrounding the motif and its history, including John Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery (London: Frank Cass, 1998) pp. 155–184. 43 Eugene von Guérard, diary entry, March 16 1854, Marjorie Tipping (ed.), An Artist on the Goldfields: The Diary of Eugene von Guérard (Melbourne: Currey O’Neil, 1982). 44 Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, trans. Edward Sabine, 7th ed., Vol. 2 (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Murray, 1849) pp. 84-85. 45 Pullin, Nature Revealed, p. 20. On this subject see also Sigrid Achenbach, Kunst um Humboldt: Reisestudien aus Mittel und Südamerika von Rugendas, Bellermann und Hildebrandt in Berlin (Berlin: SMB Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) 2009. 46 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992) p. 120. 47 Edmund Burke, A Philsophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: 1757). 48 There is a substantial literature regarding this painting. For the most recent work see Tim Bonyhady, “The Tipping Point”, in Pullin, Nature Revealed, pp. 36-41. 49 Von Guérard’s painting appears to contradict the Malthusian view which saw population growth as being directly dependent upon the means of subsistence. Here the Aborigines appear to have an abundance of food. For further on the relationship between Darwin and Malthus see Ted Benton, “Science, Ideology and Culture: Malthus and The Origin of Species”, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays, eds. David Amigoni and Jeff Wallace (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995) pp. 68-94., 50 Darwin, Origin, 1869, p. 155. 51 Indeed scholars, particularly in Australia and more recently in North America, have been working in this field. See for example Tim Barringer and Andrew Wilton, American Sublime Landscape: Painting in the United States, 18201880. In the Australian context the uninhabited ‘natural’ landscapes on the one hand reflect the fact that by the midnineteenth century Aboriginals in many parts of the south-east of the country were rapidly dwindling in numbers, the result of both widespread disease and vicious imperial conflict. But these apparently uninhabited landscapes also served to deny the widespread indigenous levels of resistance that historians since Henry Reynolds have long brought to our attention. Such paintings of uninhabited wilderness served to confirm one of colonial Australia’s founding myths, that of terra nullius (literally, “land belonging to no-one”).

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17

Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009) Chapter 4. 53 Von Humboldt, Cosmos, Vol. 1, p. 358. Cited by Walls, Passage to Cosmos, pp. 175-76. 54 Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, p. 209. In Australian colonial art biblical and classical allusions are more rare. 55 Cited by Rob Macneil, “Time After Time: Temporal Frontiers and Boundaries in Colonial Images of the Australian Landscape”, in Lynette Russell, Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) pp. 47-67. 56 McGregor, Imagined Destinies, p. 22. 57 Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, p. 207. 58 Charles Darwin, Beagle Diary, ed. R. D. Keynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) p. 42. 59 Benton, “Science, Ideology and Culture”, p. 90 60 Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003) p.1. Bowler examines the pre-Darwinian history of evolution, including the work of Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus. See also the introduction by James Moore and Adrian Desmond to Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004) pp. xi-xvi; and Benton, ‘Science, Ideology and Culture, p. 90. 61 David Bindman, “Mankind after Darwin and Nineteenth-century Art”, in Diana Donald and Jane Munro, Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009) pp. 143-144. Bindman cites the work of George Stocking, in particular his Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987) p. 148. 62 Moore and Desmond, ‘Introduction’, p. xxiv. Darwin wondered why distinct groups of people were so physically different from one another even when their physical environments appeared to be so similar. He began to think that their differences could not just be put down to natural selection, but that another factor, sexual selection, was involved. 63 Darwin, Descent, p. 212. 64 Darwin, Descent, “On the Extinction of the Races of Man”, pp. 211-222. 65 Darwin, Descent, pp. 213-14. 66 Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1990) pp. 100-105. 67 This was notably the case during the “Scramble for Africa”, which intensified later in the century. In Fae Brauer’s exploration of this field, she identifies a shift in the representation of indigenous peoples from hunters to the hunted, taking as her example Emmanuel Frémiet’s sculptures of gorilla subjects, and examining them against the rise of NeoLamarckian evolutionary theory. See her “Wild Beasts and Tame Primates: “Le doaunier” Rousseau’s Dream of Darwin’s Evolution”, The Arts of Evolution: Charles Darwin and Visual Cultures, eds. Fae Brauer and Barbara Larson (Dartmore: The University Press of New England, 2009) esp. pp. 206-208. 68 Anderson in Anderson and Ferber, Albert Bierstadt, p. 101. This source also informs the following two sentences. 69 The argument has often been made in the vast literature devoted to Bierstadt, and The Last of the Buffalo in particular. See for example the words of the late Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (London: The Harvill Press, 1997) p. 201: The blame for the ecocide is put on the Indians themselves. The picture is a lie ... . 70 Barbara Larson, “Darwin, Burke, and the Biological Sublime”, Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History, ed. Barbara Larson, (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012). 71 Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, p. 190. 72 Mitchell, Landscape and Power, p. 10.

CHAPTER TWO FERNAND CORMON’S CAIN: MAN BETWEEN PRIMITIVE AND PROPHET ISABELLE HAVET

Fernand Cormon’s monumental painting Cain (Fig 2.1) was the sensation of the 1880 Paris Salon.1 Inspired by Victor Hugo’s epic poem “La Conscience” from La Légende des siècles, Cain depicts the biblical figure’s flight from Jehovah following his brutal slaying of his brother Abel. A bold reinterpretation of the tale of the flight of the first murderer with his clan, the painting recasts the biblical narrative in blatantly scientific terms. Trudging through a barren landscape, clad in ragged pelts, and carrying primitive tools and weapons, Cain and his tribe are not portrayed as conventionally classical figures, but instead as a terrifying prehistoric troupe roving the open desert. Cormon’s daring work set off a firestorm of controversy by so obviously alluding to the contemporary reconceptualizations of humankind’s origins inspired by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the mounting national fascination with prehistory. As this Chapter will reveal, the overwhelming and grim subject matter of Cain pictured the prehistoric origins of a traumatized France, actively searching for its earliest roots in the aftermath of the devastations and repeated humiliations following the Franco-Prussian War and Commune. The complex visual strategies and embedded meanings of Cain may have conveyed the possible fortunes of an ailing French nation still reeling from defeat and seeking renewed prosperity and redemption. Most alarmingly, the painting may have also conveyed the possible threat of its people’s slide back into a primeval savage state. Finally, this Chapter will consider how Cain reaches beyond the single narrative moment of its subject matter, the flight of Cain and his tribe from Jehovah’s wrathful eye, transforming the scene into a totalizing vision of humankind’s progression, and possible regression, throughout the ages and into the future. Already Cormon’s Cain has been discussed in the context of evolutionary discourse.2 What demands further consideration, in addition to how Cain might have been interpreted by the viewing public (beyond the world of art criticism), is the question of how it fits into larger national discourses that emerged out of the vigorous nineteenth-century debates surrounding prehistory and human evolution, most notably after the publication of Darwin’s model of evolution. First alluded to in On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection (first published in 1859 and translated into French in 1862), Darwin’s model was not fully fleshed out until his second publication on evolutionary theory, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, which was translated into French in 1871 and 1874). Many French intellectuals, particularly the anthropologist Paul Broca, and philosopher and historian Hippolyte Taine, helped spread and popularize Darwin’s evolutionary vision in France. Spawned amidst this Darwinian discursivity, Cormon’s Cain poses, in its many formal inconsistencies, themes that swirled around evolutionary theory and proliferated in the tumultuous decade of the 1870s when the work was conceived and completed, including discussions of degeneration and regression, depopulation, mob psychology, and moral hygiene. Cormon’s visualization of early human ancestors working cooperatively to survive fits within the nationalistic and secular aims of a Republican government keenly interested in harnessing France’s ancient past and in promoting the values of cooperation, redemption, and rationalism. Contradictorily, and disturbingly, however, Cain simultaneously presents a scenario of humankind’s violent and brutish origins. This possibility tapped into fears of dangerous heredity and savage regression at a time when the nation was embracing rationalism.

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Figure 2.1 Fernand Cormon, Cain, 1880. Oil on canvas, 400 x 700 cm., Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photograph, Art Resource, New York.

Unearthing the Past: Prehistoric Archaeology and Identity Cormon has been acknowledged by art historians as one of the first artists to incorporate an overtly scientific visual vocabulary into the arena of academic history painting.3 While Cormon’s painting approached the subject of human origins as never before, by the final decades of the nineteenth century, prehistory was already a national obsession. Thanks to a number of archaeological discoveries in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the subject of prehistory permeated every level of visual culture, from scientific treatises and academic history painting, to public exhibitions and publications.4 The fascination with prehistory was revived during the last half of the nineteenth century in France with the discoveries of Stone Age artifacts and human remains on native soil. These discoveries generated popular images, books, museums, and exhibitions devoted to prehistory. The first Cro-Magnon specimens were unearthed in 1868 in the Abri de Cro-Magnon in the Dordogne. Eleven years later, dazzling Paleolithic era caves were uncovered in Southern France and Northern Spain.5 These artifacts spurred intense scientific debates on humankind’s origins, characteristics, and place in the natural order that would continue well into the postwar period. The scientific community remained divided on the topic of human evolution, many adhering to the theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, while others supported Darwin’s theories of natural selection. Still others were opposed to evolution and the threat it presented to the notion of France’s classical origins.6 Despite scientific and public misgivings about the troubling implications of the prehistoric material record on humanity’s origins and place in the natural order, prehistoric man became increasingly entwined with regional and national identities in France. In the wake of incredible prehistoric findings on native soil, provincial museums began promoting the ancient past of their particular regions, proudly displaying archaeological finds such as fossils, bone fragments, and tools from surrounding locales.7 The scientist Antoine-Fortuné Marion, a childhood friend of the painter Paul Cézanne in Aix-en-Provence, who was to become a leading figure in prehistoric archaeology and Provençal cultural life, was an early champion of Darwin in Provence.8 A student of geology and zoology, in 1866, Marion discovered a Neolithic cave settlement in the hills of Saint-Marc east of Aix replete with skulls, bone fragments, and flint tools.9 Marion announced the findings at the international scientific congress that year in Aix, and

Fernand d Cormon’s Cainn: Man Betweeen Primitive and d Prophet

21

the follow wing year puublished an article on thhe ancient human h settleements of thhe Bouchess-du-Rhône region thaat included a detailed plate p illustraating flint to ools found at a the excavvation site (Fig. 2.2).10 Appointedd professor of zoology and paleonntology at th he Universiity of Mars eille, he soon became the directoor of the Naatural Historry Museum m in Marseillle with man ny of Marion on’s findingss being put 11 1 on displayy at the Musseum of Nattural History ry in Aix-en n-Provence.

Figure 2.2 Flint Tools, plate from A.-F. A Marion, Premières observations o sur s l’anciennneté de l’hom mme dans les Bouches-du--Rhône: Extrrait des séancces du congrress scientifiq que de France tenu à Aixx, Aix-en-Provvence, 1867. Bibliothèquee nationale dee France, Pariss.

At the same time in the cap pital, enorm mous nationaal exhibitio ons, such ass the Anthrropological Pavilion aat the 1867 Exposition Universell e, showcaseed prehistorric archaeollogical find ds and fullscale dioraamas. Thesee prehistoric exhibitionns boasted both b of the ancient a histtory of Fran nce, as well as the inttellectual annd technolo ogical supeeriority of the nation.12 Organize zed by Lou uis Laurent Gabriel dde Mortillett and built under the direction of o Frédéricc Le Play, the fair’s prehistoric displays, hhoused in thhe Histoire du travail ((History off Labor) halll, spanned tten sectionss stretching 1 across sevven rooms.13 In addition to the pprehistoric artifacts and tools on display, th he fair also marked thhe occasioon for the conveningg of the Congrès internationaal d’anthrop pologie et 14 d’archéoloogie préhisstoriques, founded f thhree years prior. While W the exhibition displayed prehistoricc artifacts from f severaal nations, the French h exhibition n took up m more than half h of the gallery spaace, presentting Paleoliithic, Neolitthic, Celtic, Gaulish, an nd Gallo-Rooman tools in a vision of linear hhuman progrress in whicch the evoluution of toolls coincided d with the evvolution of the human mind.15 newed interrest in prehiistory, follo owing a slew w of prehisttoric finds, It was during this time of ren public exhhibition, annd popular depictions d tthat Cormon n’s Cain ap ppeared. Itss pioneering g fusion of academic painting, science, and d embeddedd Republicaan values garnered proofessional acclaim a for Cormon.166 The workk was heraalded as thhe culminattion of the sweeping reforms in nitiated by

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Napoléon III, particularly the French government’s active campaign to promote secular education focused around science, technology and, whenever possible, the glorification of the nation state. It seemed to fulfill the State’s mission to uncover the national past via anthropological and archaeological study. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Celtic and Germanic tribes were considered the first forebears of the modern nation states. Often fueled by nationalist zeal as much as by professional curiosity, scientists and scholars sought to discover the origins and special characteristics of the first peoples to inhabit their native lands. Well before he was to become emperor, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte actively studied and promoted the early history of France, and became an ardent supporter of archaeology and ethnography in the country.17 During his exile in England in the 1840s, he began studying Julius Caesar’s military campaign against the Gauls, and later “anonymously” published his highly regarded two-volume study, L’Histoire de Jules César (1865-66).18 In 1862, the emperor ordered the creation of a museum of national antiquities at the Château of Saint Germain-en-Laye, twenty-three kilometers northwest of Paris, for the purpose of preserving and displaying the many ancient artifacts that were uncovered in France. It is also likely that the creation of such a national museum on native soil was in direct response to the creation in Germany of the pioneering Roman-Germanic Museum in Mainz ten years earlier. The Museum housed an overwhelming collection of objects numbering in the thousands, including stone axes, hammers, arrows, and spearheads.19 In addition to founding the Museum of National Antiquities, the emperor financed multiple excavations at key Iron Age settlements, including in the forest of Compiègne, Gergovia, and Alésia, where Caesar had eventually defeated the powerful Gallic chieftain, Vercingétorix. Such scientific efforts succeeded in tying the re-established French government with the fierce and glorious past of its supposed early ancestors, the Gauls or, as they were also called, somewhat interchangeably, the Celts.20 This rapid growth of prehistoric archaeology in France was intimately related to the development of the science of anthropology. A leading figure in the new field was Broca, Professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. In 1859, Broca, along with twenty prominent scientists, primarily physicians, broke from the more traditional Society of Biology to found the Society of Anthropology of Paris. Between the establishment of Society of Anthropology of Paris, an organization that emphasized the study of physical anthropology, and repositories like the Museum of National Antiquities, which focused on archeology, the road was set for a new positivist regime built upon new sciences that favored quantitative assessment and materialist approaches.21

Evolution on Display: Cain’s Reception and the Question of Human Origins The 1880 Salon was a tumultuous and highly contested affair.22 Organized by the newly appointed Director of Fine Arts Edmond Turquet, a staunch Radical Republican, it brought sweeping changes to the rules and organization of exhibition. An unprecedented number of works were admitted that year. The overwhelming 7,289 artworks listed in the Salon livret were far more than could possibly be handled. In addition, works were no longer displayed in the usual alphabetical order, but were grouped thematically, making it even more difficult to locate artworks within the exhibition. Three jury members resigned in protest over the changes. Turquet’s adversary Philippe de Chennevières proclaimed the Salon of 1880 “tohu-bohu sans nom” í “unspeakable chaos”.23 Within this turbulent climate, Cormon prospered. The painting’s themes of exile and redemption, couched in Hugo’s description of Cain from La Légende des siècles í composed when the author was himself in exile í echoed Radical Republican demands for total amnesty for the Communards, the topic of major political debate since 1878, and only granted by Parliament in July 1880.24 Cain was also easily accommodated within the nationalistic mission of the Radical Republican regime advocating the scientification of the nation. The painting earned an official stamp of approval at the 1880 Salon, was immediately purchased by the state, and spawned a slew of public commissions for the artist.25 The critical reviews of the painting, however, were

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less positive, often perplexed, and sometimes openly hostile.26 What so horrified critics and delighted government officials was the artist’s unmasked reference simultaneously to the past and present. Cormon’s Cain figure captured the epic nature of original man’s struggle for survival, and furthermore suggested that struggle and change is a never-ending cyclical process unfurling over eons.27 From the first salon reviews of Cain, until the historical articles today, the painting has been seen as a first, and rather crude, attempt by an academic artist to inject anthropologically accurate details of prehistoric life into academic history painting.28 However, I would like to argue that upon closer examination, the painting reveals itself to be far more than a representation of prehistoric life, thinly disguised behind Biblical subject matter as would be appropriate for a Salon setting. Instead of adhering to an anthropological mise-en-scène of prehistoric life, as Cormon had done before and would continue to do, especially in his state-commissioned work, Cain is compositionally and thematically complex, making it challenging to read.29 Cormon depicts Cain as the clear leader of the troupe. Emaciated but striding purposefully forward, he leads his exhausted family across a barren desert landscape. The figures are massive, heavily muscled, sunburnt, and ragged. The motley group, all of them Cain’s children according to the Biblical tale, carry a crude pallet piled high with bloody carcasses and pelts. Riding high upon the stretcher is the group’s most precious cargo: Cain’s wife and bearer of the family line. Heaped protectively in her lap, her smallest progeny lie exhausted, yet plump and healthy. A pair of fearsome dogs carries up the rear of the train. Yet where Cormon’s portrayal seems to depart from the Biblical narrative is its portrayal of a diversity of human physiognomies. The painting presents all phases of life, ranging from youth to old age.30 The members of Cain’s tribe represent the full spectrum of the human lifespan, from the smallest infants, appearing supremely vulnerable in their environment, to the young and fit, and finally to the old and wizened. Cormon took these markers of difference even further, representing physiognomies that appear to exist at entirely different stages of evolution, from the brutish, to the classically ideal, and even to the contemporary, the latter most notable in the insertion of a female figure with a fashionable French hairstyle. The forward momentum of the figures, who appear to file inexorably past the viewer from left to right, recalls the diagrams devised by Thomas Huxley (Fig. I.4) and Broca representing human evolution as an ever-ascending evolutionary ladder reaching to the present-day. Cormon’s Cain, however, subverts this sense of unstoppable forward advancement, from least to most evolved. The phases of human development are not comfortingly presented as a linear progression moving rationally from the most primitive physiognomy on the left to the most evolved on the right. A reader of scientific treatises, Cormon was well aware of current theories of human evolution, as well as research on the classification of the successive ages of humankind, and followed the work of Darwin and John Lubbock.31 The artist would have been familiar with Lubbock’s seminal Prehistoric Times (1865), in which he modified the Stone Age, dividing it into two distinct periods, the “Paleolithic” (“Old Stone”), and the “Neolithic” (“New Stone”) periods, and argued that history and biology continuously developed in stages from simple to more complex forms to the present day. Contemporary critics were quick to grasp the themes of prehistory and human evolution in Cormon’s Cain, with many finding it entirely unsuitable for the Salon.32 Despite the painting’s career-making official reception, critics grappled with its radical style and meaning. Many reacted caustically to the implications of its inconsistencies. Derided for its perceived stylistic and thematic breaches, it was critiqued for its rough facture, dreary palette, and departure from classical physiognomies. The most disturbing breach committed by Cormon’s Cain as a ‘history painting’, however, lay in its rejection of Christian morality. It could convincingly act neither as a moral lesson of evil punished through divine retribution, nor a studied contrast of body types representing good and evil, but instead offered a glimpse into Darwinian evolution unfolding in prehistoric times.33 While some critics were awed by Cormon’s vision of prehistoric times, others were also deeply unsettled by the merging of the plastic arts and science, as epitomized by the critic, Charles Clément’s response to Cain:

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Despite the qualities of invention and force that I am pleased to acknowledge, all of this is too revolting and violates the most natural laws … Unless he had the intention to astound the world, I do not understand the reasons that motivated the artist … There is certainly a point here. M. Cormon did not only make the work of an artist. It is an anthropology lesson that he wished to give us. He wanted to support in his way the ideas of the most adventurous disciples of Darwin. But if man descends from the ape, he should not have depicted him so close to his origins.34

Although Clément recognized that Cormon advocated Darwin’s model of evolution as it applied to humans, he lamented the way the painting veered from the prescribed moral and artistic goals of history painting. While he lambasted the way in which Cormon had reduced “history painting” to “an anthropology lesson”, others were shocked by the ways Cormon had bestialized the human body. “This wretched band of gaunt and haggard people…these weapons from the Stone Age, these bodies that are more animal than human”, wrote one critic. These horrible and simian types … form a group that is wild, dramatic, and striking.”35 The radicalism of Cain was all the more apparent during its exhibition in 1880. Cormon’s incorporation of evolutionary theory within painting, and more generally into considerations of human nature, too blatantly undermined the traditional view that positioned mankind at the highest point on the Great Chain of Being.36 It was displayed opposite another scene of prehistory, Puvis de Chavanne’s Ludus Pro Patria (Patriotic Games), or Jeunes picards s’exerçant à la lance (Young Picards Practicing the Javelin), a full-sized cartoon for the painting being exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français of 1882 and destined for the Musée de Picardie in Amiens. The direct juxtaposition of Cormon’s work with Puvis’s classicized vision,37 posed the starkest contrast in the Salon according to the critic Émile Michel38, inviting viewers to compare conflicting visions of the nation’s prehistoric roots and inherent character.39 While Puvis represented a utopian community, engaged in healthy competitions of athletic prowess within an idealized landscape, Cormon conceived of a nomadic group whose physical features, from their skulls to Cain’s hunched posture and ape-like protruding collar bone and shoulder, suggested humanity at the instant of its transmutation from an animal past. The painting, unanchored as it is in any particular time or place, may have also encouraged viewers to imagine the scene enfolding as they watched. The flat and schematic background provides a barren but non-specific environment, able to act as a virtually abstracted backdrop to the figures. The group’s clear struggle for survival in an inhospitable environment, and their differing body types, from young, fit, and heroic to increasingly desiccated, may have invited the viewer to consider the scene in light of their present national conditions, specifically the social and political upheavals, as well as the long lingering trauma following the calamitous Franco-Prussian War and the Commune.

Tracing Human Variability: Cain, Cooperation, and Survival Given that it would appear to be the evolutionary mechanism itself that is on display in Cain, Cormon characterizes the process of transmutation as infinitely variable and fluid. While Cain seems to depict a singular moment, a vision of a nomadic prehistoric troupe on the move, visual correspondences lead the eye back and forth across the picture, somewhat mitigating the picture’s tremendous forward momentum and inviting the viewer to compare and contrast the figures. The figure of Cain’s pose, with his wide step, tautly muscular legs, hunched shoulders, and hanging right arm, is paralleled by the equally large and prominent figure taking up the rear of the group, to the far left of the foreground. While Cain, as the most primitive of the gathering, carries a crudely flaked stone axe, a Stone Age weapon, his progeny holds an item incongruous with this era: A spear with a tip that appears to be made of metal, an object associated with the Iron Age.40 To complicate evolutionary matters even further, a third freestanding male figure seems to mirror the pose of Cormon’s spear-bearer almost exactly. Rough and dark-skinned, this figure carries a woman with strikingly different features from the rest of the group. More than any other figure, she appears to belong to another age entirely. Her smooth skin, elegant pose, and fair complexion clash with the heavy musculature and weather-beaten features of her companions. The embodiment of the classical nude, she is better suited to the lush environments painted by

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William-A Adolphe Boouguereau and a those im maged by Cormon’s C teacher, t Aleexandre Caabanel. She does not appear to belong b with hin the barrren wastelaand in whicch she findds herself. Indeed, I the figure’s nnubile feattures and fashionablle, decided dly 1880’s hairstyle, resemble those of Bouguereaau’s heroine in Young g Girl Defennding Herseelf Against Eros (Fig. 2.3), exhib bited at the Salon in tthe very sam me year as Cormon’s Cain. Edm mond About, in his Sallon review of Cain in May of 18880, noted this t young woman’s w boody and thee dissonance created bby including g her in the picture, reemarking thhat she was “completeely modern in beauty, contrastingg with the horrors h and exaggerateed vulgaritiies of the triibe.”41 Yet tthe strange and seemin ngly incongr gruous juxtaaposition of different bbody types, hair, skin colors, and hhealth suggeest an even greater leveel of compleexity.

William-Adolpphe Bouguereeau, A Young Girl Defendin ng Herself against Eros, 18880. Oil on caanvas, 81.6 x Figure 2.3 W 57.8 cm. Thhe J. Paul Gettty Museum, Los Angeles.

Cormonn’s emphassis on moveement, channge, and varriation sugg gest that hum manity is in n perpetual flux, and that these changes c can n occur rapiidly. This is i partially in i line withh the Bibliccal story of Cain, whicch proclaim ms him as th he father, ddescended frrom Adam and Eve, off all of hum manity. But by condennsing this subject s mattter—the succcessive offfspring of Cain—into one picture, Cormon merged sccience and art as had never befoore been ach hieved in academic a hiistory paintting. In his painting, Cormon suuggests thaat successivve generations have been b spawnned from Cain, C with distinguishhable traitss. The rapid dity of thiss human deevelopment is accentuuated by the picture’s forward m motion from m left to right. r The hhorizontal format of the gigantiic painting is further

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emphasized by the over-life-sized figures that fill the bottom of the frame. The viewer must crane upwards to take in the enormous scene. As the gargantuan figures drive inexorably forward, what is closest to eye level, and easiest to see, is the muscular legs and heavy feet of the figures, moving with such speed and force that clouds of dust are churned up as they shuffle past. They hover in the foreground of the shallow, horizontal composition, but travel diagonally through the space, as if the figures will continue to move outside of the picture frame and into the viewer’s own space. That the group may soon move beyond the picture frame is accentuated by Cain’s giant stride and forward gesticulation. The relentless forward motion of the figures, coupled with the sheer variety of the physiognomies in this family group, suggests the speed and variation of progeneration that can occur within one family line. This recalls Darwin’s famous analogy of the branching tree, which he used to illustrate the concept of natural selection and to capture the interconnectedness of organisms by descent.42 In the revised sixth edition of On the Origin of Species published in 1872, Darwin describes the Tree of Life as ever growing and changing: At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have at all times overmastered other species in the great battle for life (…) As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.43

Cain’s ever-evolving line also bears thematic and visual affinities to the ideas of Thomas Huxley, whose study Evidence As To Man’s Place in Nature (1863; translated into the French in 1868) was the first to fully broach the topic of human evolution.44 Applying Darwin’s theory to humankind, Huxley demonstrated that apes and humans derived from a common ancestor. In the iconic diagrmatic frontispiece to Huxley’s study, the skeletons of a gibbon, orangutan, chimpanzee, gorilla, and human can be seen in Fig. I.4 lined up in strict hieratic sequence, effectively closing the gap between the evolutionary stages separating humankind from ape. Due to its left-to-right directionality and schematic nature, Huxley’s diagram does little to suggest the passage of time or environmental conditions that factor into the evolutionary process. Yet such a controversial topic during the Moral Order regime did not gain traction or acceptance until the founding of the School of Anthropology in Paris by Broca in 1876, and until the Radical Republicans gained sufficient political power the following year from which time they were able to support the new sciences. Cormon’s presentation of different phases in human evolution working together for survival may also have been informed by scientific studies of early human cooperation, a topic explored in Darwin’s writings and a central tenet of Neo-Lamarckism.45 The theme of cooperation was seminal to contemporaneous theories of Neo-Lamarckian evolution, developed by French naturalists and zoologists who were not only influenced by Darwin’s The Descent of Man and his late work but also Lamarck’s theory of Transformism. The virtues of unity, cooperation, and harmony over competition would also become the founding principles of Republican Solidarism in the 1890s.46 Cormon’s Cain, while presenting humanity as a motley assembly of divergent figures, is in reality a scene of supreme human cooperation. The figures stride forward as a unified entity, following the leader Cain, who is clearly separated as the head of the group and gesticulates forward forcefully. The group works together to carry the heavy palette, in which are piled the mother, children, and animal carcasses. Carrying an array of tools and food, the prosperous tribe echoes descriptions of prehistoric human ancestors as described by Darwin in The Descent of Man. Cooperation amongst members, ingenuity, and sympathy were key human traits ensuring sustained survival of the tribe. Darwin particularly stressed the importance of human cooperation on the evolution of intellectual faculties of early humans stating: “We can see that, in the rudest state of society, the individuals who were the most sagacious, who invented and used the best weapons or traps, and who were best able to defend themselves, would rear the greatest number of offspring.”47 Darwin proceeds by identifying the development of consciousness, including the

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faculties of remorse and sympathy, as a source of strength that could provide a particular tribe of early humans with an advantage over other tribes in the great struggle for survival: Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be affected. A tribe possessing the above qualities in a high degree would spread and be victorious over other tribes; but in the course of time it would, judging from all past history, be in its turn overcome by some other and still more highly endowed tribe. Thus the social and moral qualities would tend slowly to advance and be diffused throughout the world.48

While Cain’s group clearly suffers, their survival, and prosperity as a tribe, rests upon their mutual cooperation. The cooperation between figures in the painting, extending from the most atavistic figures, notably Cain, to the youngest and physically most modern in appearance, posits human evolution and survival, at every stage of human evolution extending from the animal past, as dependent upon the development of such human traits as sympathy and cooperation.

Literary Prehistoric Wanderers and Troubling Heredity The myriad prehistoric discoveries and evolutionary theories of the nineteenth century, sometimes loosely interpreted, were fodder for artistic and literary depictions of subjects of great national concern, including the overwhelming questions opened up by Darwin’s theory. The image of Cain, a tortured man travelling on the margins of civilization, presents in one totalizing image the forces of cyclical progression and regression believed to be at the heart of humanity’s development. His suffering was the outcome of his natural inclinations. He existed as a wanderer, in a never-ending search for enlightenment, but who was constantly at odds with his deeply destructive human urges. Cormon was not the first to picture early humans emerging from their animal past in terms of prehistory. The issue of when and how the first humans emerged from their animal ancestors, for many artists and writers, centered on the question of when homo sapiens first developed consciousness and felt emotions that were deemed unique to their species. Cormon raises these questions about the inherent characteristics of humanity and the consequences of its hereditary legacies. Hugo’s sweeping collection of poems, La Légende des siècles, was a fitting source of inspiration for Cormon’s own vision of human origins.49 Written between 1855 and 1876, while the author lived in exile, La Légende des siècles recounts, in episodic fashion, humanity’s progress through the ages. One of the first poems, “La Conscience,” describes Cain’s harrowing flight as he gathers his family and flees the relentless disembodied open eye of Jehovah. The universe of La Légende des siècles is replete with such acts of sacrifice and the search for human redemption. For Hugo, the persecuted Poet, like the messianic prophet and the figure Cain, sacrifices himself for the greater good. It is through such terrible sacrifice, both spiritual and corporeal, that humanity’s future can be ensured. Cormon’s Cain likewise emphasizes the very physical dimensions of sacrificing oneself for the greater good. The figure of Cain is separated from the mass of other trudging figures as he leads the way. With hunched legs spread, his extended arm powerfully indicates the way forward. His mass of facial hair obscures his features, but it is clear that his purpose is set, as he moves his tribe to an unknown destination. The bleakness of the desert landscape adds pathos to the scene: It is unclear whether the troupe heads towards any destination at all, or if any destination could better suit their prospects. Cormon may have been further influenced by Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle’s account of Cain’s wandering in his Poèmes barbares (1862). Lisle also imagines Cain as a primitive man materializing from his natural surroundings, the progenitor of the first men who roamed the earth. In Leconte de Lisle’s retelling of Cain, the group that emerges from the primordial mists is more beast than men: They came from the mountain and the plain, From the depths of the somber forests and the desert without end, More massive than the cedar and taller than the pine, Sweating, disheveled, breathing in harsh gasps, With their red mouths, and full of hunger.

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It was thus that they returned home, the shaggy cave bear Slung on their shoulders, or the deer, or bleeding lion.50

Rather than fleeing from the wrath of Jehovah, Cain’s group materializes from primordial lands, as if emerging from their nebulous animal past. They are on the verge of human consciousness, roving like savage predators during the age of the cave bear, in accordance with descriptions of the Paleolithic era as the epoch of the cave bear. Cormon’s figure of Cain, like Hugo’s, physically embodies the role of first murderer, his crime evident in his monstrous physical appearance and supreme suffering. In the entry for Cormon’s Cain in the 1880 Salon brochure, Cormon seems to have wanted to emphasize this aspect of his painting. The painting’s subtitle quotes the first lines of Victor Hugo’s epic poem “La Conscience”: When with his children covered with animal skins, Disheveled, livid amidst the storms, Cain fled from Jehovah, As evening fell, grim man arrived To the foot of a mountain in a vast plain.51

As Philippe Dagen has noted, Cormon subtly changed Hugo’s original wording, thus altering its meaning: In the Salon brochure, the troupe is described as “couverts” (“covered”) with animal skins, replacing Hugo’s original word “vêtus” (“clothed”) with its implications of civilization.52 This subtle modification further underscores the primitive nature of Cain’s group. Darwin broached the question of human origins in his second book on evolutionary theory, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.53 In The Descent of Man, Darwin brings to bear an enormous and even overwhelming accumulation of examples of human evolution, viewed through the theoretical lens of sexual selection. One of the major questions he tackles is whether human faculties could have evolved. Darwin was reacting to theories advanced by Alfred Russel Wallace and others that the human mind was far too complex, and the gap too large between humans and apes, for human faculties to have developed gradually. Darwin countered in The Descent of Man that the human faculties believed to be far removed from animals, such as moral sensibility, sociability, imagination, self-consciousness, sympathy for others, the sense of beauty, and music, can in reality be observed to some extent in animals, most notably in apes and dogs, which he corroborated in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals published one year later. Darwin’s main concern was not to prove the theory of evolution or descent from a common ancestor, which had been established by the time of publication. Rather, Darwin weighs in on the debate, introducing the idea of sexual selection and focusing on how “human” traits and emotions developed, including religious feeling, sympathy and morality. Darwin broaches the question of how the processes of natural selection and sexual selection have governed human evolution through the primordial ages to the modern age. Lengthy and brimming with facts, anecdotes, and predictions, The Descent of Man painted a disturbing vision of an animalistic half-formed humanity, stripped of natural checks, balanced by societal forces and on the brink of further savage regression. These predictions seemed particularly telling at the time of the release of The Descent of Man, when indeed France was locked in a desperate struggle for survival, endangered by enemies from abroad and within. In The Descent of Man, Darwin eventually turns to the question of the process of natural selection and its impact on contemporary “civilized” nations. Citing the works of W. R. Gregg, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Francis Galton, Darwin suggests that the process of natural selection has been artificially halted by modern social institutions and proclivities although these were, he noted, the “noblest” part of human nature: With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our

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medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.54

Darwin continues that an obstacle to the prosperity of “civilized countries” is the depopulation of the “superior class” vis-à-vis those “very poor and reckless, who are often degraded by vice almost invariably marry early.” The unchecked reproduction of the potentially dangerous lower classes has the potential for widespread harm: Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts—and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal ‘struggle for existence,’ it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed—and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults.55

Darwin continues that a nation, failing to check the “vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men,” will degenerate, “as has occurred too often in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule.”56 Darwin’s warning to watch, and potentially attempt to control the population rates of a given society so as to avoid extinction would have particularly resonated following the terrible realities of France during the time The Descent of Man first appeared. Death, destruction, famine, revolution, depopulation, degeneration and loss of territory all seemed signs of a nation, “sick with itself” and potentially headed towards extinction.

Decivilized Nations: Darwinism, the Visual Arts, and Fears of Savage Regression in Third Republic France In the aftermath of the tumult of the Franco-Prussian War and the disorder of Commune, the country began embracing the ideals of rationalism and scientific thought in the arena of civil governance. Scientific progress was lauded as a potential remedy for the defeated French nation, still reeling from the disastrous and decisive war with Prussia from March to May of 1871. While Baron Georges Haussmann’s marvelous civil engineering projects had once prophesied a clean sweep into the future, Paris had been instead been turned into an apocalyptic wasteland, sieged by Prussian soldiers and further devastated during the clashes between Communards and Versailles troops. Entire sectors of the city were pulverized by shelling. Familiar monuments and symbols of state power such as the Jardins des Tuileries, Hôtel de Ville, Ministère des Finances, and Palace of the Légion d’honneur, were reduced to rubble. Ernest Meissonier’s cataclysmic Ruins of the Tuileries (Fig. 2.4) illustrates the totality of the destruction to devastating effect. The structure of the Tuileries Palace, first set ablaze by the rebellious Communards on May 23, 1871, burned for forty-eight hours straight. The dome was then detonated with explosives. It remained an empty, ruined shell, untouched for over a decade, before it was finally demolished and its stones salvaged.57 The pulverized palace and gaping void that was once the central pavilion of the palace, as illustrated here by Meissonier, was a trenchant symbol of the destruction of Paris, and more largely the annihilation of the Second Empire regime and an entire world order. Almost mockingly, as if emerging from these gaping ruins, hovers François Joseph Bosio’s triumphal bronze quadriga from atop the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, entitled The Restoration Guided by Peace.58 The continued destruction to the city was widespread and severe: Over five hundred city streets were barricaded, and many were entirely destroyed. Following the siege of Paris by the Prussians, the capital then suffered bombardment and fire from the Communards, largely comprised of working-class Parisians protesting their deplorable living conditions and the provisional French government’s hasty concessions to the enemy. An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 people were killed in

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Paris durinng the course of La Semaine sangglante (The Bloody Weeek) from M May 21 and 28, 2 1871, a massacre unparalleleed in Europ pean historyy. Approxim mately 40,0 000 were aarrested, and d many of those killeed were shot after thee fighting hhad ended in i hasty court-martialss. The fear of further uprisings led to waaves of soccial purginng.59 The slaughter s was w followeed by the systematic deportatioon to New Caledonia C of o some 5,0000 to 7,50 00 people.600 It was noot until Aprril 5, 1879, nearly a ddecade laterr, and the yeear before C Cormon exh hibited Cain at the Sallon, that am mnesty was 61 finally decclared for thhe condemn ned and exilled Commun nards.

Figure 2.4 E Ernest Meissoonier, The Ruiins of the Tuilleries Palace,, 1871. Oil on n canvas. Mussée national du d château de Compiègne.. Photograph, Art Resource, New York.

In the wake of thhese eventss, and withh memoriess of bloody y war and rrevolution still fresh, 62 concerns aabout the material m body were partticularly acu ute. Death h, suffering,, and destru uction were treated ass tangible realities. Meissonier’s M s gruesomee Siege off Paris of 1884 reprresents the allegoricall figure of Paris P with a stark realiism. Paris, swathed s in a black veill and lion skin, stands alert at thee ruins of a barricade holding h a taattered French flag. Billowing clouuds of smok ke and ash, cacophonoous sounds of trumpetts and ringiing of cano on fire, and d the strewnn bodies off the dead, wounded, and starvinng all signaal the brutaal realities and a confusiions of warr. In the distance, the ghoulish ffigure of Faamine hovers over the fire-ruined d city of Parris. Meissonnier was ceertainly not alone in tturning an unflinching g eye to thee morbid realities r of contemporaary life. Th he public’s fascinationn with deaath and crim me were suuch that the Paris mo orgue, part of the larg ger Institut

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médico-légal run by the Prefecture of Police, became one of the popular tourist sites of the city in the late nineteenth-century, and was highlighted as a point of interest in Paris guidebooks.63 Here, criminals, among them unidentified victims of suicide and murder, were laid out behind glass windows for a viewing public. On the literary front, the Naturalist writer, Émile Zola, reacted to the vogue for the morbid, by treating crime, lechery, scandal, and murder as inherent human traits, especially of the lower classes. In an artistic environment where the modern artist was encouraged to turn an objective eye on all social realities, death was no longer taboo. In one of the most memorable and harrowing scenes of L’Œuvre (1885), Zola chronicles the downward spiral of aspiring artist Claude Lantier, who is compelled to paint from life the corpse of his recently deceased son. His need to record the aspects of the corpse in minute detail trumps his grief and revulsion at his own actions. Zola’s large-scale literary project of studying human nature culminated in a series of novels comprising a “natural history” following the Rougon-Macquart family line, whose penchant for crime, drinking, prostitution, and murder, are described as biologically, if not hereditarily determined.64 The story of Cain, with its central themes of barbaric origins, would have struck a chord with contemporary viewers, and may have invoked the days of bloody conflict still fresh in the French collective memory. Darwin’s The Descent of Man, with its dire predictions, appeared at the moment of the Commune, and in the years that followed, the bloody battles were equated with man’s potential to revert to barbaric, violent behavior against even the closest of kin. In The Descent of Man, Darwin posits a struggle, since man’s relatively recent emergence from a barbaric state, between “his social instincts, with their derived virtues, and his lower, though at the moment stronger impulses.”65 In the second volume of his massive historical study Les Origines de la France contemporaine (1876–1893), entitled La Revolution: l’anarchie, Hippolyte Taine locates the origins of degenerative and regressive human characteristics to irrepressible animal instincts: (…) From the peasant, the laborer and the bourgeois pacified and tamed by old civilization, we see all of a sudden come forth the barbarian, or even worse, the primitive animal, the grinning, sanguinary, wanton monkey, who chuckles as he slays and gambols over the ruins he has accomplished. Such is the actual government to which France has been delivered, and after eighteen months’ experience, the best qualified, most judicious and profoundest observer of the Revolution will find nothing to compare it to but the invasion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century: “The Huns, the Heruli, the Vandals, and the Goths will come neither from the north nor from the Black Sea; they are in our very midst.66

The portrayal of primitive barbarism in Cormon’s work was duly noted in the press. Edmond About asserted in his 1880 Salon review: This young painter knows very well that these figures predate the Stone Age, that they precede by an infinity of centuries the comb and soap, and that they are but little removed from the great apes of equatorial Africa. He has therefore tried to make them filthy, enormous, grotesque intermediaries between man and brute; nothing is more natural in his opinion than giving to old Cain the neck and shoulders of a gorilla.67

The correlation between Cain’s primitive features and the features of an ape are a source of anxiety for the critic; they seem to suggest an uncomfortably close relationship between animal and man, and idea that had long been explored by French comparative anatomists and was the subject of numerous public lectures and exhibitions. The evolutionary link between monkeys, apes, and humans, while unacceptable in the realm of academic history painting, was a major focus of anthropologists, the same year that it presented its enormous collection of prehistoric tools and remains at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, the Society of Anthropology exhibited animal and human anatomies side-by-side at the new anthropology museum. An illustration for La Nature (Fig. 2.5) depicts curious visitors peering at the comparative anatomy exhibition at the School of Anthropology peering at ordered rows of human and simian skeletons. In the foreground of the image, the skeleton of a human giant stands in juxtaposition to the flayed body of a flayed gorilla.68

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Figure 2.5 “Le Musée de L’École d’anthropologie, à Paris,” La Nature (1878, vol. 1). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

However, it is above all the reversal of the “natural order” of things in Cormon’s bodies that critics found so disquieting. Cain’s figures vacillate between human and brute, the patriarch of the clan and clear navigator appearing the most atavistic of all, defying the notion that humans enjoyed, from their first and sudden appearance, a privileged place at the top of the Great Chain of Being. As the anthropologist, Judith Berman, has argued, the visual indicators of prehistory in the early pictorial interpretations of prehistoric times drew upon conventional signs of savagery developed during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, including heavy, brutish bodies and unruly, overabundant hair.69 Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, begun in 1880 and originally destined for the massive Gates of Hell, moves beyond its classical source material, presenting a figure with the heavy musculature, massive skull, hunched shoulders, and a helmet-like head of hair of a human struggling with human consciousness. Odilon Redon’s etching, Cain and Abel (Fig. 2.6) of 1886 indicates the brothers’ primal natures through their exaggeratedly fierce gestures, Cain’s crude club, and their essential anonymity. In an unsettling reversal, the faces of the two figures are replaced by unruly mops of hair. Cormon’s figures are notably hirsute, from Cain’s billowing skin, to their wild hair, so raised and matted that they distort the size and shape of their heads. Hence the brothers’ features, and very humanity, have been replaced by wild gestures and physiognomies. Taine took up the notion of “animal passions” embedded in human nature. Through a series of lectures to the École des Beaux-Arts, Taine developed a systematic sociological approach to art history.70 According to Taine, objectivity, empirical observation, and careful documentation, all positivist values, could advance the study of history and culture to the level of modernity already

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achieved in the natural sciences. Following the revolution of 1848, the chaotic years of the Second Republic, and the coup d’état of Napoléon III in 1851, Taine’s writings increasingly focused on scrutinizing the foibles of human nature.71 Moral life, just like physical facts, resulted from discernible causes. In Taine’s words: “Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar.”72 Scientific method was applicable to both the physical and moral realms. Taine then presented his signature scientific formula for analyzing historical phenomena: “race, milieu, moment.”73 Taine involved the word “race” to describe the particular forms of behavior and mental and emotional characteristics of national groups. Race defined that he termed the “internal mindsprings” of a civilization, and was characterized by such factors as heredity, geography, climate, and psychology. Intensely afraid of the lower classes, Taine described the French Revolution in his multi-volume Les Origines de la France contemporaine as the outcome of the hungry, violent mob unleashing its dormant base instincts: “There was no longer any government; the artificial structure of human society was giving way entirely; things were returning to a state of nature. This was not a revolution, but dissolution.”74 Believing in historically layered consciousness and hereditary modes of behavior, the author maintained that the French were characterized by their penchant for revolution and their love of the guillotine. The mob, described variously as a dark entity to be feared, a holdover for man’s early days, a “contagion”, and a “bacterial infection,” was composed of the lowest classes of society. This essential barbaric character could be traced, according to Taine, farther back in time than the Revolution, to the pre-Latin roots of the Gallic peoples.

Figure 2.6 Odilon Redon, Cain and Abel, 1886. Etching and drypoint. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, photograph, Art Resource, New York.

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Harnessing Barbarian Traits: Savage Origins and Future Possibilities The Gallic, or Celtic, warrior figure emerged during the Second Empire and Third Republic as a symbol of national pride, put in terms of racial hierarchy. The French nation’s genetic link to “barbaric” Gauls was something to be feared, but was also increasingly heralded as a source of great strength. In the realm of the plastic arts, Emmanuel Frémiet’s Gallic Warrior sculpture of the 1870s depicts a bloodthirsty warrior brandishing his victim’s decapitated head by the hair in ecstatic victory. In 1865, Napoléon III, an avid ancient historian with a bent for self-promotion, commissioned Aimé Millet to create a gargantuan sculpture of Vercingétorix, the heroic Gaul who so bravely fought the incurring Roman troops commanded by Julius Caesar (Fig. 2.7). The emperor’s own head was used as model for that of the Gallic chieftain. Millet’s Vercingétorix stands proud and alert, leaning on his massive sword while surveying the surrounding area, the final battle place. Heavily muscled, carrying Gallic clothing, weapons, and adornments, and donning the distinctive hairstyle and moustache, this figure could not be called classical. The sculpture was placed at the supposed site of Alésia, commemorating the leader’s last stand against Rome. Such monuments established and glorified ancient Celtic bravery and superiority over Roman and Germanic invaders, and in so doing, declared the strengths of the contemporary French nation. The inscription at the base of the statue, penned by French architect and historian Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, only affirmed the linkage between ancient Gaul, drawing power from its very barbarism, and the modern French nation: Gaul united, Forming a single nation Animated by a common spirit, Can defy the Universe.75

Figure 2.7 Aimé Millet, Vercingétorix, 1865. Bronze. Mont Auxois, Alise-Sainte-Reine, France, photograph, Art Resource, New York.

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The anthropologists Paul Broca and Paul Topinard—Broca’s student—held this inherent bloodthirstiness and savagery to be the particular traits of Gallic bloodlines. In his craniometric study of 1873, Broca identified the short, dark, and brachycephalic (that is, short- and broadskulled) human type as exhibiting the racial markers characteristic of a “Celtic type.” According to Broca, the purest living representatives of the Celtic racial type were the contemporary inhabitants of Auvergne (and, to a lesser degree, the people of Brittany). The Auvergnats, as a Celtic “race,” stood in stark contrast to the alien “German race”, the latter characterized by tall, dolichocephalic (or, long-skulled) specimens.76 As Topinard asserted: “The impulses inherent in the cerebral matter are so tenacious, in spite of education and civilization that they still continue after crossing and mixture of races, and are of assistance in recognizing them.” The people of Auvergne, with their high brachycephalic index and a cranial capacity that was “considerably greater than that of Parisians,” were considered by Topinardas direct descendants of “the people who held firmly aloft the banner of national independence on the heights of Gergovia and Alésia.”77 The heavy physiognomies and larger skulls of the primordial French type, while perceived as less evolved than its neighboring counterparts, provided the nation with a unique identity as patriotic warriors and resistance fighters that could be manipulated and altered as was necessary, but seemed rooted in the latest scientific study. These explorations of the prehistoric physiognomy informed doomsday scenarios of the future of French civilization, simultaneously with nationalistic and even jingoist cultural productions. With its allusions to distinct ages of humankind, from the Stone Age, and Iron Age, and finally to the contemporary age, Cormon’s Cain cannot then be viewed solely as a straightforward scene of prehistoric life, rendered with an eye for anthropological details. Cormon ties the past ages directly to the present, by figuring the tools and physiognomies of different ages, and tapping into romantic literary tropes, folk figures, and scientific theories. Cain signals its artifice as a painting, proclaiming its temporal and thematic instability through a juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous references. By drawing from multiple artistic, literary, and scientific sources, Cormon proposed an image of humankind’s past states and foreshadowed possible future outcomes. Cormon responded to contemporary interest in unearthing and understanding the ages of man, as well as the theme of a linear human progression, a notion that pervaded the arts and sciences. At the same time the idea of linear progression was under constant siege, remaining a subject of acute anxiety in a modern age wracked with justifiable doubts concerning the future. Cormon’s Cain does not offer a single, unified vision of original man in his world, but suggests a multiplicity of meanings that spoke to the traumatic past and present of the French people. The frightening scenario of humanity’s emerging atavistic traits loomed large during the chaos of the Revolution and tumultuous years following the bloody repression of the Commune. Cain was not only a manifestation of the mania for the prehistoric in Third Republic France; it also emerged from the growing desire to reevaluate human history in the wake of the evolutionary paradigm, at a time when violence and depravity appeared increasingly characteristic of modern life. Cain is therefore a figure on the brink, caught between solitary wanderer and prophetic leader of his community. He is the head of a rough clan, but one that carries within its ranks hopeful signs. Yet despite the pervasiveness of depravity and violence, and its significations of degeneration and devolution, ultimately the painting may offer, perhaps, a glimmer of hope and redemption for the future: Trailing Cain’s solitary form are the future generations of the tribe, living in cooperation, and perhaps, eventually, harmony, in a world where the struggle for survival no longer dominates. This book chapter is a version of a paper delivered at the 2009 Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium, and presented in revised form at the 2012 Association of Art Historians Conference. My thanks go to the organizers and participants at these meetings for their comments and questions in response to my paper. I am also grateful to Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Fae Brauer and Serena Keshavjee, and the anonymous reviewer for their valuable critical feedback. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the French are my own.

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Notes 1

Genevieve Lacambre, “Le Caïn de Cormon,” in Pierre Georgel and Jean Boulanger, eds, La Gloire de Victor Hugo (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1985) pp. 626-627. 2 See, for example, Musée d’Aquitaine de la ville de Bordeaux, Centro de Investigación y Museo de Altamira, and Musée du Québec, Vénus et Caïn: Figures de la préhistoire, 1830–1930 (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux; Bordeaux: Musée d’Aquitaine, 2003); Martha Lucy, “Cormon’s Cain and the Problem of the Prehistoric Body,” Oxford Art Journal (25.2, 2002) pp. 107-126; Lacambre, “Le Caïn de Cormon,” pp. 625-627. 3 Lucy, “Cormon’s Cain,” 2002, p. 107. 4 Pamela Kort and Max Hollein, Darwin: Art and the Search for Origins (Cologne: Wienand, 2009) pp. 212-213. 5 See Harvey Buchanan, “Edgar Degas and Ludovic Lepic: An Impressionist Friendship,” Cleveland Studies in the History of Art, vol. 2 (1997) pp. 40-41, and Kort and Hollein, Darwin, pp. 212-213. 6 On the history of French evolutionism in the second half of the nineteenth-century, and the division between Lamarckism and Darwinism within the French scientific community, see Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwin: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900 (Baltimore: London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1983). 7 For example, the National Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies, the Museum of Prehistory in Lussac-les-Châteaux, and the Museum of Natural History in Aix-en-Provence. The discovery and display of ancient geological artifacts in France during the nineteenth-century, such as fossils, bone fragments, and tools, became an important part of nationalistic discourse, while at the same time becoming part of regionalist movements. Museums of natural history such as the one founded in Aix-en-Provence were born out of a widespread fascination with prehistory, as well as the desire to highlight the area’s rich local paleontological finds and unique history; see Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s discussion of geological inquiry and Provençal regional identity in Cézanne and Provence: The Painter and his Culture (Chicago: London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003) pp. 149-185. See also Stéphane Gerson, The Pride of Place: Local Memories & Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 8 See Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence, 155-158; Diana Donald and Jane Munro, Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts (Cambridge, UK: Fitzwilliam Museum, 2009); Anne Byrd, “The Brush Stroke as Catastrophe: Gasquet’s Cézanne and the Paintings of Bibémus Quarry”, Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review, vol. 34, no 1 (2009) pp. 41-52. 9 Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence, pp. 155-158. 10 A-F. Marion, Premières observations sur l’ancienneté de l’homme dans les Bouches-du-Rhône (Aix : Typographie Remondet, 1867). 11 Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence, pp. 155-58. 12 Stephanie Moser, Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998) pp. 133-141. 13 See Michel Chevalier, Exposition universelle de 1867 à Paris. Rapports du jury international publiés sous la direction de M. Michel Chevalier, Tome 1 (Paris: Imprimerie administrative de Paul Dupont, 1868) pp. 137-147. 14 G. Cotteau, Congrès international d’anthropologie et d’archéologie préhistoriques, tenu à Paris au mois d’août 1867 (Auxerre: Imprimerie de Gustave Perriquet, 1867) pp. 1-4. 15 Gabriel de Mortillet, Promenades préhistoriques (Paris: C. Reinwald, 1867) pp. 186–187: On peut dire que partout, dans le temps comme dans l’espace, l’homme a suivi la même évolution d’ensemble dans son développement industriel et moral. 16 Chang-Ming Peng, “Fernand Cormon’s Cain: Epic Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century History Painting,” TwentyFirst-Century Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Art: Essays in Honor of Gabriel P. Weisberg, edited by Petra tenDoesschate Chu, and Laurinda S. Dixon (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008) p. 238; Lucy, “Cormon’s Cain,” p. 107. 17 On the conscription of archaeology to establish Celtic ancestry and promote nationalist French mythologies, see Michael Dietler, “Our Ancestors the Gauls: Archaeology, Ethnic Nationalism and the Manipulation of Celtic Identity in Modern Europe,” American Anthropologist, New Series ( vol. 96, no. 3, Sept., 1994) pp. 587-595. 18 Buchanan, pp. 40-41. 19 Marie-Thérèse Moisset, “Les origines du Musée d’Antiquités Nationales,” Antiquités Nationales (9, 1977) pp. 9299. 20 The terms “Gaul” and “Celt” have been used inconsistently, and often interchangeably, since ancient times. The historical record of the Celts begins with a description from the sixth century BCE from the Greek geographer Hecataeus of Miletus, who mentioned a “barbarian” people called Keltoi living beyond the Ligurian peoples inhabiting the hinterland of Marseille in southern France. Greeks generally called these peoples “Celts” (Keltoi) while Romans preferred to call them “Gauls” (Galli/ Galatae.) Julius Caesar noted in his The Battle for Gaul (De Bello Gallico) that Romans used the term “Gauls” to designate people who called themselves “Celts.” Strabo, on the other hand, wrote in his The Geography that the inhabitants of the hinterland of the Greek colony of Marseille in southern France were called “Celts” and that Greeks simply projected this name onto all the barbarian peoples of northwestern Europe. For an excellent discussion of the role of archaeology in the creation of the Celtic type and in the construction of regional and national identities in France, see Dietler, “Our Ancestors the Gauls,” pp. 585-586.

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Buchanan, “Edgar Degas and Ludovic Lepic,” pp. 40-41. On the Salon reforms undertaken by Turquet, see Ruth Butler, Rodin: The Shape of Genius, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) pp. 106-123. 23 Chennevières described the annual Salons in “Les expositions annuelles et la Société des artistes Français,” L’Artiste (Sp., 1887); republished in Philippe de Chennevières, Souvenirs d’un directeur des beaux-arts (Paris: Athéna, 1979); cited in Butler, Rodin, p. 122. 24 Alice Bullard, Exile to Paradise: Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South Pacific 1790-1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) p. 239. 25 Fae Brauer discusses Cormon’s Cain in relation to other major paintings exhibited at the 1880 Salon that focused upon themes of forgiveness and redemption, including Aimé-Nicolas Morot’s Le Bon Samaritain and Bonnat’s Job, while the issue of full amnesty for the exiled Communards was being debated in the Chambre des Deputés throughout this Salon, particularly by the Fine Arts Director and Director of the Salon, Edmond Turquet. See Fae Brauer, Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013) pp. 47-49; Fae Brauer, “”Turquet’s Turkey”: Ending the Salon”, Painting for the Salon/Peindre pour le Salon, 1791-1881, eds. James Kearns and Alister Mill (Bern and Oxford: Peter Lang Publishing Group, 2015) pp. 408-410. See also Maria Gindhart, “Fleshing Out the Museum: Fernand Cormon’s Painting Cycle for the New Galleries of Comparative Anatomy, Paleontology, and Anthropology,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, vol. 7, no. 2 (Aut., 2008); Peng, “Fernand Cormon’s Cain,” p. 244. 26 On critical responses to Cormon’s Cain, see Lacambre, “Le Caïn de Cormon,” pp. 625-27 and Martha Lucy, “Cormon’s Cain.” 27 Philippe Dagen is one of the few scholars to acknowledge the multiple inconsistencies in Cormon’s composition, including the appearance and tools of the figures; see Philippe Dagen, Le Peintre, le poète, le sauvage: les voies du primitivisme dans l’art français (Paris: Flammarion, 1998). 28 The reading of the painting as a simple attempt by the artist to inject a certain level of anthropological accuracy persists largely to this day; see, for example, Buchanan, “Edgar Degas and Ludovic Lepic,” p. 86. At worst, the painting is dismissed as the work of an artiste-pompier seizing upon a popular and lucrative fad; see Dominique Brisson, Voyage à Orsay (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1992) p. 101; Lynne Thornton, La Femme dans la peinture orientaliste (Paris: ACR Édition, 1989) p. 225. 29 On Cormon’s didacticism in depictions of the prehistoric, see Maria Gindhart’s analysis of Fernand Cormon’s painting cycle for the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris in “Fleshing Out the Museum.” 30 Peng, “Fernand Cormon’s Cain,” p. 241. 31 See Barbara Larson, The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon (University Park, Penn: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), note 54, p. 212; Vénus et Caïn, p. 96. According to painter, art historian, and critic, Émile Michel, Cormon was familiar with Darwin’s The Descent of Man and studied the collections of the Musée d’Antiquités Nationales. See "Les Peintures décoratives de M. Cormon au Muséum," La Revue de l’art ancien et moderne (Jan., 1898) p. 1; cited in Martha Lucy, “The Evolutionary Body” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2004) and Gindhart, “Fleshing Out the Museum.” 32 For example, Charles Clément’s caustic review, “Exposition de 1880”, Journal des débats, 1 Mai 1880, cited in Lacambre, “Le Caïn de Cormon,” pp. 625-627. 33 While Cain was acceptable subject matter, it diverged from most representations of the Biblical figure. Cormon’s painting did not represent the killing of Abel or the discovery of Abel’s prone figure in the aftermath of his slaying, subjects of great pathos and particularly fit for showcasing the academic nude. In Leon Bonnat’s Adam and Eve Finding the Dead Abel (1861), the perversity of the crime is highlighted not only by the horrified reaction of Abel’s parents, but by Abel’s young, supple and prone body. Cormon, in contrast, represents Cain as leader and forefather, but on the brink of humanity, his weathered features fitting the harsh environment. 34 Clément, “Exposition de 1880”: Malgré des qualités d’invention et de force auxquelles j’ai du plaisir à rendre justice, tout cela est trop repoussant et viole les lois les plus naturelles…A moins qu’il ait eu l’intention d’étonner le monde, je ne comprends pas les motifs qui ont dicté la détermination de l’artiste…Il y a certainement là un parti-pris. M. Cormon n’a pas fait œuvre d’artiste seulement. C’est une leçon d’anthropologie qu’il a voulu nous donner. Il a voulu soutenir à sa manière les idées des disciples les plus aventureux de Darwin. Mais si l’homme descend du singe, il ne fallait pas le rendre si près de son origine. 35 Lacambre, “Le Caïn de Cormon,” pp. 625-627: Cette bande maudite de gens hâves et exténués…ces armes de l’âge de Pierre, ces corps qui tiennent plus de la bête que de l’homme. Ces types simiens et affreux…forment un ensemble sauvage, dramatique, saisissant. 36 Lucy, “Cormon’s Cain.” 37 Frédéric de Syène, “The Salon of 1880”, The American Art Review (vol. 1, no. 11, Sept., 1880) p. 491. 38 Émile Michel, “Le Salon de 1880”: Bien qu’il agisse ici encore des âges primitifs de l’humanité, le contraste entre les deux oeuvres ne saurait être plus franché. 39 See Lucy, “Cormon’s Cain,” pp. 119-121. 40 Cormon would later depict human evolution in his cycle for the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, representing scenes from distinctly different phases of physical human development, highlighting the progression of tool-making technologies. In this cycle, each era is assigned an activity and representative technology: Fishermen in the Stone Age; 22

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Farmers in the Bronze Age, and Gauls of the Iron Age. In Cormon’s sketch for Gaul on Horseback (oil on canvas, 1897, 75x65 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la ville de Paris, Petit Palais, Paris), the warrior carries a thin metal spear. See Vénus et Caïn, p. 94. 41 Edmond About, “Salon de 1880”, cited in Lacambre, “Le Caïn de Cormon,” pp. 625-27 and Martha Lucy, “Cormon’s Cain”, p. 113: L’un porte dans ses bras une jeune femme et bien faite dans le corps, tout modern dans sa beauté, contraste avec les horreurs et les vulgarités exagérées du cortège. 42 For a discussion of Darwin’s Tree of Life, see Stephen Jay Gould, Eight Little Piggies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993) p. 300. 43 Charles Darwin and Edward O. Wilson, From so Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006); On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, pp. 532-533. 44 Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence As to Man’s Place in Nature (New York: D. Appleton and Co, 1863). 45 My thanks to Fae Brauer for several discussions related to Neo-Lamarckism in France, and for encouraging me to explore the topic within the context of the 1880 Salon. On Neo-Lamarckism in France, see Stuart Michael Persell, Neo-Lamarckism and the Evolution Controversy in France, 1870-1920 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999) pp. 177-191. 46 Fae Brauer, “Wild Beasts and Tame Primates: Le ‘Douanier’ Rousseau’s Dream of Darwin’s Evolution”, The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture, eds. Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer (Dartmouth: University Press of New England, 2009) pp. 211-216; Stuart Michael Persell, Neo-Lamarckism and the Evolution Controversy in France, 1870-1920 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999) pp. 177-191. 47 Charles Darwin and Edward O. Wilson, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. In From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006) p. 868. 48 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p. 870. 49 Conceived as an epic recounting of the progress of humanity throughout the ages, La Légende des siècles was written intermittently between 1855 and 1876 while the author was exiled in Brussels, Jersey, and Guernsey, and published in three series in 1859, 1877 and 1883. The poems are populated with figures representing their respective eras, filing past in a long procession of humanity. The epic begins with the poet’s contemplation of his visionary dream of the “wall of centuries.” Scenes from past, present, and future converge, offering fleeting visions of the procession of human ages, from the emergence of Eve and Cain, and through the great ages to the present day. The result is a chronicle of human experience that emphasizes the journey that humankind has and will continue to make from a state of darkness to light. 50 Leconte de Lisle, Poèmes barbares (Librairie Alphonse Lemerre, 1889) p. 4: Ils s’en venaient de la montagne et de la plaine, / Du fond des sombres bois et du désert sans fin, / Plus massifs que le cèdre et plus hauts que le pin, / Suants, échevelés, soufflant leur rude haleine / Avec leur bouche épaisse et rouge, et pleins de faim. / C’est ainsi qu’ ils rentraient, l’ours velu des cavernes / À l’épaule, ou le cerf, ou le lion sanglant. 51 Victor Hugo, La Conscience (1853; La Première Série, 1859): Lorsque avec ses enfants couverts de peaux de bêtes, / Echevelé, livide au milieu des tempêtes, /Caïn se fut enfui de devant Jéhovah, / Comme le soir tombait, l’homme sombre arriva / Au bas d’une montagne en une grande plaine. 52 Philippe Dagen, Le Peintre, le poète, le sauvage: les voies du primitivisme dans l’art français (Paris: Flammarion, 1998). 53 Item no. 937 in the standard handlist, R.B. Freeman, The Works of Charles Darwin: An Annotated Bibliographical Handlist, Second Edition (Folkestone, England: Hamden, Connecticut, 1977). On the distribution of the first editions of Darwin’s Descent of Man, see Jon Tyler Bonner and Robert M. May’s introduction to the text in Darwin, The Descent of Man, p. xxxiv. 54 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p. 873. 55 Ibid., p. 876. 56 Ibid., p. 878. 57 On the destruction of the Paris infrastructure, including monuments such as the Tuileries Palace, during the Commune and subsequent restoration efforts, see Pierre Pinon, Paris détruit: du vandalisme architectural aux grandes opérations d’urbanisme (Paris: Parigramme, 2011); Louis Iandoli, “The Palace of the Tuileries and Its Demolition: 1871-1883,” The French Review (vol. 79, no. 5, Apr., 2006) pp. 986-1008; Charles Simond, ed., La Vie parisienne à travers le XIXe siècle: (1800 à 1900 à travers les estampes et les mémoires du temps, Tome 3 (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1900) pp. 17-57. 58 On Meissonier’s depiction of the Siege of Paris and the destruction of the Tuileries, see Constance Cain Hungerford, “Meissonier’s ‘Siège de Paris’ and ‘Ruines des Tuileries,’” in La Gazette des Beaux-Arts CXVI (Nov., 1990) pp. 201212; see also Fae Brauer, “Patriotism and Dissonance: Forging the National Fine Art Salon”, Chapter Three, Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre (2013). 59 The so-called “dangerous classes,” notably déclassés, prostitutes, and former convicts, were primary targets; see Robert Tombs, France, 1814-1914 (London: Longman, 1996) p. 19. 60 Estimates on the number of those killed, jailed, and deported victims during the Semaine sanglante vary widely, from 5,000 to over 25,000 people. Robert Tombs, in a revision of his previous calculation of 20,000 to 25,000, now estimates between 5,700 and 7,400 were killed; refer “How Bloody was La Semaine Sanglante of 1871? A Revision,” Historical Journal (vol. 55, no. 3, Sept. 2012) pp. 679-704. Benedict Anderson, “In the World-Shadow of Bismarck

Fernand Cormon’s Cain: Man Between Primitive and Prophet

39

and Nobel,” New Left Review 28 (July-August 2004) pp. 85-129, estimates 7,500 were jailed or deported to locations such as New Caledonia. See also Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, vol 3: 1871–1962 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965) p. 23. 61 See Anderson, “In the World-Shadow of Bismarck and Nobel” and Tombs, France, 1814-1914, p. 19. 62 See Larson, The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon, 2005, pp. 49-84. 63 Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: Paris: London: University of California Press, 1998) pp. 45-88. 64 Émile Zola, L’Œuvre (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1983); his series of books on the Rougon Macquart series was significantly entitled “Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire.” 65 Darwin, The Descent of Man, From So Simple a Beginning, p. 836. 66 Hippolyte Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine, vol. 1, La Révolution (Paris: Hachette, 1896) pp. 70-71: Du paysan, de l’ouvrier, du bourgeois, pacifiés et apprivoisés par une civilisation ancienne, on voit tout d’un coup sortir le barbare, bien pis, l’animal primitive, le singe grimaçant, sanguinaire et lubrique, qui tue en ricanant et gambade sur les dégâts qu’il fait. – Tel est le gouvernement effectif auquel la France est livrée, et, après dix-huit mois d’expérience, le plus compétent, le plus judicieux, le plus profond observateur de la Révolution ne trouvera rien à lui comparer que l’invasion de l’Empire Romain au quatrième siècle: Les Huns, les Hérules, les Vandales et les Goths ne viendront ni du nord ni de la Mer Noire: ils sont au milieu de nous. On the Commune, Taine, and Darwinism in France, see Rae Beth Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 1875-1910: Vernacular Modernity in France (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009) p. 67. 67 Edmond About, “Salon de 1880,” Le XIXe Siècle, pp. 18-19. Cited in Lacambre, “Le Caïn de Cormon,” pp. 625-27; Lucy, “Cormon’s Cain,” p. 115: Ce jeune peintre sait très bien que ces personnages sont antérieurs à l’âge de pierre, qu’ils précèdent d’une infinité de siècles le peigne et le savon, et qu’ils l’emportent de bien peu … sur les grandes singes de l’Afrique équatoriale. Il est donc tenté de les faire sordides, énormes, grossiers, intermédiaires entre l’homme et le brute; rien de plus naturel à son avis que de donner au vieux Caïn l’encolure et le clavicule d’une gorille. 68 See Lucy’s discussion of comparative anatomy exhibitions and the "man/ape anxiety" in “Cormon’s Cain," pp. 115121; see also Larson, The Dark Side of Nature, p. 53; see also Jennifer Michael Hecht, The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) pp. 170-210. 69 Judith Berman, “Bad Hair Days in the Paleolithic: Modern (Re)Constructions of the Cave Man,” American Anthropologist, New Series (Vol. 101, No. 2, June 1999) pp. 288-304. 70 Active in the 1860’s and 1870’s, Taine popularized the application of scientific method to the study of history, and human mores and behavior more generally, with a series of lectures at the École des Beaux-Arts on the history of art. 71 The historian, according to Taine, should view civilization as a naturalist views a plant or animal, as a system of interrelated parts. Borrowing from the anatomist Geoffroy de St.-Hilaire, Taine invoked the law of mutual dependencies, in which the organism as a whole is understood through knowledge of its parts. See Elizabeth Mansfield, ed., Art History and its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline (London: New York: Routledge, 2002) pp. 215-228. 72 Hippolyte Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise, vol. 1 (Paris: L. Hachette, 1866) p. xv: Le vice et la vertu sont des produits comme le vitriol et le sucre. 73 Hippolyte Taine, Philosophie de l’art, leçons professées à l’École des Beaux-Arts. (Paris: G. Baillière, 1865) p. 94. 74 Taine, Origines de la France contemporaine, p. 4. 75 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire de l’habitation humaine depuis les temps préhistoriques jusqu’à nos jours (Bruxelles: Pierre Mardaga, 1978): La Gaule unie/Formant une seule nation/Animée d’un même esprit,/Peut défier l’Univers. Viollet-le-Duc was himself a student of prehistory, publishing in 1875 a study of domestic architecture erected by the different “races” of man from prehistoric times to the present day. 76 Paul Broca, “La Race celtique ancienne et moderne,” Revue d’Anthropologie (2, 1873) pp. 577-628. See Dietler’s discussion of Broca’s and Topinard’s studies of the Celtic racial type in Auvergne and Brittany in Dietler, “Our Ancestors the Gauls,” pp. 592-595. 77 Paul Topinard, Anthropology (London: Chapman and Hall, 1878) pp. 409, 460; see Dietler, “Our Ancestors the Gauls,” p. 592.

CHAPTER THREE MOUTHS THAT BITE: RABIES AND LOUIS PASTEUR’S PUBLIC FACE MARY HUNTER In late nineteenth-century France, rabies was not only considered an animal’s disease, but was also understood as a virus capable of turning humans into animal-like beings.1 “Is this an animal? Is this a man?” Doctor G. E. Fredet asked his audience in 1886 after describing a rabid human patient who, in addition to biting at himself and others, had a voice that sounded “like the barking of a dog, the howling of a wolf.”2 Calling it a “disease as old as the world” affecting both men and animals from “their first generations,” Fredet conceived of rabies as a beast’s illness that had plagued human beings since the dawn of man.3 By questioning the human status of the rabies victim, Fredet’s medical analysis reflected contemporary understandings of the virus, and its significant role in the anxieties about atavism and degeneration that shaped and were informed by nineteenth-century French culture.4 Commonly referred to as hydrophobia because of the victim’s inability to swallow water and ensuing fear of it, rabies became one of the most frightening illnesses of the period. “[T]he word alone makes one tremble with fear,” Fredet observed.5 By infecting the central nervous system, the rabies virus caused an array of painful and dramatic symptoms, including seizures, paralyses, and hallucinations. During an attack, human bodies could thrash out in violent and erotic abandon. Like hysteria, arguably the most spectacularly sexualized of all nineteenth-century “diseases”, rabies fascinated the public with its assortment of astonishing signs. As English zoologist Sir Arthur Everett Shipley claimed in 1890, it was rabies’s association with “the most painful and horrible death” that “affected the popular imagination” to produce “a mass of fabulous stories and proverbial lore.”6 The fear of contracting rabies was disproportionate to the actual threat: Between 1850 and 1875, rabies was estimated to have killed only 19 to 25 people annually. Rabies was most frequently acquired when rabid dogs and wolves in rural areas bit humans. Although wolf bites were more dangerous, dog bites were more common due to the generally closer proximity of dogs and humans.7 While for people, leading a healthy and composed life in the city was understood as a means of civilising oneself (though one could not become too urban, as modern cities also threatened to corrupt morals and weaken bodies), for dogs, it was feared that rabies might be a response to the “unnatural” restrictions of modern city life. Kathleen Kete points out in her fascinating Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris that keeping dogs as domestic pets, which at the time was increasing in popularity, was thought to cause spontaneous rabies among kept canines who could not fulfil their natural mating urges in cramped apartments.8 Despite the nineteenth-century desire to “civilise” dogs—exemplified by the rise of canine fashion and grooming, and their starring role in popular entertainment venues—this surface civility was not trusted to completely erase or contain the beast within. Members of the Parisian bourgeoisie—well versed in hyperbolic accounts of rabies symptoms and popular theories of evolution and degeneration—feared that a similar “animal” within themselves might break through the layers of modern manners, customs, and clothing should they happen to be bitten by a rabid beast. “In the phobic imagination of the nineteenth century, the signs and symptoms of rabies centered on violence and sexuality, and its etiology on repression,” Kete argues. “The fear of rabies lies at the intersection of the organising themes of bourgeois life and can be read as an expression of uneasiness about modern civilization and its tolls, about the

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uncertain conquest of culture over nature.” 9 The dread of rabies was so extreme that it was manifested in cases of “hysterical rabies,” where patients would act out rabies symptoms without ever having been bitten. The very existence of this pathological state, referred to in medical books as fausse hydrophobie, demonstrates the mass public’s intimate familiarity with and terror of this disease. More recent histories of rabies have argued that the nineteenth-century fascination with the virus stemmed from the human fear of becoming animal rather than the actual threat of acquiring the illness. In her seminal 1978 text, Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag argues that, “The most terrifying diseases are perceived not just as lethal but as dehumanising, literally so. What was expressed in the rabies phobia of nineteenth-century France, with its countless pseudo-cases…was the fantasy that infection transformed people into maddened animals—unleashing uncontrollable sexual, blasphemous impulses….”10 Similarly, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy have argued in their popular history that rabies is fear-inducing because it “troubles the line where man ends and animal begins.”11 Case studies from Henri Marchais’s 1891 doctoral thesis in medicine show how the medical community focused on this critical climax when the body “turned animal.” They also demonstrate the ways in which nineteenth-century medical conceptions of rabies permeated lay consciousness and vice versa, particularly how gendered stereotypes informed the medicalised language of the virus. Marchais’s thesis contains numerous examples of rabies-afflicted men being labelled violent and aggressive while infected women are described as possessed or excited. He provides examples in which rabid patients are restrained and isolated—like rabid dogs—so that they do not infect others through saliva transmission by way of a human-to-human bite. Significantly, women—not men—are described as exhibiting signs of nymphomania in the initial stages. A 56-year-old “Mme M” was diagnosed as having a “typical case of nymphomania.”12 As the virus took hold, her body went through periods of paralysis, genital overexcitement, and flinching pain; the woman moaned as if she was giving birth.13 A “Madame R…” had an even worse fate: The miserable woman, eyes bloodshot [and] body covered in sweat, struggled in the room like a possessed person, squawking, grasping her throat with both hands; she was choking. They had to tie the woman to her bed; she wanted to bite.14

Marchais presents other cases where male patients required restraining: One bit a medical intern, another needed eight men to hold him down, and a third repeatedly attempted to jump out a window. 15 Contrary to popular belief, Marchais notes that it was quite rare for rabies victims actually to attempt to bite others.16 Yet these case studies nevertheless illustrate that those afflicted with rabies embodied a challenge to the ostensibly ordered, controlled, and rational conduct central to bourgeois civility. The undoing of that civility was a visible symptom of the rabies-afflicted body in active, atavistic decline. It should come as no surprise that when Louis Pasteur discovered a vaccine for rabies in 1885, the French public rejoiced. The first successful rabies vaccination occurred on July 6, 1885, with the inoculation of a nine-year-old Alsatian boy named Joseph Meister. By 1886, people from all over France and the world crowded Pasteur’s laboratory to be vaccinated—or to watch those lifting their shirts to get the jab in their bare stomachs.17 A plethora of Pasteurian imagery was produced and disseminated. Portraits of the celebrity scientist were exhibited at the prestigious Salon des Artistes Français, sculptures were made for public squares and the entrances to hospitals, and international Pasteur Institutes opened to provide the vaccinations to all. Significantly, Pasteur was never visually represented with rabies-afflicted patients thrashing out in violent or erotic pain. In fact, rabid patients are conspicuously absent. In official portraiture, Pasteur is portrayed as disciplined, intellectual, healthy, and humanitarian, even though rabies was popularly associated with violence, degeneracy, sexuality, and bestiality. Regularly portrayed as primly dressed with an intense stare, Pasteur became the embodiment of modern scientific prowess: The protector of France and its superior role in science.18

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By drawing on the widespread fear of atavism associated with this disease, particularly the prospect of French citizens devolving into the animals that had infected them, this chapter examines how nineteenth-century visual representations dealt with the complexities and contradictions posed by rabies as an illness and by Pasteur’s strategies to eradicate it. By comparing and contrasting a series of paintings of Pasteur shown at the 1886 and 1887 Salons with various visual and textual accounts of the chemist, I explore the tensions between Pasteur’s identity as a civilized Frenchman, whose vaccination seemed to ensure the protection and regeneration of a refined French public, and his reputation as an ambitious laboratory scientist with a careerist persona, a man who fought for patriotic honour and professional grandeur in a dog-eatdog world. I consider how rabies—a virus that threatened to reduce human beings into an animal state before killing them—was ultimately transformed into a powerful regenerative symbol for French science, commerce, industry, colonial imperialism, and honour.

Pasteur’s Persona at the 1886 Salon Of all the scientific celebrities, Pasteur was one of the most prominent national and international figures. A founder of the study of microbiology, he was known for his vaccines against rabies and anthrax, as well as for the liquid purification process that bears his name. Considered by the “nation’s elite” to be an “illustrious man, modest in his glory,” Pasteur stood as a heroic model of modern science and manhood in the late nineteenth century.19 As Bruno Latour has argued, Pasteur became a national hero in the years following France’s defeat in the FrancoPrussian war because he was seen as having the ability to regenerate France. 20 This was particularly important after a war that saw the loss of many French soldiers not only to the barbarism of battle, but also to smallpox—a disease against which the victorious Prussians had been vaccinated. Hippolyte Taine, the nineteenth-century French historian and critic who was highly influenced by Charles Darwin and evolutionary theories, analyzed the war and the violent Commune that followed as forms of national degeneration: Taine argued that France’s decline was largely due to the brutal, violent instincts that had emerged with the French Revolution.21 Against the backdrop of the recent chaos and violence of war, Pasteur became a beacon of possibility and rejuvenation. The masculinity of nineteenth-century scientific leaders was a crucial component of their identity and power, and the heterosexual, intelligent, rational, virile, objective, competitive, and Caucasian Pasteur embodied the ideal manliness of a national leader and member of the Parisian scientific elite. 22 Pasteur’s fame was accordingly tied to the profusion of visual and textual representations of his body. “His portrait and his works are universally known,” Adrien Marx wrote in Le Figaro in 1887. “Photography, the paint brush and the pen have reproduced his features, recounted his life and published his labours.”23 The first painted portraits of Pasteur produced after his monumental discovery were exhibited at the 1886 Salon.24 The majority of contemporary criticism concentrated on the large paintings by Léon Bonnat, the eminent history painter and established portraitist, and Albert Edelfelt, the relatively unknown Finnish painter who was friends with Pasteur’s son (Figs. 3.1 and 3.2). While contemporary critics generally ignored the small canvas by Laurent Lucien Gsell, Pasteur’s nephew, which showed the scientist in a messy laboratory (Fig. 3.3), they were overwhelmingly positive about Bonnat’s and Edelfelt’s works. They praised the heroic qualities of the sitter and the artists’ abilities to produce realistic portraits capturing Pasteur’s “true” character.25 Critics further positioned Edelfelt’s rendering of Pasteur as a scientist at work in a laboratory against Bonnat’s portrayal of the chemist as a grandfather. The ways in which the two artists chose to paint Pasteur, and the question of which would become the definitive historical portrait for future viewers, were debated at length.

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Figure 3.1 L Léon Bonnat, Pasteur P et sa petite p fille Caamille, 1886. Oil O on canvas, approx. 160 x 130 cm. Musée Pasteur, Paris. © Scaala/White Imaages / Art Reso ource, NY.

e d the public’’s desire to The reppresentationn of celebritties in the ppress and att the Salon encouraged examine aand analyzee famous bo odies. Bothh Edelfelt’s and Bonnaat’s portraits ts of Pasteu ur provided Salon view wers with lifelike l images to be sstudied and scrutinized d. Many conntemporary y scientists, physicianss, pseudo-sccientists, an nd the publlic believed d that exterior physicaal characteriistics were essential tto understaanding interrior states; the accuraacy of such h portraits ttherefore alllowed the public to inspect evvery inch of o the portrrayed body y, and to draw d on poopular concceptions of o aid their analyses. As A early as 1831, a phhrenology society was phrenologgy and physsiognomy to founded inn Paris and included esstablished leeaders from m medicine, law, and phhilosophy, such s as the 26 renowned doctors Caasimir Brou ussais and P Philippe Pin nel. In thee last decaddes of the century, the French fasscination with w the classsification oof bodies based b on vissual observvation contin nued to be informed bby various specialists, s including V Valentin Maagnan and Alphonse A Beertillon, wh ho explored the relatioonship betw ween phrenology and criminolog gy. 27 “It is science thaat has as itts goal the knowledgee of the intternal nature of man thhrough kno owledge of man’s exterrnal nature,,” declared Julien Lecclercq in his h popular book La P Physionomiie, visages et caractèrres from 1896. “It is science w which aims to t know maan’s interiorr nature thrrough his ex xterior natuure… No on ne ‘masks’ himself, nno one can taake on facu ulties that hee does not possess… p Th he physiognnomy of maan does not lie.”28 Thee public esppecially enjo oyed Leclerccq’s physio ognomic and d astrologicaal readings of French

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Figure 3.2 A Albert Edelfellt, Louis Pasteeur, 1885. Oill on canvas, 154 1 x 126 cm.. Musée d’Orssay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art R Resource, NY Y.

Laurent Lucienn Gsell, Le La aboratoire de M. Pasteur, 1886. 1 Oil on canvas, 91 x 788 cm. © Colleection Musée Figure 3.3 L de Vannes, V Vannes.

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celebrities. Through an analysis of Pasteur’s physical appearance, for instance, Leclercq determined that Pasteur was a good father, a gentle husband, and a focused learner. Leclercq’s book was typical of pseudo-scientific works published in the 1890s. As the French literary scholar Elizabeth Emery has pointed out, these books transformed readers into “armchair scientists” who could discover the actual identities of celebrities by studying the make-up of their faces, their bodily proportions, the slant of their signatures, and the creases of their fingertips.29 The 1886 Salon criticism is similar to these books in that it concentrates on the representation of Pasteur’s body. Like phrenologists, art critics believed that the painted exterior of the man reflected his inner character. The problems that critics identified with these works—particularly regarding the portrayal of Pasteur’s body—point to the underlying contradictions of Pasteur’s public face.

Patriotic Duty: Bonnat’s Pasteur On the surface, Bonnat’s is an intimate portrait showing Pasteur posing with his young, wideeyed granddaughter, Camille. Standing erect, with one hand tucked under his heavy wool jacket and the other held by Camille, Pasteur exudes power and warmth. The red pin of the Légion d’honneur signifies his high social standing, but there is no visible evidence of his scientific endeavours or prestigious occupation. Rather, the emphasis is on the two standing figures, intricately rendered by Bonnat’s skilled brush. The artist’s great technical ability enabled him to produce a highly detailed painting that captures the minutiae of physiognomies, flesh, and fashion, and represents the chemist as both a national hero and a family man. Bonnat’s portrait was, however, the product of commercial and industrial motives. Unlike the other two 1886 paintings—which were painted by young artists with personal ties to Pasteur who were in need of professional recognition—Bonnat’s was a commissioned portrait intended to secure personal and professional bonds between a leading industrialist and a scientist (whose sons also happened to be friends). J. C. Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg beer, asked Bonnat to make the work for Madame Pasteur in order to thank her husband for the research on microbiology that allowed for large-scale beer production.30 Although the portrait was a personal gift, it served a very public and professional function. Labelled with the Jacobsen name along the bottom of the frame, this portrait publically exhibited the ties between Pasteur and Jacobsen, conferred upon Carlsberg beer the safety associated with “pasturisation,” and emphasized the industrial connections between Denmark and France forged by Pasteur’s work. The relationship between Pasteur and Jacobsen exemplifies the larger links forming between republicanism, science, commerce, and art in the capitalist world order of late nineteenth-century Europe. Although France was celebrated for its wine, beer became a potent national symbol after the loss of Alsace—a region known for its beer—to Prussia. Pasteur used his studies on beer to express his anti-Prussian sentiment and to show that France’s industrial strength and scientific knowledge endured even in the wake of war. This is particularly evident in his 1876 book, Études sur la bière; ses maladies, causes qui les provoquent, procédé pour la rendre inaltérable, avec une théorie nouvelle de la fermentation, where he claims that all beer made using his methods must be labelled French in order to help France compete against Prussian breweries. 31 Pasteur believed that through science, commerce, and industry, France could achieve greatness and superiority over Prussia. He was able and willing to use his science as a national weapon. Claiming that science could rejuvenate France, Pasteur was very vocal about the nation’s need to be a global scientific leader following its military defeat. He linked science and nationalism by arguing that France had lost the war because it had not spent enough money on scientific pursuits. Despite numerous postwar offers from foreign universities, Pasteur stayed in France, expressed anti-Prussian sentiment, returned an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Bonn, declined the Prussian Order of Merit, and refused to drink Prussian beer.32 So fervent was his nationalism that a cartoon published in Le Rire in 1895 shows Pasteur inoculating himself against the orders of Prussia.33 Pasteur’s personal politics shaped his public image, and the majority of representations portrayed him as France’s greatest patriot. As Doctor August Lutaud, a critic of

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Pasteur’s work on rabies, wrote in Pasteur et la rage in 1887: “In France, one can be an anarchist, a communist or a nihilist, but not an anti-Pasteurian. A simple question of science has been made into a question of patriotism.”34 Despite Pasteur’s reputation for patriotism and the vehemence of “Pasteurism”, some critics had a problem with Bonnat’s painting because it presented Pasteur as a grandfather rather than a scientist. Regardless of the commissioner’s political motivations, showing the private face of Pasteur in public did not sit comfortably within the heroic iconography of the early Third Republic, which predominantly showed French leaders as strong and determined in the professional sphere.35 The portrayal of Pasteur’s ageing body, marked by deep wrinkles, waxy skin, and pronounced under-eye bags, contradicted Bonnat’s usual style, which was described by many art critics as strong, healthy, masculine, and direct—all characteristics the Republic deemed valuable.36 Although Bonnat’s Pasteur is portrayed with all the accoutrements of modern male respectability—a buttoned black jacket over black trousers, the red pin of the Légion d’honneur, eyeglasses, a bow tie, sombre expression, and well-trimmed hair and beard—the inclusion of his blond granddaughter, gripping his purplish thumb, angered Salon reviewers. They thought it undermined his prowess and virility. The portrait, as Georges Olmer wrote, “shows us the great scientist in his guise as a loving family man, a doting daddy who is happy to show off his granddaughter. It is also a glory to have beautiful grandchildren; but perhaps it is shared too widely here, and it is not in this guise that posterity will remember the man who lent his name to the cure for rabies.”37 When contextualised within Republican discourses of France’s degeneration and national devolution, however, Bonnat’s portrait of Pasteur with a healthy granddaughter demonstrates the clear connection between science (and its most famous innovator) and long-term national regeneration. From this perspective, Pasteur represents the grand guardian of France, capable of safeguarding future progeny. Certainly much was written about his love of and dedication to children. Paul Gsell, Laurent Lucien Gsell’s brother, provides a full account of Pasteur’s family in a four-page article in Revue encyclopédique: “The great man has always been an excellent father to his children; his friends remember seeing him bounce a baby on his knees while his wife was undressing another child to put him to bed.”38 The article was illustrated with photographs and drawings of Pasteur, his wife, and their children, as well as two pictures of the chemist’s childhood homes. Despite the cultural respect given to grandfathers as family leaders—particularly at a time when people feared depopulation and posited children as key to France’s future—they nonetheless also personified age, decline and, inevitably, death.39 The figure of the grandfather simultaneously exemplified the strength and the vulnerability of masculinity. He was the ultimate symbol of wisdom and family dominance (as illustrated by the popularity of Victor Hugo’s 1877 book of poems, L’Art d’être grand-père) even though his power was constantly threatened by time and bodily deterioration. Significantly, Bonnat also painted Hugo’s portrait in 1879, and showed him as an intense man with an inquisitive stare, dressed in a black suit, and sitting with splayed legs. Like Pasteur’s, Hugo’s hand is tucked into his jacket in a Napoleonic gesture, yet there is no indication of Hugo’s role as the sole guardian of his two young grandchildren. In contrast, the inclusion of Camille in the portrait of Pasteur ultimately suggested vulnerability and weakness for many Salon critics. Could it be that criticism was more acute because a man of science— particularly one who was commonly associated with national regeneration—appeared to be in decline? Pasteur’s perceived blindness further underscored the importance of vision in modern science. Some Salon critics were angered that Bonnat portrayed Pasteur as a “blind old man” 40 or “a bogeyman,”41 with oily, yellowing skin.42 Outside of his workplace and without the tools of his discoveries, Pasteur’s body did not easily manifest the ideal masculinity and strength required of a national hero. On the one hand, it revealed the shortcomings of the human body in the face of new optical equipment. On the other, scientific discourse on vision also stressed that an expert eye was needed to see, understand, and explain the abstract forms that emerged under a microscope. 43 Pasteur’s assumed ability to see the invisible, and his identity as a scientific visionary in the field

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of bacteriology, is staged in Edelfelt’s portrait: Only Pasteur sees the curative potential of the spines of rabid rabbits. New scientific thinking, such as germ theory, attempted to prove the existence of the invisible through laboratory experimentation and clinical practice rather than through visibility alone. Technological advancements in vision apparatuses and new scientific theories opened the body and the world to new forms of enquiry. However, the majority of popular discourse remained focused on the body’s exterior and stressed what was visible to the unaided eye, since this approach was accessible to those without scientific training or equipment. The ability to see the invisible—and to understand microscopic images and image-making—was essential not only to Pasteur’s earlier successes, but also to his identity as a scientist.44 While the rabies vaccine was among his most popular discoveries, the rabies virus was not actually discovered until after Pasteur’s death, despite the efforts of both Pasteur and his assistants to isolate it. Pasteur’s early work, particularly on fermentation and anthrax, supported and propagated germ theory. Despite John Waller’s assertion that Pasteur’s contribution was the product of international scientific debates, the French popular imagination regarded the chemist as the principal discoverer of germ theory.45 This was certainly the identity portrayed and disseminated in contemporary visual culture. Pasteur’s ability to observe was linked to his identity as a scientific visionary; blinding him was akin to taking away his knowledge, intellect, and, consequently, his scientific persona.46 Some reviewers criticised Bonnat for showing Pasteur in this way, as if seemingly wishing to avoid the reality of Pasteur’s body despite Salon criticism’s discursive emphasis on realism and truth. Pasteur’s health had always been fragile. His first stroke, or cerebral haemorrhage, at age forty-five, permanently impaired his speech, gait, and manual dexterity. As a personal friend of Pasteur and his family, Bonnat must have been aware of the scientist’s physical ailments. Historian of medicine, Gerald L. Geison even claims that Pasteur’s visible ageing and illness actually contributed to his public support, since he was considered a sympathetic figure rather than a competitive, elitist professional. Geison supports his argument with a contemporary description of Pasteur that emphasizes his white hair, wrinkled skin “seared with the signs of genius,” and mouth affected by paralysis but “full of kindness.” 47 Although Geison provides textual examples to show how the scientist’s sick, ageing body contributed to the construction of his persona as an altruistic humanitarian saint, Salon reviews demonstrate that depictions of a sick Pasteur were not welcome in 1886. Critics’ outrage at Bonnat’s portrayal points to anxieties about Pasteur’s physical deterioration, and by extension, public fears that the loss of this great leader might usher in a period of decline for French science and industry.

In the Laboratory: Edelfelt’s Pasteur In contrast to Bonnat, Edelfelt depicted an active Pasteur inspecting a glass-enclosed specimen while working alone in his laboratory (Fig. 3.2). Bright colours and looser brushwork, along with Pasteur’s leaning body and rumpled suit, present an unceremonious glimpse of the famed chemist hard at work. Many contemporary critics commended Edelfelt for creating a modern realist portrait, and stressed that an accurate representation of a sitter’s environment and actions were essential for portraying identity and inner being: “[Edelfelt’s] portrait is complete,” wrote Olmer. “It speaks about the man and his life’s work, and it could easily be the definitive portrait of M. Pasteur.” 48 Alfred de Lostalot also praised the detail of Edelfelt’s painting, which inspired meticulous explanations.49 Others criticised Edelfelt for showing too much. Georges Lafenestre argued that the critical success of a portrait at the Salon was not guaranteed by the inclusion of all information, but by the artist’s judicious selection of details: As he explained: “It can be unseemly to submerge this physiognomy under a mass of details that are accurate yet utterly insignificant”. 50 Edelfelt’s realism went too far: There could be nothing more natural, nothing more vivid; it is accurate, it is entertaining, but in truth, the furnishings speak louder than the figure; the thinker’s physiognomy vanishes amidst the sparkling glassware,

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and despite the “curiosity appeal” that posterity will certainly attach to the minute and ingenious reportage of the Swedish painter, it is not from him that posterity will ask the definitive image of M. Pasteur.51

In Lafenestre’s opinion, Bonnat’s work, which contained only those elements of the real world that contributed favourably to the identity of the sitter, was the quintessential image of Pasteur. Yet Edelfelt, by depicting Pasteur in such a detailed manner, presented him as the embodiment of scientific progress: His scientific knowledge is symbolised by the excessively thick book, his belief in experimental science by the glass tubes, equipment, and the laboratory, and his individual “genius” by hand-held notes, acute observation, and the portrait itself. Choosing to portray the chemist in the laboratory was a crucial decision for both Pasteur and Edelfelt. It was the locus of Pasteur’s discoveries and grandeur: A modern space par excellence.52 Filled with new technologies and tools, the laboratory’s raison d’être was discovery. Laboratories were the birthplace of knowledge and therefore held the potential to maintain France’s position as a scientific leader. In 1886, L’Univers illustré claimed that Pasteur’s laboratory was the meeting place for the world’s leading intellectuals.53 Pasteur had propagated the importance of laboratories in his speech for his 1892 Jubilee celebrations at the Sorbonne, claiming that students should “live in the serene peace of laboratories and libraries.”54 Yet laboratory work needed to be shown as rational and compassionate; scientists could not appear to take too much pleasure in their work, especially in the case of Pasteur’s studies, which involved experimenting on animals. For the most part, Pasteur’s relationship with animals was visually documented as curative and humane despite the realities of laboratory experimentation and the denunciation of vivisectionists. In 1886, the anti-vivisectionist, Alceste, called Pasteur a “maniac” who cured rabies for his own sake, not for that of humanity.55 In contrast, a picture of Pasteur from Vanity Fair published in 1887 portrays him as a calm and serious man, holding two pure white rabbits in his arms, his right hand stroking a furry back.56 A cartoon titled “The Angel of Inoculation” from 1886 also shows a healing Pasteur in which he is a winged figure hovering over an ugly, rabid mutt, preparing to inject the dog with the restorative vaccine.57 In Edelfelt’s portrait, Pasteur’s gaze is focused on the spine of a rabid rabbit air-drying in a glass jar: The source of the attenuated rabies virus that was added to a sterile broth in order to make the vaccine. It was the act of air-drying the spinal cord that eventually led to the discovery of a vaccine. In fact, it was Doctor Émile Roux and not Pasteur who first experimented with rabid spinal cords in this way.58 Adrien Loir, one of Pasteur’s assistants, recorded that Pasteur came across Roux’s experiments and copied them, giving Roux no credit. 59 In contrast, Edelfelt portrayed Pasteur as an independent scientist who is solely responsible for the cure. The artist’s personal correspondence indicates that Pasteur had asked to be shown in this way. Edelfelt described Pasteur’s involvement with the portrait in a letter to his mother in June 1885: Pasteur says he is very satisfied. The old eccentric is very interested; he proposes changes, etc. … Since he has done some painting himself, he knows how to speak about art. He had me remove the bottle of microbes and instead have him hold in his hand a round-bottomed flask containing the spinal cord of a dog, suspended by a thread. The old man says that this is something that is not yet known, but that will be of great importance later on.60

Pasteur’s instructions demonstrate his desire to claim the discovery as his own. From this perspective, the painting may be regarded as a product of Pasteurian “public relations”, and evidence of a moment in which the history of a discovery was visually produced and reinforced by its representation in paint. Ultimately, the Edelfelt portrait became the most trusted image for future viewers. This image is one of the most widely circulated of Pasteur, and can be found on stamps, book covers, and on display at the Musée d’Orsay and Pasteur Institute in Paris.

The Global Scientist: Gsell’s Pasteur The third painting of Pasteur at the 1886 Salon was the small, unfavourably hung and nearly unnoticed work by Laurent Lucien Gsell (Fig. 3.3). In this canvas, Pasteur and his colleagues are

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shown in a busy labboratory, tho ough Pasteuur is tucked d into the background b d. Were it not n for the celebrity oof Pasteur, Gsell’s G worrk might weell have beeen dismissed d as a still liife of thick books and sparkling glass flaskks, with bo ottles and ppipettes scaattered along diagonal lab bench hes. Unlike Edelfelt’s and Bonnaat’s painting gs, Gsell’s w work got litttle notice in i the presss. His portraait was not he minimal even conssidered a caandidate in the quest for the quiintessential image of PPasteur. Th Salon critticism of thhe painting suggests thhat the worrk’s size an nd location led to its invisibility, i compoundded by the fact that co ompositionaally, Pasteurr is hard to see. It is nnot surprisin ng that the following year Gsell created a big b and bolld entry forr the Salon,, positioning ng Pasteur in n the front 61 row (Fig. 3.4).

Figure 3.4 L Laurent Lucienn Gsell, La Vaccine Va contree la rage au la aboratoire de M. Pasteur, 11887. Oil on canvas, c 250 x 290 cm. Cenntre national des d arts plastiq ques, Ministèrre de la Culturre et de la Com mmunication,, France. © Drroits réservés / CNAP.

Gsell’s La Vaccine de la rag ge au laboraatoire de M. M Pasteur depicts d variious peoplee who have o the canvaas, Pasteur stares s at an come to bbe inoculated at Pasteurr’s laboratoory. On the right side of Algerian A Arab man while w holdin ng a piece of paper co ontaining paatients’ nam mes. Being vaccinated against rabbies requireed multiple jabs j at increeased levelss of potency y, and thereffore names,, dates, and levels of vvaccine werre diligently y recorded. T The numero ous sheets of o paper on the floor in ndicate that many peopple have alrready receiv ved their injjections. In the centre of o the canvaas, a French h bourgeois mother is holding outt her wrigglling child, w whose bare belly shows that it hass just been, or is about to be, inoculated by the physiciian sitting nnext to Pastteur. Behind the Algerrian are Ru ussians and

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Armenians, their national identities exhibited by their long beards and furry hats. Le Monde illustré wrote that the painting shows M. Pasteur in his Ulm Street office, the room crammed with people from all over, trusting in the method of the illustrious scientist. To the left, an Arab, Armenians, Russians; to the right, a crowd; in the centre, a young mother holding in her arms a baby whom the technician is preparing to inoculate with the life-saving virus. Standing in the foreground Pasteur, seen in profile, reads a letter that the Arab has handed him.62

Unlike the portrait he exhibited in 1886, Gsell’s 1887 work shows Pasteur in a more humanitarian, global, and colonial light. The artist replaced the microscopes, books, and pipettes of the earlier canvas with international patients, including one from France’s North African colony, Algeria, and members of the Parisian public. By excluding scientific tools from this portrait, Gsell symbolically altered Pasteur’s identity as an experimental chemist and, in turn, portrayed him as a doctor: Pasteur’s intense gaze is focused on human beings rather than virus-filled glass tubes. Unlike the 1886 portrait, in which Gsell depicts Pasteur’s intellectual endeavours within a private and privileged laboratory, the setting of the 1887 portrait is shown as an accessible place where Pasteur’s science is made public and where France’s colonial power is on display. By depicting people from all over the globe congregating in Pasteur’s laboratory at the École Normale in Paris (where Pasteur worked until the opening of the first Pasteur Institute in 1888), Gsell conveyed Pasteur’s international significance and his vaccine’s crucial role in the French “civilizing mission”, an ideological position often associated with Prime Minister Jules Ferry. In his speech to the Chamber of Deputies on 28 July 1885, Ferry outlined reasons for French colonial expansion.63 In particular, he claimed that it was not only the right, but also the duty of “superior races,” to civilise “inferior” ones; colonisation was rationalised by the belief that France could increase its colonies’ level of civilisation.64 Elected as Prime Minister twice (from 1880 to 1883 and 1883 to 1885), Ferry was an ardent republican, and was best known for his promotion of colonial expansion and the laicisation of the education system. His great financial and political support of scientific learning significantly coincided with Pasteur’s professional aims. As Geison has pointed out, Pasteur himself was highly skilled at navigating the academic-cum-political system in order to garner support for the expansion of his scientific research. By 1885, Pasteur had become the recipient of ten percent of all state funding for scientific research.65 Salon critics described Gsell’s painting with ease and familiarity, recognising Pasteur, his patients, and his equally renowned Parisian laboratory. 66 The celebrity of Pasteur’s patients resulted from their mass visibility. Illustrated, photographed, and discussed in daily newspapers, the congregation of international bodies in Paris promoted France as a leading scientific force.67 Newspapers and medical journals also listed the nationalities of those vaccinated, and recorded the international donations given to Pasteur to help found his Institute. Gsell’s inclusion of an Arab man indicates this spectacular quality of foreign bodies in Paris in the context of French colonial power. Gsell drew on the images of Algerians visiting Pasteur that filled the Parisian press at the time. The popular scientific journal La Nature (29 May 1886), for instance, published an article on Pasteur’s treatment of rabies accompanied by a reproduction of a photograph of “Pasteur’s Arabs” standing in the Jardin du Luxembourg amongst a crowd of curious Parisians (Fig. 3.5).68 In the photograph and in La Vaccine de la rage, the spectacle of foreigners is produced by their difference from the French. Dressed all in white, heads covered with layers of cloth, the Algerian bodies offer a stark visual contrast to the varied but uniformly dark costumes of the Parisian onlookers. France’s modernity is signalled by store-bought and intricate clothing—in Gsell’s work, even the young child is adorned with high socks, layered undergarments, leather shoes, and a jacket with cuffs. In contrast to the so-called “civility” of the French, the Arab appears “primitive” and out-of-date, as signified by his gnarled wooden stick, simple slip-on shoes, and sheet-like garb. The Algerian is represented as ill and in need of French medical intervention, while French men are portrayed as healthy professionals who cure and prevent illness. This potent juxtaposition helps both to justify and to proselytise the French “civilizing mission” as a peaceful project of medicine, science, education, and culture. As Doctor J. Janicot proclaimed in front of the French Academy of

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Science onn 2 March 1886, 1 the op pening of a Pasteur Insstitute could d do more foor French honour h than a bloody vvictory.69 Althouggh Gsell’s work is fiilled with tthese relatiively typicaal nineteent nth-century racial and cultural sttereotypes, the paintin ng attemptts to repressent moderrn science and Pasteu ur as nondiscriminaating, and thhe rabies vaccine v as aaccessible to o all. By deepicting Paasteur’s vacccination as universal, French scieence is marked as egallitarian, hum manitarian, and a humanee, and Pasteeur himself as a man w who protectted and enssured the heealth not on nly of France and its coolonies, but also of all humanity. By portrayying Pasteu ur’s scientiffic praxis as a tolerant and a universsally accesssible, Gsell conforms comfortablly to textuall accounts sstressing Paasteur’s hum manitarianissm. Deputy y Raymond Poincaré, who wouldd later becom me presidennt of France,, eulogized Pasteur in ssimilar term ms: France, which you looved so much h, will prouddly preserve our o venerated memory as a national go ood, as a consolatiion, as a hoppe. Humanity y, which you have helped,, will surroun nd your gloryy in a unanim mous and imperishhable cult wheerever nationaal rivalries dis solve, and wh herever the common faith inn unlimited prrogress is 7 kept alivve and strong.70

Figure 3.5 ““Groupe des Arabes A morduss par les chienns enragés, ven nus à Paris po our subir le traaitement proph hylactique de M. Pasteur””, La Nature (29 May 188 86) p. 401. Enngraving afterr an amateur photograph. © Cnum – Conservatoire C numérique ddes Arts et Méétiers – http://ccnum.cnam.frr.

Science inn this contexxt serves sim multaneoussly to unify and divide nations. Suuch nineteen nth-century scientific discourse brought peeople togethher by sho owing that scientific medicine could c cure o sex, classs, race, orr gender. Yet, Y it also provided ““scientific proof” for humans reegardless of maintaininng these diistinctions, by suggestting that no ot all racess, sexes, reeligions, cultures, and nationalitiies were equual. The clo ose contact between peeople from many m counttries and co ontinents in Pasteur’s laboratory led to naational com mparisons an nd exposed d prejudicees, as J. H. H Crespi’s quotation from an artticle in Forttnightly Revview attests: “French an nd Belgian ppeasants aree clean and P neat, but llower orderr Spanish, Portuguese and Russiaans are dirtty and loathhsome to a degree.”71 Even wheen its politiccal and econ nomic motiivations weere explicit, however, sscience wass promoted as democrratic and objective. Great G scientiific battles between European coountries too ok place in

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non-European territories because these nations offered French scientists ample specimens and unstudied diseases. Science could “progress” much more quickly in places where human experimentation was permitted. Although French doctors and scientists wrote about wanting to improve the lives of all people, the dissemination of French scientific knowledge was crucial for consolidating the French “civilizing mission” in favour of French people, and for projecting France as a world power. The French military, for example, needed protection from diseases that weakened armies, such as malaria. 72 The expansion of French scientific medicine into nonEuropean nations also functioned as a vital tool of colonization.73 Ferry proclaimed it was crucial to protecting France against a steep decline in global standing.74 Through public health initiatives and disease prevention, propagated and promoted by the opening of Pasteur Institutes overseas (starting with one in Indochina in 1891), Pasteurian medical science promised to reduce indigenous mortality and illness, strengthen local labour forces, and transform young colonial subjects into defenders of French values. 75 It was also an important means of spreading and exporting French science, as M. Beaumetz proclaimed during his speech at the inauguration of the Pasteur Institute in 1888.76 Furthermore, French medicine “scientifically” justified the control of lands and people. In constructing colonized people as barbaric and sick, French scientific intervention purported to humanize and civilize them. Like rabid dogs, colonial subjects were thought to require careful handling in order to be made safe, healthy, and docile. Yet colonized subjects were also presented as innocent and naïve, and therefore in need of French medical intervention, just like French children. From this perspective, it is possible in Gsell’s work to link pictorially the Arab man with the young child, particularly because they are the main recipients of inoculation. La Vaccine de la rage portrays rabies vaccination as a trustworthy and worthwhile procedure. Furthermore, the representation of European patients and doctors next to a North African man depicts French medical procedures as a component of France’s colonial expansion. Inoculation against rabies was regarded by the French as progressive and civilized, particularly when compared to non-European medicine, which was frequently considered tribal, rural, archaic, and non-scientific. To illustrate the superiority and modernity of French medicine, Gsell included an Algerian draped in cloth to symbolize the figure’s “backwards,” “primitive,” and child-like ways. The Arab is portrayed as the recipient and beneficiary of French knowledge; here, scientific colonization is shown as curative and generous. Although Algerians were deemed worthy of being saved from diseases, they were nonetheless understood (popularly and medically) as inferior and requiring France’s purportedly superior medicine and science. Despite the rational and humanitarian guise of scientific medicine exemplified in Gsell’s painting, the French desire to dominate colonized subjects remained. Gsell thus glosses over the realities of colonization to offer Salon viewers the spectacle of a colonized subject—a spectacle that they were familiar with through the various North African displays at the Expositions Universelles, as well as through chance sightings of Pasteur’s foreign patients in Paris. Unlike Edelfelt’s work, which showed the lab as a venue for private study and discovery, the depiction of Pasteur’s patients in Gsell’s work constructs the laboratory as a public site of national and international curing. This is important because the privacy of Pasteur’s science was a point of contention, especially between January and June 1887 when, in France and abroad, people began to argue that it was hard to prove if a person had actually acquired rabies when the rabid animal could not be found. It was even suggested that Pasteur gave his patients rabies rather than curing them. 77 Some scientists and physicians claimed that Pasteur falsified his data, increasing the number of survivors (as well as those infected) while downplaying his failures, in order to garner support for his work and position himself as a leading scientific figure. The most reported critic in the French press was Doctor Michel Peter, who attacked the legitimacy and ethics of Pasteur’s work on rabies at the Académie de médecine, claiming in part that Pasteur’s methods were not purely scientific because he kept them secret. Pasteur fought back by pointing out that he had allowed both French and international doctors and scientists into his laboratories to check his work. He also stressed the internationalism of his research and clinical work, and its ability to save

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people reggardless of national bo orders. Althhough the majority m of the t memberrs of the Accadémie de médecine supported Pasteur, P inclluding majoor figures in n the Parisiaan medical w world such as Doctors E. F. A. V Vulpian andd Jean-Martiin Charcot, it was important that the t image oof Pasteur exhibited e at the Salon in 1887, duuring the tim me of Pasteeur’s interro ogation, sho ow him as the man wh ho brought health andd safety nott only to th he French ppublic, but to all humaanity. Docttor Vulpian publically criticised P Peter for deenouncing Pasteur, P seeiing such an attack as eq quivalent too criticising one’s own country: ““I am not afr fraid to say to t him that:: As a docto or, academicc, philanthroopist, [and] patriot, he undertookk and continnues to pursu ue a deploraable campaiign.”78 Pasteurr’s identity as a cruel experimenta e al scientist competed c against a his ppersona as the t saviour of humanity. Obviouusly, Pasteu ur needed tto be seen as a man who w saved people, no ot one who experimennted on them, in orderr to maintaain nationall and intern national suppport. In a cartoon of Pasteur puublished onn the cover of Le Greloot on 8 Nov vember 188 85, Henri R Rochefort, Émile É Zola, and Graniier de Casagnac are sh hown tied too chairs, strruggling to free themsselves in orrder to flee from Pasteur’s needlle (Fig. 3.6)). The sardoonic joke iss that Pasteeur could cuure these “m mad” men, who weree associatedd with scan ndals for th their degenerate moral, cultural, and politiccal ills, in addition too rabies. At A the same time, the rrepresentatio on of Pasteur as a neeedle-wieldin ng scientist undermineed his persoona as the “good shephherd” (Fig. 3.7). 3 The caartoon mockks the exten nt to which popular cuulture turnedd Pasteur in nto a saviouur who could d cure all ev vil.

Figure 3.6 “M. Pasteur et la Rage,” cov ver of Le Grellot (8 Novemb ber 1885). © Institut Pasteuur – Musée Passteur.

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Figure 3.7 A Alfred le Petit,, “The Good Shepherd,” S in Le Charivari (27 April 188 82). © Institutt Pasteur – Mu usée Pasteur.

Gsell m must have been b familiaar with the debates surrrounding Pasteur’s P rab abies vaccin nations, not only throuugh his faamily connections as Pasteur’s nephew, but also beecause of widespread w discussionns in the popular press. Perhaps G Gsell chose to portray Pasteur P as a doctor figu ure, curing bodies, inn order to compensate c e for the baad press. He H was not alone: Latter nineteen nth-century advertisingg did so ass well, as ev videnced byy a collectiing card forr Chocolat Carpentierr, in which Pasteur is shown as a doctor injjecting pati ents with th he rabies vaaccine (Fig.. 3.8). By drawing d on Pasteur’s iidentity as an a active in nternational healer, and d by identify ying Paris aas the site of o scientific and mediccal progresss, Gsell visually alterred Pasteurr’s identity in the poppular imagin nation and contributeed to the agggrandisement of Frenchh medicine and colonial power. R Represented d within the confines oof the labooratory and d under thee watchful gaze of Frrench scienntists and physicians, p Pasteur’s fforeign patiients—like the t rabies vvirus—no lo onger threatened degenneration or decline. d

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Figure 3.8 “Chocolat Caarpentier,” ad dvertisement, c.1895-1900. Chromolitho ograph, 6.9 x 10.2 Wellco ome Library, London.

C Conclusio on Througgh heroic naarratives, seeemingly acccurate porttrayals, and d the exhibiition of theiir works at the prestiggious Salonn des Artistes Françaais, Lauren nt Lucien Gsell, G Léonn Bonnat, and a Albert Edelfelt cconstructed Louis Pastteur as a vvaliant and modern scientific leaader. More than mere likenessess, these porttraits came to symboliise an aggreegate of mo odern scient ntific ideas: The rising social, ecoonomic, andd cultural status s of sciientific men n; the integ gration of laaboratory sccience into medical practice; thee safety and d dangers o f new scien ntific discov veries invollving humaans and the crucial rolle of sciencee in French progress annd security in light of industrial annd colonial expansion. In contrastt to popularr understand dings of rabbies, which focused on the virus’s production of animallike sympttoms and thhe body’s atavistic a reggression, a heroic h Pasteeurian iconoography—su uch as that displayed at the 1886 and 1887 7 Salons—pprovided a means with which Frrance could d solve the problem oof devolution and degen neration in both its nattion and its colonies. Paasteur, too, spread the view that sscience couuld reverse French F declline and reju uvenate the country: I appeal to you on behhalf of these sacred s places tthat are know wn by the exprressive name oof laboratory.. Demand that theyy be multiplied and enricheed. These are the temples of o the future, of wealth andd well-being. It is here that hum manity grows, becomes stro onger and bettter. It is here that humankind learns to rread in naturee’s works, works off progress andd universal harrmony, while its own work ks are too often n those of barrbarism, fanatiicism and destructiion.79

For Pasteuur, the labooratory was a site off renewal th hat promiseed French bbodily, finaancial, and national pprosperity. For F the pub blic, Pasteurr embodied d the assuraances of labboratory sciience: they believed hhe would seccure the reg generation aand revitalizzation of Fraance for gennerations to o come.

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The research for this essay has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Fonds de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture (FQRSC) and McGill University. I am grateful for the help provided by the librarians and archivists at the Institut Pasteur, Musée d’Orsay, Assistance Publique des Hôpitaux de Paris and the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University, as well as my research assistants, Sylvie Boisjoli and Shana Cooperstein. A special thank you to Fae Brauer, Serena Keshavjee and the other contributors for their comments and insights.

Notes 1

For a discussion of public understandings of rabies during the nineteenth century, see Kathleen Kete, “La Rage and the Bourgeoisie: The Cultural Context of Rabies in the French Nineteenth Century”, Representations 22 (Spring 1988) pp. 89-107; Bert Hansen, “America’s First Medical Breakthrough: How Popular Excitement about a French Rabies Cure in 1885 Raised New Expectations for Medical Progress”, The American Historical Review (103, no. 2, April 1998) pp. 373-418; Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys, Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830-2000 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus (New York: Penguin Group, 2012). 2 G. E. Fredet, La Rage: Deux Jours chez M. Pasteur (Clermont-Ferrand: G. Mont-Louis, 1886) p. 12. La voix sort rauque et convulsive; elle simule les aboiements du chien, les hurlements du loup. Est-ce un animal? Est-ce un homme? 3 Ibid. p. 3. J’ai l’intention de vous entretenir de ce mal éprouvantable qu’on appelle la rage, mal aussi ancien que le monde et qui a frappé l’homme et les animaux dans leurs premières générations … . 4 For insightful investigations of the impact of theories of atavism and degeneration on late nineteenth-century French art and visual culture, see Barbara Larson, “Evolution and Degeneration in the Early World of Odilon Redon,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (2, Spring 2003) and The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2006). For an examination of degeneration in relation to medical discourse, see Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Other important sources on evolutionary theories and decline in nineteenth-century culture include J. Edward Chamberlain and Sander L. Gilman, Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University, 1985); Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-c.1918 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Sean Quinland, The Great Nation in Decline: Sex, Modernity and Health Crises in Revolutionary France c. 1750-1850 (Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007) and Diana Settler, Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 5 Fredet, La Rage p. 3. La rage, dont le nom seul fait trembler d’effroi … . 6 Arthur Everett Shipley, Pasteur and his work (Windsor: Oxley, 1890) p. 17. 7 Henri Marchais, “Contribution à l’étude Clinique de la rage humaine” (PhD dissertation, Paris: Henri Jouve, 1891) p. 15. 8 Kathleen Kete, Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) pp. 98-100. 9 Ibid. p. 98. 10 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Picador, 1988) pp. 126-127. 11 Wasik and Murphy, Rabid p. 4. 12 Marchais, “Contribution à l’étude Clinique de la rage humaine,” pp. 67-68: la nymphomanie très caractérisée. 13 Ibid., pp. 67-68. 14 Ibid., pp. 62 : La malheureuse, les yeux injectés, le corps couvert de sueur, se démenait dans la pièce comme une possédée, poussant des cris rauques, s’étreignant la gorge des deux mains; elle étouffait. On dut lier cette femme sur son lit; elle voulait mordre. 15 Ibid., pp. 50-68. 16 Ibid., pp. 15-17. 17 Many histories have been written on Pasteur and his discoveries. The main primary sources are René Vallery-Radot, Pasteur, histoire d’un savant (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1883) and La Vie de Pasteur (Paris: Hachette et cie, 1900). The most thorough secondary sources are Gerarld L. Geison, The Private Life of Louis Pasteur (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); René Dubos and Thomas D. Brock, Pasteur and Modern Science (Madison, WI.: Science Tech Publishers, 1988); and Patrice Debré, Louis Pasteur (Paris: Flammarion, 1994; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 18 For an analysis of the “scientific persona” see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Bookes, 2007), as well as Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum, “Scientific Personae,” Science in Context (16, no. 1-2, 2003) pp. 1-8. For an examination of Pasteur in particular, see Latour, The Pasteurization of France and Barbara Larson, “Odilon Redon and the Pasteurian Revolution: Health, Illness, and le Monde invisible”, Science in Context (17, December 2004) pp. 503-524. 19 “Inauguration de l’Institut Pasteur”, Le Soir, November 19, 1888: Un vrai grand homme, acclamé par toutes les élites du pays, un savant français, salué par tous les représentants des grandes puissances, un illustre, modeste dans

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sa gloire ([a] truly great man, acclaimed by the nation’s elite, a French man of science, hailed by all the representatives of the great powers, an illustrious man, modest in his glory). 20 See Introduction and Chapter 1, Latour, The Pasteurization of France. 21 Larson, “Evolution and Degeneration in the Early Work of Odilon Redon”. 22 For accounts of masculinity within the medical context of nineteenth-century France, see Robert Nye, “Honor, Impotence, and Male Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century French Medicine”, French Historical Studies 16 (Spring 1989) pp. 48-71 and Nye, “Medicine and Science as Masculine ‘Fields of Honor,’” Osiris 12 (1997) pp. 60-79. For a discussion of scientific personas and the role of biography and portraiture, see Daston and Galison “The Scientific Self”, Objectivity, pp. 191-251. 23 Adrien Marx, “M. Pasteur et le Docteur Peter,” Le Figaro, January 23, 1887 : Son portrait et son oeuvre sont universellement connus. La photographie, le pinceau et la plume ont reproduit ses traits, raconté sa vie et publié ses labeurs. 24 For an overview of portraits of Pasteur, and other scientists and doctors shown at the Salon des Artistes Français during the late nineteenth century, see Richard Weisberg, “The Representation of Doctors at Work in Salon Art of the Early Third Republic” (PhD dissertation, New York University, 1995). 25 The commemoration of French men–Pasteur in particular–was noted by Georges Olmer, whose book on the 1886 Salon gives us a useful glance at this period when the practice of portraying modern men of science was being debated, defined and created. Georges Olmer, Salon de 1886 (Paris: L. Baschet, 1886) p. 76: Comme la Revue annuelle de Variétés, le Salon sacrifie aux actualités et brûle toujours un peu d’encens en l’honneur des hommes du jour. Nous nous attendions donc à y voir figurer un portrait de M. Pasteur; nous en avons deux, et nous sommes loin de nous en plaindre, car l’hommage artistique rendu au grand savant ne saurait être trop éclatant. 26 “Phrenology in France,” American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany (1, 1839) pp. 74-79. 27 The literature on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century physiognomy and phrenology is extensive. For discussions related to art and medicine, see Martin Kemp and Marina Wallace, Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now (London: Hayward Gallery; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 95-146; Jean Clair, ed., L’Âme au corps: arts et sciences 1793-1993, ex.cat. Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), particularly the essays in the section “Le Temps de la phrenology”, pp. 196-299; Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991), pp. 84-129; and Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive: The Use and Classification of Portrait Photography By the Police and Social Scientists in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries”, October 39 (Winter 1986) pp. 3-64. 28 Julien Leclerq, La Physionomie, visages et caractères (Paris: Chez Tous les Libraires, 1896) pp. 5-6. C’est la science qui a pour but la connaissance de la nature intérieure de l’homme par sa nature extérieure…Personne ne ‘masque’, personne ne peut s’arroger des facultés qu’il ne possède pas…la physionomie de l’homme ne ment pas. 29 Elizabeth Emery, Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881-1914): Privacy, Publicity, and Personality (Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2013) p. 91. 30 For a discussion of the close relationship between the Pasteurs and the Jacobsens, as well as an account of the commissioning of Bonnat’s portrait, see Denise Wrotnowska, “Une amitié de savants, Pasteur et Jacobsen,” Histoires des sciences médicales (July-December 1970) pp. 137-9. 31 Louis Pasteur, Études sur la bière; ses maladies, causes qui les provoquent, procédé pour la render inalterable, avec une théorie nouvelle de la fermentation (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1876) p. vii: L’idée de ces recherches m’a été inspirée par nos malheurs. Je les ai entreprises aussitôt après la guerre de 1870 et poursuivies sans relâche depuis cette époque, avec la résolution de les mener assez loin pour marquer d’un progrès durable une industrie dans laquelle l’Allemagne nous est supérieure.) 32 Louis Pasteur, Correspondance de Pasteur 1840-1895, réunie et annotée (Paris: Flammarion, 1940) pp. 491-492. For an account of Pasteur’s political work, see Geison, The Private Life of Louis Pasteur pp. 43-45. 33 “L’Élève. í Que faites-vous, Maître? M. Pasteur. – Je me vaccine contre les orders prussiens”, Le Rire, 1895; reproduction, Debré, Louis Pasteur, 1998. 34 Doctor August Lutaud, Pasteur et la rage: Exposé de la method Pasteur–fréquence de la rage–insuccès du nouveau traitement–la rage du chien et du loup–statistiques completes, etc. (Paris: J. Lévy, 1887) as translated in Geison, The Private Life of Louis Pasteur p. vi. 35 For a fine and detailed account of the relationship between naturalist art and republican ideology, see Richard Thomson, Art of the Actual: Naturalism and Style in Early Third Republic France, 1880-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 36 For a discussion of how nineteenth-century art critics believed Bonnat’s Realism fulfilled Republican aims, see Alisa Luxenberg, “Léon Bonnat (1833-1922)” (PhD dissertation, New York University) 1990; see also Fae Brauer, ““The Triumph of the Republic”: “The Glorification of the Arts””, Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013) pp. 24-47. 37 Olmer, Salon de 1886 p. 76 : …nous montre le grand savant sous l’aspect aimable et familial d’un papa gâteau, heureux de montrer sa petite-fille. C’est une gloire aussi d’avoir de beaux petits-enfants; mais elle est peut-être un peu trop partagée, et ce n’est pas sous cet aspect que la postérité se représentera l’homme qui a attaché son nom à la guérison de la rage.

Mouths That Bite: Rabies and Louis Pasteur’s Public Face

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Paul Gsell, “Pasteur Intime”, Revue encyclopédique (January 14, 1895) p. 20. Pour ses enfants le grand homme a toujours été un excellent père: ses amis se souviennent de l’avoir vu faisant danser un bébé sur ses genoux pendant que sa femme en déshabillait un autre pour le mettre au lit. 39 For an account of public fears of depopulation, see Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France and Fae Brauer, “Eroticizing Lamarckian Eugenics: The Body Stripped Bare during French Sexual Neoregulation,” in Art, Sex, and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, eds. Fae Brauer and Anthea Callen (Aldershot, England; Burlington Virginia, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2008) pp. 1-34. 40 Paul Lambert, Le Salon de 1886 (Paris: C. Marpon, E. Flammarion, 1886) p. 18. 41 Gsell, “Pasteur Intime,” p. 20. 42 Henry Fèvre, Études sur le salon de 1886 et sur l’exposition des impressionists (Paris: Tresse et Stock, 1886) p. 33. 43 Jutta Schickore, The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections, 1740-1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 44 Ibid., pp. 25, 238-239. Schickore’s history of the microscope aptly explores how theories of vision and understandings of the retina informed ideas about the restrictions and possibilities of microscopy, and vice versa. 45 John Waller, The Discovery of the Germ: twenty years that transformed the way we think about disease (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002). 46 Daston and Sibum, “Scientific Personae”, pp. 1-8. 47 Percy F. and Grace C. Frankland, Pasteur (London: Cassell and company limited, 1898) pp. 209-210, as cited in Geison, The Private Life of Louis Pasteur, p. 271. 48 Olmer, Salon de 1886 p. 76: Ce portrait est complet. Il dit l’homme et le labour de sa vie, et il pourrait bien être le portrait définitif de M. Pasteur. 49 Alfred de Lostalot, “Le Salon de 1886: la peinture”, Gazette des beaux-arts (1886) p. 459: La peinture de M. Edelfelt nous montre M. Pasteur absorbé dans ses recherches; la tête penchée, il consulte du regard un bocal de verre où pend un lambeau de chair sanglante: c’est la terrible moelle de lapin rabique qui, par l’effort de son génie, se convertira en baume guérisseur du plus horrible mal. Le tableau est excellent et rempli d’intérêt; la lumière joue librement sur les ustensiles du laboratoire, et cependant aucun détail ne vient distraire de la grandeur du sujet. 50 Georges Lafenestre, “Le Salon”, Revue des deux mondes (May-June 1886) p. 597: … il pourrait être inconvenant de noyer cette physionomie sous l’amas de détails exacts, mais parfaitement insignifians [sic]. 51 Ibid. p. 597 : Rien de plus naturel, rien de plus vivant; c’est exact, c’est amusant, mais, en vérité, le mobilier parle aussi haut que la figure, la physionomie du penseur s’efface au milieu des verreries qui scintillent, et, malgré l’intérêt de curiosité que la postérité attachera certainement au reportage minutieux et ingénieux du peintre suédois, ce n’est pas à lui qu’elle demandera l’image définitive de M. Pasteur. 52 Grand Festival au profit de l’Institut Pasteur, organiser par la Conférence “Scientia”, Palais du Trocadéro, 11 May 1886 (Paris, 1886). Eugène Manuel’s poem (read publicly at a soirée celebrating Pasteur at the Trocadero on 11 May 1886) intricately links Pasteur to the laboratory: Où donc est sa grandeur? / Où se fait son histoire? / Elle se fait là-bas, dans ce laboratoire, / Où l’univers est suspendu; / Où, grave et simple, une homme, acharné sur sa tâche, / Engage avec nos maux un duel sans relâche, / Et nous rend tout l’honneur perdu! 53 “L’Institut Pasteur,” L’Univers illustré (April 17, 1886) p. 246. 54 Louis Pasteur, Jubilée de M. Pasteur (Paris, 1893), as cited in Geison, The Private Life of Louis Pasteur, p. 262. 55 Alceste, Pasteur, sa rage et sa vivisection (Lyon: Association Typographique, 1886) pp. 24, 29. 56 “Louis Pasteur”, Vanity Fair, 8 January 1887; colour lithograph, Wellcome Library, London. 57 Debré, Louis Pasteur, 1994; 1998. 58 For an account of this experiment, see Debré, Louis Pasteur, p. 428. 59 Adrien Loir, À l’Ombre de Pasteur (Souvenirs personnels) (Paris, 1938) p. 66. For recent accounts of the “myth” of Pasteur, see Geison, The Private Life of Louis Pasteur; see also Latour, The Pasteurization of France. 60 Letter from Edelfelt to his mother, June 17, 1885, in Rappelez-vous l’arboisien: l’artiste et ses amis artistes (Association Arbois-Pasteur, 1995) pp. 52-53. It is likely that Edelfelt mistakenly claimed that the spine belonged to a dog rather than a rabbit as these experiments were not performed on dog spines: Pasteur se dit très satisfait. Le vieil original est très intéressé, propose des changements etc.…Comme il a peint lui-même, il sait parler d’art. Il m’a fait enlever la bouteille de microbes et à la place mettre dans sa main un grand ballon de verre avec à l’intérieur un morceau de la moelle épinière d’un chien suspendue à un fil. Le vieux dit que c’est quelque chose dont on n’a pas encore connaissance, mais qui va avoir une grande importance plus tard. 61 Although I have not been able to find Gsell’s painting and therefore do not know the exact size, William Walton described Gsell’s work, along with that by Brouillet; see William Walton, Chefs-d’oeuvres de l’exposition universelle de Paris, 1889 (Paris, 1889) p. 88: These are very large canvases, with many figures the size of life or near it. 62 Olivier Merson, “Le Salon de 1887”, Le Monde illustré (May 14, 1887). M. Pasteur dans son cabinet de la rue d’Ulm, cabinet encombré de gens accourus de partout, confiants dans la méthode de l’illustre savant. A gauche, un Arabe, des Arméniens, des Russes; à droite, une foule; au centre, une jeune mère tenant dans les bras son enfant auquel l’opérateur s’apprête à inoculer le virus sauveur. Debout, au premier plan, de profil, M. Pasteur lit une lettre que lui a remis l’Arabe. 63 For a discussion of the French “civilizing mission” over the course of the nineteenth century, see Margaret A Majumdar, Postcoloniality: The French Dimension (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007) p. 23.

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Jules Ferry, “Madagascar, le devoir et le refus du ‘recueillement’”, Chambre des députés (28 juillet 1885), La République des citoyens Tome II, ed. Odile Rudelle (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1996) p. 318. 65 Gerald Geison, “Organizations, Products, and Marketing in Pasteur’s Scientific Enterprise”, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (24, no. 1, 2002) pp. 42-44. 66 Merson, “Le Salon de 1887”, n.p.; Roger Ballu, “Salon de 1887”, supplement to L’illustration (April 30, 1887) n. 2305; le Roux, “La Vie à Paris: A travers le Salon”, Le Temps (April 30, 1887) n.p. 67 Hansen, “America’s First Medical Breakthrough.” 68 Gaston Tissandier, “M. Pasteur et le traitement de la rage”, La Nature 29 (May 1886) p. 410. 69 As recorded by J. Janicot in his article, “Inauguration de l’Institut Pasteur”, Le Figaro, November 15, 1888. 70 Louis Lumet, Pasteur, sa vie, son oeuvre: ouvrage orné de 121 gravure (Paris: Hachette, 1923) pp. 168-170, as translated in Geison, The Private Life of Louis Pasteur, p. 259. 71 J. H. Crespi, “Pasteur at Home”, Gentleman’s Magazine (March 1890) p. 271. 72 For a discussion of malaria and the expansion of French colonies, see William B. Cohen, “Malaria and French Imperialism”, The Journal of African History (24, no. 1, 1983) pp. 23-36. For an account of the impact of diseases on European colonization, see Philip D. Curtin, The Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 73 John Farley argues that the study of tropical medicine was fundamentally imperialist. For his examination of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tropical medicine, see Bilharzia: A History of Imperial Tropical Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 74 Jules Ferry, “Madagascar, le devoir et le refus du ‘recueillement’”, Chambre des députés (28 juillet 1885) pp. 295327. 75 For an examination of how French colonial subjects were turned into “good” Republicans, see James R. Lehning, To Be a Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early French Third Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). For a discussion of malaria and the expansion of French colonies, see Cohen, “Malaria and French Imperialism”, pp. 23-36. For an account of the impact of diseases on European colonization see Curtin, The Disease and Empire and Death by Migration; and Laurence Monnais, “Preventing Medicine and ‘mission civilisatrice:’ Uses of the BCG vaccine in French Colonial Vietnam between the World Wars”, IJAPS (2, no. 1, May 2006) p. 40. Also see Anne-Marie Moulin, “Patriarchal Science: The Network of the Overseas Pasteur Institutes”, Science and Empires: Historical Studies about Scientific Development and European Expansion, eds. P. Petitjean, Cathérine Jami and A. M. Moulin (Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992) pp. 307-322. 76 Etienne Henri-Charles Dujardin-Beaumetz, Inauguration de l’Institut Pasteur, le 14 Novembre 1888, compte rendu (Paris: Imprimeurs des Annales de l’Institut Pasteur, 1888) p. 20. 77 For examples of articles that discuss the debates between Pasteur and Peter, see Marx, “M. Pasteur et le Docteur Peter.” The archives at the Pasteur Institute also contain multiple articles cut out and collected by Mme. Pasteur about these controversies. 78 “Séance du 18 janvier 1886”, Bulletin de l’Académie de médecine, vol. 17 (Paris: G. Mason, 1887) p. 112. Aussi je ne crains pas de lui dire: comme médecin, comme académicien, comme philanthrope, comme patriote, il a entrepris et il poursuit une campagne deplorable. 79 Louis Pasteur, Quelques réflexions sur la science en France (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1871) p. 6. Je vous en conjure à ces demeures sacrées que l’on désigne du nom expressif de laboratoire. Demandez qu’on les multiple et qu’on les orne: ce sont les temples de l’avenir, de la richesses et du bien-être. C’est là que l’humanité grandit, se fortifie et devient meilleure. Elle y apprend à lire dans les oeuvres de nature, oeuvres de progrès et l’harmonie universelle tandis que ses oeuvres à elle sont trop souvent celles de la barbarie, du fanatisme et de la déstruction.

CHAPTER FOUR “LA VIE RENAISSANT DE LA MORT”: ALBERT BESNARD’S “NON-MIRACULOUS” HISTORY OF CREATION SERENA KESHAVJEE

“La Science sera donc la foi nouvelle, une lumineuse conscience du moi, qui nous ouvrira le vaste champ des mystères du monde tangible, une Foi tout aussi féconde que l‘autre et qui n‘abolira pas le rêve.” —Albert Besnard, 1897.1

Figure 4.1 Albert Besnard, La Vie renaissant de la mort, 1896. Huile sur toile marouflée, peinture décorative de l’amphithéâtre de Gestion, Université Panthéon, Sorbonne, Paris I. Cliche Jean-Christophe Doërr et du propriétaire des droits. Photograph courtesy of Chancellerie des universités de Paris.

In a huge triptych that covers sixty square metres of the new Chemistry Amphitheatre at the Sorbonne University, Albert Besnard recast the Biblical story of Genesis from a materialist point of view for the chemistry students. In representing a body putrefying under a large sun, Besnard selected an unusual topic for an artistic mural: The natural cycle of degeneration and regeneration, where organic decay symbolizes regeneration. However surprising the artist’s choice might seem to twenty-first-century viewers, La Vie renaissant de la mort (The Rebirth of Life in Death)

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painted in 1896 epitomized the cultural attitude toward the natural sciences during the fin-de-siècle in France.2 As many scholars have noted, France had enjoyed scientific pre-eminence in Europe between 1750 and 1840.3 By the late nineteenth century, however, the nation’s role as an international leader in the sciences had diminished.4 The one area in which France retained its status was chemistry, largely due to the well-publicized work on organic chemistry of Louis Pasteur and Marcellin Berthelot.5 According to historian Robert Fox, consistent efforts were made by the administration of the Third Republic to boost scientific research, and scientists enjoyed unparalleled favour in that regime.6 Berthelot, in his book Science et morale, published the same year as Besnard’s mural, characterizes this reverence for science: “La science… a été la source de tous les progrès accomplis par la race humaine, depuis, ses lointaines origines.”7 For Berthelot, science, not religion, had improved living conditions and contributed to the progress of humanity throughout history. The chemist observed that science had also inspired some of the best fine art: “L’art et la poésie n’atteignent toute leur perfection que par un étroit accord de leurs conceptions avec la connaissance de la nature et les réalités constatées par la science.”8 Berthelot deduced that science should be used as a guide for moral and philosophical issues, as well as for art and culture.9 Besnard conveyed this same reverence for science in his art and in his writing: “La Science sera donc la foi nouvelle, une lumineuse conscience du moi, qui nous ouvrira le vaste champ des mystères du monde tangible, une Foi tout aussi féconde que l’autre et qui n’abolira pas le rêve, car rien n’empêchera jamais celui qui admire ce qui est de rêver encore à ce qui pourrait être.”10 Besnard, too, conceived of the natural sciences as a foundation for a modernized religion grounded in experimental methodology and observation. Nineteenth-century scientific discoveries seemed to be confirming aspects of Romantic Nature Philosophy. New technologies such as photography, increased magnification and better lenses uncovered analogies between the macro and microcosms, suggesting correspondences between humanity and nature as well as illuminating biological processes and continual transformation in the natural world.11 This re-enchanted natural science, Besnard believed, should replace the blind faith of Christianity: “Quoi donc remplacera la foi religieuse dans le coeur de l’homme et dans son cerveau? Peut-être bien la science de la Nature.”12 Besnard was knowledgeable about chemistry and Transformism, as evolutionary theory was referred to in France, and both fields revealed a network of universal correspondences that existed despite the visual diversity in nature. Putrefaction, chemical evolution, spontaneous generation, and Transformism, subjects of regular debate in France at the turn of the nineteenth century, were challenging Creationist beliefs, but they were also offering a Romantic view of science in place of traditional belief systems. Besnard’s mural, The Rebirth of Life in Death, retells Biblical stories from a materialistic point of view, illustrating the eternal cycles of life and death, renewal and decay through the lens of organic chemistry. The mural presents a critique of Genesis by referring to a “non-miraculous” creation, based on scientific developments in chemistry and evolutionary theory.13 So important was this mural in valorizing science over religion that art critic Camille Mauclair, coined the term “Symbolisme Scientifique,” to describe a new style invented by Besnard, while also acknowledging the effort to re-enchant science.14 The Rebirth of Life in Death represents a turning point in the artist’s depictions of science as an attempt to move away from the personification of science toward an aestheticization of scientific processes: “Pour la première fois un artiste a pu, dans la domaine pictural, résoudre les antinomies apparentes de l’esprit de l’artiste et de celui du savant.”15 For this prominent commission, Besnard not only chose a scientific subject, a critique of Genesis with abiogenesis, but he also employed scientific theories in his iconography and his style to present a dynamic view of the earth “where all things flow.”16 By the time he received the commission for the Chemistry Amphitheatre in the New Sorbonne, Besnard had already been awarded a number of public commissions that celebrated scientific subjects.17 Between 1885 and 1888, Besnard completed fifteen murals for the new Ecole de Pharmacie in Paris.18 Working within Naturalist conventions of painting, these murals illustrate a progressive history of the West from prehistoric to contemporary times, focusing on the advent of

“La Vie renaissant de la mort”: Albert Besnard’s “Non-Miraculous” History of Creation

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the scientific disciplines, especially those that supported the French pharmaceutical industry, including chemistry, botany, and plant manufactured medicines, as well as geology and palaeontology.19 Professors were depicted carrying out fieldwork with students and lecturing in state-of-the-art university theatres, documenting the Third Republic’s commitment to prioritizing science in the education curriculum.20 In the mural, The Chemistry Lesson, executed in 1885 (Fig. 4.2), a professor is depicted addressing students in a large amphitheatre, much like the one Besnard would decorate for the New Sorbonne some ten years later. 21

Figure 4.2 Albert Besnard, Sketch for Pharmacy College murals, La Promenade géologique, La Leçon de chimie. 1885. Huile sur toile, esquisse, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photograph courtesy of Musée d’Orsay, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski.

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Figure 4.3 Detail, Albert Besnard, La Vie renaissant de la mort, 1896. Huile sur toile marouflée, peinture décorative de l’amphithéâtre de Gestion, Université Panthéon, Sorbonne, Paris. Photograph by author, courtesy of Chancellerie des universités de Paris.

Putrefaction: ‘‘La naissance est une mort, la mort une naissance.’’22 In the Chemistry amphitheatre, Besnard framed The Rebirth of Life in Death as a triptych referencing scenes from the Old and New Testaments. Yet in each scene, the iconographical elements of the scriptures and the order in which they are presented are subverted and re-presented from a scientific point of view that privileges the theories of organic chemistry, as can be seen in Fig. 4.3. In the right-hand panel facing the viewer, Besnard paints Adam, supporting Eve as she plucks an apple from the Tree of Knowledge. The head and upper body of the snake entwine Eve’s hand, while the rest of the reptile’s undulating body seems to flow into the central panel merging with the dead woman’s hair.23 For the critic Georges Lecomte, the snake appears to represent regeneration more so than the deceptive serpent of the Old Testament (Fig. 4.4).24

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Figure 4.4 Detail, Albert Besnard, La Vie renaissant de la mort, 1896. Huile sur toile marouflée, peinture décorative de l’amphithéâtre de Gestion, Université Panthéon, Sorbonne, Paris I. Photograph by the author. Courtesy Chancellerie des universités de Paris. Scan, Kirk Warren Studio.

Typically, the most important panel of a Christian triptych is the central one, which often depicts the crucifixion of Jesus. Yet instead of the figure of Jesus in Besnard’s central panel, there is a dead woman in a posture that recalls crucifixion, but inverted, her corpse appearing in an advanced state of decay, as conveyed by the green taint of her body visible in Fig. 4.5.

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Figure 4.5 Detail, Albert Besnard, La Vie renaissant de la mort, 1896. Huile sur toile marouflée, peinture décorative de l’amphithéâtre de Gestion, Université Panthéon, Sorbonne, Paris I. Photograph by the author. Courtesy Chancellerie des universités de Paris.

Although the figure’s discoloured flesh and bloated stomach signify putrefaction, a healthy baby suckles her. Not only does the mother’s rotting flesh feed her child, it also seems to flow into the natural surroundings. Her luscious red hair appears to continue growing, merging with the meadow, while her leaking breasts are the source of the whitish water that flows into a waterfall on the left and the serpentine river on the right, drawing all three panels together. We also find the snake from the right panel again, its head touching the women’s face, its body woven into her hair.

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According to historian Jonathan Strauss, decomposition and putrefaction were subjects that fascinated the French public in the nineteenth century. J. K. Huysmans’ vivid description in Là Bas (1891) of the crucified Christ in the central panel of Matthias Grünewald’s polyptych evidences this fascination, and certainly Besnard would have known this passage. Huysmans detailed description of the ravaged body of Christ makes an interesting parallel with Besnard’s centrally placed rotting body: Purulence was at hand. The fluvial wound in the side dripped thickly, inundating the thigh with blood that was like congealing mulberry juice. Milky pus, which yet was somewhat reddish, something like the colour of grey Moselle, oozed from the chest and ran down over the abdomen and the loin-cloth. The knees had been forced together and the rotulae touched, but the lower legs were held wide apart, though the feet were placed one on top of the other. These, beginning to putrefy, were turning green beneath a river of blood. Spongy and blistered, they were horrible, the flesh tumefied, swollen over the head of the spike, and the gripping toes, with the horny blue nails, contradicted the imploring gesture of the hands, turning that benediction into a curse; and as the hands pointed heavenward, so the feet seemed to cling to earth, to that ochre ground, ferruginous like the purple soil of Thuringia.25

As Strauss explains, decomposition was perceived as fecund as well as fetid.26 Even scientific texts hinted at the transformative, regenerative process of decay. Respected French NeoLamarckian evolutionary theorist, Edmond Perrier explained that corporeal degeneration creates new life in a new form, echoing the sense of continuous creation in Besnard’s title: “Mais dans les conditions ordinaries, le cadavres d’un homme ou d’un animal est une riche nourriture pour foule d’organismes….Toute cel le substance renait à la vie sous une forme nouvelle.”27 (my italics) Mauclair focuses on that idea of organic renewal in his explanation of Besnard’s central panel. As the body decays, he writes, “the sugars of death feed the lush vegetation.”28 Above this scene of decomposition and revitalization is an enormous, pulsating sun, initiating these natural cycles.29 Butterflies flutter from the dead woman’s mouth making decay seem fructive. In painting this scene of enchanted decomposition, Besnard nods to the scientific explanation of death. By framing the scene within the central section of what is in effect a triptych, he also recasts the Christian gospel of Jesus’ death and resurrection within a scientific framework of chemical regeneration.

Figure 4.6 Detail, Albert Besnard, La Vie renaissant de la mort, 1896. Huile sur toile marouflée, peinture décorative de l’amphithéâtre de Gestion. Université Panthéon, Sorbonne, Paris I. Photograph by the author. Courtesy Chancellerie des universités de Paris.

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Organic Chemistry If the couple picking the apple is in the Garden of Eden, then, according to Mauclair, the left side of the triptych facing the viewer must signify Hell, thus contravening traditional Christian iconography where Hell is envisioned on Christ’s left side and the viewer’s right (Fig. 4.6).30 The left-hand panel is separated from the central panel by a powerful tornado. In the background, lava explodes from volcanic rock and turbulent waters swirl through a gaseous atmosphere. Besnard’s scene is one of chaos created through atmospheric tempests. Floating in the water are human bodies. Emaciated male and female figures, some with tainted flesh, flow from the waterfall, and a skeletal face bobs to the surface in the middle of the pool. While some of the bodies seem to be disintegrating, others emerge from the water fleshy and fully formed. Near the bottom of the left panel, the red-haired woman embraces a man. Her hair flows around them in the water suggesting that this is the same woman who appears in the central and right-hand panels depicted at different stages of her life—or even different stages of human evolution.31 Mauclair leaves no doubt that Besnard understands chemistry. This critic utilizes organic chemistry to explain the mural, stating that Besnard is celebrating “la Gloire de Berthelot” and “the decomposition of organic elements and their re-composition.”32 The subject of the mural is, he concludes, “la chimie.”33 Mauclair states that the treatment of the subject is unprecedented: “The field of chemistry is before our eyes. . . . For the first time an artist has found a way to represent and suggest the notions [of chemistry] with aesthetic processes.”34 In 1896, during an interview with the activist and writer, Roger Marx, Besnard had explained the motivation for the mural in a similar manner: “Thus symbolized are the forces of nature: Water, air, earth and fire, the elements of organic chemistry which create plants, animals and man under the action of the sun.”35 Besnard’s “scientific symbolism,” as Mauclair termed it, promised to illustrate the generative forces of nature being demonstrated by organic chemistry: Besnard was, in fact, describing the creation of life without supernatural intervention. In the advancement of the secularized state in the Radical Republic, chemistry was very important and highly strategic to its administration. Besnard’s effort at melding art and science in what may be called his scientific symbolism, explains much of his success as a painter during this period in being able to attract prestigious State commissions. The chaos of the left panel gives the impression of a scene from the Last Judgement. That Besnard, in keeping with his long-term interest in science, was depicting the primeval earth seems more likely to me, especially given his emphasis on an oversized sun and the placement of this chaotic scene in the first panel. Geologists of the period, in their efforts to determine the age of the planet, typically described scenes of intense heat, volcanic activity, and turbulent oceans during the early phases of earth’s evolution.36 Similar illustrations of dramatic atmospheric conditions on the young Earth abound in popular late-nineteenth-century scientific treatises, some of the most well known being written by Camille Flammarion and by Louis Figuier.37 In the widely read Le Monde avant la création de l’homme, published in 1886, the astronomer Flammarion singled out the primordial sun as seminal to generating the mechanical and chemical operations that stimulated the first life in the “gigantic chemical laboratory” of the earth. He included intriguing illustrations, evident in Figs. 4.7 and 4.8 that were designed to match his vivid descriptions: La surface du globe devait être alors d’un rouge de feu. L’atmosphère de vapeurs qui pesait sur elle êtait le siège d’évaporations, de courants ascendants, de condensations supérieurs, de pluies diluviennes et d’évaporations nouvelles qui, pendant des siècles et des siècles, firent de notre monde un gigantesque laboratoire de chimie où tous les éléments furent d’abord confondus.38

Mauclair emphasized these same primeval chemical processes in his description of the mural: Un soleil écrasant, irradiant toute la scène va créer en cette chair morte la fermentation atomique et y déterminer cette transformation que nous appelons avec terreur et dégoût la pourriture. Source de toute vie, le Feu chauffe cet organisme saisi par le froid après l’arrêt cirulatoire, et s’apprête à le dissocier pour en refaire de la vie sous d’autres formes.39

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The widespread popularity of evolutionary theory generated a fascination about the origins of the universe and life on earth.

Figure 4.7 A. Jacob, “…Sous l’immemse soleil des premiers âges, l’eau, l’eau partout, l’eau toujours: Dans son sien va germer la vie,” in Camille Flammarion, Le Monde avant la création de l’homme, 1885, Plate 16. Public Domain.

Figure 4.8 Paul Fouché, untilted, in Camille Flammarion, Le Monde avant la création de l’homme. Image for Chapître premier, “Les Origines de la vie,” p. 85. Public Domain.

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Formlessness is a useful way to describe the sense of flux and flow that nineteenth and twentieth century critics have noted in Besnard’s style.40 I suggest that the artist invented an informe style to represent the sense of metamorphosis and “becoming” being theorized in evolutionary theory, and later popularized in Henri Bergson’s L’Évolution créatrice of 1907. The bodies emerging from and dissolving into the water in the left-hand panel recreate the origins of life on earth and the eternal cycle of regeneration evident in the process of evolution. As Mauclair describes the mural: “l’Eau et le Feu s’unissent, une foule de formes humaines, cadavres, ébauches de corps, matière calcinée, matière dissociée prête à de nouvelles metamorphoses.”41 In both text and image, Mauclair and Besnard were participating in one of the most important scientific discussions in fin-de-siècle France: The probability of spontaneous generation and chemical evolution as the basis for evolutionary theory. Organic chemistry had produced strong evidence that life could have arisen without divine intervention, under the atmospheric conditions of the young earth, which is the premise of Transformist evolutionary theory. Mauclair and Besnard were knowledgeable enough about the contemporary scientific theories of Berthelot and Pasteur to understand that evolutionary theory relied on chemical evolution. As Mauclair clearly stated, “la chimie est l’empirisme du transformisme.”42

Chemical Evolution, Spontaneous Generation and the Non-Miraculous Creation of Life Most science historians attribute the theory of chemical evolution to the scientist, Alexander Oparin (1894–1980), who in 1924 published descriptions of the chemical atmosphere and conditions of a “primordial soup” that could have first generated life on earth.43 It might seem unlikely that Besnard imagined the primordial soup so much earlier, but discussions in France about the chemical origins of life date from the public debates about spontaneous generation that occurred during the 1860s.44 For centuries, the observations that decomposing matter produced maggots, suggested that life could generate from non-life. It was Pasteur’s studies of fermentation and putrefaction for the wine industry that encouraged him to disprove the idea of a vital force that generated life, as is elaborated in Chapter Three.45 Although Pasteur seemed to verify that spontaneous generation was not viable in a series of public experiments with natural historian Felix Pouchet in 1863 and 1864, spontaneous generation, including heterogenesis (living organic matter arising from a living organism) and especially abiogenesis (living matter arising from inorganic matter) remained an acceptable theory in France until 1900.46 Organic evolution, as science historian Florence Raulin-Cerceau has noted, needed an abiotic or materialistic creation as a prerequisite.47 As Mauclair seemed to know, it was chemistry that was invoked to confirm evolution during the last years of the nineteenth century.48 This speculation about origins of life was even voiced by Darwin. When pondering whether life must have started in a “warm pond,” Darwin was thinking of a qualified version of spontaneous generation that took place long ago, on an earth under different atmospheric conditions: It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present.— But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day; such matter would be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.49

Primeval spontaneous generation (understood as abiogenesis) posited a natural history of the earth and suggested that living matter could have developed from inorganic matter without the intervention of any supernatural force. Spontaneous generation remained associated with a vital force, but still offered a “non-miraculous history of creation.” Indeed German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, used this very phrase in the first chapter of his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (History of Creation) first published in 1868.50 Realizing that Darwin had not addressed the origin of the primitive organism, Haeckel worked hard to bridge that gap.

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Haeckel was one of the most prominent and widely read scientists at the fin-de-siècle in Europe. Deeply influenced by Goethe and Lamarck, especially their studies of morphology, he posited these Romantic scientists as precursors to Darwin. While his History of Creation offered a materialistic alternative to Genesis, based on evolutionary theory, it was permeated with Romantic biology and philosophy.51 For Flammarion, Haeckel’s Neo-Romantic worldview increased the appeal of his work. Following the focus of Haeckel’s idealistic morphology on a basic unity and an essential connectedness of all forms, his recapitulation theory evoked the idea of universal correspondences, which was fundamental to his Naturphilosophie. Haeckel utilized developments in chemistry and evolutionary theory to support his Romantic-scientific point of view.52 As historian Alfred Kelley explains: “Haeckel placed himself in what he thought was the tradition of Spinoza and Goethe. These thinkers, he believed, saw nature as a single universal substance that was both matter and spirit—a universe of animated matter.”53 By 1888, Perrier pointed out that Haeckel’s Monism had almost reached the status of a religion: “Le monisme n’est pas seulement un système de philosophie, c’est presque une religion.”54 Although Perrier was cautious about Haeckel’s holistic theories, he did draw upon elements of the latter’s evolutionary theory, especially the German scientist’s efforts to map out the basic material of all life. By no means was he alone: Haeckel’s rehabilitation of Lamarck, and his Neo-Romantic point of view were welcomed by French scientists, particularly after Haeckel’s visit to Paris in 1878.55 Haeckel is considered a forerunner in the attempt to envision primitive life, inspired by developments in organic chemistry.56 His discovery in 1864 at Ville Franche, near Nice, of a “primordial slime” (Urschleim), defined as a structure-less protoplasm, anucleate pieces of jelly, even simpler than basic cell structure, received much attention and was conceived of as the physical basis of all life.57 French Neo-Lamarckian scientists used Haeckel’s taxon, “Moneron,” to describe this primitive plasma that “arose from the primeval ocean through the operation of purely physical and chemical conditions.”58 Haeckel had explained that this prime matter, “the original cell out of which every animal and plant is first developed,” evolved into all of the forms on earth through the process of perpetual spontaneous generation.59 His superb drawings visualizing Monera were enormously influential.60 Haeckel’s position that Monera are between animal and vegetal states, a basic plasma close to inorganic crystals, challenged the distinction between the living and non-living realms, inferring a fundamental connection between humanity and nature, and establishing the unifying foundation of Haeckel’s Monistic philosophy.61 While rejecting a supernatural explanation for the creation of life, Haeckel’s theory remained rooted in Romantic Nature Philosophy. Tellingly, Haeckel coined the term “oekologie” (ecology) in 1866, contributing to the beginnings of Western environmentalism.62 Monism positioned culture as a part of nature, challenging the dominant anthropomorphic, Judeo-Christian point of view. From this perspective, Transformism, as Neo-Lamarckian evolutionary theory was termed in France, may be viewed as having been shaped by Haeckel’s Monism into the twentieth century. It offered a powerful metaphor, sanctioned by science, to demonstrate the correspondences between nature and culture, inspiring artists and critics alike during the fin-de-siècle to re-enchant science.63 There are direct philosophical parallels between Haeckel’s L’ Histoire de la création des êtres (as it was translated into French in 1874), Flammarion’s Le Monde avant la création de l’homme, and Besnard’s La Vie renaissant de la mort, particularly as all three projects attempt to re-tell Genesis through the discoveries of science, albeit imbued with Romantic Nature Philosophy.64 A scientist with artistic aspirations, Haeckel beautifully illustrated the “social” Moneron as an egg with radiating filaments in Plate 1 of the History of Creation, as can be seen in Fig. 4.9.65 Flammarion accepted that Monera were both vegetal and animal, and had developed in the chemical laboratory of primeval earth.66 As he wrote: “A l’origine, il n’y avant ni végétaux, ni animaux, mais seulement des cellules, ou moins encore, peut-être les monères d’Haeckel.”67 Monera, he describes, were matter without structure, “simple homogène, ce grain vivant est aussi bien plant qu’animal.” Significantly he concluded: “Il est mobile.’’68

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Figure 4.9 E Ernst Haeckell, Protomyxa aurantiaca, a P Plate 1, Natürlliche Schöpfun ngsgeschichtee, 1868. Image taken from Naturlig Skaapelsehistoriaa (1882). Public Domain.

Figure 4.10 Paul Fouchee, “Les Premiers organismees. Associatio on de monères,” in Camillle Flammarion n, Le Monde avant la créaation de l’hom mme, fig. 53, p. p 137. Publicc Domain.

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. Figure 4.11 A. L. Clément, “Myxodictyum sociale” (D’après Haeckel), in Edmond Perrier, Les Colonies animales et la formation des organismes, fig. 2, p. 61, 1881. Photograph by the author. Public Domain.

Figure 4.12 Ernst Haeckel, Protomyxa aurantiaca, Monographie der Moneren, in Jenaische Zeitschrift für Medizin Bd.IV Taf.II, 1868. Scan courtesy of Bibliotheca Laureshamensis, Univeritätsbibliothek, Heidelberg. Public Domain.

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So influential were Haeckel’s publications that Flammarion’s illustrations of Monera in Le Monde avant la création de l’homme are based on Haeckel’s drawings, through the intermediary of Perrier.69 Flammarion’s reproduction of the “social” or “communal” Monera (Fig. 4.10) is taken directly from Perrier’s Les Colonies animales et la formation des organismes of 1881 (Fig. 4.11). In turn, Perrier took his image of the “Myxodictyum socilae” from Haeckel’s Monographie der Moneren, reproduced in Jenaische Zeitschrift für Medizin in 1868 (Fig. 4.12).70 The four images together demonstrate the importance of the social aspects of Monera and the clear impact of Haeckel’s aesthetics. Although Besnard does not illustrate Monera in this anti-Creationist mural for the chemistry students, he does visualize, perhaps for the first time in high art, the primordial soup of the young earth. To do so, I am suggesting that in the left-hand panel, Besnard developed an informe visual language, a way of symbolizing scientific theories of Transformation, to reflect the conceptualizations of Monera as an undifferentiated, organic and inorganic, original substance of life. This view is corroborated by contemporary critics. As Roger Marx stated in 1896: “M. Besnard . . . de donner en quelque sorte la philosophie de la chimie; il a découvert l’origine des éléments et la vie celée dans la néant.”71 Besnard was attempting to paint the chemical origins of life, and the continuous progressive development of that life.

A Transformist Aesthetic Science historians have argued that Darwinian theory was not universally accepted by biologists during the fin-de-siècle.72 In France, natural selection as a method of species adaptation was not as well received as Lamarck’s notion that species had the ability to acquire—and transmit to their offspring—characteristics that improved their chance of survival in their environments.73 Neo-Lamarckian Transformists sketched out a progressive development through which an internal force (vital force) responded to external stimuli, initiated by Lamarck’s theories and reinforced by Haeckel’s Monistic evolutionary theory, which owes more to Lamarck than to Darwin.74 Popular culture responded to Transformism’s Neo-Romantic conception of an élan vital that initiated a never-ending metamorphosis and thus a unitary Cosmos.75 Transformists envisioned the “vital force” as a dynamism that guided evolution progressively. In The Unknown (1900), Flammarion explains the nature of this “spirit”: An intellectual law controls the universe in which our planet holds a humble place. Such is the law of progress. I showed in my work Le Monde avant la création that the evolution of Lamarck and Darwin is only a recognition of facts, and not a cause. . . . The law of progress which regulates all life, the physical organism of this life itself, the instinctive foresight of plants, of insects, birds, etc., to assure propagation of these species, and an examination of the principal facts in natural history will result, as Oersted has told us, in convincing us that there is a spirit in nature.76

Flammarion evocatively suggested in Le Monde avant la création that the vital force of primal life is movement itself: “La vie est une forme nouvelle de mouvement; elle est une création naturelle produite par les conditions chimiques qui l’ont determinée.”77 This force guides evolution—and thus life, as he explains: “There exists in our cosmos a dynamic element, imponderable and invisible, diffused through all parts of the universe, independent of matter visible and ponderable, and acting upon it; and in that dynamic element there is intelligence superior to our own.”78 Flammarion took the idea of “spirit in nature” from the Romantic Danish philosopher and pharmacist, Hans Christian Oersted’s Der Geist in der Natur (1851), which posited that science enabled humanity to read the laws of nature, and that these natural laws evidenced a superior intelligence akin to human reason.79 Similarly Neo-Lamarckian Transformism revealed universal morphological correspondences that seemed to demonstrate the connectedness of humankind and nature.80 Flammarion conjectured that humanity is subject to the laws of nature: We have no right to deny that thought can exist in space, and that it directs the movement of vast bodies, as we direct those of our arms or legs. The instinct which controls living beings, the forces which keep up the beating of our hearts, the circulation of our blood, the respiration of our lungs, and the action of our stomachs, may

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they not have parallels in the material universe, regulating conditions of existence incomparably more important than those of a human being, since, for example, if the sun were to be extinguished, or if the movement of the earth were put out of its course, it would not be one human being who would die, it would be the whole population of our globe, to say nothing of that of other planets.81

It was the anti-anthropomorphic perspective of Transformism that enabled Flammarion to describe human death as a regenerative chemical process in his science-fiction novel Uranie (1891): A human being dies every second upon the whole surface of the terrestrial globe — that is to say, about 86,400 persons die every day, thirty-one million every year, or more than three thousand million in a century. The molecules of oxygen, of hydrogen, of carbonic acid gas, of azote, which constituted those bodies, have enriched the earth and entered again into atmospheric circulation.82

Nor did Besnard shy away from a scientifically accurate illustration of decay, placing a liquescing body at the centre of his painting. The dead mother’s protruding eyes and bloated stomach, together with the butterflies fluttering from her mouth, signify the regenerative potential of putrefied flesh. Even as late as the nineteenth century, putrefaction had a magical sense about it and was linked with the vital force, according to Strauss.83 It is no accident that Besnard chose breastfeeding to demonstrate the continuation of life, as illustrated by the milk from the mother’s body oozing into the surrounding field in the central part of his mural. The state of puericulture by the late-nineteenth-century in France meant that breast milk had attained the status of a vital fluid.84 At the same time Besnard, like Flammarion, repositioned death as part of a wider system of ecology, the new field of science that had been charted by Haeckel in relation to evolution. Mauclair relies on organic chemistry to explain much of this mural, and there is no doubt that he perceives Transformism as significant to Besnard’s art. This critic felt that Transformism had finally proven the ancient hypotheses, “toutes choses s’écoulent,” that all things flow, paralleling Flammarion’s focus on movement as symbolizing life.85 Mauclair explained Besnard’s title by emphasizing continual metamorphosis: “La naissance est une mort, la mort une naissance, et mort et naissance sont les termes conventionnels qui experiment un moment de l’éternel devenir, le travail de dissociation et de recomposition atomique se continuant comme se déroulent les anneaux d’une chaîne sans fin.”86 In their discussions of Besnard’s mural, critics revealed that they were considering how he turned Transformism into an aesthetic. As soon as La Vie renaissant de la mort was unveiled, many critics associated it with organic chemistry, as Besnard had directed in his interviews, but the style was also associated with Transformism, and the notion of “becoming” and flow. Roger Marx set the tone in his 1896 article, as partially quoted above: “M. Besnard . . . de donner en quelque sorte la philosophie de la chimie; il a découvert l’origine des éléments et la vie celée dans la néant; il a montré le cycle fatal perpétuellement parcouru, puis la transformation incessant, l’éternel devenir des êtres et des choses.”87 Similarly, Lecomte wrote in 1905: “C’est la souveraine beauté du transformisme qu’a l’amphithéâtre de Chimie à la Sorbonne, Besnard exalta en cette toile harmonieuse et vibrante où il semble que la gloire humaine fulgure.”88 One year later, Gabriel Mourey directly referred to the “credo of Transformism”: “…Besnard a éclairé de si somptueuse façon le drame des palingénésies, a si magnifiquement formulé le credo du transformisme ....”89 Mourey summed up the enchanted quality most clearly: “…c’est le Triomphe de la Vie dans la lumière, dans les fleurs, dans l’éternal printemps, d’une éternelle renaissance.”90 Hence through his close engagement with Transformism, Besnard was able to conceive of a dynamic, creative, and adaptive planet with “an eternal renaissance” of life, as is most clearly demonstrated in his sketch for the mural (Fig. 4.13).91 The scientistic attitude which dominated much of the Radical Republic regime challenged and undermined traditional faith-based religious beliefs, while fuelling a desire to re-enchant science and nature, in order to make them as wondrous as religion. Berthelot’s insistence that science could fix all problems, quoted at the onset of this chapter, and Haeckel’s creation of the Monist League in 1906, verge on a Neo-Romantic worldview. In this vein we can see Besnard’s mural as

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an ecstatic portrayal of chemistry and Transformism created for the new generation of chemists at the Sorbonne. The story of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are reinterpreted and reimaged by Besnard from a Transformist chemical point of view. In La Vie renaissant de la mort, Besnard utilized current science to show that corporeal death can indeed support new life, in which case life is reborn from death. At a time when Neo-Lamarckian scientists were lobbying for an anti-clerical, science-driven Republic, Besnard was able to illuminate, using an informe aesthetic equivalent to Transformism, how evolution and chemistry were revealing the fundamental laws of renewal in the natural world in order to recast Biblical stories as a re-enchanted natural science.

Figure 4.13 Albert Besnard, La Vie renaissant de la mort. Etude pour l’amphithéâtre de la Sorbonne. Courtesy Musée départemental de Oise, Jean-Louis Bouché. I wish to thank Oliver Botar, Fae Brauer, the late Filiz Burhan, Chantal Heuvrad-Beauvalot, Janet Rauscher, and the anonymous peer reviewer for reading, commenting and editing this paper. For help with images, I wish to thank Kirk Warren, Liv Valmestad, Architecture and Art Librarian, University of Manitoba, Alexandra Büttner, Bibliotheca Laureshamensis, Univeritatsbibliothek, Heidelberg, Laetitia Villaume, patrimoine de la Chancellerie des universites de Paris, Veronique Wilcznski, Musée départemental de l’Oise, and Denise Faïfe, Musée d’Orsay. While researching and writing this article, and organizing this book, I was supported by a Social Science Humanities Research Council grant. I am grateful for the SSHRC’s generous support of my research.

Notes 1

Albert Besnard, “Le Salon de 1897,” La Gazette des Beaux-arts (1 May 1897), as quoted in Gabriel Mourey, Albert Besnard (Paris: Henri Davoust, 1906) pp. 107–12. The quotation, p. 111, reads: Quoi donc remplacera la foi religieuse dans le coeur de l’homme et dans son cerveau? Peut-être bien la science de la Nature….La Science sera donc la foi nouvelle, une lumineuse conscience du moi, qui nous ouvrira le vaste champ des mystères du monde tangible, une Foi tout aussi féconde que l'autre et qui n'abolira pas le rêve, car rien n’empêchera jamais celui qui admire ce qui est de rêver encore à ce qui pourrait être. The term “non-miraculous creation” comes from the subtitle of Chapter 1, Ernst Haeckel’s History of Creation: “The Theory of Descent as the Non-Miraculous History of Creation.”

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La Vie renaissant de la mort is usually translated as “Life is reborn from death.” There are some variations of the French title, including La Vie renait de la mort and La Vie nait de la mort. 3 Following the loss of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, and especially after the fall of the Moral Order Government in 1877, consistent efforts were made by the administration of the Third Republic to boost scientific research and France’s reputation in the scientific arena. See Robert Fox, The Savant and the State: Science and Cultural Politics in Nineteenth Century France (Baltimore, M.D.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) and Harry W. Paul, From Knowledge to Power: The Rise of the Science Empire in France, 1860–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) Introduction. Also see Richard Thomson, Art of the Actual: Naturalism and Style in Early Republic France, 1880–1900 (New Haven: Yale University, 2012). I wish to thank Fae Brauer for sharing her insight into French Republican politics with me. 4 Paul, From Knowledge to Power, Introduction, especially p. 12. Paul makes it clear that the Third Republic administration pursued science as the foundation of education and morality. 5 See Maurice Crosland, Science under Control: The French Academy of Sciences, 1795–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) p. 5. Adolphe Wurtz in A History of Chemistry (1861) stated that “Chemistry is a French science.” Translation Henry Watts (London: Macmillan, 1861) quoted in Mary Jo Nye, From Chemical Philosophy to Theoretical Chemistry: Dynamics of Matter and Dynamics of Disciplines, 1800-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) p. 23, footnote 39. On Pasteur and organic chemistry, see Nils RollHansen, “Pasteur, Louis,” Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Vol. 24 (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2008) pp. 21-30, especially “Status of Spontaneous Generation” and The Pouchet-Pasteur Controversy.” Berthelot’s discovery of the chemical composition of air and water contributed to one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of the nineteenth century, organic chemistry. For a brief history of organic chemistry, see Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada, The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2000) pp. 11–17. 6 Fox, The Savant and the State, pp. 256, 265 and 275. 7 Marcellin Berthelot, Science et morale (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1896) quotation p. 40. 8 Ibid., quotation p. 42. Berthelot advocated for science to shape society and culture, believing that it could provide a better moral basis than religion, see Fox, The Savant and the State, p. 265. According to Crosland, Berthelot was the “most influential man of science in France till his death in 1907,” Science under Control, p. 194. 9 Trevor H. Levere, “The Rich Economy of Nature: Chemistry in the Nineteenth Century.” In Nature and the Victorian Imagination, eds. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B.Tennyson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) pp. 189-200. 10 Albert Besnard, “Le Salon de 1897,” reprinted in Mourey, Albert Besnard, quotation, p. 111. 11 Lynn Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible: Art Science and the Spiritual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Levere, “The Rich Economy of Nature,” pp. 193, 199. 12 Albert Besnard, “Le Salon de 1897,” reprinted in Mourey, Albert Besnard, quotation, p. 111. 13 I take this phrase from Ernst Haeckel’s History of Creation; “non-miraculous creation” is the subtitle for Chapter 1: “The Theory of Descent as the Non-Miraculous History of Creation.” Originally published as Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1868), it was translated into French in 1874 as Historie de la création and into English as The History of Creation, Or, The Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes: A Popular Exposition of the Doctrine of Evolution in General, and of that of Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck in Particular (London: Henry S. King and Company, 1876). Mauclair points out that Besnard felt that religious iconography was outdated and should be replaced with scientific iconography—specifically French chemistry. See Mauclair, Albert Besnard, pp. 44, 47. 14 Camille Mauclair, Albert Besnard: L’Homme et l’œuvre (Paris: Delagrave, 1914) pp. 40, 46. On p. 40, Mauclair clarifies that Besnard was not a chemist but an artist, who was very interested in science. Besnard was inspired by science and strongly believed that science should be the subject of art, replacing religion as such; pp. 46, 47. When Mauclair defines Besnard’s “scientific symbolism,” he states that Besnard was evoking chemical theories formally, as if a “scientist,” p. 46. Mauclair outlines one crucial formal element of “symbolisme scientifique,” the acidic colours derived from chemical reactions, pp. 43, 45. See Chantal Heuvrad Beauvalot for a discussion of scientific symbolism in “Albert Besnard (1849–1934): Une Vocation de Decorateur,” Part 1 and 2 (Ph.D. thèse, université de Paris X, Nanterre, 2001). Microfilm Lille: Atelier national de reproduction des thèses, 2005, especially, pp. 67, 68. HeuvradBeauvalot discusses both organic chemistry and Transformism in regards to this mural, Part 1, pp. 200, 201, as does Thomson, p. 220. During the 1890s, Mauclair was a Dreyfusard and held anarchist sympathies. By the early twentieth century, however, his rhetoric was strongly anti-Semitic; see Richard D. Sonn, “Jews, Expatriate Artists, and Political Radicalism in Interwar France”, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History, Vol. 37 (2009); online at Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0642292.0037.018, and Romy Golan, “From Fin de Siècle to Vichy: The Cultural Hygienics of Camille (Faust) Mauclair”, The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, eds. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995) pp. 156-73. 15 Mauclair, Albert Besnard, p. 46. 16 Ibid., p. 41.

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Besnard was awarded a number of public art commissions from 1880 on. Most of them celebrated science, including the murals for École de Pharmacie (1884-88), Truth, Leading the Sciences, Giving Light to Man (1891) in the Hôtel de Ville, and Matter at Le Petit Palais (1904-7). For an explanation of the process through which Besnard was awarded the Sorbonne commission in 1892-1893, see Heuvrad-Beauvalot, especially the discussion of the pressure exerted by Georges Bihourd on Léon Bourgeois in 1892 to get the commission for Besnard, “Albert Besnard,” Part 1, pp. 129–30. Heuvrad-Beauvalot has completed the most thorough research on Besnard to date. I thank her for discussing Besnard with me and for allowing me to read her thesis. Also see Chantal HeuvradBeauvalot, Isabelle Collet, et al., Albert Besnard 1849–1934 (Honfleur: Musée Eugène Boudin, 2008). How Besnard dealt with scientific themes in his art is discussed in the following: Martin Kemp, “Scientific Symbolism,” Nature 458 (26 March, 2009) p. 412; Christopher Green, Art in France: 1900–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) pp. 146-147; and Thomson, Art of the Actual, Chapter 6. 18 Heuvrad-Beauvalot, “Albert Besnard,” Part 1; Maria P. Gindhart, “Touched by Science: Albert Besnard's Painted Programme for the School of Pharmacy in Paris,” Visualising the Unseen, Imagining the Unknown, Perfecting the Natural: Art and Science in the 18th and 19th Centuries, ed. Andrew Grecian (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) pp. 155–85. Thomson, The Art of the Actual, pp. 215-220. The Pharmacy College also has a series of stained-glass windows designed and installed by Émile Hirsch between 1884 and 1888, celebrating the key eighteenth-century scientists who propelled France into the international science arena, including chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who is shown in his laboratory. See Françoise Gatouillat, “Les Vitraux de l’École de Pharmacie de Paris,” in In Situ [En ligne], 17|2011, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2011, consulté le 03 août 2013. URL: http://insitu.revues.org/946; DOI: 10.4000/insitu. 946. Accessed 21/12/12. 19 As a comparison, see Besnard’s mural Truth Leading the Sciences for the Hôtel de Ville, 1891. According to Martin Kemp in “Scientific Symbolism,” Nature, it depicts humanity’s forward march to a civilized state and portrays science as the driving force of cultural progress. 20 On the importance of the university system to the Third Republic, see Fox, The Savant and the State, p. 255. 21 In the final mural for La Leçon de chimie, Heuvrad-Beauvalot has suggested that the student staring back at the viewer could be John Singer Sargent and that the Professor is Chatin; see “Albert Besnard,” Part 2, p. 184. To see a photograph of the mural in situ, refer Thomson, The Art of the Actual, Chapter 6, fig. 157. 22 Quotation from Mauclair, Albert Besnard, p. 41. Art historians agree that this work is about the cycles of growth and decay; for example see Thomson, Art of the Actual, p. 220 and Heuvrad-Beauvalot, “Albert Besnard,” Part 1. 23 I thank Kirk Warren for enhancing my photographs to reveal new details about the snake. Looking closely, it seems as if it is one long snake with 2 heads, winding through two panels: One head emerges on Eve’s arm as she picks the apple, and the other head is entwined in the red hair of the dead mother touching her face. However, in the sketch, Fig. 4.13, there are two snakes beside the dead women. 24 Georges Lecomte, Albert Besnard (Paris: Nilsson, 1925) quotation p. 86: Ce n'est pas seulement l'arabesque souple et contractée du serpent qui s’enroule; près de la mort, toute n'est qu' enroulements d'herbes et de laines surchargées de sèves. Because snakes can shed their skin, they sometimes symbolize regeneration. Compare the snake in Georges Lacombe’s headboard, L'Existence (1894–96), at the Musée d’Orsay. 25 J. K. Huysmans, Là Bas, Paris: 1891; transl. Keene Wallace (New York: Dover, 1972) quotation pp. 12-13. Huysmans describes Grünewald’s Tauberischofsheim Altarpiece in Là Bas, which he saw in Cassel (now in the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe). In his 1908 essay Trois Primitifs, Huysmans describes the Isenheim Altarpiece, which was painted for the Antonite monastery in Isenheim, and was transferred in 1852 to the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, France. See Huysmans, Trois Églises et trois primitifs (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1908) pp. 189-90, online http://openlibrary.org/books/OL14046227M/Trois_églises_et_trois_primitifs. According to Chantal HeuvradBeauvalot, in a letter to the author, Besnard may have seen the Isenheim Altarpiece when he traveled to Strasbourg in 1907. Huysmans comments that Drs. Paul Richer and J. M. Charcot noted that Grünewald’s painting is so accurate from a medical point of view that the artist must have studied the wounds of dying patients or corpses. Regarding Richer and Charcot, see Huysmans, Trois Églises et trois primitifs, pp. 189-190, footnote 1. Huysmans references Charcot’s Les Syphilitiques dans l'art, and Richer’s L'Art et la médecine. It is interesting to think about Huysmans’ concept of “Spiritual naturalism” developed in Là Bas, as perhaps inspiring Mauclair’s “Scientific Symbolism.” Husymans describes Spiritual Naturalism as Naturalism made more profound. On Spiritual Naturalism, Huysmans, Là Bas, p. 11, states: We must… retain the documentary veracity, the precision of detail, the compact and sinewy language of realism, but we must also dig down into the soul .... Zielonka states that Grünewald’s polyptych was important to the conception of Spiritual naturalism; see Anthony Zielonka, “Huysmans and Grünewald: The Discovery of Spiritual naturalism,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies Vol. 18, No. 1/2 (Fall-Winter 1989-1990) pp. 212-230. 26 Jonathan Strauss explains that hair does grow after death, as Besnard indicates; see Jonathan Strauss, Human Remains: Medicine, Death, and Desire in Nineteenth-century Paris (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012) pp. 104, 108, 118. 27 See Edmond Perrier, Anatomie et physiologie animales (Paris: Hachette, 1882) p. 272 online: http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb310859612. 28 Mauclair, Albert Besnard, p. 44.

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I speculated whether Besnard had seen Vincent van Gogh’s Sower themed paintings with their dominant sun imagery, but Dr. Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov has explained that it would not have been easy to see these works during the mid-1890s in Paris. I thank her for this observation. The regenerative power of the sun is a visual motif by the 1890s and anticipates the popularity of heliotherapy, as demonstrated in Chapter Ten and by the Roger Broders’ poster on the cover of this book. 30 Mauclair, Albert Besnard, p. 44. 31 As noted, the three panels are connected by repeating motifs, including the red haired women, serpentine flows of water, and the snake visible in the central and right-hand panels. Despite all the nineteenth century articles about the triptych, the iconography is complex. Heuvrad-Beauvalot, “Albert Besnard,” Part 2, p. 328, suggests that the Eve figure is also the dead women in the central panel, on the basis of her red hair. I note that the red hair is repeated in the left panel, suggesting that the same woman appears in all three panels. Mauclair, Albert Besnard, p. 44, suggests that the triptych reads from left to right: The emergence of human life, the birth of a baby, and the baby grown into a man, helping his partner in a fertile land. My reading is similar: The emergence of humanity in the left panel; the development of human life in a fertile setting, evidenced in the right panel with the couple, surveying “their future kingdom”. Finally in the central panel, there is a scene of organic decay and renewal. 32 Mauclair, Albert Besnard, p. 40. 33 Ibid. p. 40. Italics in the original. 34 Ibid., p. 46; quotation p. 45: Pour la premiere fois, un artiste a trouvé le moyen de représenter et de suggérer de telles notions avec les procédés esthétiques. 35 See Roger Marx, “La Vie nait de la mort d 'Albert Besnard,” Revue encyclopédique no. 146 (20 June 1896) p. 434: Quatre puissances de la nature a savoir: L’Air, La Terre, L’Eau et le Feu, principes de la chimie organique qui ont créé la Plante, L’Animal et L’ Homme sous l’action du Soleil. See Heuvrad-Beauvalot, “Albert Besnard,” Part 1; and Thomson, Art of the Actual, p. 220. Translation of part of Marx’s text can be found in Alan Bowness and Mary Anne Stevens, French Symbolist Painters (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1972) pp. 25-26. 36 Martin J. S. Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). 37 Scholars have made connections between Albert Besnard and Louis Figuier (La Terre avant le deluge, 1863), and Besnard and the Rosny brothers; see Mauclair, Albert Besnard; Gindhart, “Touched by Science.” Heuvrad-Beauvalot, “Albert Besnard,” Part 1, pp. 191-192 and Part 2, p. 271, suggests that Besnard must have known the writings of Flammarion, and to my mind Besnard’s world view matches well with Flammarion’s view. 38 Camille Flammarion, Le Monde avant la création de l’homme: origines de la terre, origines de la vie, origines de l'humanité (Paris: C. Marpon et E. Flammarion, 1886) pp. 74-75. 39 Mauclair, Albert Besnard, pp. 43-44. Charlotte Besnard also stressed the role of the sun in organic chemistry and of putrefaction in her husband’s mural, in her preface for the exhibition catalogue for the Georges Petit Gallery in 1905, quoted in Mourey, Albert Besnard, p. 133. Throughout his book, Flammarion notes the importance of heat and water for generating life; refer Flammarion, Le Monde avant la création de l’homme, p. 136. 40 Among others, Silverman, Green and Thomson all note the formal effect of flux and flow in this mural. See Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in fin-de-siècle France: Politics, Psychology and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) p. 226, Christopher Green, Art in France: 1900–1940, pp. 146–147, and Richard Thomson, Art of the Actual, p. 220-221. 41 Mauclair, Albert Besnard, p. 44. 42 Ibid., p. 41. 43 Alexander Oparin, Origin of Life, trans. S. Margolis (1936; New York: Dover Publications, 2003); Wills and Bada, The Spark of Life, Chapter 2, and Tom Fenchel, The Origin and Early Evolution of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Chapter 3. 44 The debate regarding the origins of life was active in France from the 1860s because of the profile of chemistry; refer Florence Raulin-Cerceau, “The Concept of Chemical Evolution before Oparin,” Genesis-In the Beginning: Precursors of Life, Chemical Models and Early Biological Evolution, ed. Joseph Seckbach (Dordrecht: Springer, Vol. 22, 2012) pp. 891-906, especially pp. 897, 901. See also John Farley, The Spontaneous Generation Controversy from Descartes to Oparin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) especially Chapter 6. On p. 1, Farley defines Spontaneous Generation as: … some living entities may arise suddenly by chance from matter independently of any parents. 45 Raulin-Cerceau, “Historical Review of the Origin of Life and Astrobiology,” Origins: Genesis, Evolution and Diversity of Life, ed. Joseph Seckbach (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004) pp. 17–33; refer especially pp. 18–19. A vital force contravenes Creationist beliefs. 46 Farely, The Spontaneous Generation Controversy, definitions on p. 1. Raulin-Cerceau, “Historical Review of the Origin of Life and Astrobiology,” p. 20 explains that: Very few scientists and philosophers dismissed the theory of spontaneous generation for micro-organisms: this very strong dogma remained on certain levels a valid theory to explain the emergence of very primitive life or its prime material. In this same article Raulin-Cerceau, pp. 19-20, has carefully documented that spontaneous generation involved a number of different types of germination, including heterogenesis and abiogenesis, but in general the concept of life forming without life—or, more specifically, life coming from non-organic compounds—can be referred to by the general term “spontaneous generation.” RaulinCerceau, p. 19, explains that Lamarck’s vitalist theories perpetuated the belief in spontaneous generation, which he

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described as a progressive process, which created increasingly complex species. For her definition of heterogenesis as a reorganization of particles from living matter, which needed a vital force, and abiogenesis, as a generation of life in solution that continued mineral ingredients, such as could occur in a fermentation process, refer pp. 20-21. On the spontaneous generation debates and their implications for orthodox religion, see Wills and Bada, The Spark of Life, Chapter 1, especially pp. 19–21; Nils Roll-Hansen, “Pasteur, Louis,” Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, pp. 21-30. 47 Raulin-Cerceau, “The Concept of Chemical Evolution before Oparin,” p. 894. Farley, The Spontaneous Generation Controversy, p. 71. 48 As Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada explain, the spontaneous generation debate has implications for epidemiology and evolutionary theory; see Wills and Bada, The Spark of Life, Chapter 1. Organic chemistry demonstrated that a primitive synthesis of new life was possible in a laboratory, reinforcing the idea that life could have been created from basic inorganic compounds that were available at the beginning of time. Raulin-Cerceau has outlined the history of these debates and the importance of organic chemistry to chemical evolution in “The Concept of Chemical Evolution before Oparin,” pp. 896-897. Also see Nils Roll-Hansen, “Experimental method and spontaneous generation: the controversy between Pasteur and Pouchet, 1859–64,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 34 (3) (July 1979) pp. 273–92. Accessed 28/11/12. 49 Darwin to Huxley in 1871, quoted in Raulin-Cerceau, “The Concept of Chemical Evolution before Oparin,” p. 893. 50 Ernst Haeckel, History of Creation, subtitle for Chapter 1, “The Theory of Descent as the Non-Miraculous History of Creation.” In “The Concept of Chemical Evolution before Oparin,” pp. 899–900, Raulin-Cerceau notes that Haeckel’s understanding of spontaneous generation changed over time, away from perpetual spontaneous generation to the idea of a primordial spontaneous generation. His theory of chemical evolution continued to develop until 1904. 51 Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008). 52 Raulin-Cerceau, “The Concept of Chemical Evolution before Oparin,” pp. 89. Raulin-Cerceau notes the parallels between Lamarckism and Romantic Nature-Philosophy. As she defines it, in “Historical Review of the Origin of Life and Astrobiology,” quotation p. 19, one of the most important elements of Naturphilosophe is that no distinction is discerned between living and non-living matter: Life was a constant manifestation of unity through multiplicity. Haeckel was able to unite Lamarckism and Romantic Nature-Philosophy in the philosophy of Monism, especially the blurring of organic and organic categories, p. 23. I would contend that Haeckel’s conception of an animated, united Cosmos was one of the most attractive elements of his version of Transformism. 53 Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981) p. 27, quoted in Oliver A. I. Botar, “Prolegomena to the Study of Biomorphic Modernism: Biocentrism, László Moholy Nagy’s ‘New Vision’ and Ernö Kállái’s ‘Bioromantik’” (Ph.D. Thesis University of Toronto, 1998) p. 192. 54 Edmond Perrier, Le Transformisme (Paris: J. B. Bailliere, 1888) p. 125. Haeckel started the Monist league in 1906 in Jena as a materialistic religion grounded in science. Raulin-Cerceau, “Historical Review of the Origin of Life and Astrobiology,” p. 23, states that Perrier accepted Haeckel’s premise that “origin of life should be explained in terms of organic chemistry,” but did critique and refine Haeckel’s theories. 55 Haeckel included Lamarck’s and Goethe’s names in the title of Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte. According to Peter Bowler, Haeckel was crucial in reviving Lamarckian evolution and shaping Transformism in France. After Haeckel’s visit to Paris in 1878, the most important Transformist scientists, including Perrier, Alfred Girard, Félix La Dantec, and Elie Metchnikoff, combined elements of Darwinian and Lamarckian into their Transformist theories; see Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) pp. 110–114. Haeckel’s work on Monera was influential for Félix Le Dantec, who helped spread Haeckel’s studies in France; refer Raulin-Cerceau, “The Concept of Chemical Evolution before Oparin,” p. 901. 56 Haeckel is one of the important theorists on primitive life and chemical evolution, according to Raulin-Cerceau, “Historical Review of the Origin of Life and Astrobiology,” p. 21. Farley, outlines three aspects of Monism in Chapter 5: Continual progressive development; biological evolution; and natural selection; see pp. 75-77. 57 Robert Michael Brain, “Protoplasmania: Huxley, Haeckel and the Vibratory Organism in Late Nineteenth-Century Science and Art,” The Art of Evolution, eds Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer (New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2009) pp. 92–123, especially 94–95. Raulin-Cerceau, “The Concept of Chemical Evolution before Oparin,” pp. 899–901. 58 Quotation from Haeckel, Generelle mopholologie, Vol. 1, p.183, as quoted in Marsha Morton, “From Monera to Man: Ernst Haeckel, Darwinismus and Nineteenth-Century German-art,” The Art of Evolution, eds Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer, pp. 59–91, quotation 63. Haeckel’s discovery of the moneron was reported in both Perrier’s Les Colonies animales et la formation des organismes (Paris: Masson, 1881) and Flammarion’s Le Monde avant la création de l’homme. 59 Ernst Haeckel, History of Creation, quotation p. 97. Lamarck and Haeckel accepted spontaneous generation, according to which simple forms come about from a perpetual spontaneous generation and become more complex over time; refer Raulin-Cerceau, “Historical Review of the Origin of Life and Astrobiology,” p. 19; also see Morton’s explanation of Haeckel’s worldview, “From Monera to Man,” pp. 62–63.

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So exciting was Haeckel’s discovery of Monera that when Thomas Huxley studied a gelatinous substance from a specimen taken from the bottom of the sea in 1868, he named it, Bathybuis Haecekili, thus reinforcing the theory of Monera; see Raulin-Cerceau, “Historical Review of the Origin of Life and Astrobiology,” p. 22. Huxley’s substance was discredited as a contaminated specimen by 1875, and he admitted his mistake, although Haeckel did not accept this discreditation; see Philip F. Rehbock, “Huxley, Haeckel, and the Oceanographers: The Case of Bathybius Haeckelii,” Isis, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Dec. 1975) pp. 504-533. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/228925). See also Farley, The Spontaneous Generation Controversy, where he explains that Haeckel felt the discovery of Bathybius vindicated his acceptance of abiogenesis, pp. 74-75. 61 Farley, The Spontaneous Generation Controversy, pp. 72-76. 62 Haeckel coined the term “ecology” in Generelle Morphologie (1866) and defined it as the relation of animals to their environment. 63 On the influence of Haeckel’s aesthetics, see Erika Krause, “L’Influence de Ernst Haeckel sur l’Art nouveau”, L’Âme au corps: arts et sciences 1793–1993, ed. Jean Clair (Paris: RMN, 1993) pp. 342–351; Botar, “Prolegomena to the Study of Biomorphic Modernism”; and Marsha Morton, “From Monera to Man.” On the Romantic elements of Monism see Farley, The Spontaneous Generation Controversy, pp. 75-77 and Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life. 65 Haeckel described Monera in Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866) and illustrated them for the first time in Monographie der Moneren (1868), and Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1868) in Plate 1, “Protomyxa aurantiaca.” These images anticipate his format of microscopic, symmetrically arranged images of radiolaria in Haeckel’s Art Forms of Nature (1899). 66 Flammarion, Le Monde avant la création de l’homme, pp. 72, 75. On protoplasm and vitalism, see Wills and Bada, The Spark of Life, pp. 11–12. 67 Flammarion, Le Monde avant la création de l’homme, p. 127, and l’oeuf de la vie qui dans l’avenir, se répandra à la surface de la terre, p. 137. 68 Ibid., p. 127. 69 Edmond Perrier, Les Colonies animales et la formation des organismes, p. 61, and Perrier, Anatomie et physiologie animals (Paris: Hachette, 1882) Chapter 2, especially pp. 109-111, where he links the discovery of Moneron to the discovery of bacteria, especially those bacteria being investigated and vaccinated by Pasteur. Read on-line through: http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb310859612. The section on Monère by Perrier helps elucidate why Pasteur’s microbes were often seen as creative, as well as destructive. On the importance of Haeckel in promoting the chemical origins of life, and his discovery of Moneron, see Raulin-Cerceau, “Historical Review of the Origin of Life and Astrobiology,” pp. 21–22. In 1900 Perrier became director of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris. 70 In Le Monde avant la création de l’homme, Flammarion’s figure 53 is labeled Association de monères and is based on the Myxodictyum socilae, figure 2, from Perrier’s Les Colonies animales. Perrier’s image comes from Plate II in Haeckel’s Monographie der Moneren published in Jenaische Zeitschrift fur medizin, Bd, IV, Taf 11, 1868. Flammarion’s images of Moneron dividing and the evolutionary tree seem to derive directly from Haeckel, although they are not always credited to him. Nevertheless Flammarion does cite Haeckel’s Historie de la création in his general bibliography. I am grateful to Liv Valmestad, Architecture and Art Librarian, University of Manitoba, and Alexandra Büttner, Bibliotheca Laureshamensis, Univeritatsbibliothek, Heidelberg, for helping me find a copy of Monographie der Moneren and for scanning the illustration. 71 Roger Marx, “La Vie nait de la mort d'Albert Besnard,” pp. 434–435. 72 Peter J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a. Historical Myth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) p. 59. See his analysis of Haeckel’s interpretation of Darwin, p. 84; and Stuart M. Persell, Neo-Lamarckism and the Evolutionary Controversy in France (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999). 73 See David Depew and Bruce Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995) pp. 45–47. Also see Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-Twentieth Century Britain (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001) and Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life. 74 Depew and Weber, Darwinism Evolving, p. 46. 75 One example of how Transformism was adapted to philosophy is found in Henri Bergson’s use of the term “élan vitale” and “becoming” in L'Évolution créatrice (1907; Paris: Félix Alcan, 1908); see Chapter Seven of this book for Brauer’s exploration of their relationship. Regarding how Bergson was influenced by Neo-Lamarckian evolutionary theories, see Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion, Chapter 4, especially p. 136. Also “Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution 100 Years Later,” eds Michael Kolkman, and Michael Vaughan, SubStance 36, no. 3 (2007). 76 Camille Flammarion, The Unknown, trans. unknown (French original 1900; New York: Harper, 1900) p. x. 77 Flammarion, Le Monde avant la création de l’homme, p. 136. Also relevant is la force vitale est née de la force physio-chimique, p. 133. The influence of Ether theory is evident here. 78 Flammarion, The Unknown, p. xi. 79 A trained pharmacist, Oersted relied on chemistry to reveal analogies between the microcosm and macrocosm, affirming a fundamental unity in the cosmos. See Levere, “The Rich Economy of Nature,” pp. 189-200. Also see Hans Christian Oersted, The Soul in Nature (London: H. G. Bohn, 1852), and Robert Michael Brain, Robert S. Cohen, and Ole Knudsen, eds. Hans Christian Oersted and the Romantic Legacy in Science: Ideas, Disciplines, Practices (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007).

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Levere, “The Rich Economy of Nature,” p. 190. Flammarion, The Unknown, p. xi. 82 Camille Flammarion, Uranie (Paris: Flammarion, 1891) pp. 181–182. English transition by Mary J. Serrano (New York: Cassell Publication, n.d.). http://fiction.eserver.org/novels/uranie/contents.html. Accessed 7 /08/13. 83 Strauss, Human Remains, p. 108. 84 According to influential puericulturist, Adolphe Pinard, it would be through breastfeeding that French mothers would be able to contribute to the regeneration of the French race; see Fae Brauer, “Eroticizing Lamarckian Eugenics: The Body Stripped Bare during French Sexual Neo-regulation,” Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, eds Fae Brauer and Anthea Callen (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008) pp. 97–138. See also Barbara Larson, “Microbes and Maladies: Bacteriology and Health at the Fin de Siècle,” Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe, ed. Jean Clair (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1995) pp. 385-393. Besnard describes the “escaped” milk that leaks from the dead woman’s breasts as “meandering through nature, shaped like the river of life”; see Roger Marx, “La Vie nait de la mort d'Albert Besnard,” quotation p. 435. Mauclair, Albert Besnard, p. 43, states: Le lait, est propre à activer la formation des cellules humaines, et par lui l’enfant grandira. There are a number of interesting paintings from this period that feature images of breastfeeding, notably those by Eugène Carrière, and George Lacombe’s Isis (18941896, Musée d’Orsay). The Goddess Isis’ red hair turns into the trunk of oak trees, and the secretions from her breasts, which are blood-red, feed the flowers at her feet, symbolizing the vital force. Also see comments in Serena Keshavjee “Natural History, Cultural History, and the Art History of Elie Faure,” Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide 8 no 2 (autumn 2009) http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn09/natural-history-cultural-history-and-the-arthistory-of-elie-faure. 85 Mauclair, Albert Besnard, p. 41. 86 Ibid., p. 41. 87 Marx, “La Vie nait de la mort d 'Albert Besnard,” pp. 434–435. Italics in original. 88 Georges Lecomte, “Albert Besnard,” Gazette des Beaux-arts (1 Feb., Vol. 33, 1905) pp. 153-167, quotation pp. 161162. The two articles in this series were reproduced in Georges Lecomte, Albert Besnard (Paris: Nilsson, 1925) quotation p. 85. Lecomte uses language such as fluidite vibrante, p. 86, and ce concept d’étérnite, de renouvellement perpétual d’inlassable transformatiom, que Besnard exprima dans toutes les autres toiles de son oeuvre décorative, p. 82. 89 Italics in original. Mourey, Albert Besnard, quotation, p. 20. Art historians have also used the term Transformism in connection with Besnard’s art. Heuvrad-Beauvalot notes that, in 1979, Pascal Ory used Transformism in writing about this mural in his article “La Sorbonne, cathédrale de la science républicaine,” L'Histoire 12 (May 1979) pp. 50–58. See Heuvrad-Beauvalot’s discussion in “Albert Besnard,” Part 1, p. 200. By the late twentieth century the term Transformism had fallen out of favour. Debora Silverman was one of the first art historians to contextualize and define it in this way in Art Nouveau in fin-de-siècle France, p. 226: Life is Born from Death, expressed a secular version of Catholic religiosity infused with a particular kind of organicism called Transformism, a fin-de-siècle French scientific theory that assumed the continuum of being and the unity of all matter. Both Christopher Green, Art in France: 1900– 1940, pp. 146–147, and Thomson, Art of the Actual, p. 221, have each described Besnard’s work in terms of “flux.” Thomson, p. 220 has written: Above all, La Vie renaissant de la mort is a painting about flux: the cycle of growth and decay, the flow of liquids and gases, the efflorescence of vegetation, the reproductive imperative and the eternal lifegiving energy of the sun. All three authors link this formal dynamism to Bergson’s theories. Thomson, p. 209, favours the term “organicism” over Transformism but defines it similarly. On p. 221, he also notes Besnard’s use of unnatural “chemical” colours and “fluid shapes.” Although not in the context of Besnard, Jane Becker has linked Eugène Carrière, a close friend of Besnard, with a “Bergsonian” aesthetic, based on the sense of flux; see Jane R. Becker, “Carrière and Rodin,” in Eugène Carrière, 1849–1906, ed. Rodolphe Rapetti (Strasbourg: Musées de Strasbourg/RMN, 1997) pp. 45–47. I suggest that the term informe might be considered to deal with the formal descriptions of flux, becoming and dynamism. My understanding of informe as a visual language is based on Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, L’Informe:mode d’emploi exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1996. I historicize the formal language of Transformism in Serena Keshavjee, “Natural History, Cultural History, and the Art History of Elie Faure.” Regarding science, nature-centric theories, and modernist art, see Oliver A. I. Botar and Isabel Wünsche, Biocentrism and Modernism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), especially Botar, “Defining Biocentrism,” pp. 15–46. Botar has utilized Raoul Francé’s term Biocentrism to define this nature-centric point of view in early-twentieth-century Germany. He has mapped all of the elements of this philosophy, including Neo-Lamarckism and the topos of selfsimilarity within the macro and micro realms. Although he has made a good case for using the term Biocentrism, because it was not at all used in fin-de-siècle France, to my knowledge, I consider Transformism a far more historically accurate term able to signify both a worldview and an aesthetic. 90 Mourey, Albert Besnard, quotation, p. 79. 91 Redon’s Tadpole and Marsh Flower and Gallé’s Tadpoles vase, for example, parallel the scientific description of Monera and I suggest they also utilized Transformist theories in their art by incorporating scientific imagery and depicting natural processes. On the complex science Redon unitized, see Barbara Larson, The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society and the Fantastic Work of Odilon Redon (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). 81

CHAPTER FIVE “ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL”: EVOLUTION AND ORGANICISM IN THE ART OF EMILE GALLÉ AND THE ECOLE DE NANCY JESSICA M. DANDONA

At the end of the nineteenth century, the controversy surrounding the Dreyfus Affair radically polarized French society, threatening the stability of the Third Republic and its efforts to forge political consensus. Government officials and arts reformers would increasingly turn to culture, and to the decorative arts in particular, as a way to unify the nation through the creation of a shared artistic style, one that would express both France’s unique identity as a nation and its essential modernity. 1 According to those critics who hailed Art Nouveau designer, Emile Gallé, as a quintessentially “French” artist, however, this new style would be forged not in Paris, but the provincial city in eastern France: Nancy. Nancy had found itself abruptly transformed into a frontier military outpost when Germany annexed France’s eastern territories at the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War. Residents of the city, once the capital of the independent province of Lorraine, proclaimed their unbroken loyalty to the French nation while continuing to celebrate the distinctiveness of their regional culture. 2 Meanwhile, for many in France, the province of Lorraine and the city of Nancy as its symbolic center in some ways came to stand in for the French nation as a whole. In its divided and war-torn state, Lorraine represented the struggles of France to free herself from her Prussian invaders. A native of Nancy, Gallé served in the French army during the Franco-Prussian War. Throughout his career, the artist’s works would consistently explore themes related to the loss of the eastern territories and Lorraine’s unique place within the French nation. In 1901 Gallé founded the Ecole de Nancy, or School of Nancy, a group of artists and industrialists from the province of Lorraine who sought to define a recognizable regional style that could represent France’s modernity at home and abroad. By actively participating in large international exhibitions such as those organized by La Libre Esthétique in Brussels, the members of the Ecole de Nancy quickly established themselves as rivals to better-known Art Nouveau artists, such as the Belgian designer and architect Henry van de Velde (1863–1957). Despite its provincial origins, the Ecole de Nancy sought to play a defining role in the debate over France’s future as a nation. Central to the efforts of the group was its dedication to a style that drew inspiration from the flora and fauna of the artists’ native province. This return to “naturalist decoration”, as Gallé described the group’s style, was an attempt to define French identity not through reference to tradition or a shared history, but through the metaphor of artistic forms rooted in the soil of France itself.3 Gallé would play a pivotal role in articulating the group’s goals, authoring the Ecole de Nancy’s official statutes as well as publishing numerous essays in an effort to define the group’s characteristic style. A close examination of the artist’s scientific studies of orchids and his use of orchid themes in designs for a logo to represent the Ecole de Nancy reveals how contemporary theories of evolution informed Gallé’s conceptualization of the group’s identity. In his images of orchids, the artist explores the concept of organicist solidarity in particular as an alternative to the increasingly xenophobic vision of French nationhood promoted by leaders of the contemporary nationalist movement.4

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A scientific concept popularized by Radical Republicans such as Léon Bourgeois, Prime Minister from 1895–1896, Solidarity (Solidarité) offered a way of imagining the French nation as a kind of living organism.5 According to this theory, each cell, individual, or province is unique, but each works in harmony with the others to forge unity out of diversity. By looking to biology for a model of nationhood, Bourgeois and other radical Republicans sought to naturalize a political system based on cooperation rather than competition, one that they hoped would ensure the survival of the Third Republic in the face of threats both internal and external.6 The model of organicist solidarity offered Gallé and his fellow members of the Ecole de Nancy a new way to envision their identity as artists and their place within the nation—one that preserved individual rights and the idea of difference while championing the cause of social harmony and justice. In his works and in his writings, Gallé thus sought in essence to redefine what it meant to be French, offering an understanding of the nation as inherently diverse and decentralized. His aim was to create an artistic community that would at once foster regional cooperation and promote a modern, French style, while also championing provincial identity and defending individual artists’ independence. These ideas took visual form in the illustrations for a scientific paper on anomalies in orchids presented by Gallé at the International Congress on Botany (1900), a conference held at the same Exposition Universelle where the artist had exhibited his celebrated glass and furniture designs.7 In his paper, entitled “New Forms and Polymorphism in Aceras hircina”, the artist examined the mutability of form within a single species of orchid growing in his native province of Lorraine. Gallé illustrated his account of Aceras hircina, more commonly known as Lizard’s Tongue Orchid, with six plates—these included three lithographs based on the artist’s own drawings and three halftone reproductions of black-and-white photographs (Figs. 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3).8 A trained amateur botanist,9 as well as an artist and industrialist, Gallé employed his scientific practice to enrich and inform his work as a designer of exquisitely colored and finely wrought glass vases, many of which reproduce the forms of plant life growing in the artist’s native Lorraine. A closer examination of Gallé’s illustrations for his paper thus offers valuable insight into the artist’s understanding of nature and its processes, as well as his conceptualization of how artistic styles evolve over time. The notion of organicist solidarity was indissociable from contemporary understandings of the concept of evolution, or Transformisme as it was often called in France. Although Gallé’s study never directly alluded to the role of mutation in evolution, readers familiar with the theories of Charles Darwin would have understood that the artist was exploring one of the possible means by which new species arise. 10 Unlike hybridization, mutation does not require cross-fertilization. Instead, a cellular mutation within a single organism results in a transformation of the plant’s structure. In orchids, this often leads to a change in pollinator, since the unique structure of various orchid blossoms facilitates fertilization by a relatively specific set of insects. Over time, the transition to a new pollinator tends to increase the relative isolation of the plant, which eventually becomes unable to exchange pollen with neighboring flora that no longer share the same pollinator. The new species of orchid thus displays unique characteristics while nonetheless maintaining structural similarities with the orchid family as a whole. In his study of polymorphism, the artist then celebrated a harmonious vision of the interdependence of richly varied natural systems, demonstrating his interest in the evolutionary processes that resulted in diversity. Since Gallé authored several other studies of polymorphism in flowering plants, it may be deduced that it remained an ongoing source of fascination for the artist.11 Moreover, he was not alone in his interest in mutation as an engine of evolution. The Dutch physiologist and geneticist, Hugo de Vries (1848–1935), also presented a paper on mutations at the 1900 Congress. In his study, entitled “Variability and Mutability” (Variabilité et Mutabilité), de Vries compared the role of cross-fertilization and random mutation in the evolution of plant forms. De Vries would later go on to publish The Mutation Theory (Die Mutationstheorie) in 1901–02, the first scientific study to give in-depth consideration to the role of mutation in evolution.12

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Figure 5.1 Emile Gallé, Plate I from “Formes nouvelles et polymorphisme de l’Aceras hircina Lindl., ou Loroglossum hircinum Reich.,” 1900. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Figure 5.2 Emile Gallé, Plate II from “Formes nouvelles et polymorphisme de l’Aceras hircina Lindl., ou Loroglossum hircinum Reich.,” 1900. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Figure 5.3 Emile Gallé, Plate V from “Formes nouvelles et polymorphisme de l’Aceras hircina Lindl., ou Loroglossum hircinum Reich.,” 1900. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Gallé began his study by situating Aceras hircina within the context of its geographical environment, described with striking specificity as “the grassy slopes of Jurassic limestone dominating the districts of Griscourt and Gezoncourt”, two towns in northeastern France.13 The artist went on to describe how radically the new varieties he had discovered differed from all previously known examples. Gallé’s primary interest seemed to be in the ways in which the form of the orchid had adapted to its environment and in the mechanisms by which new forms arise. These processes have a clear parallel in the origin and evolution of new artistic styles, suggesting not only that the characteristic style employed by the Ecole de Nancy was a natural product of its environment but also that the French nation itself was a composite of similarly diverse regions. Gallé’s fascination with the idea of simultaneous sameness and difference can be seen as an effort to rethink the relationship between the provinces and the larger nation of France. Indeed, the artist’s study of polymorphism in Aceras hircina offers a perfect metaphor for the regional particularity that exists within a unitary national system. Gallé’s illustrations of polymorphism in Aceras hircina demonstrate this dual nature of the orchid by exploring how far new varieties can diverge from their original form while remaining members of the same species.14 It also suggests ways in which French art might evolve in new directions, through a natural process of adaptation to its environment, without losing its essential “Frenchness.” The artist’s images of Aceras hircina were given pride of place in the commemorative volume published by the Congress. Not only did the volume accord Gallé a greater number of full-page illustrations than any other contributor, but the plates were also printed in an unusually vibrant and striking green hue. Indeed, as both an amateur botanist and a well-known designer and industrialist, the artist from Nancy occupied a unique position within the context of this Congress. Among the numerous professors, pharmacists, and directors of botanical gardens who figure on the list of members attending the Congress, there appears the mention, “Gallé, Emile. Master glassmaker, vice-president of the Horticultural Society of Nancy.”15 Emile Perrot (1867–1951), a professor at the Ecole Supérieure de Pharmacie in Paris, signalled the dual nature of Gallé’s contribution to the Congress in his introduction. As he wrote: “Upon receiving their volume, members of the Congress will have the unexpected pleasure of admiring the delicate composition that Monsieur Gallé, the passionate botanist and eminent artist, has graciously executed to illustrate this collection.”16 Although Perrot refers to the cover illustrations, not to Gallé’s drawings of Aceras hircina, the latter images also bore evidence of their dual nature as scientific documents and the products of artistic invention. The sinuous, flowing lines that dominate Gallé’s composition in the first three plates, for example, strongly recall the whiplash curves characteristic of Art Nouveau, suggesting that the artist may have taken liberties with the depiction of his specimens.17 Yet the detailed precision with which Gallé records the idiosyncrasies of each individual blossom also connotes scientific objectivity. It seems clear that in these drawings Gallé had a delicate balancing act to perform, with not only his reputation as a botanist at stake but also his status as a well-known proponent of the new style. The artist clearly struggled to reconcile these two roles in images that depart from the conventions of botanical illustration in several significant ways. Gill Saunders has argued that by the mid-nineteenth century, botanical illustrations typically fell into two categories. They included the “illusionistic pictorial”, which displayed a central image in color, surrounded by smaller details, and the “outline schematic,” black and white images useful for studying plant morphology. 18 Despite their inherent differences, both types of image typically isolated the specimen against a white background and omitted any depiction of the root system or the environment in which the plant grew. Such illustrations tended also to divide the specimen into its component parts, including stem, leaves, and flowers, and to show the plant at several different stages of growth.19 In contrast to such examples, Gallé’s hand-drawn illustrations crowd the page with numerous specimens and focus almost exclusively on the flower of Aceras hircina, ignoring all other plant structures and phases of growth. Rather than representing one single specimen dissected into its various parts or depicting the full life cycle of the orchid, Gallé recorded a wide variety of

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blossoms that have been separated from the rest of the plant. This allowed the artist to highlight variations in the length or shape of each flower’s labellum, the lip petal that is characteristic of all orchids.20 By omitting descriptive color, Gallé draws the viewer’s attention to the structure of the orchid flowers, emphasizing their polymorphism, but also indicating their potential as decorative motifs. In conventional botanical illustrations, emphasis is placed on distilling the typical characteristics of a given species from an examination of multiple specimens, resulting in a composite image that combines characteristics from a range of plants. In contrast, Gallé underscores the diversity of his specimens by calling attention to the variations that may be present within a single species.21 The artist depicts specimens with labella that are unusually elongated, stunted, or twisted, for example, thus underlining the extreme variability of this single element. By consistently pairing certain specimens with a second example depicted from a similar point of view, moreover, Gallé establishes both the uniqueness of each blossom and its underlying relationship to those around it, conveying a sense of simultaneous unity and variety. Each of the first three plates is devoted to a mutation sharing similar qualities—including exaggeratedly elongated labella in Plate I, a twisted center section in Plate II, and labella that are spiral, shortened, or missing altogether in Plate III. Using a range of selected variables related to the length and shape of the labella, Gallé then evokes the almost infinite variety spawned by genetic mutations. In this way, the artist presents the evolution of form as a process of ongoing differentiation and adaptation in which forms become more, rather than less, complex.22 Although Gallé employs the term “polymorphism” to describe his specimens, it should be noted that the artist does not compare the orchids pictured to a more “standard” form of the flower, nor does he cast his examples as monstrous or deformed. Instead, Gallé’s illustrations suggest that he values new forms of Aceras hircina for their unique visual and structural qualities. Indeed, Gallé allows aesthetic considerations such as the curve and flow of the blossoms to dictate his compositional choices, in this way underscoring the suggestion of a harmonious unity composed from difference. In Plate I, for example, Gallé pairs the carefully depicted forms of naturalistically rendered buds with a more stylized representation of orchids near the bottom of the page. Here the artist’s scientific precision seems to veer over into fantasy, as the forms of Aceras hircina take on an elegant, graphic quality and begin to resemble trailing strands of ribbon or seaweed.23 A dynamic, flowing movement runs throughout the composition, uniting both types of representation in a continuous, swirling pattern of movement. It is significant that Gallé devotes his study to the forms of the family Orchidaceae. Orchids represent the largest plant family, with over 30,000 unique species. They account for roughly 10 percent of plant species worldwide, and scientists have long sought a rationale for the extreme variability of form displayed by members of this family.24 Perhaps the best-known explanation for the diversity of orchid species is that offered by Darwin in his study entitled On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, which first appeared in 1862.25 Jonathan Smith has argued that this study, which examines the process of adaptation in several species of orchid, constitutes an attempt to offer empirical evidence for the theories explored in Darwin’s better-known work On the Origin of the Species (1859).26 François Le Tacon and others have noted the direct impact of Darwin’s theories on Gallé, and the artist himself wrote of his admiration for the British scientist.27 In 1877, for example, Gallé published a summary of a presentation on Darwin’s studies of orchids.28 He writes, “It’s a new domain that is opening for natural history with this type of study; understood in this way, it is no longer a series of monographs on a single species but the reestablishment of total harmony (emphasis added).”29 Although Gallé’s remarks are brief, it seems clear that the artist understands Darwin’s theories as offering a method by which other scientists could study the natural world as an interdependent and unified system. Yet Gallé’s own study of orchids differs from Darwin’s in several key aspects, while nonetheless sharing the latter’s fascination with the twin processes of adaptation and mutation.

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The concept of adaptation—namely, the idea that the form of a plant or animal transforms to suit its environment, thereby ensuring its own survival—is a key component of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. In his study of orchids, the British scientist devotes many pages to an examination of how the various parts of the orchid plant, and most notably the form of its flower, facilitate fertilization by a narrow range of insect pollinators. Of particular interest to Darwin and Gallé alike was the highly specialized lip petal of the orchid, which offers insect pollinators a place to land in their search for nectar. The more distinctive this lip petal, or labellum, the more limited the potential pollinators for any given orchid species. Darwin thus describes the process by which new species arise as a result of structural changes that lead to genetic isolation and biodiversity by limiting the number of possible pollinators.

Figure 5.4 Charles Darwin, Fig. 1, Orchis Mascula, from On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing (London: John Murray, 1862).

In Darwin’s study, the scientist focuses on those parts of the orchid that are directly involved in the process of fertilization, such as the stamen and the pollinia, or pollen packets transferred to insects during pollination. In general, the images accompanying his study of orchids present a

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schematic aspect, helping to clarify points made in the text (Fig. 5.4). 30 While Darwin often removes the petals and sepals from his specimens, the better to observe the mechanism of fertilization, Gallé limits his own study to the petals of the orchid, to the point of omitting any depiction of the remaining structure of the plant in his first three plates. Like most botanists of the time, the British scientist seeks to distill typical traits from the observation of many individual specimens rather than emphasizing variety within a single species.31 In contrast, as previously noted, Gallé’s illustrations of Aceras hircina instead highlight the plant’s visual complexity and the diversity of its forms. In Gallé’s essay on polymorphism, the flowers of Aceras hircina are then studied not just for what they do, but for their visual characteristics. Gallé most often depicts the flower of Aceras hircina from above or in profile, points of view that tend to flatten out the image. While he delineates some of the flowers in detail, others are presented more economically, with the artist relying on contour line alone to describe the shape of the specimen. In essence, Gallé’s numerous drawings assert their origin in the close observation of individual specimens, while the artist’s tendency to reduce those same specimens to abstracted shapes also underscores the decorative potential of their forms. By focusing on the flowing shapes of Aceras hircina’s flowers at the expense of the plant’s reproductive organs and depicting Aceras hircina as a series of abstracted motifs, Gallé takes the first step towards adapting his specimens to the creation of works of art. The artist would discuss this process at length in his article, Le Mobilier contemporain orné d’après la nature—Contemporary Furniture Decorated After Nature —published in the same year in which Gallé presented his study of Aceras hircina.32 Three halftone reproductions of black-and-white photographs, printed in a vivid green ink, follow Gallé’s hand-drawn illustrations of orchid specimens but lack the overtly stylized aspects of the latter images. Here, as in Gallé’s drawings, the absence of naturalistic coloring results in a loss of verisimilitude but a higher degree of abstraction, connoting the flowers’ status as scientific images, an impression heightened by the addition of numerals corresponding to the discussion of the specimens in the accompanying text. Nonetheless, the way in which the photographic process presents specimens in their entirety, without indicating areas of particular importance, results in images that are difficult to read and ultimately suggest little more than the inherent complexity of the plant forms being studied. Gallé’s decision to pair his hand-drawn and lithographed illustrations of Aceras hircina with halftone photographs, is then at first glance a curious one. It is likely that this pairing reflects the artist’s efforts to translate his presentation into written form, for the side-by-side presentation of the orchid plants and the flattening effect produced by the halftone process visually evoke the appearance of specimens dried and preserved using traditional botanical methods. However, the inclusion of photographic reproductions is also significant in the changing context of nineteenth century science, for it marks the shifting status of the hand-drawn illustration in botany. Originally understood as a method for combining the traits of several specimens into a single image, by the end of the century the hand-drawn illustration was beginning to seem dangerously subjective. Indeed, in their study of the history of scientific illustration, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have suggested that over the course of the nineteenth century, mechanical objectivity gradually replaced “truth to nature” as a goal for scientists. 33 The new model of the objective scientific self, they contend, existed in some tension with its opposite, the artistic self. Whereas the latter sought to impose its will upon the world, the former was expected to act as a passive observer of natural phenomena.34 Photography was one key means by which scientists sought to temper the effects of subjectivity in order to create more faithful records of their observations. 35 It is seems likely then that Gallé included his photographs of orchid specimens in an attempt to validate his own credentials as a botanist and perhaps to downplay the more artistically rendered aspects of his hand-drawn illustrations.36 On a purely symbolic level, however, the photographs also underscore the composite nature of the orchid plant and the dynamic interdependence of its constituent parts. In the photographic reproductions, it is often difficult to distinguish individual buds, which intertwine and are seamlessly integrated into the overall form of the plant. Each bud bears its own unique form, but

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the orchidd plant, as a whole, fu unctions as a single liv ving organissm. The com omposite naature of the orchid thuus indirectlyy evokes thee concept off organicist solidarity. Supporrt for this thheory can bee found in G Gallé’s desiign for the cover c of thee volume in n which his study appears (Fig. 5.5). 5 In thiss image, thee artist again offers th he viewer an organicisst vision of interdepenndence. Braanches wind d, twirl, andd overlap, making m it difficult d to distinguish individual species. L Leaves appear to taper in i an exagggerated man nner so that their elonggated shapess recall the form of seeaweed, whiile mushroo oms are trannsformed intto sea anem mones, and G Gallé’s Acerras hircina,, at the top of the imaage, brings to t mind a ffloating jelllyfish with its long tenntacles trailing behind it. 37 Galléé thus presents the viiewer with the imagee of a natu ural system m in which individual organismss are unitedd in harmon ny. This im mage of org ganicist soliidarity and cooperation was one promoted by the orgganizers of the Congreess. During g the openin ng ceremonnies, for ex xample, the President of the Conggress echoeed politicianns such as Bourgeois B when w he decclared: “Asssociation is a force thaat imposes itself i today on all form ms of human activity.”388

Figure 5.5 E Emile Gallé, Front F cover off Actes du 1err Congrès Inteernational de Botanique tennu à Paris à l’occasion l de l’Expositionn Universelle de d 1900 (Lon ns-le-Saunier: Imprimerie et Lithographiee Lucien Decllume, 1900). Bibliothèque nationale dee France.

On Febbruary 13, 1901, 1 Galléé would putt the theory y of solidariity into praactice by founding the Ecole de N Nancy. 39 By creating this t group, the artist so ought to promote his ccity as a cen ntre of Art Nouveau pproduction and, it coulld be arguedd, to stake a claim for the Frenchhness of the new style. Around thhe time he composed th he statutes fo for the Ecolee, Gallé also o sketched a possible lo ogo for the group. Thhe design coonsists of a stylized orrchid, evokiing the orig gin of Galléé’s art in thee flora and fauna of L Lorraine.40 The T species that Gallé iillustrates iss presumablly one of thee many thatt are native to his proovince, althhough here it appears in a simp plified and slightly styylized form m. At once

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representing nature, fertility, ornament, and rootedness in the soil of Lorraine, the form of the orchid also connotes a plant composed of physically distinct and visually disparate parts that function together to propagate the species. At the same time, the resemblance to and yet clear difference from the traditional French fleur-de-lis suggests Lorraine’s unique place within the nation. Beneath his two sketches of the orchid motif, Gallé penciled in a series of phrases: “tous pour chacun/chacun pour tous”; “tortous po chacun/chacun po tortous”, and “un chacun pour tous/tous pour chacun”—all variations on the motto “all for one [and] one for all.” The motto signals the dual nature of the Ecole de Nancy as Gallé envisions it: As a group, the Ecole de Nancy would protect the interests of its individual members, who would in turn work together to further the interests of the group. In other words, the Ecole de Nancy was conceived as an association, that would respect the uniqueness of individual artistic styles while urging collaboration and group action. Its identity was composite, rather than uniform.41 It seems clear that in his plans for the Ecole de Nancy, Gallé drew inspiration from the theory of organicist solidarity promoted by Republican officials. Drawing on the work of philosopher, Alfred Fouillée, social theorist, Emile Durkheim and contemporary biologists and zoologists, Bourgeois elaborated a model of social cooperation and interdependence that would “dominate French political discourse” by the 1890s.42 According to Debora Silverman, Bourgeois formulated the doctrine of solidarity in an attempt to counteract the growing influence of Socialism by adopting some of its key theories.43 The philosophy of Solidarity thus attempted to reconcile the liberal individualism of the preceding decades with an appeal to communitarian values.44 In 1896, Bourgeois published a series of essays in La Nouvelle revue in which the statesman endeavored to define this new principle of cooperation. In his discussion of solidarity as a new social model, Bourgeois drew heavily upon recent scientific theories. His view of the nation was that of a vibrant, living whole with independent quasi-cellular units that function in harmony: Every individual, every living being, is an aggregate, and the parts that compose it are themselves individuals, living beings. [...] These first elements exist and develop individually; nevertheless, a strong solidarity unites them. [...] They develop, and their development contributes to the development of the organism that they compose; they evolve, and their evolution is a function of collective evolution. They are, in a word, linked (associés).45

Towards the end of the century, the theories of anarchist geographer, Elisée Reclus, a native of Nancy, also served to connect the natural sciences with the concept of Organicist Solidarity. In his influential study, La Nouvelle géographie universelle (New Universal Geography, 1876–1894), Reclus wrote: “The ensemble [of the country’s geography] continually presents a sort of harmony in its very contrasts; great is the diversity, but it all keeps its character of geographic unity.”46 Reclus’s model of “harmony... in infinite variety” is close to the ideal of unity in diversity that characterizes Gallé’s efforts to define a regional style that is at once uniquely Lorrainian in character and patriotic in spirit.47 Although there is no direct evidence that Gallé knew Reclus, the artist’s circle of friends and relatives included many who were sympathetic to the geographer’s anarchist ideas. The engineer and political activist Charles Keller, for example, was Gallé’s cousin by marriage and had close ties to Reclus, whom he first encountered in Paris in the late 1860s.48 While Gallé was no doubt familiar with the geographer’s theories, the artist never openly embraced his anarchist politics.49 As both an artist with a lifelong interest in the biological sciences and an ardent Republican, Gallé would most likely have been acquainted with the theories formulated by Fouillée, Reclus, and others and applied to politics by Bourgeois and his successors. The idea of “unity in diversity” allowed Gallé, in essence, to reconcile his belief in the rights of the individual with his desire to reestablish a unified artistic community in the wake of the fracturous Dreyfus Affair. For Gallé, then, the orchid stands as a symbol of the interdependence of natural systems, the infinite variety of nature, and the universal processes that give rise to that variety.

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Figure 5.6 E Envelope of a letter from Em mile Gallé adddressed to Mo onsieur Auguin n. Musée Lorrrain.

Aroundd the time of o the found ding of the E Ecole de Naancy, Gallé would alsoo adopt the orchid as a kind of peersonal embblem. An envelope e disscovered by y the author in the colllection of the Musée Lorrain, fo for examplee, is printed d with four stylized orchids and a flowing, rribbon-like version of Gallé’s siggnature (Figg. 5.6). Thee artist heree abandons the naturaliism employyed in his illlustrations of Aceras hircina in favor of rendering thee orchid as a symmetriical, highly abstracted decorative neath the staamp even ap ppears to bee doubled oover on itsellf so that it motif. An orchid prinnted undern wo identicaal labella. Rather R than emphasizin ng the polymorphic chharacter of the t orchid, displays tw Gallé herre exploress its underrlying struccture. By reducing the t flower to its characteristic componennts, the artisst is able to unite u disparrate elements at will in order to creeate new fo orms. The intterrelationshhip of thesee motifs is s ignaled by the wavy lines that em manate from m the orchid on the bback flap of o the env velope. Thhese lines intersect a hand-letteered phrase reading, “Transcenndental Eccentricity” (E Excentricitéé Transcendentale). The word “eeccentricity” typically refers to aan act or quaality that deeviates from m an establisshed pattern n, while the term “transscendental” describes something that transcends humann experiencce. The term m “eccentriicity” thus evokes the idea of paarticularity, while the word “transscendental”” imbues th he relationshhip between n a pattern and its devviation withh a quasi-m metaphysicall significancce. In this way, w Gallé llends the ev volution of natural fo forms an almost my ystical asppect, suggeesting at once o the uniquenesss and the interconneectedness of all living things. In short, the orchid o functtions both aas a metaph hor for the

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place of the individual within society and as an example of the kind of evolutionary processes that engender not only biological but also artistic transformations. The wavy lines that radiate outwards from the orchid also bring to mind a concept theorized by the German biologist. Ernst Haeckel. Although best known to art historians for his richly illustrated study Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature, 1899–1904), Haeckel also published numerous scientific works on the evolution of natural forms.50 A passionate proponent of Darwin’s theories, Haeckel helped popularize the concept of evolution in works such as Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The History of Creation, 1868), in which the author demonstrates how all life evolved from single-celled organisms, as captured in Fig. 4.9.51 Although heavily influenced by Darwin, Haeckel also pioneered an alternative explanation for the mechanism by which evolution occurs. In an 1875 treatise, for example, the biologist proposed the “theory of the transmission of force” as the basis for heredity.52 According to this theory, the cells of all living organisms contain a semi-fluid, gelatinous substance called protoplasm.53 This substance not only registers the waveform vibrations of the external world, according to Haeckel, but passes them on to subsequent cells, thus establishing a direct link between the environment in which an organism lives and the form of its offspring.54 Not only does Haeckel’s theory account for the evolutionary adaptation of life forms to their environment but it also emphasizes the interconnectedness of all living things. In short, the German scientist theorized that organisms are linked by energy in the form of waves that pass through and register in the protoplasm that forms the basic building block of all life forms.55 This theory of protoplasm proposed by Haeckel suggests that while each individual life form may be unique, all living beings are connected via the forms of energy that pass through them. As Robert Proctor has pointed out, in essence Haeckel’s version of evolutionary theory rejects the Darwinian idea of chance mutations and survivals, instead suggesting that a force internal to nature itself guides evolution.56 In France, as in Germany, many scholars would embrace and embroider this theory of vitalism, which postulated that an unknown force or intelligence guided the natural world, one that could not be described by purely mechanistic explanations.57 Haeckel’s vision of a richly complex yet unified natural world may have influenced Gallé’s own understanding of regional identity and style. Although there is no direct evidence linking Gallé and Haeckel, the artist spoke fluent German and followed the latest scientific developments in Germany and England closely.58 Support for the artist’s familiarity with Haeckel’s theories can be found in Gallé’s writings and in his choice of visual motifs. In April of 1901, for example, the artist elaborated upon his ideas regarding the mutation of forms and the importance of scientific knowledge for designers during the second of the Ecole de Nancy’s monthly lectures, the lengthy yet descriptive title of his lecture being: “On the Necessity of Basic Physiological Knowledge for the Designer Wishing to Create Ornamentation in Harmony with the Modern Diffusion of the Natural Sciences”.59 Clearly conceived as an effort to promulgate and define a characteristic style for the group, the lecture was free and open to the public. A fellow member of the Ecole de Nancy, Emile Nicolas, transcribed Gallé’s lecture, which appeared in the local periodical, La Lorraine artiste.60 Speaking in a room lavishly decorated with flowers and branches, Gallé argued that the “decorators” of Lorraine were the first to apply the direct observation of nature to their works.61 Just as they respected the characteristics of the materials they used for their work, he contended that these artists were also careful to reproduce the unique particularities of the forms they depicted.62 In his lecture, Gallé also placed special emphasis upon the way in which organisms adapt to their environment arguing that “each species possesses its own beauty, which is the result of organic differentiations in harmony with the environment in which it develops” (emphasis added).63 This description strongly recalls Haeckel’s theories. Gallé then contrasted the close study of plant forms and their representation to what he termed “the teratological decor” of designs based on historical models, employing a biological term denoting the malformation of an organism and suggesting that the process of evolution taking place in Lorraine was, in contrast, a healthy one.64 During his lecture, Gallé showed slides of

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orchids, butterflies, protozoa, and other life forms demonstrating his interest in the structure of natural forms and his awareness of the latest evolutionary theories.65 Undersea forms of protozoa and radiolaria, especially a kind of zooplankton, offered further examples of the variety of forms found in nature. An image of a radiolarian used by Gallé to illustrate his lecture is strikingly similar to the one employed in Haeckel’s richly illustrated Art Forms in Nature, plates of which the artist is known to have owned, particularly from the first volume.66 Like Bourgeois and Fouillée before him, Haeckel frequently compared the cellular organization of complex organisms to the structure of political systems, suggesting that contemporaries understood the theory of evolution to bear a significance that extended far beyond the so-called ‘pure’ realms of science.67 Indeed, it can be argued that the debate over Art Nouveau’s purported ‘naturalness’ was at heart a debate about the future of French art and even French society. Could France evolve and adapt to the exigencies of a new, modern era or were the changes taking place in French art and French society an evolutionary dead-end? How could France and its artists evolve and adapt to new circumstances without losing their essential “Frenchness”? Could a return to nature offer hope for the regeneration of France’s citizens, and its artists in particular, or had modern society and modern art so transformed or even deformed nature that all hope of evolutionary progress had been lost? In Gallé’s study of polymorphism in Aceras hircina and in his writings, the artist makes a case for the particular style embraced by the Ecole de Nancy—one that he considered a ‘styleless style’ based on the direct observation of nature—as one possible solution to France’s ills. It is this ‘styleless style,’ this version of Art Nouveau and no other, he suggests, that can lead France into the next century, regenerating the nation while preserving the basic form of “Frenchness” from which it had sprung. Gallé’s impassioned defense of this Art Nouveau was all the more urgent given that its ‘style’ had fallen prey to accusations that it was symptomatic of cultural and even racial degeneration, as defined by Nordau. Nordau’s treatise, Degeneration, had, in the words of Silverman, “unleashed an indiscriminate attack on all forms of modernism in the arts,” arguing that “artistic decadence was symptomatic of national degeneration and decline.”68 Nordau had explicitly targeted the work of Art Nouveau furniture designer Rupert Carabin, decrying its purported debauchery and the way it catered to viewers’ cravings for extreme sensations.69 A contemporary caricature published in 1900 reveals that the Ecole de Nancy, named as the Maison Lorraine de l’Art, was also vulnerable to the very same criticisms that Nordau had directed at Parisian Art Nouveau (Fig. 5.7).70 The caricature, which appeared in a local weekly, suggests that the Ecole de Nancy’s version of Art Nouveau is not a naturally occurring adaptation to its environment, as Gallé suggests, but instead an evolutionary cul-de-sac, one that results in the monstrous deformation of natural forms. This cartoon in L’Echo de Maréville shows Gallé standing in the doorway of a butcher shop. In the window hang two lobed forms that closely resemble the artist’s depictions of orchids but also suggest sides of ham or the richly voluptuous thighs of the two women standing before the window display. A pair of vines vigorously climbs the façade of the store, bearing grotesque faces like overripe fruit drooping from their branches. Below the shop sign, an inscription reads, “Treat yourself, we don’t charge high prices!”71 This is a pun on the names of Gallé and the furniture maker. Louis Majorelle, both of whom did in fact charge considerable sums for their designs. To the right of Gallé, “specialties” are listed “New Lard” (Lard Nouveau), “Lorrainer Sausage” (Saucisson... dit ‘de Lorraine’), “French Fries” (Daum de terre frites), “Alley Cat Pâté” (Pâté, Chat de Goutière), and “Gruber Cheese” (Fromage de Gruber). Lard Nouveau is, of course, a play upon the words, L’Art nouveau, referring to the Art Nouveau movement. The allusion to “Lorrainer Sausage” seemingly lampoons the group’s attempt to create a recognizably regional product, suggesting that the works of individual artists blend into an undifferentiated mass only vaguely associated with the province of Lorraine. The names of other products refer to various members of the Ecole de Nancy, including the glassmakers Auguste and Antonin Daum, the writer Emile Goutière-Vernolle and the stained glass artist Jacques Gruber. Before the artists of the Ecole de Nancy can achieve their goals, the caricature implies that they must first establish the validity of a style seemingly tainted by its association with the “teratological” forms of Parisian Art Nouveau.

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Figure 5.7 Tonito, “Maison Lorraine de l’Art,” L’Écho de Maréville: Journal Loufoque illustré et peu littéraire, paraissant à l’improviste, fondé pour ennuyer les gens graves 17 (1900) p. 1. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Not coincidentally, the caricaturist, Tonito, also evokes the specter of a perverse and feminized sexuality popularly associated with the idea of degeneration, France’s declining birth rate, and fear of La Nouvelle femme: The New Woman. 72 To connote a feminized and sensual luxury more suited to the boudoir than the butcher shop, in bold letters the cartoon declares: “The more [plush] one eats, the more [plush] one wants!”.73 Likewise the two women loitering in front of the shop window provide clear references to the idea of the New Woman. They wear fashionable dresses that are pulled tight across their legs and buttocks, evoking the cleft of their genitals, which seems to be why a stray dog sniffs one of the women with prurient interest. Written across the buttocks of the other woman is the phrase “3 francs/pound,” suggesting that she is both the intended audience for the “works” on display and the source of their inspiration.74 Overall what is strongly implied is that Art Nouveau is not just a symptom of France’s degeneration, but one of its root causes. In response to these and other challenges, Gallé and fellow members of the Ecole de Nancy made claims for both the naturalness and the uniqueness of their art central to the group’s efforts at self-promotion. The first official group exhibition of the Ecole de Nancy took place in Paris in March of 1903. In his preface to the catalogue of the exhibition, Gallé takes pains to distance the Ecole de Nancy from recent stylistic trends in the capital by presenting developments in Lorraine as evidence of a healthy and progressive artistic evolution. “The Ecole de Nancy, in essence, and this is what really distinguishes it from recent attempts to impose on us an incoherent and bizarre modern style”, he stresses, “the Ecole de Nancy aims to possess and put into practice certain principles that are its own.”75 French critics often employed the English phrase “modern style” to refer to Art Nouveau, in order to emphasize its perceived origins in the British Arts and Crafts Movement.76 In Gallé’s use of the English phrase to disparage any connection being drawn with Paris, he thus asserts the resolutely French character of the Ecole de Nancy, while simultaneously defining its artistic principles in opposition to those of the metropole. Strategically this was a means of positing the art of Lorraine as more truly French than that emanating from the cosmopolitan capital, particularly Siegfried Bing’s Art Nouveau and L’Art dans tout. In a subsequent passage Gallé openly attacked the work of such Paris-based groups as L’Art dans tout, which included among its members the furniture maker, Tony Selmersheim, the architect, Charles Plumet and sculptor, Alexandre Charpentier.77 As Gallé writes: Let us not be afraid, then, to encounter... such saloons, where, under the pretext of modernism and comfort, furniture whose pieces form an integral part of the building, find themselves soldered one to the other like Siamese twins, or rather appear, as in the world upside down, with their feet on the ceiling.78

Gallé here inveighs against the use of experimental forms in L’Art Nouveau and L’Art dans tout and the interplay they created between architecture, sculpture and the decorative arts. As this art appeared to be the product of cosmopolitan, rather than native inspiration, and seemed to ignore the structural principles found in nature, this was why Gallé rejected their sculptural, organic forms as unnatural. Moreover, through his reference to “Siamese twins,” Gallé posits that the style of Art Nouveau artists working in Paris is evidence of a “teratological” or monstrous mutation, one that constitutes an evolutionary impasse.79 Gallé had of course employed the same term in his critique of historicist design, suggesting that for the artist from Nancy, the classical language of decoration and the inventions of contemporary Parisian Art Nouveau designers share a common lack of respect for forms found in nature. Rather than grounding their art in fantasy, Gallé argues that the artists of the Ecole de Nancy look to nature for examples of logic and rational structure—a naturalism that he posits is more truly French than the distortions embraced by Parisian designers. By asserting the Ecole de Nancy’s difference from the world of Parisian Art Nouveau, Gallé thus challenged a centralized model of nationhood while stressing both the inherent Frenchness and the unique character of his native province. Frenchness, itself, is then redefined by Gallé not as Parisian but as regional that emanated from a dialogue between the capital and the provinces. In 1904, the Ecole de Nancy hosted a second major exhibition in the city that lent the group its name. Critical response to the exhibition was overwhelmingly positive, with articles praising the exhibition appearing in both the regional and the national press. The Exposition d’Art décoratif

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opened on October 29, 1904 with a speech by the Director of Fine Arts, Henry Marcel, extolling the eastern province’s contributions to forging a modern French style.80 In this speech, Marcel praised the decentralizing goals of the exhibition and affirmed that its regional focus did not diminish the strength of the nation but rather enhanced it. In his words, Marcel offered a metaphor to those assembled that was close to Bourgeois’s concept of organicist solidarity: Asserting provincial patriotism in the realm of the beautiful, far from weakening our French nation, which would only be threatened by the fragmentation of an indifferent and selfish individualism... will increase the strength of [its] influence... because the vitality of a nation resides in the vigor and cohesion of the groups that compose it, as the resistance of fabric [resides] in the density of the fibres from which it is made.81

In the Director of Fine Art’s speech, far from region and nation existing in opposition, they lent support to each other. The individual and the group, like the province and the nation, were interwoven by bonds that he considered fortified the whole through the strengthening of its parts. This is what Gallé then sought to express in his art—the harmonious interdependence of the individual and the nation. If Gallé’s ideal of artistic community was briefly realized in 1904, nevertheless the success of his initiatives was short-lived. Ultimately, his efforts to balance individual artistic vision and the social ideal of collaboration met with only partial success. In the wake of the artist’s premature death that same year, the Ecole de Nancy quickly dwindled in size and influence, disappearing altogether by the eve of the First World War. In its place, a new generation of artists would explore the question of a national style not through the language of naturalism, but through Modernist Transformism, explored in Chapters Four and Seven; Modernist “Primitivism”, explored in Chapter Seven; Modernist Metropolitanism, in terms of the new experiences of French modernity; Intimism as manifest by decorative painting and the French domestic interior, as well as a return to French Classical ideals.82 In the end, the flowering of the Ecole de Nancy proved to be an all too fragile blossom, one quickly discarded as an evolutionary cul-de-sac in the search for a style to represent France’s triumphal entry into the modern era.

Notes  1

Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) p. 172. Silverman’s groundbreaking study of the political dimensions of Art Nouveau remains the most detailed and comprehensive account of this period in French art. For a discussion of the search to define a purely “French” style in the decorative arts, see also Nancy J. Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 2 The province of Lorraine was incorporated into the nation of France in 1766. 3 “Association des Artistes Lorrains”, Bulletin des Sociétés artistiques de l’Est 7 (No. 1, January 1901) p. 8: Cette reprise en France du décor naturaliste. 4 For a discussion of nationalism in fin-de-siècle France, see Brian Jenkins, Nationalism in France: Class and Nation since 1789 (Savage, Maryland: Barnes & Noble Books, 1990) and Nationhood and Nationalism in France: from Boulangism to the Great War, 1889–1918, ed. Robert Tombs (London: Harper Collins Academic, 1991). For a discussion of the impact of nationalism on the visual arts in Nancy, see Richard Thomson, “Regionalism versus Nationalism in French Visual Culture, 1889–1900: The Cases of Nancy and Toulouse”, Nationalism and French Visual Culture, eds. June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam, special issue, Studies in the History of Art (68, 2005) pp. 208–223. 5 J. E. S. Hayward, “The Official Social Philosophy of the French Third Republic: Léon Bourgeois and Solidarism”, International Review of Social History (6, 1961) p. 26. Bourgeois first publicized his ideas in a series of articles published in the journal La Nouvelle revue; see Léon Bourgeois, “La Doctrine de solidarité”, La Nouvelle revue (93, March 15, 1895) pp. 390–398 La Nouvelle revue (93, April 1, 1895) pp. 640–648; La Nouvelle revue (94, May 1, 1895) pp. 167–178, and La Nouvelle revue (94, May 15, 1895) pp. 387–398. The collected essays appeared as Solidarité (Paris: A. Colin, 1896). 6 Many have argued that the doctrine of solidarity offered Republicans like Bourgeois a compromise between the competing philosophies of individualism and socialism. Solidarity’s emphasis on the interconnectedness and interdependence of all members of society, for example, balanced rights and duties by arguing that each individual was indebted to his or her fellow citizens and to preceding generations but also benefitted from the actions of the rest of the society. According to Lawrence A. Minnich, Jr., “Social Problems and Political Alignments in France, 1893–

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 1898: Léon Bourgeois and Solidarity” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1948) pp. 102–104, politicians like Bourgeois based their model of Solidarity on studies of biological units, animal colonies, and organized societies, blending biology and sociology, and emphasizing “the interdependence of parts of a whole.” 7 Emile Gallé, “Formes nouvelles et polymorphisme de l’Aceras hircina Lindl., ou Loroglossum hircinum Reich”, Actes du 1er Congrès International de Botanique tenu à Paris à l’occasion de l’Exposition Universelle de 1900 (Lonsle-Saunier: Imprimerie et Lithographie Lucien Declume, 1900) pp. 112–117. Gallé’s paper also appeared in pamphlet form; see Emile Gallé, Orchidées lorraines: formes nouvelles & polymorphisme de l’aceras hircina Lindl, Loroglossum hircinum Reich (Lons-le-Saulnier: Imprimerie et Lithographie Lucien Declume, 1900). In 1998, this work was reprinted as Emile Gallé, Orchidées lorraines (Paris: Messene, 1998). In the years preceding his death in 1904, Gallé would further elaborate on his ideas concerning the polymorphism of orchids in an unpublished manuscript also entitled Orchidées lorraines (Orchids of Lorraine). The manuscript, composed between 1886 and 1903, describes orchids of the genus Ophrys, focusing largely on variations of Orchis militaris and other species of orchid found in Lorraine. The work consists of over one hundred pages of notes and drawings in the artist’s own hand. Also included are dried and preserved specimens, color plates drawn by two artists in Gallé’s design studio, Paul Nicolas and Auguste Herbst, and black and white photographs of specimens. According to François Le Tacon and Jean Pertuy, who have studied the manuscript in detail, Gallé begins his study with an examination of the mechanisms of fertilization in orchids before discussing orchid phylogeny. The manuscript is located in an unknown private collection; refer Jean Pertuy and François Le Tacon, “Quand l’évolution des orchidées inspirait Gallé”, Le Pays lorrain (87, 2006) p. 1. 8 The first three plates in the series appear to be the product of collaboration between Gallé and Paul Nicolas. Drawn from life, the illustrations are based on specimens gathered locally by Gallé, his family, and friends. The hand-drawn quality of these illustrations clearly reflects a centuries-long tradition of botanical illustration premised upon firsthand observation. The plates appear to have been printed in Nancy, perhaps at Gallé’s expense, and subsequently sent to Paris to be bound with the rest of the volume. 9 According to Le Tacon, it was the botanical excursions undertaken with his friend René Zeiller and the latter’s grandfather, Charles-François Guibal, which first fuelled Gallé’s passion for botany in 1860–1861. Guibal, a local magistrate with a taste for poetry and natural history, in turn introduced Gallé to the noted botanist DominiqueAlexandre Godron (1807–1880), the director of Nancy’s Jardin des Plantes. Gallé joined other students in the informal classes Godron offered in the evenings, and the botanist soon became the young man’s friend and mentor; refer François Le Tacon, Emile Gallé: Maître de l’Art nouveau (Paris: La Nuée Bleue, 2004) pp. 33–34 and pp. 128–129. In 1880, Gallé was nominated to serve as a member of the Commission de surveillance for the Jardin des Plantes upon the death of his mentor; refer François Le Tacon, “Emile Gallé botaniste et scientifique”, M/S: Médecine sciences 21, (no. 12, December 2005) p. 1097. 10 Gallé’s familiarity with Darwin’s theories is well documented. Le Tacon, “Emile Gallé botaniste et scientifique”, p. 1097, has noted, for example, that the artist devoted four pages of his journal to Darwin during a voyage to Italy in 1877. 11 See Emile Gallé, “Anomalies dans les Gentianées”, L’Amour de la fleur: les écrits horticoles et botaniques du maître de l’Art nouveau, ed. François Le Tacon and Pierre Valck (Nancy: Place Stanislas, 2008) pp. 300–305. Two other studies, a manuscript on Catalpa and another on polymorphism in ivy, both remained unfinished at the time of Gallé’s death in 1904. 12 Indeed, Le Tacon has established that Gallé’s work on mutations may predate that of De Vries; refer François Le Tacon, “Emile Gallé et l’École de Nancy”, Mémoires de l’Académie de Stanislas (13, 1998/1999) p. 295; François Le Tacon, “Emile Gallé, la botanique et les idées évolutionnistes à Nancy à la fin du XIXe siècle”, Annales de l’Est special issue (2005) p. 79, and Le Tacon, “Emile Gallé botaniste”, p. 1097. 13 Gallé, “Formes nouvelles”, p. 112: Les coteaux herbeux du calcaire jurassique dominant les communes de Griscourt et de Gezoncourt. In seeking to associate Aceras hircina with the precise locality in which it grew, Gallé no doubt drew inspiration from Godron, who beginning in 1843 published an extensive account of the flora of Lorraine that associated each species with a particular geographical location; see D.-A. Godron, Flore de Lorraine, 3 vols. (Nancy: Grimblot, Raybois et Cie, Imprimeurs-Libraires, 1843–1844). Unlike Gallé, however, Godron does not illustrate his account, which remains largely descriptive in nature. In “Emile Gallé botaniste,” p. 1097, Le Tacon argues that Godron shared Gallé’s fascination with mutations and may have inspired the younger man’s explorations. Le Tacon, Emile Gallé, p. 130, also points out that Godron lists Gallé as co-author of a study entitled, “Note sur un fait remarquable de tératologie végétale”, published in the Bulletin de la Société d’horticulture de Nancy, 1879. 14 Indeed, there are echoes of the theories of the eighteenth-century writer, artist, and politician, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) in Gallé’s study. During his voyage to Sicily in 1788, Goethe formulated his influential theory of the “Urpflanze”, or archetypal plant. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Zur Morphologie: Von den Anfängen bis 1795, Ergänzungen und Erläuterungen, in Goethe: Dis Schriften zur Naturwissenchschaft, edited by Dorothea Kuhn, 21 vols. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1977) p. 58, quoted in Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) p. 396, he argued: All is leaf, and through this simplicity the greatest multiplicity is possible. The “Urpflanze”, in Goethe’s formulation, can never be directly observed, only imaginatively recreated from the traces of its original form visible in its progeny. It is, in Richard’s words, ibid., p. 396: … the dynamic idea that lay behind the variety of all plants.” In the late 19th century,

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 scientists working in the field of evolutionary morphology likewise sought to trace organisms back to their common ancestors through close study of their form at all stages of the life cycle. Refer also Lynn K. Nyhart, “Natural History and the ‘New’ Biology”, Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine et al (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) p. 430. In On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing (London: John Murray, 1862) p. 288, Charles Darwin himself writes of a similar search to identify the ancestral form of flowering plants: Homology clears away the mist from such terms as the scheme of nature, ideal types, archetypal patterns or ideas, etc.; for these terms come to express real facts. The naturalist, thus guided, sees that all homologous parts or organs, however much they may be diversified, are modifications of one and the same ancestral organ; in tracing existing gradations he gains a clue in tracing ... the probable course of modification through which beings have passed during a long line of generations. He may feel sure that... he is tending towards the knowledge of the actual progenitor of the group, as it once grew and lived. 15 “GALLÉ, Emile, maître verrier, vice-président de la Société d’Horticulture de Nancy.” “Liste des membres”, Actes du 1er Congrès International de Botanique tenu à Paris à l’occasion de l’Exposition Universelle de 1900 (Lons-leSaunier: Imprimerie et Lithographie Lucien Declume, 1900) p. xviii. 16 Emile Perrot, “Introduction au Volume des Actes du 1er Congrès International de Botanique”, Actes du 1er Congrès International de Botanique tenu à Paris à l’occasion de l’Exposition Universelle de 1900 (Lons-le-Saunier: Imprimerie et Lithographie Lucien Declume, 1900) p. xxxi: Les membres du Congrès jouiront de l’agréable surprise en recevant leur volume, d’admirer la délicate composition que le botaniste passionné et l’éminent artiste qu’est M. GALLÉ, a bien voulu exécuter gracieusement pour illustrer ce compte-rendu. 17 Gallé himself would distinguish between the ‘soulless’ scientific image and the ‘symbolic’ use of natural motifs in his essay, “Le Décor symbolique” (1900), first presented as a talk at the Académie de Stanislas in Nancy. Refer Emile Gallé, “Le Décor symbolique”, Écrits pour l’art: Floriculture—Art décoratif—Notices d’exposition (1884–1889), 1908 (Marseille: Editions Jeanne Laffitte, 1998) pp. 210–228 and p. 217: Mais qui ne conçoit que l’artiste, penché à reproduire la fleur, l’insecte, le paysage, la figure humaine, et qui cherche à en extraire le caractère, le sentiment contenu, fera une oeuvre plus vibrante et d’une émotion plus contagieuse que celui dont l’outil ne sera qu’un appareil photographique, ou qu’un froid scalpel? Le document naturaliste le plus scrupuleux, reproduit dans un ouvrage scientifique, ne nous émeut pas, parce que l’âme humaine en est absente. See also “Le Mobilier contemporain orné d’après la nature”, where Gallé counsels young artists to devote themselves to rigorous study of natural forms but warns that this knowledge is no substitute for invention. Gallé, “Le Mobilier contemporain orné d’après la nature”, Écrits pour l’art: Floriculture—Art décoratif—Notices d’exposition (1884–1889), 1908 (Marseille: Editions Jeanne Laffitte, 1998) p. 255: C’est dans ses études que l’artiste décorateur doit s’appliquer à une notation rigoureuse. Mais il convient, en général, dans le mobilier, que cette information reste à l’état latent, synthétique. 18 Gill Saunders, Picturing Plants: An Analytical History of Botanical Illustrations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) p. 15. 19 Jonathan Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) p. 148. While eighteenth century illustrations based on a Linnaean model usually focused on the flower and reproductive organs of plants, in the nineteenth century most artists adopted the “natural” system developed by Antoine Laurent de Jussieu (1748–1836) and Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (1778–1841), which illustrated the whole plant. Gallé thus emulates an older model of botanical illustration in order to emphasize changes in the morphology of the orchid blossom. 20 All orchids are characterized by three petals, one of which functions as a labellum, and three sepals, or petal-like leaves. The sepals and petals are bilaterally symmetrical rather than radially symmetrical like the flowers of many other plant species. 21 Gallé, “Formes nouvelles”, p. 117: Gallé’s goal is the identification and naming of a new variant of Aceras hircina, one that he proposes to call Aceras hircine, var. platyglossa. 22 In this respect, Gallé’s ideas are closer to Neo-Lamarckian than to Darwin’s theories of evolution, which supported Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s idea of organisms’ inherent “tendency to complexification”; refer Robert Proctor, “Architecture from the Cell-Soul: René Binet and Ernst Haeckel”, The Journal of Architecture 11 (September 2006) p. 414. 23 Serena Keshavjee has noted that Gallé’s approach to recording the form of orchids relies upon an older tradition of hand-drawn illustration that privileges the artist’s unique hand at the very moment when scientific objectivity was increasingly connoted through the use of mechanical recording devices such as the camera; refer Serena Keshavjee, “Emile Gallé and the Aestheticization of the Scientific Process: Metaphors of Light and Dark in the Pasteur Vase”, paper presented, Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences, Light and Darkness, International Symposium, University of Illinois (Monticello, Illinois, April 25–28, 2012). I would like to thank Dr. Keshavjee for sharing this paper with me. 24 John Alcock, An Enthusiasm for Orchids: Sex and Deception in Plant Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) p. 16. 25 Darwin’s work appeared in French in 1870; see Charles Darwin, De la fecundation des orchidées par les insects: et des bons-résultats du croisement, trans. L. Rérolle (Paris: C. Reinwald, 1870). 26 Smith, Charles Darwin, p. 141. 27 Le Tacon, “Emile Gallé botaniste”, p. 1097.

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According to Gallé’s notes, the presentation was delivered by a certain Le Monnier before the Ligue d’Enseignement of Nancy; refer Emile Gallé, “Ligue de l’Enseignement, Conférence par M. Le Monnier sur Darwin et le rôle des insectes dans la fécondation des orchidées”, L’Amour de la fleur: les écrits horticoles et botaniques du maître de l’Art nouveau, eds. François Le Tacon and Pierre Valck (Nancy: Place Stanislas, 2008) p. 296. 29 Ibid., p. 296. C’est un domaine nouveau qui s’ouvre pour l’histoire naturelle avec ce genre d’études; ainsi comprise, elle n’est plus une série de monographies d’espèces, mais la reconstitution de l’harmonie totale. Gallé’s remarks recall observations first recorded in his travel diaries during a visit to Italy in 1877. He writes, as cited in Le Tacon, Emile Gallé, p. 135: Les biologistes contemporains ne doivent donc plus se contenter uniquement de monographies d’espèces; ils doivent raisonner en termes d’évolution. La vie forme un ensemble harmonieux. Cette harmonie est à la fois merveilleuse et d’une complication extrême. 30 In Darwin’s Pictures: Views of Evolutionary Theory, 1837–1874 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) p. 5 and p. 7, Julia Voss goes even further in her analysis of Darwin’s illustrations, arguing that the images accompanying his most famous publications are “visualizations that helped Darwin to formulate his theories in the first place” and that “Darwin developed his ideas in the nineteenth century by tirelessly creating, reworking, and revising pictures.” While images certainly played a central role in Darwin’s scientific practice as Voss emphasized, p. 5, it is important to note that the British scientist lacked the drawing skills of an artist such as Gallé, and was obliged to collaborate with professional illustrators in order to realize the images for his publications. 31 As Voss notes, ibid., p. 13, Darwin’s images do highlight variation between species, underscoring the incredible diversity of natural forms. 32 Describing the suitability of plant forms to the design of furniture, Gallé argues, “Le Mobilier”, p. 253: Les forms fournies par les végétaux s’adaptent tout naturellement aux ligneux. Elles sont d’une variété, d’une beauté infinies. Elles se décorent naturellement par les structures caractéristiques des divers organs à leur état de croissance, dans les innombrables familles, genres et espèces de plantes, dont chacun possede pour ainsi dire son style général et son style particulier. 33 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007) p. 195. 34 Ibid., p. 246. 35 Ibid., pp. 191–94. Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998) p. 22, has also explored the rise of photographic illustration and the close ties between photography and science in the late nineteenth century. Armstrong points out that an important shift took place in the 1880s with the introduction of the halftone process for reproducing photographs. She argues that this process, which made the union of text and photographic illustration almost seamless, tended to conceal the mediated nature of photographic imagery, allowing illustrations to preserve their “force of evidence”. According to Armstrong, p. 424, the indexical nature of photographs, their rootedness in the physical presence of that which they depict, thus seemed to many nineteenth century observers to guarantee a certain objectivity. 36 There are compelling reasons why Gallé might have chosen to employ both modes of representation. For example, hand-drawn illustrations offer a clear advantage over photographs for the purpose of recording the appearance of multiple specimens. While a drawing can capture the physical aspect of specimens gathered over a period of several months or even years, a photograph can only capture those specimens that have not yet withered. 37 Philippe Thiébaut, Gallé: Le Testament Artistique, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2004) p. 109, and others have persuasively argued that Gallé’s famous Main aux algues, or Hand with Seaweed (1904), symbolically represents the origin of all life in the ocean. Gallé’s cover for the Actes surely reflects a similar interest in the mutation of forms as they evolve and change. 38 “Allocution de M. le Dr de Seynes, Président du Congrès, prononcée à l’ouverture de la première séance”, Actes du 1er Congrès International de Botanique tenu à Paris à l’occasion de l’Exposition Universelle de 1900 (Lons-leSaunier: Imprimerie et Lithographie Lucien Declume, 1900) p. xi: L’association est une force qui s’impose aujourd’hui à toutes les formes de l’activité humaine. 39 In “Emile Gallé et l’association École de Nancy (1901–1904)”, Hommage à Emile Gallé, ed. François Le Tacon, Annales de l’Est (55, 2005) p. 260, Valérie Thomas points out that due to the law of July 1901 regarding “associations d’utilité publique” and the necessity of obtaining legal advice, it would be a full year before Gallé registered the “déclaration de constitution” and the Statutes with the Prefecture of Meurthe-et-Moselle on February 14, 1902. 40 As the owner is deceased, the current location of this drawing is unknown. For an illustration, see ibid., p. 261. 41 In the native dialect of Lorraine, “po” is “pour” and “tortous” is “tous.” It is notable that Gallé employs the local dialect for the phrase, “tortous po chacun, chacun po tortous,” signaling the group’s origins in the traditional culture of the province. 42 Jennifer Michael Hecht, End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2003) p. 259. Stuart M. Persell has argued that the roots of this Republican Solidarity movement lay not with Darwin, but with Neo-Lamarckianism. Citing the work, Le transformisme written by the scientist and politician Jean de Lanessan in 1883, Persell contends in Neo-Lamarckianism and the Evolution Controversy in France, 1870–1920, vol. 14, Studies in French Civilization (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999) p. 186: … what historians have called modified Darwinism, the reform Darwinism found in Solidarist Republican circles, was fundamentally not Darwinism at all, but social Lamarckianism. 43 Silverman, Art Nouveau, p. 49.

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Ibid., p. 49. Bourgeois, “Solidarité”, p. 25: Tout individu, tout être vivant, est un agrégat, et les parties qui le composent sont elles-mêmes des individus, des êtres vivants. [...] Or, ces éléments premiers tendent individuellement à l’existence et au développement; cependant une étroite solidarité les relie. [...] Ils se développent, et cependant leur développement contribue au développement de l’organisme qu’ils composent; ils évoluent, et leur évolution est une fonction de l’évolution collective. Ils sont, en un mot, associés. Alfred Fouillée would connect the issue of solidarity even more directly to the relationship between the provinces and the French nation, writing in La Science sociale contemporaine, 1880 (Paris: Librairie Hachette & Cie, 1904) p. 85: La forte centralisation des animaux supérieurs ne prouve donc point, selon nous, qu’ils ne soient pas composés d’animaux plus élémentaires, tout comme la forte centralization d’un État cache sans l’exclure la distinction des provinces, des cités et des individus. 46 Élisée Reclus, La Nouvelle géographie universelle: La France (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1877) p. 2. 47 Ibid., p. 47. 48 Le Tacon, Emile Gallé, pp. 51–52, p. 106. Together with Mikhaïl Aleksandrovitch Bakounine and Reclus, both anarchist theorists, Keller would found the Alliance internationale de la démocratie socialiste (1869), a group affiliated with the Marxist First International. After taking part in the events of the uprising known as the Commune in 1871, Keller joined Reclus in exile in Switzerland. Keller later established his family first in Belfort and then, in 1892, in Gallé’s hometown of Nancy. 49 Lucie Marie, “Patriotisme et décor symbolique dans l’œuvre d’Emile Gallé”, Hommage à Emile Gallé, ed. François Le Tacon, Annales de l’Est (55, 2005) p. 231. Robyn Roslak has explored Reclus’s impact on fin-de-siècle art in some detail; see Robyn Roslak, Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siècle France: Painting, Politics and Landscape (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007). For more on Reclus’s “recognition of the continuity and underlying unity of all being”, see Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of Élisée Reclus, ed. John P. Clark and Camille Martin (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2004) p. 23. 50 See Ernst Haeckel, Anthropogénie, ou Histoire de l’évolution humaine (Paris: C. Reinwald, 1877) and Histoire de la création des êtres organisés d’après les lois naturelles (Paris: C. Reinwald, 1874). Haeckel’s influence on a wide range of Art Nouveau artists is well established. See Erika Krause, “L’Influence de Ernst Haeckel sur l’Art nouveau”, L’Âme au corps: arts et sciences 1793–1993, ed. Jean Clair, exh. cat. (Paris: Grand Palais, 1993) pp. 342–350; also see Robert Michael Brain, “Protoplasmania: Huxley, Haeckel, and the Vibratory Organism in Late NineteenthCentury Science and Art”, The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture, eds. Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2009) pp. 92–122; refer also Proctor, “Architecture from the Cell-Soul”, 2006. 51 For a more detailed account of Haeckel’s theories, see Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). See also Robert J. Richards, “The Tragic Sense of Ernst Haeckel: His Scientific and Artistic Struggles”, Darwin: Art and the Search for Origins, exh. cat., eds. Pamela Kort and Max Hollein (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 2009) pp. 92–103. 52 Brain, “Protoplasmania”, 2009, p. 93. 53 In Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel, The History of Creation: or, The development of the earth and its inhabitants by the action of natural causes (London: H.S. King & Co., 1876) and in Haeckel’s own words, pp. 159– 160: The transmission by Inheritance, if we express ourselves quite generally, is essentially dependent upon the material continuity and partial identity of the matter in the producing and produced organism, the parents and the child. In every act of breeding a certain quantity of protoplasm or albuminous matter is transferred from the parents to the child, and along with it there is transferred the individually peculiar molecular motion. These molecular phenomena of motion in the protoplasm, which call forth the phenomena of life, and are their active and true cause, differ more or less in all living individuals; they are of infinite variety. Adaptation, or transmutation is, on the other hand, essentially the consequence of material influences, which the substance of the organism experiences from the material surrounding it, –in the widest sense of the word from the conditions of life. Haeckel thus blends Darwinian theory with a Neo-Lamarckian emphasis on environmental determinism, arguing for a mechanistic transmission of hereditary traits that results from the action of the environment (“conditions of life”) upon the organism. 54 Brain, “Protoplasmania”, 2009, p. 96. 55 Haeckel’s theories also reflect his interest in Monism, the belief that humankind, God, and nature are united in a single, seamless continuum. 56 Robert Proctor, “A World of Things in Emergence and Growth: René Binet’s Porte Monumentale at the 1900 Paris Exposition”, Symbolist Objects: Materiality and Subjectivity at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Claire I. R. O’Mahony (High Wycombe: The Rivendale Press, 2009) p. 228. 57 Ibid., pp. 233–234. 58 Haeckel’s hypotheses also dovetailed neatly with the Neo-Lamarckian theories then widely accepted in France. Many French scientists combined elements of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s “Zoological Philosophy” (1809) with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, theorizing a process of evolution in which environmental and cultural factors could result directly in the transformation of species; refer Fae Brauer, “Eroticizing Lamarckian Eugenics: The Body Stripped Bare during French Sexual Neoregulation”, Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, eds. Fae Brauer and Anthea Callen (Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008) p. 98. Serena Keshavjee, “Natural History, Cultural History, and the Art History of Elie Faure”, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (8, no. 2, Autumn 2009) np, 45

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 accessed April 26, 2013, http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn09/natural-history-cultural-historyand-the-art-history-of-elie-faure. For more on the embrace of Neo-Lamarckian theories in France, see Peter Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1988) and Persell, Neo-Lamarckianism. 59 De la nécessité des notions physiologiques pour le compositeur désireux de créer une ornementation en harmonie avec la diffusion moderne des sciences naturelles. 60 Emile Nicolas, “Ecole de Nancy: Alliance provinciale des Industries d’Art”, La Lorraine artiste (1901) pp. 211–215. 61 Ibid., p. 211: Les premiers, ils ont préconcisé l’observation directe de la nature pour trouver des formes inédites à appliquer aux objets en tenant compte de la matière employée pour chacun d’eux. 62 Ibid.: Ils ont opéré dans le décor en s’efforçant de garder à chacune de leurs compositions les signes typiques des espèces naturelles. 63 Ibid.: Chaque espèce possède sa beauté propre qui est la résultante de différenciations organiques en harmonie avec le milieu dans lequel elle se développe. 64 Ibid., p. 212: Le décor tératologique. 65 Nicolas, “Ecole de Nancy”, pp. 211–215. 66 See Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (Leipzig and Vienna: 1899–1904). In the nineteenth century, scientists were continuously uncovering new varieties of radiolaria. The considerable variety displayed by radiolaria, when paired with the relative simplicity of their structure, provided the naturalist with a way to examine the gradual development of forms from an evolutionary perspective; refer Brain, “Protoplasmania”, p. 105; also refer Proctor, “A World of Things”, p. 228. According to Le Tacon, Emile Gallé, p. 135, the images displayed by Gallé were given to the artist by the oceanographer and fellow resident of Nancy, Julien-Olivier Thoulet. Several illustrations of radiolaria appear in Thoulet’s illustrated study Océanographie (1890), lending support to this theory; see J. Thoulet, Océanographie (Statique) (Paris: Librairie Militaire de L. Baudoin et Ce., 1890) p. 150. However, it seems likely that Haeckel’s more artistically rendered treatment of marine animals in Kunstformen der Natur, and particularly the example of a plate illustrating the Spumellaria subclass of Radiolarians, may have inspired Gallé’s attempts to blend art and science in his own images. According to Thiébaut, Gallé, pp. 45–48, Gallé owned sheets from Haeckel’s 1899 publication of Kunstformen der Natur. 67 Proctor, “A World of Things”, p. 232. 68 Silverman, Art Nouveau, p. 82. 69 Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton, 1895) p. 11: These balusters, down which naked furies and possessed creatures are rolling in mad riot, these bookcases, where base and pilaster consist of a pile of guillotined heads, and even this table, representing a gigantic open book borne by gnomes, make up a style that is feverish and infernal. If the director-general of Dante’s ‘Inferno’ had an audience-chamber, it might well be furnished with such as these. Carabin’s creations may be intended to equip a house, but they are a nightmare. See also Richard Thomson, The Troubled Republic: Visual Culture and Social Debate in France, 1889–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) p. 23. 70 L’Echo de Maréville: Journal Loufoque illustré et peu littéraire, paraissant à l’improviste, fondé pour ennuyer les gens graves (No. 17, 1900), p. 1. 71 Tonito, “Maison Lorraine de l’Art”, L’Echo de Maréville (No. 17, 1900) p. 1: Rais-Gallé-vous, on ne Majorelle pas les prix! 72 Critics of the feminist movement often blamed the La Femme nouvelle for France’s falling birth rate, which was feared to be symptomatic of the nation’s evolutionary decline; see Elizabeth K. Menon, “Anatomy of a Motif: The Fetus in Late 19th-Century Graphic Art”, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (3, No. 1, Spring 2004) np, accessed April 28, 2013, http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/spring04/283-anatomy-of-a-motif-the-fetus-in-late19th-century-graphic-art. See also Brauer, “Eroticizing Lamarckian Eugenics”, p. 100; Barbara Larson, The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005) p. 76; Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989) p. 15; and Silverman, Art Nouveau, p. 66. 73 Tonito, “Maison Lorraine de l’Art”, 1900, p. 1: Peluche on en mange, Peluche on en veut manger! This phrase may also refer to the fabric designs created by Charles Fridrich (1876–1952), a member of the Ecole de Nancy and the founder of the Maison d’Art Lorraine. 74 The processes of pollination and cross-fertilization were well established as metaphors for the creative process by the end of the nineteenth century. As Alison Syme has noted in her study of the art of John Singer Sargent, the use of such metaphors often carried with it a strongly sexualized charge. As she writes, A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010) p. 12: The cogency of a garden metaphorics imaging artists as pollinators and plants, and artistic creation as cross-fertilization, was predicated on more than a fashion for plein-air painting. Also at stake was something more difficult to attain and too risky or risqué to formulate directly: the naturalization of alternative sexualities and identities. 75 Emile Gallé, Foreword, Exposition de l’Ecole de Nancy à Paris (Paris: Guérinet, 1903) np: L’Ecole de Nancy, en effet, et c’est là ce qui la distingue heureusement des tentatives récentes pour imposer chez nous un modern style incohérent et bizarre, l’Ecole de Nancy prétend posséder et mettre en pratique certains principes qui lui sont propres.

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Amy Ogata, “Artisans and Art Nouveau in Fin-de-siècle Belgium: Primitivism and Nostalgia”, Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, ed. Lynda Jessup (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) p. 165. According to Stephan Tschudi-Madsen, French critics employed the term, “modern style”, until about 1895, when the opening of Siegfried Bing’s shop L’Art nouveau popularized the new phrase to describe the reform movement taking place in the decorative arts. The use of the term, “modern style”, invokes the style’s purported origins in English art, while “art nouveau” conjures a more francophone origin. Tschudi-Maden also notes the use of less commonly used terms to describe the new art, including “Style Métro,” a reference to Hector Guimard’s designs for the Paris metro, and “style rastaquouère,” which he translates as “foreign adventure”. Stephan Tschudi-Madsen, The Art Nouveau Style (Oslo, Norway: H. Aschebourg, 1956) p. 81. Emile Bayard would also employ the term “modern style” to castigate the essentially foreign origin of the Art Nouveau style; refer Paul Greenhalgh, Modernism in Design (London: Reaktion Books, 1990) p. 67. 77 For more on this group, see Rossella Froissart-Pezone, L’Art dans tout: Les arts décoratifs en France et l’utopie d’un Art nouveau (Paris: CNRS, 2005); also refer Fae Brauer, “Chauvinists and Cosmopolitans: Art Nouveau, L’Art dans tout and “L’unité de l’art”, Chapter Six, Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). 78 Gallé, Foreword, Exposition de l’Ecole de Nancy à Paris, 1903, np: Qu’on ne craigne donc pas de rencontrer... tels salons-wagons, où, sous couleur de modernisme et de confort, des mobiliers dont les pièces font partie intégrante de l’immeuble, se trouvent soudés les uns aux autres comme des frères siamois, ou bien apparaissent, comme dans le Monde renversé, les pieds au plafond. The phrase “le Monde renversé” presumably refers to the carnivalesque tradition that subverted social hierarchies and allowed for the union of things and/or people normally kept separate and distinct. The reference thus evokes the idea of a pairing that disrupts the order of nature. For more on the carnivalesque, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1941). 79 In his essay “Le Mobilier contemporain orné d’après la nature”, Gallé attacked the new style even more forcefully, describing Parisian Art Nouveau as “le style tentaculaire, tératologique”, writing, pp. 250–252: Trop souvent aujourd’hui, il faut en convenir, des hommes qui se croient des novateurs et ne sont que les pasticheurs des initiateurs qu’ils ont mal compris, négligent absolument la construction et l’utilité pratique. Ils tombent dans le bizarre. Et, chose bien curieuse à noter, ce sont ceux-là mêmes qui abondent dans les pires étrangetés du décor le plus artificiel, ce sont ceux qui tiennent pour parure et somptuosité ce qui n’est que pénurie et affectation. Par contre, la nature, qui, elle, ne fournit pas les festons et les astragales, prête à l’artiste bien autres choses que les lombrics et les ténias, les pseudovarechs et les vermicelles affolés dont on a pensé faire, avec beaucoup de talent, à l’occasion de 1900, un berceau où abriter le vingtième siècle, un style helminthique et ‘larveux’. Si c’est là le mobilier moderne, nous consentons à reprendre la perruque et la queue! 80 [Commandant Lalance], “Souvenirs de l’Exposition d’art décoratif de 1904”, Bulletin des Sociétés artistiques de l’Est 11, no. 8 (August 1905) pp. 135–138. 81 Ibid., p. 190: En affirmant sur le terrain du beau le patriotisme provincial, bien loin d’affaiblir la nationalité française que menacerait seul l’émiettement d’un individualisme indifférent et égoïste, elle augmentera sa force de rayonnement et de propagande, car la vitalité d’un pays réside dans la vigueur et la cohésion des groupes qui le composent, comme la résistance d’un tissu dans la densité des fibres dont il est fait. 82 See Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris 1905–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); David Cottington, “‘Ce Beau pays de l’avenir’: Cubism, Nationalism and the Landscape of Modernity in France”, Framing France: The Representation of Landscape in France, 1870–1914, ed. Richard Thomson (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998) pp. 194–216; Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) and Brauer, Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre (2013).

CHAPTER SIX REGENERATING THE “MAN-BEAST”: EMBODYING BRUTISHNESS IN FIN DE SIGLO SPANISH ART OSCAR E. VÁZQUEZ

Figure 6.1 Carles Mani y Roig, Els Degenerats. 1891-1904. Stucco. 20,5 x 37 x 22 cm. Barcelona: MNAC - Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. Photograph: © MNAC - Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. Barcelona. Photographers: Calveras/ Mérida/ Sagristà.

Els Degenerats (Fig. 6.1) by Carles Mani y Roig (1867-1911), the sculptor and aide to Antoni Gaudi, is one of few, if not perhaps the only European nineteenth-century extant artwork to literally represent degeneration.1 Few other artworks seem to speak so literally of the symptoms and conditions of degeneration as does Mani’s sculpture. When located within the descriptions and understandings of degeneration that saturated medical, scientific and popular discourses, Mani’s sculpture may be read as an allegory that embodies the concept of degeneration or, as will be explained, embrutecimiento. However, if by embodiment, we mean giving physical form to a concept, Mani’s sculpture is significant because it immediately raises questions concerning representation and signification. His work is also intriguing because of the related, oftenparadoxical correspondences he wrote explaining his theories of art which, in the context of fin-desiècle discourses of degeneration, call into question the uses of documentation in relation to representation. While this chapter’s aim is not to plumb that art historical, methodological question concerning representation, it does seek to examine how Mani’s work, unique in its embodiment of

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the conceppt of degeneeration, dem monstrates hhow knowleedge of degeeneration haad seeped in nto general parlance aand had becoome part off an artist laanguage in fin f de siglo Spain. S

me descend veers la brute,” Magasin M Pitto oresque 11, nno 14 (April 1843) 1 p. 108. Figure 6.2 JJ. J. Grandvillle, “L’homm Photograph of the author. Public Domaain.

J. J. G Grandville’s woodcut, published p iin Magasin Pittoresqu ue of 1843 (Fig. 6.2) provides a telling com mparison. Itt shows thee physical trransformations of “Maan Descendiing toward the Brute” and visuallly demonsstrates a gro owing awarreness of prre-Darwiniaan theories of Transfo ormisme or species chhange, follow wing Lamarck or Bufffon. Grandv ville’s wood dcut, howevver, is more in keeping with cariccature and with w the meetamorphosses popular with illustrrators and ““fabulists” of the day that experrimented with w analogies.2 These types of metamorpho m oses provideed the foun ndation for subsequennt caricaturees by Charlles Bennett published in i 1863 in the Londonn Illustrated d Times, as well as inn the Spanissh Museo Universal U (F Fig. 6.3). Th hey reflect the popular arization of Darwinian notions wiithout indicating speciffic knowleddge of degen neration.3 The seaarch for preecedence is, of course the terrain of genealogy, but the aim in traccing earlier examples here is not to search for f origins. Rather it iss to show ho ow these w works begin to point to ntations of degeneratio on specificaally as ataviism, on thee one hand, the differeences betweeen represen and more generalizedd fears of so ocial declinee and decad dence, on the other. Theere are furth her reasons why the work of this t fairly unknown aartist meritts continued attentionn today: Through its examinatioon it is possible to ellicit how thhe Spanish response to o degenerat ation and reegeneration differed frrom other European E nattions. Drawinng upon theese differencces, this chaapter focusees upon three questionns about thee place that Mani andd his workk occupy within w cultturo-politicaal currents of degeneeration theories, that simultaneoously set his h work ap part from ssome of th hese earlier mentionedd examples. The first question iis how migght the scullpture’s origginal title of o Embruteecimiento, aas is known n from the artist’s doocuments annd prelimin nary sketchees, along with w the scu ulpture’s reppresentation n of inertia and exhauustion, inform us of contemporar c ry understaandings of degeneracy? d ? The seco ond is how such a woork represennting degeneerative beinngs may be aligned with h theories oof artistic reegeneration in fin de siiglo Spain, and the lastt question iss how may have h the gendered langguage of “brrutishness” functionedd within thee artistic discourses of tthe period?

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Figure 6.3 C Charles Bennnett, “Origin of o Certain speecies of anim mals,” Museo Universal,” 220 (17 May 1863) p. 160. Photograph of the author. Public domaiin.

Embbrutecimiiento Mani pprobably beggan the prottotypes of hhis larger-th han-life-sizee work as eaarly as 1891 1. The final version, hoowever, waas not shown n until the F Fifth Internaational Exhibition of B Barcelona in n 1907 and, now-lost, is known only o throug gh photograaphs (Fig. 6.4) 6 and exttant preparaatory plasteer models.4 The originnal title off the work, Embruteccimiento, may m be tran nslated as ““stupefactio on” or the “dulling oof the senses,” but can also mean the depriviing of one’ss reason andd, as such, to become brutish.5 E Embrutecim miento is deerived from m the Latin “brutus”, the t name ggiven to the patrician family andd one of thee founders of o the Romaan Republic, Lucius Jun nius Brutus,, who feigned insanity as a way oof escaping his familiess’ executionn. The namee is more famously connnected thro ough Dante and Shakeespeare, to Marcus M Junius Brutus ((85-42 B.C.E.), one off the assassinns of Caesaar, after the latter attem mpted to naame himselff “Emperor for life”. In n both casess, the namee’s origin is associated with the founding of o Rome and, a later, the attemp pt to return n Rome to republican nism.6 The etymologyy is significcant given th he sensitivitties to vario ous class-bo ound denotaations of deegeneration and regeneeration at thhe fin de sig glo.

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Figure 6.4 A A. Merletti (O Original photo ographer). Vieew of interior of 1907 Fifth h Internationaal Exhibition in i Barcelona, with Mani’ss Els Degenerrats second fro om right. La IIlustración Arrtística, no 13 325 (May 20, 1907) p. 336. Photograph of the authorr. Public dom main.

In the 11880s, Spannish dictionaaries defineed bruto and d embruteciimiento as a noun to mean m the act of becomiing an irratiional animaal or metaphhorically, to o act as an ignorant i perrson. It also o described the originss of early huuman life.100 Belgian aartist Fernan nd Khnopff, interestinggly, completted a pastel work alsoo titled Brutishness (18 885, privatee collection n), in which h a nude feemale stand ds between columns w with the muulti-breasted d torso of the ancientt goddess Aphrodite, A w whose head d the artist replaced w with skulls.. Brutishnesss here, em mbodied in an eroticizeed female fform typicaal of many symbolistss, suggestedd an atavism m of not oonly regresssion to an earlier e pagaan age, but possibly a Dionysiann sensual retturn. This laater interpreetation also seems to haave been thhe case for the Spanish writer Migguel de Unaamuno. In his play The Sphinx, S com mpleted arouund 1897 and a debuted d 1909, thee main chaaracter is a m over the precarious siituation of the t politics politician named Anggel. The dessperation annd cynicism o his marriiage lead hhim to wish h for being more like a “bruto”, or like an of his couuntry and of animal; thhat is he wisshed to beco ome more innstinctual and a be moree able to bellieve in whaat his over11 intellectuaalized reason will not permit. p Thhis double in nterpretation of a desirre, on the on ne hand, to become m more animal-like throug gh a return to a purporrtedly more natural statte, and on the t other, a simultaneoous critiquee of that staate in whichh a primitiv ve condition n becomes eequated witth a loss of reason, is significant for the conttext of Manni’s statue, as a will be sh hown. It is unnclear what the target audience a forr the work may have been. b In all likelihood because of the exhibitted size, annd because Mani M workeed on the ideea through multiple m veersions over the course of several years, it was intended d for public salons. Thee work, how wever, attraccted only a handful of critical ressponses in the contem mporary presss when sho own in the 1907 Internnational Ex xhibition in 12 Barcelonaa. The imppression pro oduced by that large-sscale versio on upon vieewers then, as well as when seenn by artists a few yeears beforee in Mani’ss studio, raanged from m disgust to o awe and admirationn. A few reviewers add dressed the monumenttality of the object, andd others tou uched upon the rough finish, but most m focuseed on the exxpressive, melancholic m content. The boowed heads and hunch hed positionns of Mani’s simian crreatures sugggest total exhaustion. e Contempoorary criticss highlighted d the seemiing despond dency of the figures annd quickly lapsed l into

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common medical metaphors of the nineteenth century. One critic felt that the bodies in the work showed signs of “being contaminated by the ills of the sculptor himself,” while another described it as the product of a delirium or nightmare.13 While these metaphors are significant, a full scrutiny of artistic knowledge of terms of medical pathologies lies beyond the parameters of this essay. Nevertheless in light of Mani’s linking of primitive brutishness with fatigue, despondency and, as will be revealed, lack of volition, and because these symptoms lie at the heart of so many significant, often overlapping discourses of turn-of-the-century Europe, it is necessary to question the significations of exhaustion and “lack of will” before returning to Els Degenerates.

Fatigue, Volition and the Nation By the last decades of the nineteenth century, fatigue was being studied across Europe as the prime condition for contemporary “sloth” and for making people “desire inaction”.14 It was discussed and used within as well as outside of Spain as political propaganda. Outside Spain, writers and the international press used laziness and idleness, associated with fatigue, as traits to characterize Spaniards. As early as the seventeenth century, the Spanish were described as “melancholy” and “the most disorderly people in the world”. Throughout the early nineteenth century, they were derided by Americans as “a poor, lazy, idle, dirty, ignorant race of semisavages”.15 The foreign perspective had changed little by century’s end. Henry Charles Lea’s famous 1898 article on “The Decadence of Spain” was typical of foreign political propaganda during the period of the Spanish-American War when he stated: “Labor, in fact, to Spanish pride, was the badge of inferiority, to be escaped in every possible way.”16 Five years later, a foreign critic would repeat similar accusations, with a more explicitly racist tone, by attributing the poor state of affairs in Spanish arts, among other causes, to “the want of energy and capacity for application” which was partially a result of “the temperament and racial peculiarities of the Southron.”17 Characterizations of similar symptoms of fatigue were employed even among Spanish critics themselves in the contemporary press and in nearly identical terms when reviewing and criticizing the arts or artists. A reviewer of the 1897 National Exhibition in Madrid, Francisco Alcántara, argued that the passion that had inspired past artists had been reduced in the present to a “debilitating mysticism” and this saddened viewers even more for being “the only available, visible reality among the exhausted moral forces that have shaped [our] history” [emphasis added].18 Common to most nineteenth-century discussions (whether within or outside of Spain) was an understanding of fatigue as symptomatic of a particularly modern, urban pathology, and linked increasingly with neurasthenia. The American physician, George Miller Beard, had used the term beginning in an 1869 published lecture, explaining that neurasthenia was manifest through chronic fatigue, anxiety, impotence and restlessness.19 One physician commented in the Revista de España on what was by 1884 understood as an illness that was “dominating the century”. He stated that although neurasthenia and related disorders were insidious and have a long incubation period, they almost all end with “a gradual degradation of the intellectual faculties, and of physical force, to the point of dementia; this being, in a word, a faithful image of the tendency of our century.”20 At the time, nearly two dozen different explanations were offered by French, German, Spanish and Italian specialists, many of which were examined by Vicente Otis y Esquerdo for his Spanish specialized audience and which further elaborated the connections between the symptoms of neurasthenia/ nervous exhaustion, madness and degeneration. In this way, we find that physician and head of the Zaragoza asylum in Spain, Mateo Bonafonte, argued in 1900 that not only fatigue but also a lack of volition (will) were the typical characteristics of degenerates and mad people.21 Fatigue, in terms of the degradation of physical and intellectual forces, first began to appear in European medical literature in the late-nineteenth century and was, in Anson Rabinbach’s words, a “persistent reminder of the body’s intractable resistance to unlimited progress and productivity” and as the “permanent nemesis” of industrial-age Europe.22 Fatigue and lack of will, as symptomatic

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of such nervous disorders as neurasthenia, became increasingly gendered.23 While volition was understood in masculine terms, the traits of inactivity and lack of will were seen as feminine and pejorative. Nietzsche’s and Schopenhauer’s gendering of will and its libidinal nature were clearly influential.24 By the fin de siglo, Spanish writers would connect a lack of will, or voluntad, with sexual, often illicit, activities producing fatigue of “man’s vital functions”, the prescription for which was sexual abstinence.25 Indeed, the feminization of listlessness, and the masculinization of will as a metaphor for the causes of Spain’s decline, could be found already in the works of the Golden-Age Spanish historian, Juan de Mariana, and those of the writer, Francisco de Quevedo.26 That such equations of a lack of voluntad with effeminacy were common among late nineteenthcentury critics is manifest in Lucas Mallada’s attribution of the maladies of Spain in 1890 to a “lack of virility” and courage.27 Nicolás Salmeron, the ex-president of Spain, in his introduction to the Castilian edition of Max Nordau’s notorious Degeneration, translated into Spanish as Degeneración in 1902, also used terms like impotency. The notion of a lack of virility was liberally employed, especially when writing of Spain’s literature and artistic productions as “dominated by the feminine, fictitious, hypocritical, and without energies.” It was, Salmeron surmised, “a literature that … does not take masculine breaths but rather sighs; and does not know how to roar wildly, but [only] gets worked up with impotent anger.”28 This condemnation of effeminate lethargy was aimed at the non-manual labor of artistic and cultural producers, particularly those associated with Aestheticism and Decadence.29 In Spain, in particular, this virile/effeminate split came also to define the “robust” and “masculine” productions of the Generation of 1898, in contrast to the effete, visionary modernistas: While the former was inscribed in terms of intellectual history and philosophy, the latter was described largely in terms of formalist studies.30 Once the language of medical sciences inflected most discourses, the discussions of male sexual potency became a vehicle for arguments about power and its place in the public and domestic spheres.31 Nineteenth-century intellectuals took seriously the social implications of virility as Spain saw dramatically smaller population increases in the face of the rising populations of Germany and England, leading to what many believed to be biologically inferior races – in other words, degenerate – and declining Latin Mediterranean nations, in the face of the expanding imperialist powers of the Anglo-Saxon nations. During the period of 1872 to 1911, for example, Spain’s and France’s populations grew by less than 20% and 10%, respectively, in comparison with Germany’s 58% and England’s more than 60%.32 Within this depopulation paranoia, the symptoms of physical fatigue and laziness were especially worrisome for many because they signaled an even more dangerous trait, namely, a lack of will power, which was increasingly synonymous with an absence of character. Nobel Prize-winning Spanish playwright, José Echegaray, explaining in 1895 what hße felt were the most important aspects of a work of art, wrote that it was their definition of carácter. As he explained, the word referred especially to force, energy and voluntad; that is, will.33 Character, or its lack, was also understood stylistically. The nuanced colors of symbolists, contemporary artists’ inability to paint clearly or forcefully, but rather, according to the press’s complaints, ambiguously in their search for evocation, were understood as signs of muddled expression and clouded thought. An important example emerges from the various responses to the 1903 survey promoted by the Madrid journal Gente Vieja, which asked readers to answer the deceptively simple question, “¿Qué es el modernismo?”34 Of among the two dozen or so respondents, one in particular, that of the historian José Deleito y Piñuela, whose answer appeared in other magazines as well, is significant for the way it equated an unclear formal style with a lack of moral or personal character: This indecisiveness, this vagueness, this fight [among contrary elements], are reflected in artistic expressions that, giving special attention to their character, is, paradoxically, the absence of all character, if by that quality we understand a certain [stylistic] direction, a way of being, or a particular tendency subject to canons and principals… .

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He continued stating that modernismo í a term he claimed was notoriously inadequate and vague í is not a “school” but rather a “complex phenomenon of diverse and multiple tendencies” tied together only by the “exaltation of individuality,” an egoism which he equated with disorder and anarchism. Deleito y Piñuela accused the practitioners of modernismo of making a “gala of obscurity and inconsistency.” His suggestions to readers further linked the new stylistic tendencies with contemporary notions of fatigue and the pathologies of modern life: What is needed is a stimulus that will awaken our lethargic sensibility, something that strongly excites the unbalanced nervous system of this generation of neurotics, that is wearing down with the speed of electricity its mental and physical life, and [finds itself somewhere] between the refinements of pleasure and the incentives of work.35

The signs of outward exhaustion meant not only debilitation of physique but also the waning of spirits and volition. In this way, exhaustion and will (or its lack) were connected with a national identity.36 This was endorsed by the multiple studies on the “psychology” of a people, particularly Gustave Le Bon’s 1894 Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples. In Spain, among the most influential studies were those by the early Spanish sociologists, Manuel Sales y Ferré “Psicología del pueblo español. Complejidad de los problemas sociales” (1901), followed by Rafael Altamira’s Psicología del pueblo español being published in 1902, preceding by a year the translation of Alfred Fouillée’s 1898 Psychologie du peuple français.37 Coterminously, assessments of the Spanish national character and cultural psyche were undertaken by leading intellectuals associated with the so-called Generation of ‘98. Miguel de Unamuno’s En torno al casticismo (1895) and Angel Ganivet’s Idearium español (1897) examined psychological lack of will, using the term aboulia (abulía in Castilian), as particularly symptomatic of Spain’s degeneration. Ganivet, borrowing from Théodule Ribot, further defined in his work that in Spain, “there are numerous cases of weak will” and “an extinction or a grave debilitation of volition”, with the result that we have a state of “collective aboulia”. He observed that in practical life, it is characterized by a “lack of action” and in the “intellectual sphere” by a lack of attention. Referring to the lost colonial projects, he argued that the origin of Spain’s decadence and its actual prostration was in “our excess of action, in our having undertaken enterprises out of all proportion to our powers.”38 The very year of the Spanish translation of Max Nordau’s immensely popular 1892 Entartung, cited earlier, the Spanish leading journalist and playwright Azorín (José Ruíz Martínez) in a work entitled La Voluntad, confessed “…now, at this moment, I barely have the strength to write; aboulia paralyzes my will.”39 Hence according to these writers and intellectuals, the Spanish nation was like the individual’s own aboulia, paralyzed by, in Ganivet’s words, the “lack of a dominant idea that will move it.”40 These were certainly not the first scholars to interpret exhaustion and the loss of energies as symptoms of contemporary social ills and afflicted artistic production, as demonstrated by the discourses circulating amongst the previous generation. Already Matthew Arnold had identified modern times as plagued with “sick-fatigue” and ‘”languid doubt”, while Chateaubriand had coined the phrase, mal du siècle.41 The Comte de Gobineau, in his influential Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853-1855), had assured readers that “if it [a society or nation] perish, it is because it has no longer the same vigour” with which to battle life’s dangers; “in a word, because it is degenerate.”42 Yet, it was Alfred Fouillée in works such as L’évolutionnisme des idées-forces (1890), and Théodule Ribot in Les maladies de la volonté (1883), who most influenced Ganivet. Ribot, who Ganivet repeats at times almost verbatim, believed that first, through evolution, all reactions have been individual in origins; secondly, all volition is a recognizable expression of action; thirdly indecision (“irresolution”) is an indication of the beginning of a pathological, interior morbid state, and from it arises the weakness to act; and finally, out of indecision is born poor ideas because “[d]eliberation leads with difficulty to more choices and the more difficulty to act.” Volition, on the contrary, is “a definitive state; it closes the debate.”43 Thus, inertia and lack of physical movement were connected by these physiologists with a lack of will power symptomatic of the pathology of “aboulia”.

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Together, they comprised the conditions of degeneration. Eugene Talbot in 1899 understood perfectly these connections between degeneracy (as atavism which he saw as arrested development), lack of will, and the demise of a race: “The factors of degeneracy affect in the ancestor the checks on excessive action acquired during the evolution of the race, thus producing a state of nervous exhaustion. The descendant in consequence is unable to reach the state of the ancestor thus nervously exhausted”, he wrote.44 The same equation was figured by American historian, Brooks Adams who suggested in 1896 that civilization revolved in cycles of centralization and dispersal (decay) based upon the energies of a people. He argued: When a highly centralized society disintegrates, under the pressure of economic competition, it is because the energy of the race has been exhausted. Consequently, the survivors of such a community lack the power necessary for renewed concentration, and must probably remain inert until supplied with fresh energetic material by the infusion of barbarian blood.45

Indeed, Adams applied these theories of energy and velocity particularly to Spain arguing that Spaniards were simply “incapable” of achieving comparable “velocity of movement as the races” they competed with and for this reason, had never achieved the kind of centralization in which the English excelled.46 Two years later, in Spain’s ominous year of 1898 and that nation’s defeat in the SpanishAmerican War (an event to which I shall return), future Spanish president Francisco Silvela also connected a lack of inertia with the demise of a nation due to “anemia and the decline of its central forces,” pronouncing the Spanish body as lifeless, “without a pulse.”47 That same year, an anonymous editorial would rally against what was to a become a familiar characterization of both the individual psyche and the character of the nation as a whole, in terms of the energy needed to overcome a moribund, impotent and abulic Spain.48 All of these accounts show that by 1900 in Spain, intellectuals had adopted much of the language of specialists who were examining and arguing over categories of various philosophical, physiological, psychological, and social ills ascribed to dozens of nervous conditions such as neurasthenia and aboulia, and whose symptoms included fatigue, inertia and lack of will. It was also after 1898 and the first years of the new millennium, that commentaries began to turn increasingly to the question of the social and national attributes of a people.49 At the same time, the above symptoms were progressively connected to the etiology of degeneration (particularly mental degeneration).50 Produced in the midst of these varied discourses of atavism and national degeneration, Mani’s representation of listless, simian-like humans appears to embody all of these various characteristics: They seem to epitomize the degeneration and devolution of the Spanish nation. At the same time, this sculpture does not configure a straight-forward allegory of Spanish degeneration, particularly given contemporary artist’s gendering of ape imagery and Mani’s use of the notion of “brutishness”.

Social Darwinism and the “Ape of Nature” In addition to theories of aboulia and lack of will as a manifestation of degeneration in Spain, artists were greatly influenced by contemporary anthropological and Darwinian theories of evolution.51 The Spanish translation of Darwin’s Descent of Man appeared in 1876, that is, a year before the translation of On the Origin of Species.52 While Darwinian evolution was a topic of discussion between 1867 and 1871, it was only after a French version of The Descent of Man reached Spain that the discussion turned into a heated debate. At that time the reception of Darwinism in Spain was linked to various university reforms, the abolition of censorship, and the empowerment of liberals, albeit briefly, in administrations that followed Spain’s 1868 Revolution.53 Darwinian theories continued to be debated in various forums around the same time that Mani’s statue was placed on display.54 The connection drawn between simian figures and evolutionary theories extended well beyond Darwin’s 1859, On the Origin of Species, or the 1871, The Descent of Man, becoming widespread

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in visual cultures, as has been demonstrated by Barbara Larson, amongst others, in the case of such artists as Odilon Redon.55 Representations of monkeys and simians became center stage. Their representation throughout Western art history served multiple functions, from the age-old association of monkeys as mischievousness and sinful to cabinet and other paintings remindful of the mission of artists to be more than merely copyist. Such allusions to the “arts as the ape of nature” (ars simia naturae), first appearing in the late medieval period, and becoming popular in the Renaissance, had a wide diffusion and transformation in the later sixteenth century, particularly in Flanders.56 In the mid-nineteenth century, artists such as Maxime Du Camp continued to employ monkey imagery as a vehicle for criticism and satire, while Gabriel von Max used his collection of monkey photographs to make numerous paintings of simians.57 Reproductions of those paintings were readily available to Spanish artists as illustrated by the October 8, 1893 issue of the Ilustración Española y Americana. In all these later cases, the critique used ape or monkey images not only to question the role of academic traditions, but also to condemn critics who might overstep their authority on artistic judgments.

Figure 6.5 Emmanuel Frémiet. Gorilla Carrying Off a Stone Age Woman, after 1888. Bronze, reduced replica. Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Harlan E. Moore Charitable Trust Fund, 1995-1996.

Given Spain’s tradition of hunting and game pictures for royal patronage in earlier centuries, it is curious that the country never developed a strong modern group of animal sculptors, as in France. From the time that Georges Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck worked at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, “les artistes animaliers” such as Antoine-Louis Barye, abounded in France.63 Apes were increasingly portrayed in the last half of the century, Emmanuel Frémiet producing his first version of Gorilla Dragging Away a Dead Negress in the very year of

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publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. The 1847 introduction in the contemporary press of the gorilla, even more so than the earlier notices of the orangutan (on display in Paris, circa 1836) ignited popular interest in Western Europe, increasingly so as the animal was brought into the evolutionary debates. By the time Frémiet exhibited another version of his gorilla in Paris and Munich in 1887 and 1888 respectively (Fig. 6.5), where the statue won gold medals, it was considered “the personification of brute force,” and even a metaphor of male brutality. When reproduced in the Barcelona-based La Ilustración Artística, it was chastised for its graphic representation of brutal sensuousness.64 While visual commentaries on these artworks of aggressive simians reveal concerns over the brute force of primitive states, they also reveal anxiety festering over fin de siglo masculinities.65 Frémiet’s visual hyperboles helped establish, as Anne McClintock has argued, an arena for negotiating the boundaries between, on the one hand, a nascent anthropology and investigations of human prehistoric origins and, on the other hand, degenerate populations, namely the working classes, most races outside of Europeans, the insane, criminals and those perceived sexual deviants.66 Fremiet’s gorillas abducting women invoke Lombroso’s theories of the most primitive forms of sexual mating, and what that Italian criminologists understood as the end of a line of humans who are born criminals and brigands. As Lombroso argued, the criminal’s closest equivalents were the insane, children and animals. He stressed in the first edition of Criminal Man (1876), “criminals resemble savages and the colored races.”67 Lombroso’s theories were based on notions of evolutionary progress and the idea that atavism manifested itself in the inherited often-visible traits that could be quantified through anthropometric data. Thus he became known as one of the significant founders of positivist criminology.68 He focused on biological anachronisms, that is, a regression or reappearance of some savage, ancestral past that could be detected through external physiognomic features, which he called stigmata. This was in contrast to the internal, less-visible traits often discussed by others such as Bénédict Augustin Morel.69 For Lombroso, a brutal atavism was always observable on the surface, waiting to be read, as in his epiphany of reading the skull while performing an autopsy on Giuseppe Villella, an outlaw from Calabria, and of his seeing in it “an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.”70 In 1898 the Spanish criminologist, Bernaldo de Quirós, explained the essential points of atavism to his readers in Modern Theories of Criminality: “Atavism is characterized by the reappearance of unusual traits in most recent ancestors, which were characteristic of that distant race.” Behind or underlying the proliferation of degeneration theories is the fear of a regression to a person with “ferocious instincts of primitive humanity … and inferior animals,” in Lombroso’s terms or, following Quirós, of unleashing in that criminal person an “enormous aggressive power”.71 Representations of monkeys and apes, therefore, served multiple functions. They signified that atavistic degenerate humans were in danger of becoming a beast, of reverting to the supposedly early stages of human evolutionary development that were equated with the lower classes and races outside of European whites. Yet paradoxically, the simian beast or savage figure could also signify an instinctual force that offered the potential for countering an over-intellectualized and effeminate decadence, as theorized by Fae Brauer in the next chapter of this book. They epitomized what was understood as the needed injection of “raw energy, aggressive force, sexual prowess”, often attributed to races outside of Europe, or to the lower classes.72 Significantly, while women were often placed on the same end of the evolutionary hierarchical scale as inferior races and classes, they were rarely included alongside those who appeared to offer the energy needed to revitalize society. The interest in the primitivising animal, in this light, can also be seen as part of a wider concern over what H. G. Wells prognosticated as “the coming beast,” or, what Kelley Hurley and others have termed the abhuman: The anxiety and arousal of the prospect of becoming quasi-human or monstrous.73 These anxieties were also driven by scientific, medical and biological discourses that included degeneration theories. Within these discourses of degeneration, Mani’s work presented to contemporary viewers the disturbing prospect of becoming monstrous and/or the redeeming possibility of being able to regenerate neurasthenic masculinity with long-needed

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life-force. It is in the context of these contradictory functions of singerie and ape imaging that Mani’s Els Degenerats seems to have evolved. Mani’s work brings these diverse trajectories together. Yet while it embodies a post-Darwinian concern with the probability of devolution to a less-civilized, animal state, and with it the related notions of physical and social degeneration, it also provides a lengthy tradition of simian representation as a tool to critique art. Contextualized within this later interest, Mani’s sculpture may appear not only as an observation and response to popularized notions of social and medical discourses, but also as an ironic, even sarcastic commentary on the degenerate state of contemporary art.

Regenerating the “Man-beast” Mani explained his theories of a socially transformative art in a somewhat rambling personal letter to his friend, the Asturian painter, Nicanor Piñole (1878-1978). In it the sculptor noted that among his aims was to eliminate the man-beast (“hombre bestia”) and search for the truly human man (“hombre hombre”). In the same letter, he revealingly added: How much can be drawn from that word [art], and asked of institutions of art, in order that art may be beneficial to all. Men, so they can change; and we will not stop until they think and feel as a real man [hombre hombre] should think and feel, not the abandoned man-beast, as all authorities have represented him … to the shame of all (original emphasis).74

While Mani seemed to have been searching for some mythical essence of a freethinking individual, it is less clear, however, to decipher what formal shape that freedom might take. Nonetheless, in a statement that was as much a call for artistic liberation as it was a reactionary indictment of radical vanguards, he argued: We have to begin to respect art that, until now, has been maintained only as commerce by some, and as the lowest price by others. We have to rid ourselves of all of these bohemians who, instead of having drawn the silhouette of the Man and artist, have instead drawn the silhouette of pigs, of a dirty, black spirit, and of a totally corrupt silhouette, instead of the Man that is necessary for the world and for the Human spirit.75

The language of Mani’s statements above is rife with the gendered equation of action as a masculine domain, and also with the fear of the irrational and the bestial. Further, the resurgence of instinctual violence (a characteristic attributed to the brute, cretin and criminal alike), is a concern that appears to lie at the heart of Mani’s statements. Although Mani’s lethargic simian pair is tempered by inertia and despondency, unlike Fremiet’s aggressive gorillas, inherent in his theme of embrutecimiento, of becoming brutish, there is the possibility of latent violent passions, according to Lombroso’s own definition of atavism. Indeed, the sluggish animal characters of Mani’s Embrutecimiento suggested to viewers not only a dulling of the senses and loss of reason, but also a degradation to a more instinctual, primitive state of animal passions. Such an hypothesis is supported by his now lost artwork entitled El Instinto Humano shown at the Madrid 1899 exhibition, for which Mani earned a third-class medal, and which his painter friend Hortensi Güell understood as representing the destructive instinct that “more or less developed, [and] possess[es] man from his infancy.”76 The rise of animal passions and the desire to control them, a long-standing concern of a “civil” society manifest in examples as far apart as Plato and Edmund Burke, were central to latenineteenth-century anxieties about social degeneration. Indeed, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Charles Bell in Anatomy of Expression in Painting, characterized madness as a “peculiar form of ferocity,” “vacancy of mind,” and human countenance “reduced to the state of brutality.”77 He instructed artists that they must recourse animals as models to capture the proper idea of madness. However, Mani’s is a tempered rejoinder to these fears of violence in the gendered discourses of brutishness. Further interest by Spanish artists in the representation of the bestial within humans is seen in

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the works of Mani’s contemporary, the Catalonian sculptor Pau Gargallo (1881-1934). In a low relief bronze that bears the inscription “La Bestia del Hombre,” (1904) is portrayed a bald, flattened-nosed, pugilist-like figure raising his fist in aggression or defense.78 Gargallo’s title was almost certainly a reference to Zola’s La Bête Humaine (published in 1890 in Castilian) in which the “beasts” are the principal characters; these are the men and women who ultimately murder each other in fits of rage and jealousy, because of the inherited blood contaminated by alcoholism and insanity.79 Like Mani’s letters describing the man-beast, Gargallo’s work suggests an atavism of a primal, potentially destructive state that Lombroso and others had linked to the violent nature of criminals. Lombroso’s visible characteristics of degeneration, namely, the “enormous jaws, high cheek bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped ears found in criminals, savages and apes”, could just as well be a formal description of Mani’s slothful, simian pair and Gargallo’s “Human Beast.”80 Just over a decade earlier, the physician José R. Garnelo, had published an anatomy and theoretical text for artists similar to Bell’s, but influenced by the nascent field of criminal anthropology: El hombre ante la estética o Tratado de antropología artística. In addition to general anatomy, the treatise included a theoretical section that taught the proper way of representing particular expressions of emotion. His work is highly significant for demonstrating how artists had absorbed Lombrosian and other notions of degeneration theories. In a section of the book outlining the “Principal Character Types,” Garnelo’s description of “destructiveness” is almost identical to Lombroso’s on the criminal. He identified in that character type an “overly developed instinct” that makes them resentful, angry, and hateful with the potential for homicide. Describing their physical characteristics to include a very wide head above highly developed ears, he then rhetorically asks: “Who, in examining those contracted eyebrows, that wild stare, and that extraordinarily wide head… does not see clearly the ferocity of his condition?”81 In the section on emotions and the states of “idiocy,” Garnelo mentions Darwin í and tells his readers that the heads of these “idiots” have exaggerated craniums. Garnelo then divides this “idiocy” group into varying degrees of affliction: The first “degree” was easily distinguishable and “easy to draw because of the exaggerated diminution of the cranial and the deformity of its surface, because of the absence of the protuberances that should exist there, which are a patent lack of development of the underlying organs.” He continues: “It is in these unfortunate beings that is found the seed of passion that, without ever germinating, is the reason why they feel uncomfortable, querulous, are unsettled, and ultimately suffer from more or less the offenses against their own selves, the setback placed there beforehand, in spite of their wishes.” Finally, he adds the description of a third degree of “idiocy”: “To these [other] degrees corresponds what is today called microcephalic (monkey head [sic]), or rather, small head, … considered by some as a set back to the origins of man according to Darwinism… .”82 It is unclear whether Mani or Gargallo believed, like Garnelo, following Lombroso, that such atavisms of more primitive human states could be detected in the actual inherited physiognomy of criminals, “cretins,” or whether, like Morel, following Lamarck, that such traits were as much a consequence of environment, which would then become pathological and passed on. Nevertheless there is no doubt that these artists were aware of the general theories of degeneration that had become popular in Spain by the late 1880s. Mani’s representation of degenerations signaled the concepts of slothfulness, fatigue and lack of will, on the one hand, as well as connotations, on the other, of the possible latent violence of brutishness í a primal state that, paradoxically, may have offered the impulsive energy much-needed for an abulic nation.

Brutishness and Regeneration The curving, downward lines in Mani’s statue emphasize the figures’ fatigue and powerlessness to act, key symptoms of degeneration. The plaster version of Mani’s work in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya is only eight inches high by eight and a half inches long (approximately), roughly cast, without details. The only surface contrasts that articulate the figure and give it any

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play of light are the deep crevices that have been carved between the two figures and their individual legs and arms. The simian-like figures have arched spines and ape-like skulls: They are two parabolas that correspond to the downward gaze suggestive of a lack of energy. The extended, drooping arms on either side of the two figures (the left figure’s right, and the right figure’s left arms) point downward, in both cases touching the ground. The inner arms of the seated pair also indicate a lack of strength as they rest on the upper thighs, seemingly without any ability to move. This conveys a sense of a heavy weight bearing down on the figures. There is no documentation to suggest that Mani may have understood the emotive qualities of particular upward or downward lines, as theorized by Charles Henri and as applied by, say, Georges Seurat. Nevertheless Mani may not have required such a theoretical apparatus. After all, the metaphors of prostration and death, in addition to a lack of inertia and fatigue, filled the pages of the contemporary press even beyond the medical discourses associated with degeneration. Themes of death and pessimism were part and parcel of the interests of Symbolists. Yet given Spain’s lengthy history of returning to the related question of decadence, such themes became increasingly tied to a national psychopathology of degeneration. Partaking in the late nineteenthcentury discussions of the presumed inferiority of the Latin Mediterranean nations and conversely, the supposed superiority of Anglo-Saxons, Spain was especially sensitive to the notions of decline and renewal, particularly after the “National Disaster” of 1898, and Spain’s loss of its remaining larger colonies in the Spanish-American War. That loss, which became known as the “Desastre Nacional”, in turn was part of a discourse of “los males de la patria” (the ills of the country), as one earlier title put it, or El Problema Nacional, as the lawyer-philosopher Ricardo Macías Picavea dubbed the situation in his oft-cited book published a year after the war.83 The “National” or “Spanish” problem was the name given to Spain’s perceived political and cultural decadence, the mythologized origins of which were placed as early as the sixteenth century with the conquest of the Americas, the “Black Legend”, and the writings of such earliest colonists as Bartolomé de las Casas. This image of a Spain cursed by the Black Legend because of its abuse of the indigenous populations and mismanagement of New World resources, was employed in international politics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.84 Nineteenth-century Spain’s concerns were but another chapter in that narrative. By the first years of the twentieth century, there were dozens of articles, books, and conference proceedings arguing about which strategies to adopt in addressing the problem of Spain’s decadencia and social degeneration.85 Spain’s notions of degeneration in the late-nineteenth century differed from other European countries in two main ways. First, it had already been built upon a formidable and lengthy bibliography regarding the Black Legend and the country’s purported decline since the sixteenth century. Second, while many European and American writers were obsessed with the psychiatric and health issues of degeneration, following the seminal works of Morel, Lombroso, and Nordau (to name the most famous), Spanish writers – as concerned as others with the cultural, social, and political implications of such symptoms – quickly incorporated the narrative of loss in the Spanish-American War of 1898 into the lengthy tradition of Spain’s decadence. In this way, the literature of the “National Disaster” and the “Spanish Problem” became one more resource contributing to Spain’s contentious “decadence” debate, and was folded into a volatile discourse of degeneration at the national level. Unlike the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and ensuing Commune, which Nordau saw as the origins of France’s degenerative trend, the 1898 National Disaster merely underscored extant fears and simply rekindled anxieties of decadence that already had a long history in Spain. The result was the intensification of what other Spanish writers have called a “crisis” of the fin de siglo.86 In fin de siglo Spain these attitudes became known variously as miserabilismo, that is, the representation of the “miserableness” of life, or la mala vida, literally, the bad life.87 All of this was laid upon the politics of regeneration that characterizes much of the period of the Bourbon monarchy Restoration in Spain beginning in 1874, but becoming especially strident after the 1898 war.88 In the searching question of the leading intellectual Miguel de Unamuno: “What is it that lies there in all its backwardness?”89 It is against the backdrop of this general pessimism that regeneration – the political and

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intellectual policies and programs debated and forged to combat Spain’s decadence – began to coalesce, and with them a new theme of desire and voluntad (will) for reform. Given that so much of the rhetoric of the fin de siglo was filled with the anxiety over volition, or lack thereof, the ability of politicians and intellectuals to muster enough moral and physical energy to move Spain in new desired directions was a critical strategy to counter Spain’s perceived degeneration and decadence. Desire and volition were, therefore, understood as regenerative antidotes to the symptoms of degenerative morbid pathologies, particularly those of listlessness, indecisiveness and paralysis. It has been customary to speak of the links between artists, art and the political concerns of regenerationism in Spain, especially after the “National Disaster” of 1898, principally via the theme of landscape painting and the imaging of the spaces of the nation.90 However, I have been arguing that the call for regeneration to rally against the consequences of decadence and degeneration had saturated all other media and most discursive arenas. Appropriating diverse tropes of the period, Mani represented the physical signs of degeneration in quasi human-simian form as a way to critique the degenerative state of contemporary art, as well as politics. Of these, brutishness – or degeneration as atavism – signaled by fatigue and lack of volition, was a primary sign of the condition of both the arts and society. It is precisely in the literalness of his representation that Mani’s work conforms to and elaborates these discourses of degeneration and regeneration in fin de siglo Spain. Mani’s statue is the embodiment of brutishness, of becoming the “man-beast”. Nevertheless what Mani’s statue does not represent is the energy, desire and volition needed to regenerate this “hombre-bestia” into the truly human. Perhaps, at this prickly juncture in regeneration after the National Disaster, for Mani as for other fin de siglo artists and critics, demonstrating the cost of degeneration, particularly the outcome of its symptoms of indecision, inertia and paralysis, was political gesture enough.

Notes 1

This chapter emerges from a larger book project titled The End Again. Degeneration and Visual Culture in Modern Spain. In this shorter essay, I am connecting Mani’s work with degeneration for other reasons than those given by Juan Jose Lahuerta who acknowledged that Mani’s figures “are the perfect image of that species of sinister, inverted evolutionism, of that process of racial, social and sexual selection that were theories of degeneration.” Refer Juan Jose Lahuerta, “Miserabilismo,” in Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Universo Gaudí (Barcelona: Diputació de Barcelona; Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 2003) p. 73. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 2 Charles Baudelaire himself understood Grandville’s works in this way, when writing of numerous plates first published in 1828-29, and later collectively as Métamorphoses du jour par Grandville (Paris: Garnier Fréres, Paris, 1844). However, Jonathan Mayne feels Baudelaire was probably referring to Grandville’s Un autre monde (1844). Refer Charles Baudelaire, “Some French Caricaturists,” [1857], in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, Jonathan Mayen, editor (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964) p. 181. 3 Several of Charles H. Bennett’s woodcuts from his series “The Origin of Species, Dedicated by Natural Selection to Dr. Charles Darwin”, were published in the Illustrated Times in 1863 between May 9 and July 11. The entire series was published as a collection, Character Sketches, Development, Drawing and Original Pictures of Wit and Humour, in 1872 (London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler). The circular motif of his images was, according to Janet Browne, contrary to Darwin’s notions and that “Such ad hoc representations of progressive change indicate the range of available interpretations of Darwinian evolution.” Browne, “Darwin Caricature. A Study in the Popularization and Dissemination of Evolutionary Theory,” in The Art of Evolution. Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture, eds. Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press; Lebanon New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2009) p. 23. 4 Francesc Fontbona (Carles Mani: L’escultor maleit, Barcelona: Edicions Viena, 2004) p. 41, stated that seven or eight versions were executed, of which only two survive and that the work on these must have begun around 1901. However, the Museu Nacional de Art de Catalunya has dated its version somewhat earlier (1891-1904); the Casa Museu Gaudi’s version is signed and dated at 1907. The photograph of the original, large-scale work in situ in the 1907 Barcelona exhibition was printed in Ilustración Artística 26, no. 1325 (May 20, 1907) p. 336, and first reproduced by Fontbona, Carles Mani, 2004, p. 144. 5 Cristina Mendoza and Francesc M. Quílez i Corella have given the title “Stultification” to Mani’s work, p. 132; “Nonell and Maní: Two Artists against the Current,” in Barcelona and Modernity: Picasso, Gaudí, Miró, Dalí, eds. William H. Robinson, Jordi Falgás, and Carmen Belen Lord (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art; New Haven;

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London: Yale University Press, 2006) pp. 125-133; Fontbona, Carles Mani, 2004, p. 38. 6 Although Marcus Junius Brutus does not fare as well in Canto XXXIV of Dante’s inferno (34: pp. 61-67) where he is one of three people sent to the very center of Hell and the mouth of Satan (along with Judas Iscariot and Cassius), Shakespeare elevated him in Julius Caesar (Act 5, Scene 5) to “the noblest Roman of them all” for his part in attempting to return Rome to the common good; refer Guy P. Raffa, The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) p. 115; M. L. (Martin Lowther) Clarke, The noblest Roman: Marcus Brutus and his reputation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981). 10 R. Roque Bárcia, Primer Diccionario General Etimológico de la Lengua Española, vol. 2 (Madrid: Establecimiento Tipográfico de Alvarez Hermanos, 1881) p. 357. 11 Miguel de Unamuno, La Esfinge, in La Esfinge, La Venda, Fedra, José Paulino, editor (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1987) p. 108. Conversely, in an 1897 play titled The Degenerates by the physician Tomás Maestre, a leading character warns another that “Reading so many large books will only make you brutish.” Refer Tomás Maestre, Los Degenerados (Madrid: Rodriguez & Odriózola, 1897) p. 60. 12 Fontbona (Carles Mani, 2004) has collected most of the documents and critical reception on Mani’s piece. It was Camilo Bargiela who first reported having seen Mani working on the large-scale version by early 1903; refer Bargiela, “Gente Nueva. Mani,” El Globo 29, No. 9,931 (Saturday, 21 February, 1903) p. 1. 13 Josep Lleonart, Folletos literarios. Mañana de Arte (Barcleona: 1907) pp. 13-16, as cited by Fontbona, Carles Mani, 2004, p. 145. 14 For example, Maurice Keim, De la Fatigue et du surmenage au point de vue de I’ hygiène et de la médecine légale (Lyon, 1886), as quoted in Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990) p. 40. 15 The US historical text quote is from Samuel Whelpley, A Compend of History from the Earliest Times [1814] (New York: Robert B. Collins, 1856) p. 38, as cited in Spain in America: the Origins of Hispanism in the United States, ed. Richard Kagan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002) p. 23. See also Ruth MacKay, “Lazy, improvident people”: myth and reality in the Writing of Spanish History (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2006) pp. 95; 207. 16 Henry Charles Lea, “The Decadence of Spain,” The Atlantic Monthly (82, no. 489, July 1898) p. 38. 17 Gustav Diercks, “The Decadence of Art in Present-Day Spain,” Brush and Pencil (12, no. 4, July 1903) p. 234. 18 He used Miguel Blay’s statue Towards the Ideal as an example. Alcántara, La Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1897, p. 174. 19 He preferred the term neurasthenia over “nervous exhaustion” (by comparison to Charles Féré’s neurasthénie d’épuisement). He stated it was a byproduct of “our progress and refinement,” and was more frequently experienced by the educated classes of “civilized, intellectual communities” in large cities, rather than in rural areas, prefiguring what will be a common late-nineteenth century concern over “sick” cities; refer George Miller Beard, “Neurasthenia and Nervous Exhaustion,” The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 3, no.13 (Thursday, April 29, 1869) pp. 217-218. 20 Dr. Ph. Hauser, “El siglo XIX considerado bajo el punto de vista medico-social,” Revista de España (101, no. 402, December 1884) p. 206. Another researcher, J. Grasset, would dub neurasthenaia as the “disease of the century.” Cited by Vícente Ots y Esquerdo, Patogenia, variedades, profilaxis y terapéutica de la neurasthenia (Madrid: Establecimiento y Tipografía Viuda e Hijos de Manuel Tello, 1897) p. 5, without full reference, but most likely referring to Grasset’s Maladies du Systéme Nerveux (Paris 1879). 21 Ots y Esquerdo, Patogenia, variedades … de la neurasthenia, 1897; Mateo Bonafonte Nogués, Degeneración y Locura. Tesis de Doctorado (Zaragoza: Tipografía de Manuel Ventura, 1900) p. 11. 22 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990) pp. 4-6; 21. 23 For the popularity of representations, in the Spanish illustrated press, of women as languid, fatigued, or dying, see Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth-Century Press (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000) Chapter 6. 24 Nietzsche, although not published in translation until 1899, was known in Spain by the early 1890s and even before then by a few intellectuals reading the German original. Schopenhauer’s El mundo como voluntad y como representación appeared in Spain by 1899 and Miguel de Unamuno translated this German philosopher’s Sobre la voluntad de la naturaleza in 1900; refer Paul Ilie, “Nietzsche in Spain: 1890-1910,” PMLA (79, No. 1, March 1964) pp. 80-96; refer also Roberta Johnson, Crossfire. Philosophy and the Novel in Spain, 1900-1934 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993) especially chapter 3. 25 Michael Aronna, Pueblos Enfermos: The discourse of illness in the turn of the century Spanish and Latin American essay (North Carolina: University North Carolina Press, 1999) p. 19. 26 José Álvarez Junco, “De la Decadencia a la Degeneración. Nacionalismo y ambiente intelectual en la época de Ganivet,” Fundamentos de antropología (Nos. 8-9, 1998) p. 34. 27 Lucas Mallada, Los Males de la Patria [1890] (Madrid: Fundación Banco Exterior, 1989) p. 175. Likewise, art critic and novelist José Frances, more than a decade later, described the English and North American schools as produced by a temperament that was “solid, manly without coarseness, and graceful without being effeminate.” José Frances, “De Nuestra Decadencia Artística,” El Nuevo Mercurio no. 3 (March 1907) p. 277. 28 Nicolás Salmerón’s introduction to his translation of Max Nordau’s, Degeneración (Madrid: Imprenta de A. Marzo,

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1902) vol. 1, p. 14. 29 In contrast, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, German Nazi museum organizers and politicians would complain that the signs of degenerate (Entartete) art would be, precisely the opposite, namely the overly inflamed sexuality of artist. See Stephen Barron, ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles; New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991). 30 Richard A. Cardwell, “Degeneration, Discourse and Differentiation: Modernismo frente a noventa y ocho Reconsidered”, Critical Essays on the Literatures of Spain and Spanish America, eds. Luis T. González-Del-Valle, and Julio Baena (Boulder: The Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1991) p. 33. 31 Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) p. 67. 32 Albert Carreras y Xavier Tafunell, editors, Estadísticas Históricas de España, Siglos XIX-XX, 3 volumes, (Bilbao: Fundación BBVA, 2005) vol. 3, p. 124 (tables 2.4 and 2.5); André Armengaud, La Population Française (Paris 1971) pp. 494-496; cited by Robert A. Nye, “Cultures of Neurasthenia and the Culture of Sport in Belle Époque France,” Journal of Contemporary History (17, No. 1, Decadence, January 1982) p. 54; C. M. Law, “The Growth of Urban Population in England and Wales, 1801-1911,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (No. 41, June 1967) p. 130. For a discussion of the Latin /Anglo-Saxon debates in literature, see Lily Litvak, Latinos y anglosajones: orígenes de una polémica (Barcelona: Puvill Editor, 1980); and Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France, 1993, pp. 72-97. 33 “This idea goes united with the idea of force [fuerza], and of energy, but above all, spontaneous and autonomous force…”, José Echegaray, “Del carácter,” Historia y Arte. Revista Mensual Ilustrada 1, no. 1 (March 1895) p. 2. 34 For a discussion of that debate, see the essays in Qué es el modernismo?: nueva encuesta, nuevas lecturas, eds. Richard A. Cardwell and Bernard McGuirk (Boulder, Colo.: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1993). 35 José Deleito y Piñuela “¿Qué es el Modernismo?” Álbum Ibero-americano 20, no. 29 (August 7, 1902) pp. 340-341. 36 Perhaps this is in parallel manner to the way that the concept of volksgeist was transformed into that of national character; refer José Luis Ramos Gorostiza, “‘Caracter Nacional’ y Decadencia en el Pensamiento Español,” Biblio 3W. Revista Bibliográfica de Geografía y Ciencias [Universidad de Barcelona] (XV, No. 860, February 25, 2010); WEB: http://www.ub.edu/geocrit/b3w-860.htm [Accessed January 30, 2012]. 37 Manuel Sales y Ferré was published as an article in Juventus, nº 6 (1901); a related work, “Psicología del pueblo español,” was published in Nuestro Tiempo (nº 13 (January1902) p. 9ff. 38 Angel Ganivet, Idearium español [1897] (Madrid: Librería General de Victoriano Suárez, 1915) pp. 162-164; 171; English translation: Angel Ganivet, Spain: An Interpretation. Introduction by R.M. Nadal (and trans. possibly by him) [Reprint of 1946 London: Eyre & Spottiswoode ed.] (New York: AMS, 1976 ) pp. 122-124, 128. For a more detailed examination of the influences of various French perspectives on volition, will and the concept of aboulia in the works of Unamuno and Ganivet, see Gayana Jurkevich in “Abulia, Nineteenth-Century Psychology and the Generation of 98,” Hispanic Review (60, No. 2, Spring 1992) pp. 181-194; Ricardo Senabre, “Ganivet y el diagnóstico de la abulia”, Studia hispanica in honorem R. Lapesa. 3 vols. (Madrid: Gredos, 1974), II, pp. 595-599; and Álvarez Junco, “De la Decadencia a la Degeneración,” 1998, p. 36 39 Azorín, La Voluntad, 1902, Part III, Chapter 5; cited by Guillermo Diaz-Plaja, Tratado de las melancolías españolas. (Madrid: Organización Sala Editorial, 1975) pp. 58-59. Max Nordau, Degeneration, 1968, pp. 19-20, saw as characteristic of the degenerate not only a “mental weakness and despondency,” but also “a disinclination to action of any kind, attaining possibly to abhorrence of activity and powerlessness to will (aboulia).” 40 Ganivet, Idearium español, 1915, p. 163. 41 In Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Scholar Gypsy” (1853). Edward Alexander, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin and the Modern Temper (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1973) p. 137. Armand Hoog and Beth Brombert, “Who Invented the Mal du Siècle?”, Yale French Studies (13, 1954) pp. 42-51. Fin de Siècle. How Centuries End. 1400-2000, eds. Asa Briggs and Daniel Snowman (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1996) p. 160. 42 Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, trans. Adrian Collins. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1915) p. 25. 43 Th. Ribot, Diseases of the will, trans. Merwin-Marie Snell (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1915) pp. 25-27. 44 Eugene S. Talbot, Degeneracy. Its causes, signs, and results (London: Walter Scott, LTD.; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899) pp. viii-ix. 45 Brooks Adams, The law of civilization and decay: an essay on history [1896] (New York; London: Macmillan and Co., 1910) pp. xi. 46 Ibid., Adams, The law of civilization and decay [1896], 1910, p. 286. 47 Francisco Silvela, “Without a pulse, 1898” [El Tiempo (Madrid) Aug. 16, 1898] reprinted in translation in Modern Spain: A Documentary History, ed. Tim Cowans (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) p. 96 48 Anon. “En la cúspide,” El Globo 25, no 8242 (Monday, June 20, 1898) p. 1. 49 According to Ricardo Campos Marín and Rafael Huertas, this shift was also partially due the spin given by hygienists; refer “Theory of Degeneration”, The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian World. Spain, Spanish America and Brazil, eds. Thomas F. Glick, Miguel Angel Puig-Samper, and Rousaura Ruíz (Dordrecht; Boston; London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001) pp. 178-179. 50 For example, Bonafonte Nogués, Degeneración y Locura, 1900, pp. 31; 109, stated: “The limits of mental

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degeneration are very difficult to define, because the concept encompasses so much terrain.” 51 See the catalog, Pamela Kort and Max Hollein, editors, Darwin: art and the search for origins (Franfurt: Schrin Kunsthalle/ Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 2009); and “Endless forms”: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts, eds., Diana Donald and Jane Munro (Cambridge: The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge; Princeton: Yale University Press, 2009). 52 Thomas F. Glick, “Spain,” The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, ed. Thomas F. Glick (Austin; London: University of Texas Press, 1974) p. 310. This is a translated revision of work original published by Glick as “La recepción del darwinismo en España en dimensión comparativa”, Asclepio, (21, 1969) pp. 207-214, and later as the proceedings of the III Congreso Nacional de Historia de la Medicina. Actas, vol. I (Madrid; Valencia: Sociedad Española de Historia de la Medicina, 1971) pp. 193-200. Works by Darwin on other subjects had appeared in print in Spain as early as 1857. However, the first translation in Castilian of The Descent of Man first appeared in 1876 under an incorrect title that combined both Origins and Descent into “El Origen del Hombre” (translated by Joaquín María Bartrina and published by Editorial Renaixença). A later edition with the correct title appeared in 1885. On these early editions, see José Antonio Zabalbeascoa, “El primer traductor de Charles R. Darwin en España,” Filología Moderna [Madrid] 8 (1968): 269-275; José Alberto Gomis Blanco and Jaume Josa Llorca, “Los primeros traductores de Darwin en España: Vizcarrondo, Bartrina y Godínez,” Revista de Hispanismo Filosófico (14, 2009) pp. 43-60; and Jésus I. Catalá Gorgues,“Cuatro décadas de historiografía del evolucionismo en España,” Asclepio. Revista de historia de la medicina y de la ciencia [Madrid] (61, No 2, July - December 2009) pp. 9-66. 53 Glick, “Spain,” in The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, ed. Glick, 1974, pp. 307-345. 54 As one example, just a couple of years after the 1907 Barcelona exhibition featuring Mani’s statue, there were various lectures held in Valencia on the centenary of Darwin’s birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species; refer Thomas F. Glick, “The Valencian Homage to Darwin in the Centennial Date of his Birth,” III Congreso Nacional de Historia de la Medicina. Actas, vol. II (Madrid/Valencia: Sociedad Española de Historia de la Medicina, 1971) pp. 577-601. 55 Barbara Larson, The dark side of nature: science, society, and the fantastic in the work of Odilon Redon (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), especially Chapter 3, “Evolution and Degeneration”. 56 H.W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1952) p. 309. 57 His works appeared in various Spanish illustrated journals of the day, for example, “Críticos de Bellas Artes,” Ilustración Artística 20 (No. 1012, May 20, 1901) p. 335. On von Max’s and other nineteenth-century artists pictorial reactions to Darwin and uses of monkeys in their art, in addition to the previously mentioned catalogues, refer Kort and Hollein, Darwin art and the search for origins, 2009; and “Endless forms,” eds. Donald and Munro, 2009; also refer Marsha Morton, “From Monera to Man. Ernst Haeckel, Darwinismus, and Nineteenth-Century German Art,” The Art of Evolution. Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture, eds. Larson and Brauer, 2009, pp. 59-91. 63 See Fae Brauer, “Wild Beasts and Tame Primates: ‘Le douanier’ Rousseau’s Dream of Darwin’s Evolution”, Chapter Eight, The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms and Visual Culture, eds. Larson and Brauer, 2009, pp. 194223. 64 Marek Zgórniak, Marta Kapera, and Mark Singer, “Frémiet’s Gorillas: Why Do They Carry off Women?” Artibus et Historiae (27, No. 54, 2006) pp. 219; 223. Three to four years after Fremiet’s success in Paris and Munich, Mani was working on his Degenerats. Frémiet also about that same time was creating his Orangutan strangling a Borneo Hunter (1895; Paris, Gallérie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie Corporée, Museum National de’Historie Naturelle). “El Gorila,” La Ilustración Artística (6, no. 306, November 7, 1887) p. 410. 65 Barbara Larson, “Darwin’s Sexual Selection and the Jealous Male in Fin-de-Siècle Art,” The Art of Evolution, eds. Larson and Brauer, 2009, pp. 173-193. 66 Anne McClintock, Imperial leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest (New York; London: Routledge, 1995) p. 216. For further historical contexts of Fremiet’s works, see Zgórniak et al, “Fremiet’s Gorillas: Why Do They Carry off Women?” 2006, pp. 219-237. 67 Lombroso, Criminal Man [1876], 2006, p. 91. 68 On the reception and place of Lombroso within the history of criminology, see Paul Rock, “Caesare Lombroso as a signal criminologist,” Criminology and Criminal Justice (7, No. 2, May 2007) pp. 117-133. 69 Paul Lerner “Degeneration”, The Oxford Companion to the Body, eds. Colin Blakemore and Sheila Jennett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign:Web: . [Accessed: 16 July, 2005]; Stephen Jay Gould, Mismeasure of Man [1981] (New York: Norton, 1996) pp. 153-159. 70 Lombroso cited by Stephen G. Tibbetts and Craig Hemmens, Criminological Theory: A Text/Reader (Los Angeles and London: Sage, 2010) p. 191. 71 At the same time, he admitted it need not always be “ferocious, brutal, and violent”; refer Bernaldo de Quirós, Las nuevas teorías de la criminalidad, (Madrid: Hijos de Reus, Editores, 1898); English edition, Modern Theories of Criminality, trans. by Alfonso de Salvio (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co.,1912) pp. 13; 23. 72 Rae Beth Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 1875-1911. Vernacular Modernity in France (Farnham, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009) p. 97. 73 H. G. Wells, “Zoological Retrogression,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 271 (September 1891) pp. 246-253.

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Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body. Sexuality, materialism, and degeneration at the fin de siècle (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) pp. 5; 57. As Georges Canguilhem has written in his understanding of monstrosity to guard and define normalcy, it is “the threat of incompletion or distortion in the formation of the form”; refer Georges Canguilhem, La Connaissance de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 1985) pp. 172-173, cited by Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France, 1993, p. 63. 74 Francesc Fontbona, Carles Mani: L’escultor maleit (Barcelona: Edicions Viena, 2004) p. 93. 75 Ibid., p. 91. 76 Cited by Fontbona, Carles Mani, 2004, p. 36. 77 Charles Bell, Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806) pp. 155-156. 78 The work measures 44.5 x 61 x 18 cm. and is in the Museo Pablo Gargallo, Zaragoza. The low relief may have been related to a series dealing with capital virtues and sins, and that was exhibited in 1906 on Gargallo’s return from his Paris stay (1903-1904) under the title Estudis d´extremis oposats. WEB: Museo Pau Gargallo, http://cmisapp.zaragoza.es/ciudad/museos/es/gargallo/obras/detalle_Gargallo?id=2 . [Accessed 12-10-07.] 79 On themes of atavism in literature in France, see Dorian Bell, “Cavemen among us: Genealogies of Atavism from Zola’s ‘La Bête Humaine’ to Chabrol’s ‘Le Boucher’,” French Studies (62, 1, 2008) pp. 39-52. A few years after the Spanish translation of Zola’s work, the painter Antonio Fillol y Granell had shown in both the Spanish National Exposition of 1897, and at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, a work with the similar title, La Bestia Humana, which reviewers described as “pure modernity”; some understood the work as a representation of an unstable and violent-prone family, while others saw in it a scene of prostitution. The present location of this work is unknown. The quote of “pure modernity” was made by William Walton in Victor Champier, Andree Saglio, and William Walton, Chefs d’Oeurvre of the Exposition Universelle 1900 (Philadelphia: George Barrie and son, 1900) p. 37. Jacinto Octavio Picón “La Exposicion de Bellas Artes. Impresiones. IV,” El Imparicial [Madrid] (Weds., June 30, 1897) p. 1. 80 Similarly, some of the works of Degas, as previously mentioned, were thought to represent criminal elements, beginning at least in 1881 through his portraits of “Physionomie de criminal”, which were recognized as visual expositions of the theories of Lombroso; refer “Edgar Degas and Ludovic Lepic”, pp. 84-85. On Degas’s interest in evolutionism and biological determinism, see also Douglas W. Druick, “Framing the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen”, in Richard Kendall, Degas and the Little Dancer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) pp. 77-96. For a more complete discussion of Degas’s “Little Dancer” within the context of criminal and medico-scientific discourses, see Anthea Callen, The Spectacular Body: Science, Method, and Meaning in the Work of Degas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) Chapter 1. 81 José R. Garnelo, El hombre ante la estética. Tratado de antropología estética. 2 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta de A. Ruíz de Castroviejo,1885) vol. I, p. 268. 82 Garnelo, El hombre ante la estética, vol. I, pp. 272-273. 83 Lucas Mallada, Los males de la Patria (Madrid: Libería General de Victoriano Suárez, 1900); Ricardo Macías Picavea, El Problema Nacional (Madrid: Tipografía de Manuel Ginés Hernández, 1899). Macías Picavea was highly influenced by the theories articulated by Ernest Renan in his important 1882 essay, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?. 84 Two standard works on the “Black Legend” are Julián Juderías, La leyenda negra (Madrid: Editorial Swam, 1986) and Ricardo García Cárcel, La leyenda negra: historia y opinión (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1992). For the “Black Legend” as a tool of international politics, see Joseph P. Sánchez, The Spanish Black Legend: Origins of AntiHispanic Stereotypes / La leyenda negra Española: orígenes de los estereotipos antihispánicos (Albuquerque, N.M.: National Park Service, Spanish Colonial Research Center, 1990); and E. Shaskan Bumas, “The Cannibal Butcher Shop: Protestant Uses of las Casas’s ‘Brevísima relación’ in Europe and the American Colonies,” Early American Literature 35 (No. 2, March, 2001) pp. 107-136; more recent is María Guzmán’s examination, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 85 See the various publications listed in the works by P. Laín Entralgo, España como problema (Madrid: Seminario de Problemas Hispanoamericanos, 1948); Dolores Franco, España como preocupación [1944] (Madrid: Ediciones Guadarrama, 1960); and Sala Fundación BBVA [Francisco Comín et al], Regeneración y Reforma: España a comienzos del siglo XIX (Madrid: Fundación BBVA Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Secretaría de Estado de Cultura, 2002) p. 311. Also, Leonardo Romero Tobar, “La novela regeneracionista en la última década del siglo,” in Mercedes Etreros, María Isabel Montesinos, and Leonardo Romero, editors, Estudios sobre la novela española del siglo XIX (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1977) pp. 133-209. 86 José Álvarez Junco, “De la Decadencia a la Degeneración. Nacionalismo y ambiente intelectual en la época de Ganivet,” Fundamentos de Antropología (Nos. 8 & 9, 1998) p. 34. Likewise others have seen that the “”Desastre” multiplied “exponentially” the issues of an already heated, extant debate; see, Mariano Esteban de Vega “Los conceptos de decadencia y regeneración en la España de fin de siglo,” Crise intellectuelle et politique en Espagne à la fin du XIXe siècle: En torno al casticismo, Miguel de Unamuno; Idearium español, Angel Ganivet, ed. Jean-Claude Rabaté (Paris : Editions du Temps, 1999) pp. 75-86; and Más se perdió en Cuba. España, 1898 y la crisis de fin de siglo, ed. Juan Pan-Montojo [1998] (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2006). 87 Lahuerta, “Miserabilismo,” Universo Gaudí (Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 2003) p. 73. Álvarez Junco also characterized the writings of the period as “a tidal wave of pessimism covered with misleading terms such as ‘vitalism’, and that was represented by such names as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nordau, Ibsen, and

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later, Bergson and Sorel.” Also refer Álvarez Junco, “De la Decadencia a la Degeneración. …” 1998, p. 34. 88 Francisco Comín, et al, Regeneración y Reforma: España a comienzos del siglo XX (Madrid/ Bilbao: Sala Fundación BBVA) p. 311. Still others, such as Mariano Esteban de Vega, consider that the “mythification” of the Disaster was a political move that accompanied the rise of intellectuals in late nineteenth-century Spain, and that served the, perhaps necessary, purpose of promoting a program of regeneration; refer De Vega, “Los conceptos de decadencia y regeneración en la España de fin de siglo,” Crise intellectuelle et politique en Espagne, ed. Rabaté, p. 80. 89 Miguel de Unamuno, “La vida es sueño,” La España Moderna (10, No. 119, November 1898) p. 71. 90 For example, Pilar de Miguel Egea, “Pintura y Regeneracionismo,” Regeneración y Reforma: España a comienzos del siglo XIX, ed. Francisco Comín et al (Madrid: Fundación BBVA; Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Secretaría de Estado de Cultura, 2002) pp. 263-275.

CHAPTER SEVEN BECOMING SIMIAN: DEVOLUTION AS EVOLUTION IN TRANSFORMIST MODERNISM FAE BRAUER

We believe in the existence of very special becomings í animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting the animal no less than the human.1

In their anticolonialist and anticapitalist quest for “primitive consciousness” untainted by “civilizing missions”, it has been well established that such Anarchist Modernists as František Kupka and Pablo Picasso turned their gaze to tribal cultures.2 What has not been explored is the Transformist evolutionary dimension of their quest for interspecies relationships, particularly with primates í a quest equally pursued by Henri Rousseau and Clémentine-Hélène Dufau í at a time when these relationships appeared to have become irrevocably severed by “the scramble for Africa”.3 As Elisée Reclus so poignantly lamented: The world of animals, from which we derive our genesis and which was our tutor in the art of existence, which taught us fishing and the chase, and the rudiments of healing and of house construction, the habits of work in common, and of the storing of food í this world has become a stranger to us. ... the gulf which separates man from his brethren, the animals, has widened.4

This was also an ecological time when many species were recognized as being less threatening to human activity than threatened by it, as signified by the hunting and imaging of apes. When Paul Du Chaillu’s Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa was published in 1861, a menacing ape appeared on its frontispiece.5 Nearly fifty years later when Alexander Sokolowsky’s Observation on the psyche of the great apes was published, a menaced ape was shown on its frontispiece with an “unmistakable expression” of anxiety and helplessness in its “worriedly introspective eyes”.6 The horror conveyed by Du Chaillu images and text was displaced by a deep sense of empathy Sokolowsky shared with the ape, a feeling that Nigel Rothfels points out was alien to Du Chaillu.7 In sculpture this shift in imaging simians is marked by the differences between Emile Frémiet’s Gorilla enlevant une negresse in 1859 and his 1887 Gorilla enlevant une femme (Fig. 6.5), positioned so that the hunted gorilla, rather than the huntergorilla, was able to turn its accusatory gaze upon human spectators.8 It is also signified by the paintings of simians by Dufau, Kupka, Picasso and Rousseau. Although the popular culture of “jungle fever” and “monkeyana” accompanying France’s “colonialism by investment” relentlessly exoticized the cruelty of “wild beasts”, such AnarchoCommunists as Peter Kropotkin and Reclus and the Neo-Lamarckian zoologist, Edmond Perrier, were well aware how this facade masked widespread slaughter of animals.9 Yet in his treatise, Les Colonies animales, Perrier emphasized that the highest forms of evolution arose through the laws of association and cooperation exercised less by humans than by animals, as epitomized by primate colonies. That these primate colonies provided an ethical model for political Solidarism was well recognized by such French politicians as Léon Bourgeois. That they illuminated how interspecies relationships could evolve symbiotically was demonstrated by Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid and by Reclus in a range of publications including L’Homme et la Terre. That primates were able to develop close interspecies relationships, especially with human-animals, was pictured by

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Dufau, Kupka, Picasso and by Rousseau’s monkey paintings in which human-animals, as spectators, become the subject of the simian gaze. This politico-cultural transformation in interspecies relationships in France was only able to arise during the Republic of Republicans with the spread of Charles Darwin’s evolutionism, Ernst Haeckel’s “monism” and their fusion with Lamarckism to create Neo-Lamarckism, which Perrier and other Neo-Lamarckians termed “Transformism”. It was propelled by Perrier’s seminal treatise, Les Colonies animales in which animal colonies ranging from the simplest to the most complex were revealed as having evolved through association and cooperation. It was fuelled by Léon Bourgeois’ appropriation of Les Colonies animales to buttress his political doctrine of Solidarism. It was accelerated by formation of the Société pour la prévention de la cruauté envers les animaux (SPCA), Société protectrice des animaux (SPA), the Grammont Law passed in 1850 to outlaw acts of cruelty towards domestic animals in public alongside the emergence of animal rights, animal welfare, vegetarian and anti-vivisection societies, zoophilia and animal cultures which reached their zenith between 1900 and the outbreak of the First World War. It was also inspired by Henri Bergson’s 1907 treatise, L’Évolution créatice in which evolution was conceived neither as mechanistic not deterministic but as a creative impulse of becoming in which instinct played a vital role.10 At this time of degeneration pananoia over the acceleration of alcoholism, arthritis, tuberculosis, hysteria and syphilis, paradoxically interspeciation was lubricated by the flurry of monkeyana in popular culture parodying the evolutionary proximity between humans and simians as a subliminal means of defusing the phobia of devolution, and by Transformist Modernism. By unravelling this interdiscursivity this chapter will examine how, at the very moment when animals became endangered species, their colonies were inscribed as evolutionary models for homo sapiens to emulate, particularly primate colonies. By focusing upon the ways in which Dufau, Kupka, Picasso and Rousseau re-presented primates as playful, caring and collaborative, embodying the very mutualism and “socialist solidarity” of Neo-Lamarckian symbiosis articulated in Perrier’s, Kropotkin’s and Reclus’ treatises, it will explore how paradoxically the very devolutionism conjured by presenting primates as models for human behaviour became linked to evolution. By locating their re-presentations amidst the evolutionist politics of legislation for the Separation of Church and State, with feisty debates over animal rights as well as over the institution of medical primatology by Elie Metchnikoff, it will reveal the cultural and political activism inherent in modernists “becoming simian”. Finally it will reveal how their Transformist Modernist re-presentations of interspecies relationships entailed inverting human and animal power relations with human-animals becoming the object of primate visions.

Transformism, Mutualism and Solidarism: Perrier’s Les Colonies animales After the turmoil and trauma of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, by no means were Darwinism, Lamarckism or Monism immediately accepted in the Third Republic. During the Moral Order Regime of the Third Republic when “Church, Monarchy and Military” were extolled and Creationism taught, evolutionism was banned.11 Not only were species decreed to be “fixed by God” but a clear demarcation was also drawn between humans and animals, as Perrier pointed out in relation to the sanctification of Montaigne’s aphorism, “man alone is intelligent; beasts only have instinct”, and its elaboration as “man alone is religious and moral.”12 In 1872, Charles Martins complained to Darwin that French Professor of Physiology, Charles Rouget, had been officially warned not to teach evolution.13 In 1877, all libraries and educational societies were placed under State surveillance.14 Six times Darwin was rejected for membership of the Académie des Sciences.15 Only in 1878 after Radical Republicans, many of whom were Neo-Lamarckian Transformists, had gained a slim majority of Seats in the Chamber of Deputies was Darwin finally elected as a foreign correspondent and then only to its botany, not its zoology section.16 Only that year was Haeckel finally permitted to visit Paris where he was toasted by Perrier.17 The severe laws upon censorship passed by the Moral Order Government also had repercussions for translation and publication of Darwin in France. While French translations of

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The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals were published in 1873, as well as a new edition of Lamarck’s Philosophie zoologique, it was not until 1876 that Darwin’s The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants was translated, followed between 1878 and 1882 by The Fertilization of Orchids by Insects, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilization and The Power of Movements in Plants, and Insectivorous Plants. In these treatises, as Kropotkin pointed out, Darwin revealed “how the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by cooperation, and how that substitution results in the development ... which secure for the species the best conditions for survival.”18 These translations had a major impact upon Perrier who in 1872 had become Chair d’Histoire naturelle des mollusques, des vers et des zoophytes at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle and from 1879 President of the Société Zoologique de France. So sure was Perrier of the transformation of species that in 1879 he took the dangerous step of announcing it publicly to an audience at the Muséum.19 Convinced that the earliest signs of life evolved in the sea as demonstrated by Haeckel’s research into radiolarians, poriferans (sponges) and annelids (worms),20 and by Darwin’s publications on Coral Reef communities, from 1880 to 1885 Perrier embarked upon a series of oceanographic expeditions.21 Instead of following Haeckel to the Canary Islands, Perrier concentrated upon the Mediterranean and Atlantic to scrutinize algae, protozea, monera, radiolaria, sponges, hydras, medusas and coelanterata.22 While Haeckel’s innovative research into monera provided Perrier with demonstrations of simple organisms, he found Darwin’s examples of reciprocal evolution chimed with those in Lamarck’s Zoological Philosophy in which Lamarck theorized how the simplest of organisms (in terms of low life) could be transmuted into complex (or fitter) species through mutual cooperation and environmental interaction from which they developed new traits that could be inherited.23 Fusing Darwin’s reciprocal evolutionism and Haeckel’s concept of the association of organs with Lamarck’s Transformism, Perrier maintained that instead of simple organisms being eliminated in “the struggle for existence”, they could evolve into more complex species through association and cooperation. This was the premise of his treatise, Les Colonies animales. As he explained: “All superior organisms are nothing other than associations or, to use a scientific term, colonies of organisms.”24 Just after Pierre de Brazza planted the French flag in the Congo in 1881 to mark France’s “scramble for Africa”, Les Colonies animales was published. Politically its timing could not have been more serendipitous. That year Jules Ferry and Léon Gambetta had legislated for the liberalization of association, education, suffrage and the press.25 With religious instruction forbidden in state schools and funding to religious schools and orders suppressed, this legislation was instrumental to laicization of the Republic. It entailed dispersing the budget allocated for religion to the institutions of science and medicine, notably the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle.26 It also entailed proselytizing Neo-Lamarckian evolutionism through such publications as Des Sociétés animales: Etudes de psychologie comparée by Alfred Espinas that paved the way for Les Colonies animales.27 Challenging Thomas Huxley’s concept of “the animal world” as “a gladiator’s show … whereby the strongest, the swiftest and the cunningest live to fight another day”, Perrier maintained that diverse species did not evolve through “might makes right”.28 Conversely “low forms” were not eliminated in “the struggle for existence” despite this having been the way in which Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” was translated.29 “I have tried to show in my book Les Colonies animales et la formation des organisms that the success in the struggle for life does not arise merely through brute strength or a malicious tactic”, Perrier subsequently explained. “Association, mutual assistance, the division of labour ... the solidarity which results [from them] have played a preponderate role in the perfection of organisms.”30 Through association and cooperation, “low forms” were not annihilated or extinguished, Perrier maintained, but transmuted into higher species as illuminated by such minute organisms as monera. “These moneras show us that even with the simplest living forms”, Perrier deduced, “there is a strong tendency manifested amongst individuals who look like another, to associate with one another in order to keep

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everythingg in commoon.”31 As Perrier P acknnowledged,, for a long gtime Pasteeur had rev vealed how important it was for humans h to penetrate p “thhe secret of the infinitely small”.322 This w was particulaarly clear with w “Myxoodictyum So ociale”, thee monera thhat Ernst Haeckel had discoveredd consistingg of small sp pherical shaaped deposits with rad diating pseud udopodes (Fig. 4.11).33 Once eachh sphere reaached a partticular volum me, Perrier found they divided intto two equaal parts that engendereed more paartitions.34 Yet insteaad of bein ng separated d, each spphere was linked by 35 pseudopoddes, as dem monstrated by b his illustrrations. With W protoplasmic granuules passing g from one to anotherr this “enseemble of ind dividuals” ffunctioned, he found, as “a true society”.36 Even with these simpplest of liviing forms, he h deduced that there was w a strong tendency to associatte with one another, tthe same cooperation c n occurringg with Pro otomyxa formed on aabandoned shells, as demonstraated in the illustration ns commisssioned for Perrier’s trreatise from m Muséum d’Histoire 37 Naturelle illustrator, Armand-Lu ucien Clémeent (Fig. 7.1). Not on nly did theyy share sustenance but he discovvered that at the very y moment of reprodu uction, their pseudopoodes also rendered r a 38 protective envelope of o protoplassm around tthe commu unal mass. “This is coommunism in the full acceptancee of the worrd”, Perrier concluded..39

Figure 7.1 A Armand-Lucien Clément, Protomyxa auurantiaca aya ant capturé de d nombreux IInfusoires, 18 881. Etching, Edmond Perrrier, Les Coloonies animaless et la formatiion des organ nismes (Paris: Masson et Ciee, Éditeurs, 18 881). Figure 7.2 A Armand-Lucieen Clément, Squelette S de ddeux éponges: Grand Épong ge, 1881. Etch ching, Edmond d Perrier, Les Colonies animales et la foormation des organismes o (P Paris: Masson et Cie, Éditeu urs, 1881). Puublic Domain.

In enerrgizing theiir cells with h algae Perrrier consid dered Radio olarians, ass the first in nheritors of 40 monera, fo forged a moore complex x relationshhip. Their relationship p with algaee appeared mutual andd symbiotic. This provved to be th he same witth such inteermediary beings b betw ween the veegetable andd animal woorld as Myxxomycetes, developing d from wood d-chips, and d Dendromaanas.41 Even n though thee common ssponge mayy seem an ex xception (Fiig. 7.2), Perrrier was qu uick to pointt out:

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The mechanism for (its) formation … is in reality the same as for the most elevated animals; one and the other are cellular colonies whose ancestors took steps to constitute an organism.42

Initially independent with a distinct personality, he found that little by little each sponge was absorbed into the commune as illustrated by Clément in Fig. 7.2. When fused “to the highest degree”, Perrier compared them to an association of workshops or a vast factory where productive power develops by itself in order to preserve and enhance the prosperity of the colony.43 In the conclusion to his 790-page treatise, Perrier pondered whether the picture he had painted of their evolution was comparable to the gradual ascension of humanity towards civilization.44 “Was it not through the division of labour … cooperation, solidarity, liberty tempered by law, and the gradual coordination of all social forces that humble and savage people had acquired the richness, power and unity of our great modern nations?” he rhetorically asked.45 Far from “colonies” being confined to these species, Perrier pointed-out that this theory extended to the animal kingdom whose societies were admirably governed. Continually emphasizing that evolution was facilitated by “cooperation”, “solidarity” and an harmonious division of labour, in his earlier treatise, Animal Transformations, Perrier called this the Law of Association.46 The significance of association and mutualism in Animal Societies had also been stressed by Espinas, and correlated with animal sociability, empathy and morality.47 Its significance was subsequently corroborated by Kropotkin from his research conducted across Eastern Europe and Siberia and published in his treatise, Mutual Aid, as expounded in the third part of this essay. From the power generated by this Law of Association, Perrier deduced that higher organisms could evolve from the simplest to most complex forms of life as epitomized by simians. He found that Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Georges Romanes’ Animal Intelligence followed by the treatise of Berlin-based zoologist, R. Hartmann, The Anthropomorphic Monkeys and their organization compared to that of man, translated into French in 1886, all confirmed that the colonies of mammals most admirably governed were those of simians.48 In his book, Transformism, Perrier singled out the high intelligence of “des grands singes”: The great monkeys.49 In The Anatomy and Physiology of Animals, he emphasized the “true solidarity” that existed amongst numerous species of monkeys who form bands with a leader.50 Often he deferred to Animal Intelligence by the British zoological Secretary of the Linnaean Society, George Romanes, which Perrier translated into French in 1887.51 So impressed by their intelligence, their powers of reason, imitation and “observation and readiness to establish new associations”,52 Romanes had concluded: “Monkeys certainly surpass all other animals in the scope of their rational faculty”.53 Through his examples of simian mothers grieving for the loss of their children to the point of death, their mourning rituals when a member of their colony dies and their care for the injured, particularly the way they gently folded them in their arms, Romanes conveyed their empathy.54 “Affection and sympathy are strongly marked”, he wrote, “the latter indeed more so than in any other animal.”55 While Romanes also emphasized the many examples he could provide on how they acted in cooperation, so did Hartmann who concluded that they were “peaceful”, “never dangerous to the human or animal economy” and in this respect, “invariably superior to many men”.56 Despite their supposed lack of morality being contrasted with human ethics by traditional zoologists, Perrier reported that even in captivity at the Galerie des Singes of the Muséum, they displayed remarkable sensibility and a high degree of moral development far surpassing that of many of their human spectators. Perrier acknowledged that this had long been observed by Lamarck who had described them as “apathiques”, as well as “sensibles et intelligents”.57 Their cooperation with one another, which Perrier called “their excellent domestic relationships”, and their etiquette had not just been also acknowledged by Darwin, according to Perrier, particularly in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, but even by Richard Owen and his wife at the London Zoo whose observations were comparable to the cartoons of Jenny the second OrangOutang at the London Zoo “taking Tea” with far more delicacy than the ladies and gentleman ogling her.58 Perrier likened the “cooperation, solidarity” and “division of labour” in these animal

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colonies with “forms of government” and with “great modern nations”.59 Given the French Solidarist quest for harmonious cooperation, Perrier ended Les Colonies animales with an ominous warning to governments against abiding by the “struggle for life” or “survival of the fittest”: If they did not heed these conditions fundamental to natural organisms, even the most perfect of species could become extinct. “As nations succeed one another in the domination of the world”, he warned, “evolutionary progress would end in ruins”.60 From the moment he entered the Chambre des Députés as a Socialist Radical in 1887, this “struggle for life” was what Léon Bourgeois railed against. Through his reading of Darwin, Bourgeois was cognizant of brutal struggles in nature.61 At the same time he linked France’s brutal social-economic conflicts and colonial wars to Social Darwinist liberal individualism and laissez-faire capitalism, especially when “survival of the fittest” seemed as free to reign in business as it was in the jungle. Rather than evolutionary progress, he considered Social Darwinism had wrought degeneration and devolution. Seeking an alternative evolutionary model of society and nature, Les Colonies animales provided him with a solution. In proving that interdependence was a natural phenomenon and a scientific fact, Perrier’s treatise propelled Bourgeois to conceive of society as an interdependent organism where individuals and primary communities were the cells with the state as the regulating centre. Instead of competition or conflict, human relations in this interdependent organism would be comparable to Perrier’s examples in nature of cooperation and association, this model of governance supposedly producing organic relations. This was the premise of Bourgeois’ 1896 book, Solidarité in which he argued that mutual obligations and co-operation, rather than laissez-faire capitalism and individualism, were fundamental to a just society. In the wake of the Pasteurian revolution, Solidarism was also posited as a means of negotiating the crisis of contagious disease and degeneration by co-operation and interdependence.62 In his Lettres sur le mouvement social, Bourgeois quoted from Perrier’s Les Colonies animales to provide natural validation and scientific justification for his theory of Solidarism. Instead of competition being the precondition of progress, progress has only been realized by the association of individual forces and their harmonious coordination. The natural sciences constitute not only the highest philosophy, but the only one capable of furnishing to governments the light necessary to clarify and heal the profound plagues of the present time.63

Readily reciprocating Bourgeois’ generous acknowledgement, Perrier demonstrated the connection between the social constitution of organisms and human societies in the Preface to his second edition of Les Colonies animales in which he posited Solidarism as the ideal outcome.64 ... this book will show those who preach to us about the struggle for existence; those who show us success in this struggle [and] progress in power, only do so from association; it will also show us that … the strongest progress results from association. Those who teach us by their associations prosper ... and always confirm that the most elevated place, among the social virtues, arises from the practice of solidarity.65

By presenting Solidarism as a natural phenomenon linked to the evolution of organisms through association, Bourgeois was able to galvanize support. In 1895, the Socialist Jean Jaurès declared in the Chamber of Deputies that it was necessary “to substitute for the universal lutte pour la vie – which leads to universal struggle on the battlefield – a regime of social concord and unity.”66 Since solidarity was not a human invention but one arising from animal species, claimed Reclus, humans needed to turn to the animal world for aspirational models.67 The “spread of the ideas of solidarity” and the “conquests of science” amongst the “associated masses of workers” would then, Reclus predicted in his treatise, Evolution and Revolution, yield a revolution for the benefit of all.68 “To the great evolution now taking place will succeed”, he jubilantly predicted, “the great revolution.”69 In The Descent of Man, Kropotkin pointed out that Darwin had recorded that in numerous animal societies where there are sufficient resources, the struggle between individuals disappears and is replaced by cooperation. In such societies, the fittest are not the physically strongest or the

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most cunning, but those best able to provide mutual aid for the welfare of the community. “In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life”, he wrote, “understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense í not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species.”70 He concluded that “the animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous and the most open to further progress.”71 Reclus took this one step further, proudly confessing that he “embraced all animals in my affection for socialist solidarity” and insisted they be granted equal status in mutualist society.72 His supporters included Bergson, who stressed human kinship with all living creatures, their mutual interpenetration through which human instincts and intuition could be unleashed.73 In their search for “primitivist” animal cultures and their cultural manifestations of mutualism, these theories became just as significant for Picasso, Kupka and Dufau as they were for the art of Rousseau.

Animal Welfare, Monkeyana and Curating Evolution: Muséum National de l’Histoire Naturelle and the Jardin Des Plantes By 1890, Neo-Lamarckians reigned within the faculties of the Sorbonne as much as they did at the Musée national d’histoire naturelle. Such ‘muséum science’ figures as Henri Milne-Edwards and Isidore and Albert Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Director of the Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation were replaced in 1893 by the Neo-Lamarckians Alphonse Milne-Edwards and Perrier. While Isidore and Albert Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had situated the Museum and Zoo within the theory of Lamarck, Alphonse Milne-Edwards and Perrier situated them within Neo-Lamarckism.74 The advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution and Neo-Lamarkism confirmed the role of the Muséum to find analogies and homologies between these species in order to consider how they were related through evolution. It also led to a project to increase the collection of primates. Once Director of the Muséum from 1891, Alphonse Milne-Edwards prepared an extensive natural history of animals while continually lobbying government to increase the zoo budget.75 From the moment he was appointed, he wasted no time in presenting a paper to the Minister for Public Instruction in Robert Arthur Talbot’s government, arguing that the popularity of the zoo had proven a hindrance to development of its scientific research and the expansion of its collection.76 To corroborate his argument, Milne-Edwards cited the outstanding research conducted by Georges and Frédéric Cuvier, Étienne and Isidore Geoffey Saint-Hilaire and most of all, by Lamarck. Major breakthroughs in the understanding of comparative anatomy, animal behaviour, hybridization and the acclimatization of foreign species to European conditions had, he maintained, only occurred because the Muséum and zoo were at the centre of a vast collecting and research programme.77 The Muséum’s emphasis on precision in the categorization and description of animals had, he continued, spread across the literature of zoology and botany.78 Milne-Edwards stressed the role that the Muséum and zoo had played in contributing to the knowledge of evolution, following Lamarck and the “great Darwin”, while endeavouring to develop new species, several types of antelope along with gnus having been released as “new game” into the forests around Paris.79 To continue to do so, he required funding for artists to image evolution, particularly in the Muséum’s teaching amphitheatre. He also required re-curation of the Galleries of Comparative Anatomy, Paleontogy and Anthropology. Perceived as fulfilling the Radical Republican mission of propagating evolutionism, MilneEdwards was relatively successful. In 1893 on the centenary of the Muséum, he gained funding to commission Fernand Cormon for the “pictorial decoration of the Classroom of the new galleries of the Museum of Natural History” in 1893.80 Set in the new galleries, this “Classroom” or amphitheatre was primarily designed to illustrate or at least to complement the history of evolution from the Stone Age for courses in anthropology, comparative anatomy, paleontology and zoology, many of which were free.81 Funding was forthcoming for sculpture to be commissioned from

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Frémiet annd Paul Riccher for thee Jardin dess Plantes, as illustrated d by Frémieet’s Orang--outangs et sauvage dde Borneo exhibited e in n 1895, com mmissioned d by the Miinister for PPublic Instrruction and 82 designatedd for the Museum. M Funding wass also ceded d in 1893 fo or re-curatiion of the Galleries G of Comparatiive Anatom my, Paleonttology and Anthropology under the directiion of Charrles-LouisFerdinandd Dutert, whhich was inaaugurated onn 21 July 18 898.83

Figure 7.3 B Black and whiite postcard, Galérie G des Sin inges - Les Go orilles, 1900. Muséum M d’hiistoire naturellle, Jardin des Plantes. Phootograph by thhe author. Posttcard collectioon of the autho or.

To currate “the vision v of th he evolutionn of the organic o worrld”, in Auuguste Petiit’s words, specificallly from thee position of o Neo-Lam marckian Trransformism m, the exhibbits were arranged so that the sppectator couuld graduatee from the ooldest and simplest s org ganisms, sittuated at the entrance, to increasingly compplex ones at a the end oof the galleery.84 This “marche dee la vie”, as a Chair of Paleontoloogy, Albert Gaudry, caalled it, waas pictured with organisms becom ming “de pllus en plus perfectionnnés”.85 As the postcarrd of the Gaalerie des Singes S taken n around 19901 makes clear (Fig. 7.3), apess, gorillas, chimpanzee c es, orang-uttangs and monkeys m were situatedd within the Muséum omplex orgaanisms beforre homo sap piens. That displays as the culminnating pointt in the evollution of co the conjunnctions of anatomy a in this displayy conveyed d a Transforrmist messaage that all organisms are associiated, follow wing Perrieer and otheer Neo-Lam marckian ev volutionistss, was cleaar to many artists, inccluding Euugène Carrière, Dufauu, Kupka, Picasso P and d Rousseauu.86 That Piicasso was familiar w with this display is ind dicated by his commeents to And dré Malrauxx about thee bones he encountereed there apppearing “neever sculptedd” but “moulded” and about his hhaving rounded off the ends whennever he dreew them.87 At the same time, Milne-Edw wards had aalso stressed d in his rep ports to Bouurgeois as Minister M of u a collectiion of live primates p in Public Insstruction thee urgent neeed for fundinng to be ablle to build up the Jardin des Plantess. In his 189 91 Report too the Ministter, he emph hasized the importancee for artists to be ablee to study directly d from m these livee animals, particularly p y primates.888 As he rem minded the Minister: ““Barye, Caiin, Frémiet and many oothers weree able to maake studies tthere from which w they 89 could proffit.” He pointed p out that the M Muséum also o needed to o replace thhe deplorable monkey house, phhotographedd around 19 900 in Fig. 7.4. Estab blished as early e as 18337, it had become b so

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unhygienic that he reported finding most of the monkeys became sad within weeks before sickening and dying.90 Virulent lobbying for the improvement of these conditions continued when Perrier became Director of the Muséum in 1900 and when as President of the Société zoologique de l’acclimatation, he insisted upon pursuing an ecological policy dedicated to the protection and conservation of species.91 This was the polemical state of the Jardin des Plantes when Dufau, Kupka, Picasso and Rousseau visited it just before and after 1900.

Figure 7.4 James, black and white postcard, 313, Paris íJardin des Plantes í Palais des Singes, 1900. PhotoMécanique, 155 Boulevarde Magenta, Paris. Photograph by the author. Postcard collection of the author.

By the time Rousseau frequented the Jardin des Plantes, the display of its zoo animals had become, according to Eric Baratay, transformed into living tableaux.92 “Often on Sunday”, recalls the Baroness d’Oettingen writing under her pen-name of Roch Grey, he would “walk in the Jardin des Plantes or the Jardin d’Acclimation”.93 These Sunday promenades were far from being merely recreational. In the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes, Rousseau would watch the lions, tigers and particularly, the primates for hours before picking up his pencil or stick of charcoal to sketch them vigorously. On returning to his studio, he would pin these drawings up on his walls and transpose parts of them into canvas.94 By no means was he alone in so doing. Each spring, more than three hundred cards were issued by the Muséum to permit artists to set themselves up in front of the cages before the Jardin was opened to the public.95 From 1900, they included such well-known artistes-animaliers as Paul Jouve and Rembrandt Bugatti, as well as those Modernists not renowned for depicting animals, Dufau and Kupka. Those ineligible for such cards pursued less legitimate means of access, Picasso and the Catalan sculptor, Manolo (Manuel Hugué), sneaking into the Jardin around midnight with their friend, the poet Nicolas Deniker. Nicolas was the son of the zoologist and botanist, Joseph Deniker, Bibliothécaire of the Muséum National de l’Histoire Naturelle, an authority on apes who had published his 1886 treatise comparing ape, gorilla and gibbon fœtuses with human fœtuses and who had contributed to a book on the history and morals of mammals, particularly simians.96 To expound Huxley’s research into anatomical analogies between homo sapiens and primates as proof of their common ancestry,

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Deniker had compared the similarities between human and gorilla genitals and their fœtuses and concluded that their differences were only observable in the last part of the gorilla’s fœtal development.97 Not only was his son, Nicolas, aware of his theories but Nicolas seems to have also been given his father’s key to the Jardin des Plantes, according to Picasso’s recollection of these events for André Malraux.98 Once safely inside the Jardin des Plantes, they would pretend to be monkeys and orang-outangs taunting the lions in their cages until they roared.99 Not until four years later did Picasso visit the Musée de l’Homme at the Palais de Tokyo, the Ethnographic Museum being curated by Professor of Anthropology at the Muséum National de l’Histoire Naturelle, E.T. Hamy.100 Hence well before he experienced his notorious epiphany on encountering African tribal masks and sculpture at the Ethnographic Museum, he had already visited the Muséum National de l’Histoire Naturelle and the Jardin des Plantes.101 While he may have been aware of Joseph Deniker’s Les Races et les peuples de la terre, as Christopher Green conjectures, he may also have been aware of his Mammifères, Singes, Prosimiens, Chiroptères, Carnivores, as well as the exploration of simians by Perrier, Darwin, Hartmann, Romanes and Kropotkin.102 At the same time, Picasso, like Dufau, Kupka and Rousseau could not have avoided contact with the prolific Monkeyana in popular culture illustrated in Figs. 7.5 and 7.6 that provided a curious parody to the prevalence of zoological research into monkeys, scrutiny of their psychology at the General Psychological Institute and experimentation with their domestication from 1900, as well as the foundation of medical primatology by Elie Metchnikoff at the Pasteur Resource Centre in 1903.103

Figure 7.5 Jules Chéret, L’Île des Singes, tous les soirs, Nouveau Cirque, 1888. Poster, lithograph. Gallica: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ENT DN-1 (CHERET,Jules)-FT6). Public Domain. Figure 7.6 Charles Lévy, Jacqot & Coco [duo de singes], 1888-1894. Poster, lithograph. Gallica: Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, FT 6-ENT DP-17). Public Domain.

Between 1880 and 1910, as Rae Beth Gordon points out, “the number of trained monkeys increased exponentially on music hall stages”.104 So prevalent had they become at Olympia and

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Folies-Berrgère that Fantasio F complained oof France su uffering from m an “invassion of mon nkeys” and warned that it would culminate in a monkeyy union thatt would revo olutionize hhuman cultu ure.105 Haven’t you seen thee posters for the Olympia and Folies-B Bergere? ... The revues aree supposed to o sum up current eevents satirizinng the most visible v incidennts of contemp porary history ... and they’vve found nothing better to put onn stage than a monkey, tw wo monkeys, m more monkey ys. ... When so ocialism has ccompletely trriumphed, when thee worker (of the t fourth estaate) will have finished bleeding us dry ... the fifth estaate which is none n other than the monkey-statee will be then ready to joinn in the dance.. Educated, peerfected, civillized ... we wiill see the monkey union and thee monkey revo olution.106

Invariaably these performancees tended too binarize monkeys m into o opposing identities. They were characterizzed as Jeaan-Jacques Rousseau’’s “noble savage” an nd the sopphisticated gentleman epitomizedd by Prince Charles, the monkeyy performeer at the Fo olies-Bergèrre who wass presented equally aas intelligennt and as sophisticaated as thee average human. Coonversely they were mischievoous like Daccko, who peerformed at the Eden Theatre T in Ju uly 1884 annd who wass likened to a degenerrate proletarriat, Socialist and Annarchist trou ublemaker capable c of terrorizing the entire 1077 country. On livinng in Paris, both Pic asso and Kupka K wou uld have bbeen exposed to this Monkeyanna which inncluded Gasston Serpettte’s Songe d’une nuit d’été, Monnnaie de singe, Louis Jacolliot’ss Voyage aux a pays dees singes, ssuch salacio ous circus feats as L’’Île des Sin nges at the Nouveau C Cirque in ruue S. Honorré where Juules Chéret’’s poster rev veals womeen being lusstily seized by rampannt monkeyss (Fig. 7.5),, and even an hilarious duo act at a the Ambaassadeurs Café C on the 108 Champs-É Élysées by thhe notoriou us performinng monkeyss, Jacqot and d Coco (Figg. 7.6).

Figure 7.7 F František Kupkka, Self-Portra ait with Pipe, 1902-1903. Pen P and ink drrawing on grayy paper. Photo ograph of the author. Mussée d’Orsay Documentation n. Pablo Picassoo, Picasso parr lui-même, 1 903. Pen and d ink drawing on cartridge paper. Photo ograph of the Figure 7.8 P author. Mussée d’Orsay Documentation n.

Drawinng upon thhe allegoriccal connecction in Western W culttures of m monkeys with w sexual licentiousnness, both Picasso P and Kupka hadd pictured monkeys m in association with promiiscuity and prostitutioon.109 Yet inn keeping with w these ssatirical reviiews in which monkeyys were hum manized as wise men,, gentlemenn like Princce Charles, or even kiings, Kupkaa pictured ttwo cloaked d monkeys bearing crrowns on theeir heads en ntitled Les R Rois-Singes.110 Consistent with succh popular performers p as James Sardner annd his monk key, Jocko,, at the Buttes Chaum mont, in 19001 Picasso pictured a

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circus clow wn holdingg the hand of o a monkeyy dressed in a red jack ket, white ttrousers and d black hat (Fig. 7.9).111 Yet duriing and afteer their visitts to the Jarrdin des Plan ntes, this seeems to hav ve changed. While Kuppka drew tw wo monkey ys in 1902 eengaged in a playful tu ug-of-war gaame over a toy sword rather thann survival-oof-the-fittestt rivalry andd portrayed himself at his h desk witith a monkey climbing over his drawings (Fig. 7.7), Picasso portrays himself h as a monkeyy (Fig. 7..8).112 His metamorpphosis is thee reverse off Armand C Charpentier’s contempo oraneous noovel entitled d The Story of a Monkkey where the t monkey y evolves innto an Anth hropoid befo ore becominng a man.113 Yet it is consistentt with the monkey m costtumes that T Toulouse-L Lautrec and the owner oof the Mou ulin-Rouge, 114 Charles Ziidler, wore to the futurist “1993 B Ball”.

Pablo Picasso, Clown au sin nge, 1901. Oil on canvas. 33 3x19.1 cm. Pu ublic Domain.. Figure 7.9 P Figure 7.10 Benjamin Raabier, La Théo orie de Darwiin... retournéee. Le singe qu ui descend de l’homme, 190 01. Coloured lithograph. A Archives Charrmet. Public Domain. D

In his ppen and ink drawing daated 1 Januaary 1903 in nscribed Piccasso par luui-même (Fig. 7.8), the monkey-aas-Picasso iss crouched in i such a w way that his penis is just visible. W With one arm m dangling, the other ccurled, tail unfolding u behind b him, Picasso picctures himself naked w with paintbru ush behind one ear, crrayon behinnd the otherr and a miscchievous grrin, the sort that Darwiin likened in n apes to a “hideous ggrimace”.115 In alludin ng to investtigations intto simian creativity byy zoologistss, this selfportrait m may suggest how Picassso would loook had he not n evolved d into a hum man, follow wing Prince Charles’ ddeclaration about his id dentity as “tthe monkey y [who] desscends from m man.”116 The T subject of extensivve satire, thhe most reprroduced carrtoon parod dying this in nversion waas by Benjam min Rabier in 1901, eentitled La Théorie T de Darwin... D rretournée. Le L singe quii descend de l’homme (Fig. 7.10) in which a monkey iss shown liteerally descennded to the ground dow wn a gentlem man’s back k to pick up a rosette just like thee one that th he gentlemaan is wearin ng. Upon beeing rebukeed as a “dirtty animal”,

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the monkey reminds him that it was not he who descended from man: It was man who descended from monkeys.117 This desire to become more simian than human may be regarded as part of a quest for devolution into a primate or primitive evolutionary state in which Picasso and Kupka could become more in contact with their instincts and raw animality, spontaneity and playfulness, which they considered had been lost by the civilization, colonization and rationalization of homo sapiens and their demarcation from animals. Since primates were regarded as an intermediary stage between man and animal, this inversion of evolution and devolution meant that devolution was equivalent to evolution: It was a means of going back in order to go forward with new forms of consciousness gained through direct contact with the unconscious, instinctual impulses, the empathy, energy and sensitivity of animal magnetism, as well as new sources of creativity. Picasso’s identification of himself with the transgressive mischief-making monkey of Georges Méliès’ 1900 film, Le Savant et le Chimpanzé, rather than with the gentlemanly demeanour of Prince Charles, was also consistent with Picasso’s political alignment with AnarchoCommunism.118 By no means were Picasso and Kupka alone in this quest as illuminated by the rapid growth in zoophilia, zoological psychology, vegetarianism, antivivisectionist societies, animal rights and animal welfare. As Ceri Crossley surmizes: “At the turn of the century, one had to look hard to find a French literary figure or intellectual who didn’t keep a pet of some sort.”119 This included Picasso who maintained a menagerie of pets including a dog, three Siamese cats and a monkey named Monina, and who was often photographed with some of his animals.120 Once animal welfare became mainstream, the killing, hunting and even eating of animals was regarded by many in the Republic of Republicans as reprehensible.121 As early as 1845, La Société protectrice des animaux (SPA) had been established followed by the passing of the Grammont Law in 1850 although it was not until 1903 that the first refuge for animals was created.122 While La Société française contre la vivisection had been founded in 1882 with Victor Hugo as its Honorary President, more confrontational was the Ligue populaire contre les abus de la vivisection directed by Marie Huot (also a member of Société protectrice des animaux) and Maria Deraismes.123 They were supported by Reform Feminists, Marguerite Durand and Madeleine Pelletier, Durand keeping a pet lion she named Tiger and establishing a pet cemetery at Asnières in 1899,124 while Pelletier lobbied for abandoned animals to be cared for by the State and humans refused the right to kill them.125 While Reclus insisted that the same human rights needed to be extended to animals, animal rights were supported by Frenchmen as disparate as Max Jacob and the Alliance Démocratique politician who became President of France in 1913, Raymond Poincaré.126 An active anti-vivisectionist and animal defender, in 1898 Poincaré had joined Pierre Loti in a protest against the killing of dogs in Constantinople.127 When President of the Republic, he had refused to participate in hunting parties held at the presidential residence at Rambouillet.128 Like Clemenceau, Michelet and Reclus, Poincaré believed that the values of the Republic must extend to animals. In fact, he considered an integral part of the Republican agenda entailed reuniting humans with animals. These advocates of animal rights were invariably proponents of vegetarianism. Founded in 1882 by Dr. Goyart, the Société Végétarienne de France was reconstituted in January 1899 under the presidency of Dr. Jules Grand, renowned for his endorsement of French Rational Vegetarianism.129 By 1896, there were around eight hundred members. The most influential advocate was Dr. Ernest Bonnejoy, whose 1891 book, Le Végétarisme et le régime végétarien rationnel was in popular demand.130 After Reclus had met Dr. Ernest Bonnejoy and read his book, he heartily endorsed the argument by French Rational Vegetarians that meat was damaging to human health although he joked that Bonnejoy’s book had failed to cure him of aging and becoming doddery.131 A devout vegetarian, Kupka zealously combined it with his daily air baths.132 Yet while Kupka, like Bonnejoy, lauded the health values of vegetarianism, its most important principle for Reclus remained ethical moreso than medical. In his 1901 article, A Propos du végétarianisme, he argued that killing and eating animals was a process that defiled nature and

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degraded humans, the murdering of animals in abattoirs being comparable to man’s enduring inhumanity to man.133 From this time onwards, animals’ rights became just as important for artists. Writing on animals and nature reached its peak, according to Jean Borie, around 1900 in the form of “literary natural history”.134 This is demonstrated by La Vie des abeilles by Maurice Maeterlinck published in 1901, Chantecler by Edmond Rostand published in 1910, De Goupil à Margot, histoires de bêtes by Louis Pergaud also published in 1910, Souvenirs d’un entomologiste, 1879-1907, by Jean-Henri Fabre, Le Roman de lièvre by Francis Jammes published in 1903, and Dialogues des bêtes published in 1904 by Colette. Like Colette, the vegetarian and animal rights activist, Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery), included animals in her novels, Louise Michel commenting that while some feminists deployed animal identities as signifiers of female oppression, Colette and Rachilde pursued animal identities as a challenge to human patriachal power.135 The significance of animals in modernist literature is also demonstrated by the collection of quatrains that Picasso’s close friend Apollinaire began writing in 1907, Le Bestiaire ou cortège d’Orphée, and the woodcuts of Apollinaire’s animals that Picasso made for it.136 In La phalange the following year, no less than eighteen poems were published by Apollinaire figuring all kinds of animals.137 While monkeys feature in his Oneirocriticism, and in his poem, Saltimbanques, Apollinaire wrote of “the bear and the monkey” as “wise animals”.138 In his inscription on the tomb of Rousseau, he also paid homage to the significance of monkeys in his “aztec landscapes”: Tu te souviens, Rousseau, du paysage aztèque, Des forêts où poussaient la mangue et l’ananas, Des singes répandant tout le sang des pastèques Et du blond empereur qu’on fusilla là-bas.139

Apollinaire was even portrayed by Marie Laurencin as a monkey perched on her shoulder.140 Identifying himself from 1908 as an Orpheus redivivus, Apollinaire valued animals for their intelligence, instincts, social organization of their lives and for their “bridge to something other, to do something more awesome, to a power that was creative.”141 Integral to the prevalent culture and practice in Paris of animal magnetism, animals were connected to the unconscious energies of the cosmos, Orpheus epitomizing a human able to live in harmony with animals as illuminated by Apollinaire’s lecture at the 1908 Salon des Artistes Indépendants in which he maintained that the new Orpheus would be able to make wild beasts respond to their strains.142 This was consistent with the Zoophilia and interspecies political culture of the Radical Republic.

“Solidarité simiesque”: Picturing and Propagating Transformism during Separation of Church and State Following the Radical-Socialist parliamentary and press campaign, in the Elections from 27 April until 11 May 1902 the Bloc des Gauches was victorious. Radicalizing the Republic under the Bloc des Gauches ministry of Emile Combes primarily entailed laicization of the State.143 Laicization under Combisme was deemed necessary to secularize the Republic and generate a social order of diversity rather than one of either neutrality or monopoly. Laicization led to the Law of Associations as an indispensable preliminary to Separation, whereby religious communities could not be formed without legislative authority and Prefects were authorized to carry out annual checks on the property of these communities in their area.144 This in turn, led to the Decrees of 27 July and 1 August 1902, resulting in the closure of 120 church communities and in 1903, the rejection of requests for authorization of unauthorized clerical communities.145 It led to the Law of 7 July 1904 prohibiting teaching by religious orders, dissolution of the Concordat and ultimately the Law of Separation of Church and State on 9 December 1905.146 It also led to the placement of animal rights on the political agenda and Bourgeois’ Solidarist doctrine for new social institutions to function on the basis of mutual obligations and co-operation rather than laissez-faire capitalism, individualism and investment colonialism.147 Seminal to laicization,

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animal rigghts and thhe Separation of Chuurch and Sttate was th he propagattion of evo olutionism, particularlly Neo-Lam marckian Traansformism m, as Perrier well knew. In 1903 Perrier collaborated c d with one of his stud dents, M. A. A Ménégauux, who haad become Assistant Chair of Mammalog gie and Orrnithologie at the Mu useum, to pproduce a “popular” nimals.148 Inn his introductory staatement to La vie dess animaux illustratedd book devvoted to an illustrée, P Perrier madde his oppossition to Crreationism and a the Antticlerical miission of th his book all too clear: The ideaa of the miraclle has becomee insupportablee; mystery and the incomprrehensible no longer attractts anyone. God is nno longer the tyrant of natu ure with fanciiful resolution ns, capricious willpower, viindictive and fearsome when thee time suits hiim, infinitely patient and inndulgent in go ood times, yieelding to angeer or appeasing himself like a chhild. God ... obliges man to know, andd to know ex xactly if he does not wishh to be crusheed by the unconsciious workings of the univ versal mechannism. We theerefore need to observe nnature with sccrupulous care.149

Having deemolished thhese premisses of Creattionism, Peerrier then proceeded p too argue thatt there was no longer any need too search for a theologiical premisee for the su upremacy off man over the rest of nature or to search for f philosop phical reasoons to justify the hypo othetical oppposition beetween the origin of aanimals andd humans.1550 This queest had been n changed irrevocably i by sciencee.151 Perrier attributed this to Lam marck given n that he w was the firstt to theorize spontaneoous generattion and to mals had occcurred thro ough naturaal causes, thheir successive forms show thatt the evoluttion of anim arising froom how theyy used theirr bodies in ttheir environ nments acco ording to thheir needs.1552

Figure 7.11 Friedrich Wilhelm W Kuhn nert, La Vie ddes Animaux Illustrée. Less Singes: Le Chimpanzé Tségo, T 1903. Watercolourr illustration. Librairie L J.-B.. Baillière et F Fils, Paris, p. 21. 2 Gallica: Bibliothèque N Nationale de Frrance. Figure 7.122 Friedrich Wilhelm W Kuhn nert, La Vie ddes Animaux Illustrée. Lees Singes: Les es Semnopithéécidés, 1903. Watercolourr illustration. Librairie L J.-B.. Baillière et F Fils, Paris, p. 31, 3 1903. Galllica: Bibliothèèque Nationale de France.

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In this book designated for academics, scientific voyagers, colonialists, agriculturalists, breeders, “all young people curious about nature” and all the “lovers of natural history”, the illustrations of simians were mostly in full-colour created by the highly esteemed German animal painter, Friedrich Wilhelm Kuhnert, as demonstrated by Figs. 7.11 and 7.12.153 In Perrier’s eyes, Kuhnert had distinguished himself by his illustrations for Wilhelm Haacke’s Animal Life on Earth.154 So impressed was he that Perrier seems to have commissioned Kuhnert for his facility of being able to track down animals in their milieu, rather than photograph them in captivity, and to sketch them on the spot.155 He also commissioned Kuhnert to represent their “typical movements”, “characteristic poses” and “appropriate environments”, as well as their anatomy, ethics, intelligence, instincts and relationships.156 As Perrier explained: The anatomical structure, the morals, the intelligence of an animal, its instincts are closely related to each other. This is one of the originalities of the work that Mr. Menegaux publishes today after having collected all that we currently know of their external organization, their ethics in freedom and captivity, their geographical distribution and the connecting relations of the animal that he studies.157

Stressing the superiority of Kuhnert’s coloured drawings to instant photographs invariably taken in menageries with unnecessary details disrupting the clarity of composition, Perrier proudly proclaimed that “all the figures are entirely new with an effect altogether that is entirely artistic”.158 So affective were Kuhnert’s images that Perrier considered that they were able “to make us feel as if we were witnessing scenes from the life of animals”.159 This effect was designed to be complemented by the text in which Ménégaux analyzed animals according to their anatomical character, geographical location, ethics, habits, hunting procedures, diet, acclimatization and domestication, especially that of simians.160 No sooner had this book been printed in full-colour than the treatise Kropotkin had long prepared during his exile in London opposing Huxley’s essay, The Struggle for Existence in Human Society, was published in French: Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.161 Right from the start, Kropotkin demolished the specious premise of Huxley’s concept of animal life as a “gladiator show”: I failed to find í although I was eagerly looking for it í that bitter struggle for the means of existence among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of the struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.162

In The Descent of Man where there are sufficient resources, Kropotkin pointed out that Darwin himself had shown how the struggle between animal societies disappears and is replaced by cooperation resulting in the development of intellectual and moral faculties securing the best conditions for survival.163 In such societies, Kropotkin considered the fittest were not the physically strongest or the most cunning, but those best able to provide mutual aid for the welfare of the community.164 The animal species in which the practice of mutual aid had attained the greatest development, were invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress, as epitomized by primates.165 It is hardly needful to say that those mammals, which stand at the very top of the animal world and which most approach man by their structure and intelligence, are eminently sociable. ... Sociability, action in common, mutual protection and a high development of those feelings that are the necessary outcome of social life, are characteristic of most monkeys and apes.166

From the smallest to largest primate colonies, from the capuchins to the howling monkeys, he considered sociability so endemic that it was a rule if not the law of nature that reached its fullest development with the higher vertebrates: “The monkey tribe í the chimpanzees, the sajous, the sakis, the mandrills, the baboons, and so on í are sociable in the highest degree”, he declared. “They live in great bands and even join with species other than their own.”167 Kropotkin described how they would band together to repel attackers, overturn stones, care for their wounded and grieve over their dead.168 He also stressed “the playfulness of the tailed apes and the mutual attachment that reigns in the families of chimpanzees.”169 “Association is found in the animal

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world at aall degrees of evolution”, Kropootkin conclu uded, “so brilliantly b ddeveloped in i Perrier’s Animal C Colonies; coolonies aree at the veery origin of evolutiion in the animal kingdom.”170 Kropotkinn’s theory was w elaboraated by Recclus in his six volumees entitled LL’Homme et e la Terre, illustratedd by his closse friend, Kupka, K and published in i 1905 í th he very yeaar when leg gislation forr Separationn of the Chuurch and Staate was finaally passed by b the Natio onal Assem mbly. In this historical and a social geography oof the earth, Reclus foccused upon such Neo-L Lamarckian factors as soil condittion, climatte and whatt he called “ambiance”” to explore re the interrrelationship between eenvironmenntal changes and the evolution of o species, particularlyy their con nsciousness within natture. As hee famously surmised inn his Prefaace: “Man is i nature beecoming co onscious off itself”.171 B Building uppon Kropotk kin’s Mutuaal Aid, Recllus posited collaboratioon as imperrative to the evolution of species and a to a con nscious soliidarity of th he individuaal with the uuniverse as pictured p by 172 Kupka onn its cover in i which th he earth waas viewed by b man from m outer spaace. Yet for that to happen, R Reclus conssidered prejjudice and ignorance had to be dismantledd through an integral educationaal system frree from feaar and superrstition emb bodied by reeligion whicch, he maintained, was 173 no more than a “prrop in the exterior woorld to reaassure [man n] when feaars assail him”. h In providing an antithettical narrativ ve to that oof the Bibliccal Genesiss, his enviroonmentalist geography ucation andd consistentt with his Anarcho-C Communist concept off was instruumental to this re-edu Propaganda by the Deed, D as werre Kupka’s images for it (Figs. 7.1 13 and 7.14)).

Figure 7.13 František Kupka, K Livre Premier: P Less Ancèstres, 1904-1905. 1 Pen and ink iillustration. Elisée E Reclus, L’Homme ett la Terre, Parris, Librairie Universelle U 19905-1908. Bib bliothèque Nattionale de Frannce. Public Domain. Figure 7.14 František Kuppka, Livre Preemier: Originees, 1904-1905 5. Pen and ink k illustration. E Elisée Reclus,, L’Homme ett la Terre, Parris, Librairie Universelle U 19 905-1908. Bibbliothèque Nationale de Fraance. Public D Domain.

Commiissioned in 1904, the socio-cultuural roots of o human kind k were cconveyed by b Kupka’s drawings of apes andd anthropoids. To illusstrate Origin ns, significaantly subtittled The Succession off Ages is for us the Grreat School, Kupka picctured a sim mian family with ape-liike physiognomy (Fig. 7.14). Whhile the motther is poseed against ssome form of shelter whilst suckkling and cradling herr baby, the father is placed p outside it, seem mingly on th he alert witth tools in or by both hands í a sharpenedd stone beingg couched in i his left paalm while a large bonee is wedged between hiis right foot and elbow w. That thesse primates were capabble of makin ng tools and d of using tthem constrructively, iff not creativvely, was reeinforced by Kupka’s preceding plate p design ned for thiss first part of o the bookk entitled “T The Ancestoors” (Fig. 7.14). 7 On thhe left two anthropoidss are pictureed turning a bone-like structure iinto a huntting tool an nd carving a rock agaainst a woo oden base w while on th he right, an

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anthropoid is shown hammering a tool. Given that culture and language continued to be posited by those Creationists fighting the Separation of Church and State as uniquely human, one supposedly distinguishing humans from animals that disproved evolution, Kupka’s image seems designed to dislodge this myth. This appears to be corroborated by the lithograph he produced during the political debates over the Separation of Church and State (Fig. 7.15).

Figure 7.15 František Kupka, Ecce Homo, or Monkey with the Sphinx drawing Adam and Eve with a Serpent, 1905. Lithograph on paper; 24x35 cm. Photograph by the author. Musée d’Orsay Documentation, Paris.

Figure 7.16 Hélène Dufau, Zoologie, 1905-1908. Oil on panel. Photograph by the author. Sorbonne Nouvelle, Salle des Autorités, Paris.

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Entitled Monkey Drawing a Portrait of Adam and Eve with a Serpent, Kupka’s satire upon the Christian location of the origin of humans in the Garden of Eden is sharpened by it being drawn by a monkey as the true ancestor to humans, gleefully watched by a sphinx with the head of a female human but the paws of a lioness. That the monkey was not only creative but also capable of making art is resonant in the sculpture entitled D’après Nature, l’Artiste et son modèle au Jardin des Plantes made by the animalier, Paul Jouve at exactly the same time in which the artist appears as a monkey holding his model í another monkey in the form of an Egyptian figurine. Other artists engaged in evolutionary musicology. Simians’ use of phonological musical patterns for mating had been first pointed out by Darwin. Yet after their drumming upon tree roots and hollow logs had been discovered and “the simian tongue” had been recorded on phonographs by Richard Garner, Dufau and Picasso explored their relationship to music.174 Amidst fiery debates in the Chamber of Deputies over the Separation of Church and State, French Fine Arts Director, Henry Marcel, commissioned Dufau and Ernest Laurent to paint four panels each for the Salles des Autorités at the New Sorbonne on art and science with no reference whatsoever to religion. Unlike Ernest Laurent’s choice of Philosophy, Eloquence, History and the Poesie, Dufau chose to paint the new Republican religion of Science and more specifically, such Lamarckian disciplines as Geology and Zoology, as well as such Neo-Lamarckian ones as Radioactivity and Magnetism. To picture interspecies relationships alongside environmental conditions conducive to universal attraction and spontaneous generation, for her panel, Zoologie, Dufau created an Orpheus figure, who looks like Khrishna, playing the flute in the Caenozic stage of the earth’s evolution. Through his musical notes, the orphic Khrishna appears able to lure a black panther, leopard, parrot, elephant and monkey to a space where they can co-exist in mutual harmony (Fig. 7.16). Long had Darwin speculated on the attraction of animals to music, particularly monkeys. While he had asked his wife to play the piano to his jars of earthworks, Darwin had played an harmonica to Jenny at the London Zoo and encouraged her to use it. “The perception, if not the enjoyment, of musical cadences [i.e., melodies] and of rhythm [was] probably common to all animals and no doubt depends on the common physiological nature of their nervous systems”, he deduced.175 The power of music to enchant monkeys was also depicted by Picasso.

Figure 7.17 Pablo Picasso, Circus Family with Violinist, 1905. Pen, ink and gouache. Baltimore Museum of Art. Figure 7.18 Pablo Picasso, Family of Acrobats with a Monkey (Famille au Singe), 1905. Collage, gouache, watercolor, pastel and India ink on carboard, 104 x 75 cm, Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Göteborg. Public Domain.

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Once the Law of Separation of Church and State was passed in France, when Picasso’s closest friends in Paris, Apollinaire and Max Jacob, were avidly discussing Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, Reclus’ L’Homme et la Terre and the reconception of simians in La Vie des animaux illustrée, Picasso began more drawings and watercolours of monkeys. Rather than locate them in their natural environments, like Kuhnert, Picasso located them in circuses as illustrated by his Circus Family with Violinist (Fig. 7.17) and Family of Acrobats with a Monkey (Fig. 7.18). Rendered with almost identical anatomical features and shown listening to music as attentively as the humans, not only does Picasso convey the comparability of the monkey’s and human’s physiognomy but also their emotional and cultural sensibilities in terms of Darwin’s and Perrier’s concept of monogenesis. Placed in a similar position to the circus child in the family, the monkey also seems as much a part of the family as the child. Not only does the monkey then appear to be embraced, following Reclus, by modern mutualist society but also granted equal status to humans. In his picturing of these circus families, Picasso then seems to bring to life Reclus’ concept of La grande famille in which animals were not just embraced as performers but as members of the extended interspecies family in what Reclus called “fraternal association”. Hence Picasso’s circus families seem to recapture the world of animals that Reclus lamented had been lost with their exploitation: Does not the horse of the Bedouin ... come into the tent? And do not the weanling children sleep between his legs? The natural sympathy existing between all these creatures harmonised them in a broad atmosphere of peace and love. ... Associations between man and the animals included, in those early times, a much greater number of species than we find today in our domestic sphere ... primitive man was thinking of a fraternal association. He saw in these living beings companions, and not servants.176

However, in Picasso’s painting, Family of Acrobats with a Monkey (Fig. 7.18), La grande famille appears to be reworked with a Darwinist twist. While the arms of both the adults and the monkey seem foreshortened, the feet, hands and fingers of both seem elongated to the point that they appear identical, a device also deployed by Rembrandt Bugatti in his humanization of the hand of his 1910 sculpture, Hamadryas Baboon. Placed within this family, this monkey seems as much at home within this mutualist society as the monkey in Picasso’s Circus Family with Violinist (Fig. 7.17). Yet given the intimate proximity with which this monkey sits in relation to the mother, father and their newborn baby at this time of Separation of Church and State as well as Neo-Lamarckian Transformism, this painting seems to represent the new Holy Family. It was followed by the Salon d’Automne where Rousseau exhibited The Hungry Lion throws itself on the Antelope, alongside paintings by Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck, which Louis Vauxcelles astutely likened to “les fauves”,177 not as a perjorative, but arguably as a new animal aesthetic following the Separation of Church and State.178 As soon as it closed, Rousseau began his series of monkey paintings that chimed with Kuhnert’s illustrations of simians in La Vie des animaux illustrée (Figs. 7.11 and 7.12) in which they were not depicted with humans but with one another in their own colonies as illustrated by Fig. 7.19.179 Long had the common ancestry of humans and simians been stressed by Perrier and others.180 Although openly acknowledged in the Dictionnaire populaire illustré d’histoire naturelle, amidst its thousands of entries only two pages were devoted to simians.181 By contrast, La Vie des animaux illustrée opened with text and images to demonstrate the evolution of over ninety different kinds of simians. “There is such a comparable structure between humans and monkeys”, Ménégaux explained, “that they must be considered as the primates of animals.”182 Ménégaux then quoted the nineteenth century biologist and zoologist, Armand de Quatrefages, who maintained that “from the anatomical point of view, man differs less from superior monkeys than they differ among themselves”.183 Yet Ménégaux pointed out that, even though their intellectual faculties could be developed through education and they could be taught to eat with a fork and drink from a glass, ironically monkeys and their cultures had been far less studied than other mammals.184 All too aware of their caricaturization as wicked and treacherous, Ménégaux endeavoured to counterbalance this image with his characterization of them as caring, cheerful, kind, friendly, trustworthy with many other beneficial characteristics.185 “They are sociable, courageous and

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devoted too their com mmunities”, he said. “T Their love for f their offfspring andd the compassion that they show w for feeble beings, whether w theey be of th heir race orr not, can only inspirre us with admirationn.”186 Consttantly he sttressed theirr affection, comic hum mour, curiossity and usee of reason which he found moree developed d than amonngst any other animal. He also sttressed whaat he called their “solidarité simieesque”: Theeir morality and the clo oseness of th heir societiees or “colon nies” which could conntain as maany as three hundred. Such emp pathy did th hese monkeeys and ch himpanzees possess thhat Ménégauux highlightted how theey selflessly y helped oth hers, even m members off a different species, iff they recoggnized the need n for asssistance. Off the monkeeys that hadd lived in Europe, E Les 187 Magots, M Ménégaux pointed out that t they lovved the sociiety of humans and of oother animaals. They willingly adopt smaller being gs from other species in ord der to carry th hem, kiss them m and pet theem, and if you try tto remove theem, they defeend them withh fury. They also easily make m friendshiips with anim mals much larger than themselvess, searching in n their hair forr the least specck of dirt that they can findd.188

His descriiption was complement c ted by Henrri Coupin’s popular boo ok, Singes eet Singeriess, published in 1907, in which monkeys m were w portray ayed as creeative, play yful, vivacioous, seducttive, witty, charming and caring.189 His desccription wass also comp plemented by y Rousseauu’s simian paintings.

Figure 7.19 Henri Roussseau, Monkeyss in the Junggle, 1910. Oil on canvas, 114x162 cm. PPrivate Collection. Public Domain.

In Rouusseau’s aniimal paintin ngs after thhe Separatio on of Churcch and Statee and the 1905 1 Salon d’Automnne, the plannts, insects and monkkeys appearr as pulsating with innterspecies life as in Perrier’s ddescriptionss of Les Co olonies anim males and Ménégaux’’s La Vie ddes animauxx illustrée. Unlike Roousseau’s earlier e portrrayals of ““wild beasts” and Kuh hnert’s colo loured illustrations of individuall primates that t Perrierr commendded for theiir “typical movementss” and “characteristic poses”, Roousseau deppicts his mo onkeys grouuped togeth her caring fo or one anotther in smalll colonies,

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as epitomized by Monkeys in the Jungle.190 (Fig. 7.19) Unlike the bloodthirsty behaviour of his “wild beasts” in which their only corporeal contact is through slaughter, Rousseau shows his “primates” sensually rubbing up against one another and tenderly grooming each other’s fur. Readily seeming to tend to each other’s needs for food and drink, he captures their “solidarité simiesque”. Following Darwin’s description of their joy in caresses, they seem to “delight in fondling and being fondled by one another”.191 “Touching each other with their much protruded lips”, Darwin wrote from his observations, “they then mutually folded each other in their arms. Afterwards they stood up, each with one arm on the shoulder of the other, lifted up their heads, opened their mouths and yelled with delight.”192 Consistent with Darwin’s, Perrier’s and Ménégaux’s descriptions of their chuckles, laughter and playfulness, particularly their love of being tickled under the armpits, Rousseau’s “primates” also appear as game players and mischief makers.193 Mutually aiding one another, Rousseau shows them sharing the fruit of nature in Monkeys in the Jungle (Fig. 7.19) rather than hoarding it or fighting over it. While Picasso’s monkeys are shown able to live in harmony with humans, Rousseau’s monkeys are portrayed in mutual harmony with one another and able to live in vividlycoloured communities with other species. Compatible in interdependent colonies, Rousseau’s monkeys then seem to embody Republican Solidarism, Anarchist Mutualism and Perrier’s NeoLamarckian Transformist theory of association not rivalry, cooperation not competition. Yet although these paintings may seem to exude Edenic harmony, they are confrontational exuding discomfort like Jacques Derrida’s when viewed naked by his cat.194 Since the monkeys in Rousseau’s paintings look at the human-animal spectator, they reverse the power relations inherent in the anthropocentric gaze. In this way the human-animal becomes the subject of primate visions. Long had Rousseau’s paintings been viewed as dangerous agents of change.195 “So disconcerting” were they to Félix Vallotton that he predicted “the most deeply rooted convictions are held up and questioned.”196 Invariably these convictions were rooted in what had been the official religion of the State, Roman Catholicism. At this crucial time when Transformism and interspecies relationships were touted by the Radical Republic while Roman Catholicism was officially rejected as an obfuscation if not mystification of evolution, Rousseau’s paintings of simians may well have appeared as agents of change with his simians appearing as the new saints of anticlericalism. “Before a Rousseau the senses are gripped with such an emotion”, explained Rousseau’s close comrade, Robert Delaunay, “that they sometimes abandon the desire to control the working process.”197 Since this abandonment of human reason may have appeared equivalent to becoming animal, Arsène Alexandre considered it was a “dangerous fascination”.198 In establishing an empathic rapport between the human-animal and the simian-animal, this “dangerous fascination” seemed to entail giving way to what it would feel like to become simian. “We must learn not to resist him”, advised André Salmon. “We must learn to take full pleasure in this deeply delicious art.”199 This empathy was intensified by the ways in which his images of simians seemed to exercise what Pascal Rousseau calls an hypnotic relationship with the spectator, equivalent to animal magnetism that Henri Rousseau called “magnetic love”.200 So prevalent was animal magnetism, electromagnetism and cosmic magnetism in France by the Separation of Church and State that this period has been aptly dubbed one of “neo-mesmerism”, if not “neo-magnetism”.201 Containing luminous signs acting as hypnotic points, Rousseau’s paintings were conceived, according to Stanislaus Stückgold, as “a living magnetic or electromagnetic field for the viewer”.202 Yet rather than investing the emanations of human animals with fixed luminous points, Rousseau locates them to simians. With eyes lustrous with light, the simians’ gaze in these paintings becomes a mesmerizing device to hypnotize and command the human spectator. Instead of animals being mesmerized by the human gaze, as performed by the respected magnetist and zootherapist, Hector Durville, and as observed by the hypnotist “vulgarizer”, Dr. Foveau de Courmelles, for the Bibliothèque des merveilles, this process was then reversed.203 Following theories of suggestion emanating from both the schools of Salpêtrière and Nancy that the hypnotist’s thought could be communicated to and reflected in the

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mind of the hypnotized subject, the simian gaze may have been directed to immerse the humananimal in simian consciousness and empathy for the state of becoming simian. Looking with such empathy entails looking reciprocally in an intersecting gaze, animal to animal. Following Donna Haraway, it is equivalent to respecere, the act of esteeming an interspecies relationship. In light of Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s concept of “becoming animal”, it demonstrates the inseparable affective relationship of human animals and animal animals.204 In replacing anthropocentric projection with interspecies performativity, it entails the possibility of “becoming simian”.205 At this potent political juncture when Roman Catholicism was being exorcised from the Third Republic and Neo-Lamarckian Transformism proselytized as the new religion of the State able to elucidate the origin of species while providing a model for Solidarism capable of uniting French citizens across the ideological spectrum and integrating them with animal species, it was crucial to illuminate not just the ethics and cultures of species but interspecies relationships. It was important to show that homo sapiens were not created by a mystic being but evolved from ancestors that they shared with simians. It was also important to find a way in which human-animals could identify with simian-animals, particularly through creative performances in which they could empathize with them to the extent of imagining how they felt, thought and looked at the world. In picturing simians and their interspecies relationships with sufficient empathy for the spectator not just to marvel at their creativity, sensitivity, spontaneity and sociality but to desire to identify with them and to “become simian”, the Modernist Transformism of Dufau, Kupka, Picasso and Rousseau revealed how devolution, as Creationists would have conceived it, may have in fact been equivalent in the Radical Republic to the “creative evolution” of a new form of consciousness í what Bergson called “supraconsciousness that is at the origin of life”.206 I wish to thank Justin Fleming and Serena Keshavjee for their perceptive readings of this chapter and their insightful comments. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are my own.

Notes 1

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) p. 237. 2 Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Painting (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1938); Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994). 3 Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (New York: Avon Books, 1991). 4 Elisée Reclus, “La Grande famille”, Le Magazine International (January, 1896) pp. 8-12; English trans., Edward Carpenter, “The Great Kinship”, The Humane Review (January 1906) pp. 206-214. 5 Paul R. du Chaillu, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (London: John Murray, 1861). 6 Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2002) pp. 3-4. 7 Ibid. 8 Fae Brauer, “Wild Beasts and Tame Primates: ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau’s Dream of Darwin’s Evolution”, The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinism and Visual Culture (Hanover and London: University of New England Press, 2009) p. 206. Rrefer Ted Gott, “Clutch of the Beast: Emmanuel Frémiet Gorilla, Gorilla-Sculptor”, Kiss of the Beast: From Paris Salons to King Kong (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2005) p. 54, n. 66. Refer also Laurinda S. Dixon, “Emmanuel Frémiet’s Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman: Beauty, the Beast, and Their Contexts”, Twenty-first century Perspectives on Nineteenth-century Art: Essays in Honor of Gabriel P. Weisberg (eds. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Laurinda S. Dixon (New Jersey: Associated University Publishing, 2008) pp. 204-211. 9 The term, “monkeyana”, derives from the title of the notorious Punch image published on 18 May 1861 in which an ape was depicted beneath the title, Monkeyana, with a banner hung from his neck saying “Am I a man and a brother?”; refer Janet Browne, “Darwin in Caricature: A Study in the Popularization and Dissemination of Evolutionary Theory”, Chapter 1, The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms and Visual Culture (Hanover and London: University Press of New England) pp. 21-23. 10 Henri Bergson, L’Évolution créatice (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1907); Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911).

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Fae Brauer, Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013) pp. 25-49. 12 Edmond Perrier, “Préface sur l’évolution mentale”, L’Intelligence des animaux par G.-J. Romanes, trans. Edmond Perrier (Paris: Ancienne Librairie Germer Ballière et Cie; Félix alcan, Éditeur, 1887) p. vii, quoting Michel de Montaigne, Essais, livre II, chap. xii (Paris: 1598; Didot, 1859) p. 226: L’Homme seul est intelligent; les bêtes n’ont que de l’instinct. Refer also p. x: L’Homme seul est réligieux et moral. 13 Joy Harvey, “Darwin in a French Dress: Translating, Publishing and Supporting Darwin in Nineteenth-Century France”, Chapter 18, The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, vol. 1, eds. Eve-Marie Engels and Thomas F. Glick (London and New York: Continuum Books, 2008) p. 370. 14 Ibid., with reference to Katherine Auspitz, The Radical Bourgeoisie: The Ligue de l’enseignement and the origins of the Third Republic, 1866-1885 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 15 Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1989) p. 129. 16 The Organization of Science and Technology in France 1808-1914, eds. Robert Fox and George Weisz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 17 Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992) p. 111. 18 P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1st pb. 1902; London: William Heinemann, 1910) p. 2. 19 W. H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) note 62, p. 302: It was Perrier’s acceptance of evolution in 1879 that more than anything else accounts for his subsequent biological theories. 20 Ernst Haeckel, Die Radiolarien (Rhizopona Radiaria) Atlas von Fünf und Dreissig Kupfertafeln (Berlin: Druck und Verlag von Georg Reimer, 1862). 21 Edmond Perrier, La Terre avant l’histoire. Les origins de la vie de l’homme (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1920). 22 Edmond Perrier, Les Explorations sous-marines (Paris: Librairie Hatchette et Cie, 1886). Perrier was also a member of the Commission Scientifique d’Exploration des Grand Fonds de la Méditerranée et de l’Atlantique. 23 Edmond Perrier, Les Colonies animales et la formation des organisms (Paris: Masson, 1881) p. 62, refers to Ernst Haeckel, Naturliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Berlin: Verlag von Georg Reimer, 1868). 24 Ibid., Perrier, Les Colonies animales, 1881, Préface, p. viii: Tous les organisms supérieurs ne sont autre chose que des associations, ou, pour me servir du terme scientique, des COLONIES d’organismes plus simples diversement groupés. 25 Called the Belville Programme, after Léon Gambetta’s Le Programme de Belville, Cahier de mes électeurs (Paris: 1871; Discours et plaidoyers politiques, rassemblés par Joseph Reinach (Paris: Charpentier, 1881), this policy of political reform ultimately entailed the Separation of Church and State. 26 Both the Muséum national de l’histoire naturelle and such medical institutions as Jean Martin’s neurological clinic at Salpêtrière benefitted from this reprioritization of State funding; refer Brauer, Rivals and Conspirators, 2013, Chapter Two and pp. 222-223 for the murals illustrating the evolution of homo samiens commissioned from Fernand Cormon. 27 Alfred Espinas, Des Sociétés animales: Études de psychologie comparée (Paris: Librairie Germer Ballière et Cie, 1877). 28 Thomas Huxley, “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society”, The Nineteenth Century (23, February 1888) pp. 161-180. 29 Charles Darwin, De l’Origine des espèces, des Lois du progrès chez les êtres organisés, trans. Mme Clémence-Aug. Royer (Paris: Guillaumin et Cie, Victor Masson et Fils, 1862). When republished in 1869, Royer translated “survival of the fittest” from Darwin’s 1869 edition as either “la lutte pour la vie” or “concurrence vitale”: “The struggle for life” or “vital competition”; refer Brauer, “Wild Beasts and Tame Primates”, 2009, p. 202. 30 Perrier, “Préface sur l’évolution mentale”, L’Intelligence des animaux par G.-J. Romanes, 1887, p. xvii: ... j’ai essayé de la faire dans mon livre Les Colonies animales et la formation des organismes í que le succès dans la lutte pour la vie n’est pas dû seulement à l’emploi de la force brutale ou d’une ruse de mauvais aloi : l’association, l’assistance mutuelle, la division du travail, ... la solidarité qui en résulte, ont joué dans le perfectionnement des organismes un rôle prépondérant. 31 Perrier, Les Colonies animales, 1881, pp. 8-9. 32 J. Pizzetta, Dictionnaire populaire illustré d’histoire naturelle, Edmond Perrier, Introduction (Paris: A. Hennuyer, Imprimeur-Editeur, 1890) p. xxxix: Les incomparables recherches de M. Pasteur ont révélé depuis longtemps de quelle importance il était pour l’Homme de connaître le secret des infiniment petits ... . In Les Colonies animales, p. 12, Perrier also acknowledged: Les incomparables recherches de M. Pasteur sur les fermentations … . 33 Perrier, Les Colonies animales, 1881: Chapître III, Les Monères, p. 62. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., Figure 2. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., p. 70. 38 Ibid.

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Ibid., p. 69: C’est la communisme dans tout l’acception du mot. Ibid., p. 92: Les premiers heritiers des moneres. 41 Ibid., Chapter V, Les Entrées Intermédiares entre Les Animaux et Les Vegetaux, pp. 123-124. 42 Ibid., p. 156. 43 Ibid., pp. 142-143; refer also p. 713: … dans une colonie peut se contituer toute une série de fonctionnaires, parasites … mais dont l’utilité pour la colonie peut-être de premier ordre, car ils deviennent les instruments de sa puissance et lui assurent, eu definitive, la victoire dans la lutte pour la vie. 44 Ibid., Chapître Premier : La Théorie de l’association et les lois de l’organisation, p. 704. 45 Ibid., p. 783: N’est-ce pas aussi par la division du travail, offrant aux aptitudes diverses les moyens de se developer, par la cooperation, la solidarité, une liberté temperée par la loi, une discipline respectée de tous, une coordination graduelle de toutes les forces socials, que l’humble people de sauvage arrive à acquérir la richesse, la puissance et l’unité de nos grandes nations modernes? (The words in bold are as they appeared in the original text). 46 Edmond Perrier, “New Views of Animal Transformations”, Popular Science Monthly (Vol. 16, March 1880). 47 Espinas, Des Sociétés animales, 1877, p. 379: Ainsi la sympathie, loin d’exclure les relations nées du besoin, commence grâce à elles à s’affirmer dans les espèces capables de représentations quelque peu distinctes et durables. C’est ensuite la sympathie qui orne la famille animale des ses plus nobles attributs, c’est elle qui fonde la peuplade. 48 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872); George J. Romanes, Animal Intelligence (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1882); R. Hartmann, Les Singes anthropoïdes et leur organisation comparée à celle de l’homme (Paris: Germer Ballière et Cie, Félix Alcan, Éditeur, 1886). 49 Edmond Perrier, Le Transformisme (Paris: J.-B. Baillière et Fils, 1888) pp. 326-327: L’intelligence des grands Singes. íL’histoire de quelques-uns ... montre que la sensibilité et l’intelligence peuvent atteindre chez eux un haut degré de développement ... . 50 Edmond Perrier, Anatomie et physiologie animales (Paris: Librairie Hatchette et Cie, 1882) p. 204: Ces sociétés deviennent permanentes chez ... de nombreuses espèces de Singes, qui formes les bandes obéissant chacune à un chef et où il existe une réelle solidarité. 51 G.-J. Romanes, L’Intelligence des animaux, trans. Edmond Perrier (Paris: Félix Alcan, Éditeur, 1887). 52 Romanes, Animal Intelligence, 1882, p. 480. 53 Ibid., p. 478. 54 Ibid., pp. 474-476. 55 Ibid., p. 472. 56 Hartmann, Les Singes anthropoïdes, 1886, p. 219: ... il n’y a absolument rien de comparable à cela chez les anthropoïdes, qui sont paisibles et ne jouent jamais le rôle d’ennemis dangereux pour l’économie humaine et animale. Sous ce rapport le singe anthropoïde est bien supérieur à beaucoup d’hommes. 57 Perrier, “Préface sur l’évolution mentale”, L’intelligence des animaux par G.-J. Romanes, 1887, p. xviii. 58 Nicolaas Rupke, Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, revised edition, 2009). Richard Owen and his wife reported the following: We saw Jenny have her cup of tea again. It was spooned and sipped in the most ladylike way, and Hunt, the keeper, put a very smart cap on her head, which made it all the more laughable. Hunt told me that, a few days ago, the Queen and Prince Albert were highly amused with Jenny’s tricks, but that he did not like to put the cap on Jenny, as he was afraid it might be thought vulgar! 59 Perrier, Les Colonies animales, 1881, p. 783: Ne semble-t-il pas voir l’image exacte de l’évolution que vous venons de tracer dans la lente et graduelle marche ascensionnelle de l’humanité vers la civilization? N’est-ce pas aussi par la division du travail, offrant aux aptitudes diverses les moyens de se developer, par la cooperation, la solidarité, une liberté temperée par la loi, une discipline respectée de tous, une coordination graduelle de toutes les forces socials, que l’humble peuple de sauvage arrive à acquérir la richesse, la puissance et l’unité de nos grandes nations modernes? Il serait évidement oiseux de chercher dans les organisms resultant de cette evolution une resemblance avec telle ou telle forme de gouvernement. 60 Ibid.: Les espèces les plus parfaites d’une époque disparaissent à l’epoque suivant, de même que les nations se succèdent dans la domination du monde et sur toutes ces ruines, s’édifie lentement le progress des organisms comme celui des peuples. Des ruines! 61 Léon Bourgeois, Solidarité (Paris: A. Colin, 1896) p. 119: The history of societies, as well as of the species, demonstrates that the struggle for existence is the basic condition for all progress; it is the free exercise of abilities and creativity that bring about change … . (My translation). 62 Barbara Larson, The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon (University Park, PA: Pennsylvia State University Press, 2006) p. 97. 63 Nouvelle revue, 93 (1895). 64 Edmond Perrier, Les Colonies animals et la formation des organisms, second edition (Paris: Masson et Cie, 1897) p. xxxii: Existe-t-il, d’autre part, quelque rapport entre la façon dont se sont formés et constitués les organismes, et celle dont se constituent les sociétés humaines qu’on leur a si souvent comparées? ... Le seul fait qu’elles apparaissent en telle place, suffit à démontrer que les sciences naturelles sont par elles-mêmes la plus haute, la plus impartiale, la plus certaine des philosophies. 65 Ibid.: ... ce livre établira qu’elles ne nous prèchent pas seulement la lutte pour la vie; elles nous montrent le succès dans cette lutte, le progrès dans la puissance, résultant de l’association; elles nous enseignent que dans toute 40

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association prospère, les éléments associés, tout en gardent les uns vis-à vis des autres une liberté qui est la condition nécessaire du progrès, demeurent unis par d’incessantes condescendances, et confirment la place toujours plus élevée que prend, parmi les vertus sociales, la pratique de la solidarité. Refer Schneider, Quality and Quantity, 1990) p. 32. 66 Jean Jaurès, Speech in the Chamber of Deputies, 7 March, 1895; Textes, p. 88. 67 Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre (Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1905-1908, 6 vols.) vol. I, p. 144. 68 Elisée Reclus, Évolution et Révolution (Geneva, 1880; 1884; Paris: Bureau des Temps Nouveau, 1891). 69 Ibid. 70 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 1902. 71 Ibid. 72 Reclus, Évolution et Révolution, 1880; 1891. 73 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 1911, p. 266-271; P. A. Y. Gunter, “Bergson and the War against Nature”, The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). 74 Michael A. Osborne, “Naissance et développement d’une institution”, Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire, eds. Claude Blanckaert et al (Paris: Éditions du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, 1993) p. 152: … Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire et … Edmond Perrier, deux directeurs du Muséum se situant dans l’orbite de la théorie biologique de Lamarck. 75 Alphonse Milne-Edwards, Note on some currently extinct species of birds which are represented in the collections of the Natural history museum of Natural history (London: 1893); Alphonse Milne-Edwards, Musée d’histoire naturelle. La menagerie. Rapport au ministre de l’instruction publique (Paris: Masson, 1891). 76 Milne-Edwards, Musée d’histoire naturelle. La menagerie, 1891, p. 13. 77 Ibid., p. 11. 78 Ibid., p. 12. 79 Ibid., p. 10. 80 Ibid., Archives Nationales F/21/2128: M. F. Cormon Commande Décoration picturale de la Salle des Cours des nouvelles galeries du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelles. 81 Ibid., Alexis Lemaistre, L’Institut de France et nos grands établissements scientifiques (Paris: Hachette, 1896) p. 152: Le Muséum est avant tout un lieu d’études. Un grand nombre de cours ayant trait à l’histoire naturelle ont lieu ... . 82 Archives Nationales F/21/7663. 83 Maria P. Grindhart, “Fleshing Out the Museum: Fernand Cormon’s Painting Cycle for the New Galleries of Comparative Anatomy, Paleontology, and Anthropology”, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (Vol. 7, Iss. 2, Autumn 2008). 84 Ibid., Auguste Petit, “La Galerie d’anatomie comparée”, L’Anthropologie 9 (1898) p. 325: ... en quelque sorte la vision de l’évolution du monde organique. 85 Ibid., Albert Gaudry, “La Galerie de paléontologie”, L’Anthropologie 9 (1898) pp. 320-324. 86 Serena Keshavjee, “Natural History, Cultural History, and the Art History of Elie Faure”, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (Vol. 8, Iss. 2, Autumn 2009) with reference to Eugène Carrière, L’Homme visionnaire de la réalité: Conférence faite au Muséum d’Histoire (1901) (Paris: Ecole de la rue, 1903), reprinted in Jean Delvolvé, Eugène Carrière: Ecrits et Lettres Choisies (Paris: Mercure de France, 1907) p. 37: Sous nos yeux, dans ce Musée de nature, les formes se suivent et se lient, riches de leur infinie variété, éloquentes par leur commune essence. 87 André Malraux, La tête d’obsidienne (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, Editions Gallimard, 1974); Picasso’s Mask, trans. June Guicharnaud and Jacques Guicharnaud (London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976); (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994) p. 52. 88 Milne-Edwards, Musée d’histoire naturelle. La Ménagerie, 1891, p. 12: Enfin, j’ajouterai que les artistes trouvent, parmi les animaux tenus en captivité, des modèles précieux pour leurs études de peinture ou de sculpteur. 89 Ibid.: Barye, Cain, Frémiet et beaucoup d’autres ont trouvé là des renseignements qu’ils ont su mettre à profit. 90 Ibid., p. 22. 91 Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, 1994, p. 54. 92 Eric Baratay, Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2002) p. 150. 93 Roch Grey, “Henri Rousseau”, L’Action (no. 7, May 1921; Paris: Galerie René Drouin, 1943). 94 Christopher Green, “Souvenirs of the Jardin des Plantes: Making the Exotic Strange Again”, Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris (London: Tate Publishing, 2005) p. 32. Green points out that the dealer-critic, Adolphe Basler, recalls Rousseau sketching there. The American painter, Max Weber, who introduced Rousseau to Picasso, recalls seeing sketches of the Jardin des Plantes in his studio, according to Sandra E. Leonard, Henri Rousseau and Max Weber (New York: Richard L. Feigen & Co. Inc., 1970) pp. 39-40. 95 Milne-Edwards, Musée d’histoire naturelle. La Ménagerie, 1891, p. 12: Enfin, j’ajouterai que les artises trouvent, parmi les animaux tenus en captivité, des modèles précieux pour leurs études de peinture ou de sculpteur. 96 J. Deniker, E. Trouessart, H.-L.-A. Blanchon, Mammifères, Singes, Prosimiens, Chiroptères, Carnivores (Paris: J. Rueff, Editeur, 1904). 97 T. H. Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (London: Williams and Norgate, 1863); La place de l’homme dans la nature (Paris: Librairie J.-B. Baillière et Fils, 1868; 1891); Joseph Deniker, Recherches anatomiques et

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embryologiques sur les singes anthropoïdes, Fœtus de forille et de gibbon compares aux fœtus humains et aux anthropoïdes jeunes et adultes (Paris: C. Reinwald, 1886). 98 Malraux, Picasso’s Mask, 1994, p. 52. 99 Fernande Olivier, Picasso et ses amis (Paris: Librairie Stock, 1954). 100 Christopher Green, Picasso, Architecture and Vertigo (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006) p. 59. 101 Malraux, Picasso’s Mask, 1994, pp. 10-11: A smell of mould and neglect caught me by the throat. I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately, Picasso said. But I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them colour and form. And then I understood what painting really meant. 102 Green, Picasso, Architecture and Vertigo, 2006, p. 171. 103 For the Institut général psychologique, established in 1900 as the Institut psychologique international, and its investigation of psychic phenomena, mediumism and telepathy alongside the habits, instincts and maternal love of animals in their milieus, refer Raf de Bont, Stations in the Field, 2015, pp. 108-110. For the domestication of primates, refer Victor Meunier, Avenir des espèces. Les Animaux perfectibles (Paris: Steinheil, 1886); for Metchnikoff’s primatology, refer Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London and New York: Routledge, 1989) pp. 22-25. 104 Rae Beth Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 1875-1900: Vernacular Modernity in France (Burlington and Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2009) p. 93. 105 Ibid., p. 96, with reference to Fantasio, 15 May 1909, pp. 681-682. 106 Ibid. 107 Diana Snigurowicz, The Musical Standard, 1862-1871 (Paris: Repertoire International de la presse musical, 1991) pp. 52-54; also refer Jane R. Goodall, In the shadow of Man (London: Phoenix, 1999) for their role in American minstrel shows. 108 Louis Jacolliot, Voyage au pays des singes (Paris: C. Marpon et E. Flammarion, Éditeurs, 1883). 109 Picasso, The Lady and the Monkey, pen and ink drawing, 1897; Kupka, Défilé, etching and pastel, c. 1900: A striptease artist performing with a monkey dressed in a top-hat; gouache of nude girl dancing for a male audience to music played by a chimpanzee. 110 Kupka, Les Rois-Singes, watercolour and gouache, Catalogue, Walden Collection (Prague: 1899) No. 35, p. 67. 111 In Monkey (London: Reaktion Books, 2013) p. 121, Desmond Morris mentions that when Picasso was only twenty years old, he had visited the monkey circus that had visited Paris, Cirque Médrano, after which he had made this image. Morris highlights their companionship created by the monkey and clown working side by side at the Cirque Médrano. 112 Kupka, Joujoux, pen and ink, 1902, Catalogue, Walden Collection, No. 61, p. 216. 113 Armand Charpentier, Le Roman d’une singe (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, Éditeur, 1895); also refer Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 2009, p. 93. 114 Ibid., Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 2009, p. 94, quoting Toulouse-Lautrec saying: That’s what people will look like a century from now! 115 Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872, p. 7. 116 “Une Singe qui descend de l’homme”, Fantasio (1 October 1910) p. 162. 117 Such subjects were frequently the subject of parody by Benjamin Rabier, particularly animal-human encounters where the animal gains the upper-hand, as demonstrated by his cartoons in the book, Benjamin Rabier, Ecoutez-moi (Paris: Librairie Garnier Frères, 1905), particularly Un Duel an Jardin des Plantes and L’automobile au cirque. 118 Patricia Leighten, “The White Peril: Colonialism, L’art nègre, and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, Chapter 2, The Liberation of Painting. Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013) pp. 57-84. 119 Ceri Crossley, Consumable Metaphors: Attitudes Towards Animals and Vegetarianism in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford-Wien: Peter Lang, 2005) p. 210. 120 Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: Pablo Picasso (London: Picador, 2013) pp. 94-95; also refer Picasso’s letter to Kahnweiler, 20 mai 1912, Céret, Donation Louise et Michel Leiris: Collection Kahnweiler-Leiris (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1984) p. 165: Pour les chiens je ai chargé Braque de me envoyer Fricka et les autres bêtes [sic] le singe et les chats. 121 Crossley, Consumable Metaphors, 2005, p. 287. The term, La République Radicale, was used to signify the political consolidation between Radical Republicans, Socialists, Anarcho-Communists and Feminists and the reforms they engendered from 1898-1914 although, as Madeleine Rebérioux has shown in La République radicale? 1898-1914 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975), the extent of its Radicalism is questionable. 122 Georges Fleury, La Belle histoire de la S.P.A. de 1845 à nos jours (Paris: Grasset, 1995) p. 92 ... le premier refuge SPA est créé à Gennevilliers. Il permettra d’accueillir de nombreux animaux, de les soigner, les stériliser et leur retrouver une nouvelle famille. Très vite, en 1905 le combat de la SPA se diversifie notamment en dénonçant les expérimentations animales sur les chiens.

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Maria Deraismes, Ligue populaire contre les abus de la vivisection, Discours contre La Vivisection prononcé par Maria Deraismes à la conférence donnée le dimanche 23 septembre 1883 au Théâtre des Nations (Paris: Auguste Ghio, Editeur, 1884). 124 Jean Rabaut, Marguerite Durand (1864-1930) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996). 125 Felicia Gordon, The Integral Feminist: Madeleine Pelletier, 1874-1939 (Cambridge Polity Press, 1990) pp. 48-49; Madeleine Pelletier: Logique et infortunes d’un combat pour l’égalité, ed. Christine Bard (Paris: Côté-femmes, 1992): Pelletier kept four dogs, chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs. 126 Elisée Reclus, “Letter to Richard Heath”, Correspondance (Paris: Schleicher, 1911-1925, 3 vols.) Vol. 2, p. 336: Comme vous, je donne les mêmes droits aux animaux qu’aux hommes ... . 127 J. V. F. Keiger, Raymond Poincaré (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) pp. 10-14. 128 Ibid., p. 14. 129 L’Homme et l’animal : un débat de société, ed. Arounda P. Ouédraogo et al (Paris: Éditions Quae, 1999) pp. 184186. 130 Ernest Bonnejoy, Le Végétarisme et le Régime Végétarien Rationnel. Dogmatisme, Histoire, Pratique (Lausanne: F. Payot, 1891). 131 Elisée Reclus, “Letter to Louise Dumesnil” (his sister), Correspondance (Vol. 3) p. 137, February 1893. 132 Ludmilla Vachtovà, Frank Kupka, Pioneer of Abstract Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968) p. 25; also refer, The Liberation of Painting, 2013, p. 146 and note 4, p. 200 referring to the influence of German nature philosopher, Karl Diefenbach’, particularly his Körperculture, upon Kupka. 133 Elisée Reclus, “A Propos du végétarisme”, La Réforme alimentaire, March 1901; “On Vegetarianism”, The Humane Review (1:4, 1901) pp. 316-324: ... l’abbatage du premier [d’un bœuf] facilite le meurtre du second [d’un homme], surtout quand retentit l’ordre du chef et que l’on entend de loin des paroles du maître couronné: ‘Soyez impitoyables!’" 134 Jean Borie, “Dossier”; Jules Renard, Histoire naturelles (Paris: Edition Gallimard, 1984) p. 330. 135 Changing Anarchism: Anarchist Theory and Practice in a Global Age, eds. Jonathan Purkis and James Bowen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) p. 14. 136 As many as twenty-six animals feature in Guillaume Apollinaire’s Le Bestiaire ou cortège d’Orphée (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1911) with woodcuts by Raoul Dufy and a sketch by Picasso in the Frontispiece. 137 Judith E. Bernstock, Under the Spell of Orpheus: The Persistence of a Myth in Twentieth-Century Art (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991) p. 12: Eighteen of the thirty verses published in Le Bestiaire ou cortège d’Orphée had appeared in La Phalange, 15 June 1908, entitled La Marchande des quatre saisons ou le bestiaire mondain. 138 Guillaume Apollinaire, “Saltimbanques”, Alcools (Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1913; 1920) p. 78: L’ours et le singe, animaux sages / Quêtent des sous sur leur passage. 139 In the catalogue, Henri Rousseau à la Fondation Beyeler (Berne: 2010), this quatrain is referenced as Guillaume Apollinaire, Ode à Rousseau, 1908. It is considered to be the quatrain that Apollinaire delivered at the end of the Banquet to Rousseau, held in Picasso’s studio at the Bateau Lavoir in November 1908. It has also been published as the second quatrain by Guillaume Apollinaire, Inscription pour le tombeau du peintre, Henri Rousseau douanier (Paris: 1912); Guillaume Apollinaire, son vie, son œuvre (Paris, 2012), which I translate as: You remember, Rousseau, the Aztec landscape / The forests where mango and pineapple grow / The monkeys spilling the blood of watermelons / And the blond emperor that they shot over there. This line may be explained by the next one: The pictures you paint you saw in Mexico. It may be linked to the assassination in 1867 of Emperor Maximilian – the younger brother of the Austrian emperor, Franz Joseph – by a squad of Mexican riflemen three years after Napoléon III’s appointment of him to the Mexican throne. Edouard Manet’s three paintings of this event were well-known to Apollinaire. 140 Elizabeth Louise Kahn, Marie Laurencin: Une femme inadaptée in Feminist Histories of Art (Hampshire, UK and Vermont, USA: Ashgate Publishing, 2003) p. 43. 141 Bernstock, Under the Spell of Orpheus, 1991, p. 11. 142 Ibid. 143 Dominique Lejeune, La France de la Belle Époque 1896-1914 (Paris: Armand Colin, Éditeur, 1991) p. 30, stresses Combes’ anticlericalism: Le Combisme est fondamentalement un anticléricalisme de combat ... . 144 Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madéleine Rebérioux, The Third Republic from its Origins to the Great War, 1871-1914 trans. J. R. Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Rebérioux, pp. 227-228: The Law of Association was passed on 1 July 1901. 145 Ibid. 146 The Concordat, concluded by Napoléon Bonaparte and Pius VII on 15 July 1801, largely regulated the Church and State relations until this nexus with the Vatican was broken on 30 July 1904. In October 1904, the Radical Party Congress at Toulouse unanimously accepted the Buisson Report on immediate Separation. The Law was presented to the Chambre by Aristide Briand on 21 March 1905. The parliamentary consolidation, provided by the Bloc des Gauches, eased its passing on 3 July 1905 with 341 votes for and 233 against it. 147 Léon Bourgeois, Solidarité (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1896; 1898; 1902) Chapître II, pp. 39-72: Doctrine scientifique de la solidarité naturelle. 148 A. Ménégaux sous la direction de Edmond Perrier, La Vie des animaux illustrée (Paris: J.-B. Ballière et fils, 1903). In his Préface, p. v, Perrier points out that M. A. Ménégaux was Assistant Chair of Mammalogie and Ornithologie at

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the Museum, was well known for his zoological work and had spent over fifteen years in science education at Les grand lycées. 149 Ibid., p. viii: L’idée du miracle est devenue insupportable; le mystère et l’incompréhensible n’attirent plus. Dieu, ce n’est plus le tyran de la nature aux résolutions fantasques, à la volonté capricante, vindicatif et redoubtable à ses heures, infinement patient et indulgent aux bons moments, cédant à ses colères ou se laissant apaiser comme un enfant; Dieu ... obligeant l’homme à savoir, et à savoir exactment s’il ne veut être broyé par les rouages inconscients du mécanisme universel ... On s’est donc mis à observer la nature avec un soin scrupuleux. 150 Ibid., p. viii: Il ne s’agit plus de savoir dans quelle mesure les facultés des animaux ressemblent aux nôtres, ni de chercher dans des conceptions philosophiques les raisons d’une opposition hypothétique entre notre origine et la leur, ni d’établir sur des bases théologiques la suprématie de l’homme sur la reste de la nature. 151 Ibid.: L’a priori, sous la poussée de la science, s’est lentement éliminé de notre esprit. 152 Ibid., p. ix: Lamarck imagina le premier, non pas que les animaux actuels sont les descendants modifiés plus ou moins profondément de ceux qui les ont précédés sur la terre, mais que ces animaux avaient été modifiés par des causes naturelles ... . 153 Ibid., p. v: Aux savants ... aux voyageurs scientifiques ... aux colons ... aux agriculteurs et aux éleveurs ... aux jeunes gens ... a tous les curieux de la nature ... aux amateurs d’Histoire naturelle et aux gens de monde. 154 Wilhelm Haacke, Das Thierleben der Erde (Berlin: Martin Oldenbourg, 1901). In his Préface, p. v, Perrier admits to being inspired by this book but stipulates that he and Ménégaux had wished to make une œuvre de vulgarisation. 155 Perrier, Préface, La Vie des animaux illustré, 1903, p. v: Mieux que la photographie instantanée, prise ne pas dans la vie libre, mais dans des menageries, sur des types modifiés par la captivité, l’artiste habile a su saisir et rendre le mouvement typique, la pose caractéristique et le milieu approprié ... . 156 Ibid. 157 Ibid., p. xi: La structure du corps, les mœurs, l’intelligence d’un animal, ses instincts sont conce choses étroitement liées l’une à l’autre. C’est une des originalités de l’ouvrage que M. Menegaux publie aujourd’hui, que d’avoir rassemblé tout ce que l’on sait aujourd’hui de l’organisation extérieure, des mœurs en liberté et en captivité, de la répartition géographique et des liens de parenté des animaux qu’il étudie. 158 Ibid., Préface, pp. v-vi: Toutes les figures sont entièrement nouvelles ... avec un effect d’ensemble tout à fait artistique. ... il sait même éviter, ce que ne peut faire la photographie, les détails inutiles qui nuisent à la clarté de dessin. As Perrier explains, not without a tad of chauvinism: C’est une œuvre original, conçu dans un esprit français, écrit avec cette clarté d’exposition dont l’auteur a trouvé le modèle dans les leçons de son savant maître. 159 Ibid.: ... il nous fait assister aux scènes de la vie des animaux; il sait même éviter, ce que ne peut faire la photographie, les détails inutiles qui nuisent à la clarté de dessin. 160 Ibid., pp. 7-8: Caractères, les mœurs, les habitats, domesticité, captivité. 161 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 1902; L’Entaide, une facteur de l’évolution, 1904. 162 Ibid., Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 1902, p. 3. Kropotkin acknowledges the 1880 lecture delivered by Russian Zoologist, Professor Kessler, On the Law of Mutual Aid, as the catalyst for his research. 163 Ibid., p. 9. 164 Ibid. 165 Ibid. 166 Ibid., p. 34. 167 Ibid., p. 51. 168 Ibid. Kropotkin cites their dogged reclamation of a female monkey, shot dead by a hunting party, as recounted by James Forbes, Oriental Memoirs: A Narrative of Seventeen Years Residence in India, 2 vols. revised by the Countess de Montalembert (London: Richard Bentley, 1934). 169 Ibid. 170 Ibid., p. 53. 171 Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre. Tome Premier (1905) p. i: L’homme est la nature prenant conscience d’elle-même. 172 For an excellent analysis of Kupka’s image in relation to Reclus’ text, refer Keshavjee, “Natural History, Cultural History, and the Art History of Elie Faure”, 2009. 173 Ibid., p. 288. His implicit argument for atheism was comparable to that of Mikhail Bakunin in God and the State, which Reclus and Carlo Cafiero had discovered on the death of Bakunin, Reclus translating it into French in 1882 as Dieu et l’État (Geneva: Imprimerie Jurassienne, 1882). 174 Gregory Radick, The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007). 175 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871). 176 Reclus, “La Grande Famille”, 1896; as trans., Carpenter, “The Great Kinship”, 1906. 177 Louis Vauxcelles, “Le Salon d’Automne”, Supplément au Gil Blas, 17 October 1905, p. 2: Au centre de la salle, un torse d’enfant et un petit buste en marbre d’Albert Marque, qui modèle avec une science délicate. La candeur de ces bustes surprend au milieu de l’orgie des tons purs: Donatello parmi les fauves. For a discussion of this exhibition, refer, Brauer, Rivals and Conspirators, 2013, pp. 295-306. 178 Ibid., Vauxcelles: Salle archi-claire, des oseurs, des outranciers, de qui il faut déchiffrer les intentions, en laissant aux malins et aux sots, le droit de rire, critique trop aisée. This response is in stark contrast to that of Camille

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Mauclair, “Le Salon d’Automne”, Art et Décoration (Vol. xx, 1906) p. 486, who complained of the prominent placement of Rousseau’s Hungry Lion, considering that it should have been put in an obscure corner í the fate of Rousseau’s Merry Jesters at the 1906 Salon d’Automne. 179 Ibid., Vauxcelles, “Le Salon d’Automne”, 1905, p. 2: Au centre de la salle, un torse d’enfant et un petit buste en marbre d’Albert Marque, qui modèle avec une science délicate. La candeur de ces bustes surprend au milieu de l’orgie des tons purs : Donatello parmi les fauves. 180 Perrier, Le Transformisme, 1888, p. 318: Nous disons ancêtre commun, car nous ne pensons pas qu’on puisse faire descendre directement les Pachydernes des Lémuriens dont l’adaptation à l’existence arboricole est déjà avancée. 181 Pizzetta, Dictionnaire populaire illustré d’histoire naturelle, 1890, SINGES, p. 975: Ce sont, de tous les animaux, ceux qui ressemblent le plus à l’homme par leur conformation générale, comme par leur organisation interne. 182 Ménégaux, Le Vie des animaux illustrée, 1903, p. 2: Il y a une telle conformité de structure entre l’homme et les Singes qu’ils doivent être considérés comme les primates des animaux. 183 Ibid.: “Au point de vue anatomique, l’homme diffère moins des Singes supérieurs que ceux-ci ne diffèrent entre eux”, a écrit de Quatrefages. 184 Ibid., p. 3: L’éducation développe les facultés intellectuelles du Singe ... Ils apprehent vite à se servir d’une forchette, à boire dans un verre, à aller chercher de l’eau, etc. 185 Ibid., p. 4: En effet, il est certain qu’ils sont méchants par plaisir, perfides, rageurs, haineux, batailleurs, soumis à toutes les passions les plus détestables. Mais, d’autre part, il faut leur reconnaître de la gaieté, de la douceur, de l’amitié et de la confiance pour l’homme. 186 Ibid.: Ils sont sociables, courageux et dévoués à leurs sembables. Leur amour pour leur progéniture et la compassion dont ils ont fait preuve en mainte occasion pour les êtres faibles, de leur race ou non, ne peuvent que nous inspirer de l’admiration ... . 187 Ibid., p. 60: En captivité, les Magots aiment la société de l’homme et des animaux. 188 Ibid.: Ils adoptent volontiers des êtres plus petits appartenant à d’autres espèces pour les porter, les embrasser et les choyer, et si on veut les leur enlèver, ils les défendent avec fureur. Ils se lient aussi facilement d’amitié avec des animaux plus gros qu’eux, pour chercher dans leurs poils les moindres saletés qui s’y rencontrent. 189 Henri Coupin, Singes et Singeries : Histoire anecdotique des Singes (Paris: Librairie Vuibert & Nony, 1907). 190 Green, Souvenirs of the Jardin des Plantes, p. 46, note 69; for Rousseau’s paintings of “wild beasts”, refer Brauer, “Wild Beasts and Tame Primates”, 2009, pp. 208-211. 191 Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872, p. 213. 192 Ibid. 193 Ibid., pp. 128-129; 198. 194 Jacques Derrida, The Animal that therefore I am, 1997; 2006; trans. David Wills (Fordham University Press, 2008). 195 “The Dangerous Exotic”, Henri Rousseau, Jungles in Paris, 2005, p. 144. 196 Félix Vallotton, Le Journal Suisse, 26 March 1891, as quoted in “The Dangerous Exotic”, Henri Rousseau, Jungles in Paris, 2005, p. 141. 197 Robert Delaunay, “Mon Ami Henri Rousseau”, Tous les Arts (Paris: 7 August 1952) as quoted in “The Dangerous Exotic”, Henri Rousseau, Jungles in Paris, 2005, p. 144. 198 Arsène Alexandre, “La Semaine Artistique”, Comœdia (Paris: 3 April 1909): ... exerceraient sur nos esprits une dangereuse fascination. 199 André Salmon, Henri Rousseau dit le Douanier (Paris: Crés, 1927) p. 38. 200 Pascal Rousseau, “The Magic of Images: Hallucination and Magnetic Reverie in the Work of Henri Rousseau”, Henri Rousseau, Jungles in Paris (London: Tate Publishing, 2005) p. 191. 201 For “neo-mesmerism”, refer Anne Harrington, “Metals and magnets in medicine: Hysteria, hypnosis and medical culture in fin-de-siècle Paris”, Psychological Medicine (Vol. 18, Iss. 01, February 1988) pp. 21-38; for “neomagnetism” and Modernism, refer Fae Brauer, “Magnetic Modernism: František Kupka’s Mesmeric Abstraction and Anarcho-Cosmic Utopia”, Utopia: The Avant-Garde, Modernism and (Im)possible Life, eds. David Ayers, Benedict Hjartarson, Tomi Huttunen and Harri Veivo (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2015-2016). 202 Stanislaus Stückgold, “Henri Rousseau”, Der Sturm (Berlin: 1913); Rousseau, “The Magic of Images”, 2005, p. 201. 203 Hector Durville, Le Magnétisme des Animaux : Zoothérapie (Paris: Librairie du Magnétisme, 1896); Dr. Foveau de Courmelles, Le Magnétisme devant la loi (Paris: Georges Carré, Librairie-Editeur, 1889); L’Hypnotisme (Paris; Hachette, 1890); also refer Pascal Rousseau, “The Magic of Images”, 2005, p. 199. 204 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) p. 1: To become is not to attain a form (identification, imitation, Mimesis) but to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation where one can no longer be distinguished from a woman, an animal, or a molecule—neither imprecise nor general, but unforeseen and non-preexistent, singularized out of a population rather than determined in a form. 205 Ibid.; refer also Alain Beaulieu, “The Status of Animality in Deleuze’s Thought”, Journal for Critical Animal Studies (Volume IX, Issue 1/2, 2011) pp. 69-88. 206 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 1911, p. 261.

CHAPTER EIGHT BEAUTY AND THE BEAST: IMAGING HUMAN EVOLUTION AT THE MOSCOW DARWIN MUSEUM IN THE 1920S PAT SIMPSON

In pre-Revolutionary Russia, discourse on degeneration and regeneration within the scientific community and more generally, was as rife as it was in France and other countries during the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. According to Daniel Beer, Russian concerns were triggered by Benedict Augustin Morel’s Traité des degenerescences physiques, intellectuelles, et morales, de l’espece humaine (1857), a work influenced by Lamarck’s ideas on the inheritability of acquired characteristics. Such concerns were further fuelled by theorisations of evolution derived initially from Lamarck and Darwin, and later also from Gregor Mendel, August Weissman and T.P. Morgan.1 The debates were infused with political radicalism against the Tsarist regime, and centred on the apparent paradox, that industrial modernisation – identified as the pathway to socioeconomic progress and a better way of life for all – currently also produced increases in exemplars of degeneration in terms of crime, squalor, debility and disease.2 After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, while there remained a level of relationship between the arguments and theorisations of Soviet and western writers concerned with this topic, particularly regarding the power of modernisation, the context was vastly different. Soviet Russia represented a new and unprecedented form of social organisation, characterised as the triumph of the working people over the forces of capitalism.3 For obvious reasons, there was little space here for neo-Malthusian ideas about reducing the numbers of the working classes. There was, however, a pressing need to improve the health and living conditions of the masses and to increase the population, in order that the new state should survive. It was in the context of such anxieties that the artist and zoologist, Vasili Vatagin made an intriguing pair of monumental sculptures for the Darwin Museum in Moscow (Figs. 8.1 and 8.2). This chapter explores some of the contextual resonances that can be argued to be inscribed by these sculptures, which are still on display there today. Collectively entitled Ages of Life, they depict the variations of role, behaviour and appearance of, on the one hand, orang-utans, and on the other hand, human women at various stages of their lives. The title of this essay, “Beauty and the Beast”, relates only loosely to the famous fairy tale. As will become clear, the title in part refers on a denotational level to the divergent subject matters of the individual sculptures, the anthropoid “beast” and the implicitly superior “beauty” of its evolved distant relation, humankind, as (mainly) exemplified through the female form. More seriously, on a connotational level, the title refers to the fairy-tale’s theme of transformation from a lower to a higher form of physical and social existence. This is a theme that is focal to the essay’s discussion of the sculptures, although in the Soviet context the desired transformation was, hypothetically, to be activated not by love, but by political ideology and “scientific” intervention. At the most basic level what emerges from the investigation, I deduce, is a picture of a complex relationship between the sculptural images and the contemporary dialectic between Bolshevik anxieties about degeneration within the Soviet population, and utopian dreams of the post-Revolutionary evolution of a new, human “biologic type”.4 The discussion begins by looking at the characteristics of the sculptures, both in relation to relevant elements of current artistic discourse that may have affected Vatagin’s practice, and also

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with regard to the research and educational concerns of the Darwin Museum. The latter includes the museum’s orientation towards pyscho-physiological ape-research, and possible linkages with certain Neo-Lamarckian inflections within contemporary Soviet Darwinism that tended to be associated with pre- and post-Revolutionary discourses on degeneration and regeneration. In such discourses, particularly after 1917, there appeared to be preferred beliefs in the possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, inheritable mutations related to habitual adaptation to environment and, to some extent, a belief in cooperation amongst and between species as mitigating or problematizing the Malthusian-based “struggle for existence” posited by Darwin in Origin of Species.5 This partly followed on from the various interpretative traditions regarding Darwin’s ideas, established not only in France but visible elsewhere, for instance in Germany through the work of Ernst Haeckel, and in England through the writings of Herbert Spencer,6 that were perhaps all fuelled by Darwin’s own ambivalence towards Lamarck’s ideas.7 For the most part, however, Russian and Soviet Darwinism would seem to have simply conflated these fragments of Lamarckian thought with Darwin’s evolutionary theory without differentiation.8 While Lamarck was honoured as a significant historical precursor to Darwin, there were few intellectuals or scientists who explicitly espoused Lamarck’s ideas.9 Indeed, his Philosophie zoologique ou exposition des considérations relatives à l’histoire naturelle des animaux (1809) was not published in Russian until 1911,10 and from the period of the “cultural revolution” (192832) onwards, Lamarckism became a derogatory term,11 so that even Trofim Lysenko, whose theories have been equated with Lamarckism by western writers,12 was careful to distance his own “Michurinist biology” from Lamarckian ideas.13 As Alexander Vucinich has argued, in Russia there was not a substantially theorised or experimentally explored body of explicitly Lamarckian constructs of how the favoured processes should work.14 Hence it seems inaccurate to label Russian or Soviet Darwinism as “neo-Lamarckist” per se, although, as will be seen, the apparently neo-Lamarckian aspects of Soviet Darwinism may be argued to have had a significant influence on the appearance of Vatagin’s sculptures. Regarding this point, the spotlight of the chapter’s discussion then shifts to the potential relationships between Vatagin’s sculptures í understood as symbolic representations relating to contemporary understandings of Darwinian evolution í and the broader socio-political context in which they were produced in 1926. This wider context was notably characterised by the implementation and/or attempts to implement, a number of Bolshevik ideas and strategies designed to address the actual diseased and degenerate state of the masses, who were still scarred, if not physically disabled, by the events and outcomes of recent history. In this respect, state support for zoo-psychological and ape-research, as manifested at the Darwin Museum and elsewhere in the USSR in the 1920s, was a scientifically significant, but ultimately a socially minor aspect of the new Soviet government’s concern for the development of biological science in its broadest ramifications. Greater emphasis was given to “social-hygienist” concerns with “hygienic” maternity and infant care, and to eugenics research. Both trajectories were dominated by an overarching belief that the October Revolution would inevitably prompt the genesis of a new species of humankind – the New Soviet Person. Given that Vatagin’s sculptural group features the reproductive cycle of women to represent Age Variability in Humankind, as part of its evolutionary narrative, the consideration of the representations of women towards the end of the chapter focuses particularly upon the potential connections with these contextual elements. The conclusions drawn from this investigation are partly informed by Michel Foucault’s interlinked concepts of power/knowledge and disciplinary biopower, in relation to the nature of these sculptures of human and animal bodies as apparently authoritative scientific statements, emanating from an ambitious State-sanctioned institution. In Foucault’s terms, I suggest, the works may be seen to be simultaneously, discursively enmeshed in and contributing to the creation and propagation of new knowledge and new regimes of scientific “truths” about Darwin’s theories and contemporary bio-sciences, in relation to the immediate concerns of Party and state. By the process of such engagement, the sculptures arguably constituted a means to assist in the creation of power, both for the new State, and also, hopefully, for the museum itself. For Foucault,

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a significant aspect of the operation of power was the disciplinary control of bodies through scientific objectification, in order to render them “docile” and more productive.15 In relation to this idea, the chapter ultimately suggests that Vatagin’s Ages of Life might be viewed as offering contextually relevant, positive images of the objectified, medicalized and scientifically controlled “docile” bodies of both women and apes, transformed for service to Soviet society.

The Darwin Museum and Ages of Life The Darwin Museum, from its foundation in 1907 at the Women’s Higher Courses Institute of Moscow University, was committed to using art works to support evolutionary narratives. Nationalised in 1917, and open to the general public from 1924, the museum remained under the direction of its founder, Professor Aleksandr Kots, a zoologist, ornithological expert and amateur taxidermist, and his wife Nadezhda Ladygina-Kots, a zoo-psychologist and ape-researcher.16 Extraordinarily, Kots continued to be the Director of the museum until his death in 1964,17 by carefully ensuring that the displays at the Museum, including commissioned art works, were always politically correct and corresponded closely with aspects of the shifting currents of Soviet ideology that were most likely to be relevant to the Museum’s continued existence and status. Historically, this is strongly exemplified in the divergences regarding the value of Lamarck’s ideas in relation to those of Darwin, between certain of Kots’ unpublished writings and lecture notes 1917-1963, which correspond closely to the shifts of dominant, party-approved views on Lamarck at particular times.18 Most obviously, it is exemplified by the documentation, within the Darwin Museum archives, of Kots’ lightning reaction to the outlawing of genetic science and absolute imposition of Lysenko’s “Michurinism”, resulting from the Congress of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in August 1948.19 There appear to be three major reasons why Kots may have commissioned the monumental Ages of Life sculptures from Vatagin in 1926. In the first place, from 1913 onwards, Kots was determined to expand the museum and was constantly planning and petitioning for a new and bigger building.20 In 1926, a Soviet Decree was passed promising such a building (although ultimately the promise was not fulfilled).21 Theoretically, there soon would have been more space in the museum, so that the displays could encompass a range of bigger art works as well as larger taxidermised specimens such as the African elephant created by Fedor Fedulov in 1927.22 Secondly, the idea of the contemporary political value of monumental art works “where the artist feels his heart beating in unison with the creative classes, of the people themselves” in spaces “which attract people by their thousands”, was particularly emphasised by the art critic and historian P. S. Kogan in his speech at the opening of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR) exhibition The Life and Being of the Peoples of the USSR in Gorky Park, Moscow, on May 6, 1926.23 This was a highly significant affair, which occasioned a public holiday for the opening, and may have suggested to Kots that the production and display of monumental works at the museum would increase its contemporary status and likelihood of obtaining the desired new building. Thirdly, while Vatagin had not exhibited in the AKhRR exhibition, he was certainly occupying a potentially significant position in the current Soviet art world, and large works by him could only add to the prestige of the museum at this point. By 1926 Vatagin was well-established, both as a scientific illustrator, and also as an artist per se. In relation to the latter activity, his work had been exhibited not only in the Soviet Union, but also at both the Paris and Venice International Expositions of Art in 1925. In February 1926, Vatagin had his first and well-received, solo exhibition of watercolours and engravings sponsored by the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN).24 Then in May 1926, he exhibited work in the Society of Russian Sculptors exhibition, gaining very favourable reviews from a leading Soviet art critic, Yakov Tugenkhol’d, as well as from the Commissar for Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky – who had also given a speech at the opening of the 1926 AKhRR exhibition.25 While Vatagin, like Kots, was not a Communist Party member, as a child of the preRevolutionary socialist intelligentsia he seems to have been supportive of the Bolshevik

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Revolution and its aims. 26 For example, in his Memoirs (written in 1966-1967 but not published until 1980), he claimed no patriotic feelings towards the Tsarist regime, and stated that in 1917 he was a member of the Moscow Soviet of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers.27 In 1918 he had participated in Lenin’s “Campaign for Monumental Propaganda” with a highly stylised design for a monument to the famous medieval Russian icon painter, Andrei Rublev. He also taught alongside the pre-Revolutionary avant-gardists at the Free State Studios in 1918, and at Vkhutemas in 1922, and exhibited with the pre-Revolutionary Realist artists who eventually formed AKhRR in 1923.28 In particular, Vatagin shared with both Kots and the Bolsheviks a deep concern for the opening up of art and science to the public.29 Ages of Life was an example of this shared concern, which seems to have been closely tied to the period, since the Darwin Museum Archives have no record of any other works of this type by Vatagin after 1926. The Ages of Life sculptures are remarkable, large high-reliefs, cast in plaster, from a clay model built on an armature composed of whatever materials came to hand, and then hand-finished with further carving.30 This, in itself, was an unusual choice of material for such large pieces. Vatagin asserted in his Memoires that he used plaster for finished works because he found the process of translating the plaster model into harder materials “boring” and regarded it as “unethical” to exhibit work not directly from his own hand.31 However, this may also be a post-hoc rationalisation for the museum’s lack of the financial means to have the sculptures cast in bronze, and indeed, for the probable lack of facilities and raw materials in the USSR to do so in 1926.

Figure 8.1 Vasilii Vatagin, Ages of Life-Age Variability in Humankind, 1926. Plaster, 206 x 103m x 80cm, State Darwin Museum Moscow. Image by kind permission of the State Darwin Museum, Moscow. Photo © the author, 2010.

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Figure 8.2 Vasilii Vatagin, Ages of Life-Age Variability in Orang-utans, 1926. Plaster, 301 x 103m x 80cm, State Darwin Museum Moscow. Image by kind permission of the State Darwin Museum, Moscow. Photo © the author, 2010.

The sculptures are quite different in appearance and content from his previous, similarly large, carved plaster portrait of Blind Lamarck and his Daughters, made around 1921 (Fig. 8.3).32 Here, there is a legible (if sentimental) historical narrative of daughters lamenting over their father, now old, poor and blind, although the sculpture may also have a metaphorical reference to Lamarck’s blindness to the conclusions about evolution later drawn by Darwin. By comparison, the narrative in Ages of Life seems less clear-cut, and the images appear more abstractly symbolic. In this regard, Vatagin may have been exercising elements of his previous training in the shared atelier of Konstantin Iuon, a Russian Symbolist painter and member of the World of Art (Mir Iskusstvo) group, and the similarly orientated sculptor, Ivan Dudin.33 Perhaps it also expressed Vatagin’s more contemporary, possible engagement with the ideas of GAKhN to which Iuon (now also a member of AKhRR) belonged,34 and which sponsored two solo exhibitions by Vatagin in 1925 and 1926.35 The aims of the Academy were to produce a “scientific” theory of art, in which art was viewed as a vehicle for expressing the “inexpressible” by symbolic means.36 Although not offered in the GAKhN sponsored exhibition, arguably Vatagin’s Ages of Life sculptures were “scientific”, because they were produced for public display at the Darwin Museum. They were also symbolic in intent since, as a pair, they did not project a simple story.

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Figure 8.3 Photograph of Vasilii Vatagin, making Blind Lamarck and his Daughters, c1921 (125 x 150 x 310cm), with Nadezhda Ladygina-Kots, and the taxidermist Dmitri Fedulov posing for him, c.1921. By kind permission of the British Museum of Natural History Archive, MSS MUS 8 vols, L.MSS. Photo © the author 2012.

What makes the sculptures even more remarkable is that, although they are a pair and represent narratives of reproduction, development and ageing, they differ not only in their subject matter but also in their modes of representation and facture, as well as marginally in height. This suggests that the depictions of the two species are meant to be read as representing differently nuanced narratives in relation to Darwin’s ideas of evolution. Vatagin’s Memoires emphasise Kots’ insistence that commissioned art works were tightly constrained to evolutionary themes.37 Thus, the sculptures may at least be seen to refer to Darwin’s theorisations about the descent of humankind from primates.38 That they may do so within this time of post-revolutionary cultural politics raises a crucial question: What may have been the more context-specific messages about evolution that these art works were designed to convey in 1926? This may be partly elucidated by scrutiny of Vatagin’s sculpture, Age Variability in Humankind (Fig. 8.1).

Age Variability in Humankind In this sculpture, largely populated by representations of women, the bodies are smooth and idealised, bearing some relationship to the structural and representational ideals associated with Classical sculpture. The mass of figures are clearly delineated and ordered, partly melding into an equally smoothly rendered background. The bodies are healthy-looking, slender, and physiognomically “caucasian”. It seems easy to read the implied narrative of the life-cycle, from baby to child, to nubile woman, and then from mother to mature woman and crone – except for the fact that the baby is represented as male. The nudity of the youngest figures might be associated with childhood innocence while that of the standing figure on the right, with ripeness for sexual activity. The direction of that figure’s gaze implies that such activity leads inevitably to the production of children. The concomitant of procreation, preoccupation with nurturing, is suggested by the poses of the generically clothed central figures. Additionally, some of the figures seem to be represented as co-operating across the generations with no sign of the famous Darwinian “struggle for existence.”39 It is a rather peculiar sculpture in that, despite the overall reference to Classical tradition, there are stylistic divergences between aspects of some of the representations. For example, the drapery on the central figure is quite detailed, albeit in a stylised way, whereas that on the figure of the old woman is much simpler and more abstract, but the facial features of this figure are more detailed than those of any other figure. Also the treatments of the standing nude on the left-hand side, and that of the figure in contemplative pose at the top right, seem very different from each other, as well as from the treatment of the other figures. These divergences may have been simply because Vatagin was not fully competent in representing female forms. Tugendkhol’d’s review of the 1926 Society of Russian Sculptors’

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exhibition did note, after all, that Vatagin’s two sculptures of Dancers,40 appeared less successful than his “animalist” pieces.41 However, the differences might also relate to a tension in Vatagin’s practice, between his interest in pre- and post-Revolutionary avant-garde art,42 and with the “scientific” accuracy and truth incumbent upon producing work for the Darwin Museum. In the late 1960s he retrospectively described these constraints as preventing his museum work from being “art”, because it inhibited his individual creative freedom.43 But this may not have been what he thought in the very different context of the 1920s, when the very notion of art was open to a myriad of conflicting definitions, and the Russian Symbolist idea of art as a self-justified activity was being profoundly challenged. Notwithstanding the possible constraints of artistic ability, and the nature of the commission, it is also possible that the stylistic differences were at least partly deliberate, and a means to reinforce the Darwinian theme of variation and variability, by making the treatment of the figures more individuated. In relation to this possibility, it is interesting that the elongated figure of the standing nude on the right-hand side seems to make vague references to aspects of French art of the previous decade. The pose, sensual and semi-invitational, with upraised arms to expose and tighten the breasts of the model, plays on tropes familiar in French post-Impressionist paintings of nudes by Henri Matisse and others, as well as some of the sculptural female nudes by Auguste Rodin (such as the very popular Toilette de Venus of 1885) and by Aristide Maillol. While Vatagin’s memoirs explicitly expressed admiration for Rodin’s work rather than that of Maillol,44 this figure, perhaps, owes more to Maillol in its reduction of body structure to a series of curved planes, and the representations of breasts almost reduced to compressed geometrical cones.45 Vatagin’s art training at the studio of Iuon and Dudin would certainly have been orientated towards French post-Impressionism, judging from the simplification of forms, use of nonnaturalistic colour and concern with flattened planes that can be seen in their work. As a result, Vatagin may also have been drawn to see genuine French art works of this type at the “Golden Fleece” exhibitions in Moscow 1908-10,46 and perhaps at the houses of the rich merchantcollectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, as well as on his visits to Paris in 1908 and 1925.47 Such works were also conveniently available during the 1920s in Moscow, at the Museum of Modern Western Art, which displayed the predominantly French post-Impressionist collections sequestered in 1918 by the Bolshevik regime from Morozov and Shchukin.48 The works contained in this Museum included some sculptures by Rodin, notably a small marble version of Eve (1881), a work admired by Vatagin.49 The museum also had Maillol’s Pomona (1910), and the series of gilded bronze sculptures commissioned from Maillol by Morozov: Flora (1911), and two works from 1912, Spring and Summer.50 These works exhibit the abstracted, curved and planar approach to representing the female body that Vatagin appears to have been attempting in the standing nude in Age Variability in Humankind. In relation to contemporary Soviet criticism, the reference to French sculpture, however vague, would have aligned with Tugendkhol’d’s view that Rodin’s and Maillol’s works offered appropriate models for Soviet sculptures of “healthy bodies”.51 It would also, perhaps, have underscored the nature of the stage of life represented by the figure, with regard to the general assumption amongst Russians that French art was “sensual.” 52 By contrast, the topmost figure in Age Variability in Humankind is neither sensual nor, unlike the other figures, in high relief. Rather, as a low-relief, the image with its vaguely indicated drapery merges fluidly with the background. While the other figures’ attention seems focused on the image of the infant, the stylistically detached topmost figure in thoughtful pose is the only one that appears to gaze out at the viewers, as if inviting them to consider her “vision” of the life-cycle. The way that the life-cycle is presented could be interpreted as an endorsement of the traditional notion of the role of women, briefly seductive and then tied to nurture and domesticity. This is apparently shown as approved by the low-relief female observer and projected towards an audience which, after 1924, not only comprised university students, teachers and school-children, but also people who were not even literate. To some extent, this might seem to fit with the arguments rehearsed by Darwin in The Descent of Man concerning women’s supposed congenital

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inequality with men due to lesser variability in abilities.53 Yet Darwin, himself. was equivocal about this notion, suggesting that a proper education at the right time could do much to improve the levels of physical and particularly intellectual equality that could be achieved by women.54 There is a sense in which this radical idea had been fundamental to the establishment of the preRevolutionary Women’s Higher Courses Institute of Moscow University, where the museum had been founded. Indeed, Nadezda Ladygina-Kots was a successful a product of this policy. The Bolshevik Revolution pioneered the idea of the total equality of the sexes, but at the same time emphasised the need for women to fulfil their traditional roles, which inevitably led to conflict. In this context, the topmost figure could be read partly as a “scientific” observer, implying that alongside the duty of motherhood, women also had a significant observational and analytical place in science, as did the museum’s Co-Director, Ladygina-Kots. In relation to the display at the Darwin Museum, the figure in Vatagin’s sculpture then seems to be a deliberate ploy to engage the viewers with an educational narrative that, as will be seen, encompassed the major and enduring contradictions in Soviet discourse concerning women.55 How then, are we to understand the rather different representation of the orang-utans in the other Ages of Life high-relief – subtitled Age Variability in Orang-utans (Fig.8.2)?

Age Variability in Orang-utans In this sculpture, instead of smoothness of execution, there is a roughness of surface on the animal figures and the background, giving it a more dynamic and chaotic appearance. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish where the rough background ends and the figures begin. This is especially so in relation to the baby orang-utans depicted above the heads of the two central characters, as if to stress the animals’ subservience to raw nature, as opposed to humans’ ability to manipulate and organise it for their own purposes. Stylistically, the active treatment of the background may have a passing relationship with that of Rodin’s 1884 sculpture, Eternal Springtime, a small bronze version of which was displayed at the Museum of Modern Western Art in the 1920s. Yet the link to Rodin may well have been via the work of Vatagin’s some-time mentor and co-member of the Society of Russian Sculptors, Anna Golubkina, who had consulted with Rodin when she was studying in Paris.56 Golubkina’s works commonly had a very active surface all over, as exemplified in Mound 1904 (Fig. 8.4) in which the figures simultaneously seem to emerge out of the rough substrate and be an organic part of it, much as in parts of Vatagin’s sculpture. By contrast with Age Variability in Humankind where the sex of each image is clear, that of the individual orang-utans is not. For instance, the largest of the main figures may represent a dominant male, as it seems to have some physical characteristics similar to those in a recent photograph of “Dyok”, the dominant male orang-utan at Pondok Tanggui National Park in Indonesian Borneo.57 In Vatagin’s sculpture, the other figure with arm upstretched to a baby orang-utan may represent a dominant female or even a younger male. The problem is that no nipples or breasts are depicted on either figure, or indeed on the images of the younger orangutans. Thus, despite Darwin’s observation that there were observable differences in appearance of the sexes in adult orang-utans,58 the life-cycle shown for the orang-utans by Vatagin is much more generic for the general public than that of the other sculpture. Yet like the women in that sculpture, the creatures are depicted as healthy-looking, and able to engage in cooperative behaviour, and once again, there is no sign of the Darwinian concept of “struggle for existence”.

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Figure 8.4 Anna Golubkina, Mound, 1904. Bronze (cast from the plaster version in 1940), 75 x 67 x 37cm, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo © RIA Novosti, 2012.

The intimation of shared co-operative characteristics relates to Darwin’s categorisation of humans and monkeys as “social animals”, although there was an implied difference between the species in that he identified humans as the only “social animal” able to extend their sympathies outside their kin group, and potentially to their whole species.59 This would resonate, for instance, with the contemporary universalising Marxist-Leninist theories regarding the comradeship of the working-classes, albeit recently circumscribed by Stalin into “Socialism in one country.” 60 The Bolsheviks followed Karl Marx and particularly Friedrich Engels in rejecting the Malthusian element of Darwin’s evolutionary theory – the “struggle for existence” – as applicable to humans.61 This rejection was echoed by the majority of the Russian radical intelligentsia, including Russian Darwinist scientists.62 Moreover, within Russian Darwinism there was a strong trajectory of discourse playing down the role of “struggle for existence” and stressing co-operation also within the plant and animal kingdoms.63 This trend had been instigated by the leading theorist, Kliment Timiriazev, whose lectures Vatagin had attended as a student.64 It appears to have been dominant in the mid-1920s, as attested to by the large amount of space given to discussion of cooperation in the long entry for “struggle for existence” in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia of 1927.65 Thus the angle on Darwin projected by Ages of Life would have been very much in tune with both contemporary politics and with Russian Darwinian scientific constructs inflected with Neo-Lamarckism. The cooperative aspect of Darwin’s theory had been particularly linked by Engels to the potential for human manipulation of nature via science and technology for the benefit of postrevolutionary society.66 This idea was arguably central to the high level of support given to the biological sciences by the Bolsheviks in this period. In relation to the Darwin Museum, such support extended to the zoo-psychological research undertaken by Nadezhda Ladygina-Kots, who had a particular interest in Darwin’s comparative studies in The Expression of the Emotions in

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Man and Animals, first published in 1872. Indeed, this research interest may have influenced the anthropomorphised poses and facial expressions, which can be seen in both Vatagin’s Age Variability in Orang-utans sculpture, and the watercolour sketches of an orang-utan’s head which he made in 1920 (Fig. 8.5). Visually, there seems to be a close relationship between the earlier sketches and the sculpture, although the details of the bodies may have been furnished by sketches made at Berlin Zoo during Vatagin’s two-month stay in 1926, which he noted in his Memoires as providing the basis for “many plaster sculptures for the Darwin Museum.”67 Between 1913 and 1916, Ladygina-Kots had made an incomplete, first-hand study of a young chimpanzee, Joni. When her son Rudi was born in 1925, she began a comparative study of Infant Chimpanzee and Human Child (published in 1935). Vatagin worked on both projects, providing composite drawings and paintings. In return, she posed for some of Vatagin’s sculptural works, such as Lamarck and his Daughters, as shown in Fig. 8.3. It is indeed possible that all of the women in Age Variability in Humankind, but most particularly the “scientific observer”, may have been modelled on Ladygina-Kots, and the human infant on Rudi, her son and current zoo-psychological subject. Conceivably at one level, the Ages of Life sculptures then offered homage to LadyginaKots as both mother and scientist.

Figure 8.5 Vasilii Vatagin, Head of an Orangutan. Sketches, 1920. Graphite pencil and watercolour on paper, 61 x 47cm, in V. Udaltsova, Sokrovishcha russkogo iskusstva: gosudarstvennyi darvinovskii muzei moskva. Moscow: Belyi gorod, 2007, plate 27, 14. By kind permission of the State Darwin Museum, Moscow. Photo © the author, 2011.

When Ladygina-Kots’ comparative study was finally published in 1935, she ultimately concluded that contemporary chimpanzees were an evolutionary dead end, not “almost human” but “by no means human”,68 and that unlike humans – as defined in the Soviet 1930s – they had no will or incentive towards “self-improvement”.69 While they could be trained or educated to a

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certain extent, they could not be environmentally, or otherwise “evolutionised”. She had tentatively reached a similar conclusion about non-anthropoid monkeys in a study of macaque behaviour published in 1928, arguing that their inability to engage with work identified them as “regressive” forms of species that had once had the capability to evolve in a human direction.70 This still left room for the possibility that, in 1926, she believed anthropoid apes, such as orangutans, had retained this capacity. At this point historically, on the one hand Soviet ape-research was poised to experiment genetically with “evolutionising” primates, to test out Darwin’s theories through Professor Ilya Ivanov’s state-funded project to hybridise them with humans by artificial insemination.71 On the other hand, the brand of Russian Darwinism favoured by the Bolsheviks held out the Lamarckianstyle possibility that evolutionary change could be triggered by training, habit, and environment, which could promote new, inheritable characteristics.72 Given also the apparent inclination of museum director, Aleksandr Kots, towards this interpretation of Darwin, indicated by his lack of conviction concerning Mendelian genetics in the early 1920s,73 plus the shortness of LadyginaKots’ study of Joni, it is highly possible that within the Darwin Museum such an interpretation at least lingered as a possibility in 1926. If so, then Vatagin’s sculpture of Age Variability in Orangutans might be seen to present the viewer with a relatively benign and even hopeful vision of the contemporary ape as still transmutable, given human-controlled, civilising influences. However, this possibility needs to be seen as tempered by the enormous time-span of the evolutionary process referenced by the “reconstructive” art works in the Museum’s display depicting extinct, prehistoric species of plants, animals and hominids. These images were mainly created by Vatagin who is shown in a photograph taken c1921 (Fig.8.6) mainly surrounded by his own works, although the sculpture immediately on his right is an image of Pithecanthropus that Kots commissioned from the famous death-mask maker, Mikhail Kurbatov, in 1917 while Vatagin was serving in the army.74 Ultimately, the Darwin Museum’s symbolic representation of evolution then reveals how it may have been hedging its bets between Neo-Lamarckism and genetics.

Figure 8.6 Photograph of Vasilii Vatagin with his works [except the sculpture of the Neanderthal to his right, which is by Mikhail Kurbatov] in the Darwin Museum, c.1921. By kind permission of English Heritage Down House Archive, 88203384. Photo © the author, 2012.

As it turned out, this was a wise decision, since during the “cultural revolution” from 1929 to1932, genetics simultaneously won and ultimately lost its battle against Lamarckian-style concepts of evolution, which re-emerged in Trofim Lysenko’s “Michurinist” biology, albeit without explicit reference to Lamarck.75 What the context most clearly suggests is that Vatagin’s non-threatening images of orang-utans certainly could be seen as a “scientific” depiction of objects for scientific scrutiny and experiment – both in relation to his association with GAKhN, and to the function of the Darwin Museum as an educational and research institution of the Soviet state. In

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relation to the latter role, it is important to note that Ladygina-Kots, like other state-funded aperesearchers both in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, justified her research by reference to the potential benefits to society, through deeper understanding of the anthropoid relatives of humankind, leading to better understanding of humans and perhaps also of their improvement.76

Degeneration and Extinction In relation to Darwin’s theories, the museum displays located contemporary humans as the latest products of a long and ongoing process of transformation. The process involved extinction of plants, animals and particularly, early hominids. The latter extinctions were implicitly memorialised in “reconstructive” paintings and sculptures such as those shown in Figs. 8.6 and 8.7.

Figure 8.7 Vasilii Vatagin, Cro-Magnon Man (detail), 1921. Oil on canvas, 300 x 100cm. By kind permission of the State Darwin Museum, Moscow. Photo © the author, 2010.

The works themselves, however, avoided depicting the moment of extinction, tending rather to focus on images of hominid victories in their collaborative, interspecies “struggle for existence” against large, dangerous animals. The peak of primitive human development was represented by Vatagin’s 1917-1921 sculpture and 1921 painting of Cro-Magnon Man, “the first artist” (Fig. 8.6 far left and Fig. 8.7). Within the museum, however, a dark note was struck by Vatagin’s painted plaster sculpture of an Enraged Gorilla (Fig. 8.8), a work offering a very different view of the relationship between apes and humans from that given in Ages of Life in 1926. It also offered a far less optimistic view of “primitive” life than the “reconstructive” art works, although from Vatagin’s post-hoc perspective as expressed in his Memoires, it was only supposed to give a characterising view of the gorilla’s psychology as apparently dangerous to humans, as opposed to constructs of the chimpanzee and orang-utan as non-threatening.77 The sculpture recalls Emmanuel Fremiet’s wellknown, faintly salacious 1889 representation of a Gorilla Carrying off a Woman (Fig. 6.5), familiar to both Vatagin and Kots from their pre-revolutionary visits to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.78 Unlike the Fremiet, however, the Vatagin depicts a young “negro” man trampled to death

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by the ferocious beast.79 Enraged Gorilla calls up a vision of the fragility of contemporary human existence, and a reminder that humankind, at least in less developed parts of the world, was not immune to extinction in the “struggle for existence” with the forces of nature.

Figure 8.8 V.Vatagin, Enraged Gorilla, 1917-1918. Painted plaster, 150 x 130 x 210cm.; by kind permission of the Darwin Museum Moscow. Photo © the author, 2010.

The message of the sculpture was well matched to its context of production. The immediate post-Revolutionary period was a very difficult time for the emerging Soviet state faced with a multiplicity of serious problems. Bolshevik support for a wide range of bio-scientific research, at the Darwin Museum and elsewhere, was not just ideological, but deeply practical in relation to the apparently degenerate state of the population. The empire inherited by the new Soviet government had been extracted from participation in the carnage of the First World War, only to be plunged immediately into civil war. This was accompanied by trade blockades and a brief, unsuccessful war of intervention waged by the West. The new State had a very low level of industrial development. It had a disastrously low birth-rate and high infant mortality rate in relation to the population losses through war and post-Revolutionary emigrations. It also had high levels of alcoholism, poor sanitation and rampant epidemic diseases such as typhoid, cholera, dysentery, malaria, syphilis and typhus.80 Just as an example, typhus, most commonly spread by lice, affected over 6.5 million people between 1918 and 1920.81 Hence the famous phrase attributed to Lenin by Health Commissar Nikolai Semashko: “Either socialism will defeat the louse or the louse will defeat socialism.”82 It seems an amusing construct, projecting a sort of interspecies “struggle for existence” between lice and socialism. Yet Semashko was not joking. Disease and depopulation potentially spelt extinction for the nascent, socialist form of socio-economic organisation.

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Regeneration and the New Person In the post-Revolutionary context, the only extinction that the Bolsheviks were officially prepared to countenance was that of capitalism. What seems to have been commonly believed both before and after 1917 í partly rooted in Engels’ discourse on Darwin í was that the revolutionary change of the socio-economic system could potentially lead to evolutionary change in those members of the human race involved with it. Within the new society, the “struggle for existence” would be entirely replaced by socialist cooperation.83 Leading Party theoreticians, such as Nikolai Bukharin and Leon Trotsky, prophesised the coming of a new genus of humankind í the New Soviet Person í that would be generated by the social and environmental changes triggered by the October Revolution of 1917.84 Lunacharsky’s opening speech at the 1926 AKhRR exhibition even identified art as a means to encourage the emergence of the New Person, describing the portraits displayed as being the “organisers of a completely renewed social being, hitherto unknown in human history.”85 With this evolutionary goal in mind, the Bolsheviks set out to address the major forces of social and physical degeneration, disease and depopulation amongst the masses. Almost all of the structures, organisations, institutions and legislation that were put in place during the 1920s, can be argued to have been directed in some way towards this conquest. In relation to this chapter, however, two things stand out as particularly significant for their focus on the task of “engineering” the New Person. One of these was the promotion of hygienic maternity and infant care within the free medical health service set up in 1918. The other was the state-supported institution of eugenics research between 1920 and 1930. Both fell under the aegis of the Commissar for Health, Nikolai Semashko. As a “social hygienist” Semashko was particularly concerned with prophylactic medicine and health education, with special emphasis on the health of women and children in relation to the unsatisfactory birth and infant mortality rates.86 In January 1918 a State Department for the Protection of Mothers and Children (Okhrmatmlad) was set up with the support of Aleksandra Kollontai, who was briefly Commissar for Social Welfare after 1917. At its core was the belief that motherhood was the social duty of all Soviet women, and that the fulfilment of this duty was a pressing state requirement.87 By the mid-1920s Okhrmatmlad was issuing thousands of “sanitary enlightenment” (Sanprosvet) posters, aimed at educating both urban and peasant women about hygienic maternity and childcare, stressing the need to take infants to clinics for health checks, and to have babies in hospital rather than at home.88 This propaganda is very likely to have had some bearing on the representation of the female reproductive cycle in Vatagin’s Age Variability in Humankind. Between 1924 and 1926 the Darwin Museum directorate, and probably also their close friend Vatagin, would have been aware of Okhrmatmlad and the “scientific” medical services available, in relation to Ladygina-Kots’ pregnancy and the birth and early infancy of her son, Rudi. Indeed this awareness may have influenced the emphasis on the traditional role of woman as mother and carer in Age Variability in Humankind, faintly ameliorated by the lone image of woman as professional scientific observer. As I have argued elsewhere, the contemporary angle of propaganda and ostensible service provision can be seen in Foucault’s terms as a medicalization of women’s bodies, to bring them more closely under the surveillance and control of the state – in effect, to create what Foucault called “docile bodies”.89 Thus, it is possible that the majority of the images of women in Ages of Life may also symbolically represent the medicalized, “docile” female bodies desired by the State. If so, then these images were also referring to contemporary eugenics discourse. Hygienic motherhood and the concomitant medicalization of women’s bodies was a central theme of international and Soviet eugenics discourse, concerned as it was with the improvement of populations.90 Semashko himself defined the strategies of “social hygiene” as a necessary preliminary to the adoption of “eugenics as the science of making the human race healthy.”91 For instance, he identified “physical culture as the foundation of eugenics,”92 and the pathway to healthy, hygienic maternity. Between 1920 and 1921, eugenics research laboratories were set up in

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the main cities. The Petrograd Institute was controlled by Professor Iuri Filipchenko. The Moscow Institute for Experimental Biology was established by Professor Nikolai Kol’tsov, the sponsor of Ivanov’s ape-human hybridisation project and founder/editor of the Russian Eugenics Journal.93 From 1920, eugenics societies sprang up in other major cities of the Soviet Union. According to Kol’tsov, the aim of Soviet eugenics was to support the evolution of a “higher type of human”. 94 It needs to be emphasised here, that Soviet eugenics discourse was somewhat different to its counterparts elsewhere in the world. For the most part, as Kol’tsov wrote in 1929, it blurred the boundaries between eugenics – genetic control of the population and euthenics – improving the population by improving their living conditions. This inclination was linked to the level of credence given to Lamarck’s notion of the inheritability of acquired characteristics within Soviet Darwinism.95 That said, there is also no doubt that issues of eugenic sterilisation were raised, if only by the leading anthropologist Mikhail Volotskii in 1925.96 There were also elements of racial prejudice, particularly against Jews, within Soviet eugenics discourse as edited by Kolt’sov in the Russian Eugenics Journal. For instance, in 1925 it was noted in the American publication Eugenical News that Kol’tsov had recently contributed information on the Soviet eugenics movement to the Archiv für Rassen und Gesellschafts-Biologie, and that the second and third parts of the Russian Eugenics Journal 1924 contained two articles on “data for comparative characteristics of physical conditions of Jews.”97 This aspect of Soviet eugenics was accompanied by some inclination towards the theory of “caucasian” or “Nordic” racial superiority aligned with Great Russian chauvinism.98 Effectively this was an emphasis on the superior genetic type as having blond hair, blue eyes, aquiline features and fair skin, comparable to the Aryan boy in Fidus’ Prayer to the Sun (Fig. I.7), something that would seem to be alluded to in Vatagin’s 1921 “reconstructive” painting of CroMagnon Man (Fig. 8.7), and in the physiognomy of his eponymous sculpture of the first early human – homo sapiens (Fig. 8.6 far left). The reconstructed appearance of Cro-Magnon Man, just as much as the appearance of the figures in the Ages of Life sculptures, were the result of deliberate choices directed by Aleksandr Kots in negotiation with Vatagin. It is highly feasible that the choices in both cases were informed by aspects of eugenics discourse. In the archives of the Darwin Museum, while there does not seem to be any evidence of explicit writings on eugenics by the Directorate, there is a wealth of material that implies their acquaintance with both international and Soviet eugenics discourse at least until the mid-to-late 1930s. Regarding Soviet eugenics for example, Kots was acquainted with Kol’tsov, who was a scientific colleague at Moscow State University, and he certainly knew Aleksandr Serebrovskii, a leading geneticist and eugenicist. Kots and his wife were also in correspondence with such prominent international eugenicists as Director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Henry Fairfield Osborn;99 Julian Huxley;100 William Bateson;101 Robert Yerkes;102 and Paul Kammerer.103 The personal libraries of Kots and LadyginaKots contain significant texts about eugenics by Yerkes, Tikhon Iudin, Kammerer, Reginald Ruggles-Gates, Julian Huxley and H. G. Wells, Karl Pearson, Francis Galton, and Cesare Lombroso.104 Some of these eugenically orientated scientific figures, notably Galton, Kammerer, Bateson, Yerkes and Kol’tsov, were also visually represented in the 1920s museum display through sculptural busts by Vatagin and others.105 Such evidence of the Kots’s interest in eugenics does not necessarily carry any sinister import. Rather it identifies them as quite typical among their contemporaries. There were few biological scientists or theorists of evolution either in the USSR or the West, who were not in some way engaged with ideas related to eugenics. The archival data, however, does suggest that Kots’ decision-making regarding the imagery of Cro-Magnon Man and the women in Ages of Life may have taken account of eugenic ideas. In addition, Vatagin himself had some links with Soviet and German eugenic and racial discourse. For instance, he was acquainted with the famous sculptor, Vera Mukhina, and most likely also knew her husband, Aleksandr Zamkov, who worked on eugenics with Kol’tsov at the Moscow Institute for Experimental Biology. In 1926, when Vatagin was in Berlin for two months, he stayed with the geneticist, Nikolai Timofeev-Resovskii,106 a student of Kol’tsov who was

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working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research with Oskar Vogt, a leading German eugenicist and racist.107 Between 1924 and 1929 Vatagin also produced Masks of the Peoples of the USSR for the Moscow Museum of Ethnology. 108 In the USSR, the study of racial difference called ethnology was connected to eugenics and ideas of Great Russian, “caucasian” superiority mainly through the work of anthropologist and craniometrist, Viktor Bunak.109 There were also some tenuous links to German racist eugenics in relation to the German-Russian Racial Research Institute set up in 1927 with which Vogt and Kol’tsov were also involved. It is unlikely that the Museum of Ethnology was itself a hotbed of racist eugenics, since it was not directly connected to the Institute. Nevertheless, the discipline of ethnology was abolished and the Museum closed down in 1930 in parallel with the abolition of State-funded eugenics research, alongside preliminaries to closure of the Race Research Institute, suggesting some taint was attached to the Museum.110 Returning to Vatagin, it is significant that at the time he was working on Ages of Life in 1926, he was not only concerned with the representation of racial characteristics regarding his work at the Museum of Ethnology, but also may have had the association between “caucasian” features and superior types of humans reinforced by his encounters with Timofeev-Resovskii in Berlin. Certainly, the physiognomies of the idealised, healthy women represented in Age Variability in Humankind appear aquiline and “caucasian”, whether they were directed by Kots or initiated by Vatagin with Kots’ agreeement. Given the array of circumstantial evidence, it seems hard not to identify Vatagin’s Age Variability in Humankind as having two layers of eugenic resonance, relating both to notions of superior racial types and to contemporary concerns with hygienic maternity. This may be a reason why, despite being unique in Vatagin’s oeuvre and comprising two of the largest sculptures he created for the Darwin Museum, Ages of Life is barely mentioned in Vatagin’s memoires, and not at all in Kots’ draft biography of Vatagin written in the 1950s1960s.111

Conclusion In this chapter I have argued that Vatagin’s Ages of Life sculpture group was an ambitious work, designed to serve the Darwin Museum’s concerns with physical expansion and with the acquisition of an enhanced authoritative status within the USSR, by deliberate alignment with politically correct contemporary scientific ideas and themes. Both by artistic context in relation to GAKhN, and by function in relation to the Darwin Museum the work was, apparently, not only “scientific” in orientation, but also symbolic in intent. This was signified not just by the ostensible subject matter, but arguably it was also inscribed into the facture and modes of depiction of the individual sculptures. In relation to the function of this sculpture group within the Darwin Museum, there are, for example, implicit references to contemporary Soviet interpretations of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, through the absence from the imagery of an intra-species “struggle for existence”, and the emphasis on depicting co-operative behaviours, attesting to the currency and political correctness of the representations. The most self-evident references to Darwin, however, are to his theorisations of The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, in the pairing of humans and orang-utans, as well as in the anthropomorphised poses and facial expressions of the depicted creatures. Implicit in the pairing is the Darwinian idea of the superiority of humans over apes as “social animals” that is, perhaps, inscribed into the contrasting smooth/rough facture of the respective sculptures. The rough surfaces of Age Variability in Orang-utans seem to suggest the apes’ close link with raw nature. Yet in contrast to the sense of unfettered brutality offered within the museum by Vatagin’s sculpture of an Enraged Gorilla (Fig. 8.8) where the forces of nature are “red in tooth and claw”, the benign and slightly cartoony depictions of the orang-utans in 1926 appear to offer a deliberately non-threatening view of the anthropoid “beast.” Whereas Enraged Gorilla underscores the potential for any sort of interspecies “struggle for existence” to lead to human extinction, Age Variation in Orang-utans seems to project a vision of

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docile, “evolutionisable” objects of scientific study and experimentation, with particular reference to the trajectory of research currently being pursued within the museum by Ladygina-Kots. The function of such research was to lead not just to a better understanding but indeed the improvement of Soviet humankind. Effectively then, this sculpture implied human mastery over nature, an idea that was central to Engels’ construct of a viable post-revolutionary society. Within the museum display by Vatagin’s celebratory “caucasian” images of cro-magnon man, such mastery also indicated something that appears to link strongly with the broader context of Bolshevik beliefs in the power of science to assist in the regeneration of society and to prompt the evolution of the New Person. In one sense, the other sculpture, Age Variability in Humankind, offers a sort of homage to Ladygina-Kots’ roles as scientific observer and mother. Within the contemporary context of Bolshevik concerns with degeneration, disease and depopulation, both of these roles were highly significant as a means to promote regeneration. On a less personalised level, the sculpture also can be argued to engage artistically with two interlinked aspects of Bolshevik attempts to combat degeneration – eugenics and hygienic maternity – topics with which Kots, Ladygina-Kots and Vatagin would have been at least relatively familiar. The figures, with their aquiline “caucasian” features, potentially indicate not only the generic superiority of humans over apes; in relation to eugenic ideas of the “Nordic” type transposed into Great Russian chauvinism, they are also to be viewed as representing a superior type of human, worthy to be the progenitor of the New Person. Another aspect of such worthiness is the apparent healthiness of the represented bodies. This quality is reinforced in relation to the nubile standing nude with its references to both the smoothness of Classical sculpture and to stylistic tropes from French art of the 1910s, in particular the sculptures of Rodin and Maillol, viewed by leading Soviet art critics as model representations of “healthy bodies.” The focus of the sculpture, intimated by the gazes of the majority of the figures, is healthy and hygienic to convey the need for medicalized maternity resulting in the production of healthy children. The sculpture’s stress on the evolutionary role of women may be seen to relate to the contemporary intensification of eugenic emphasis on hygienic maternity and childcare as a highly important means to generate the New Person. In relation to the significant level of circumstantial evidence for some level of engagement with eugenics by the Kotses and Vatagin, it does not seem far-fetched to imagine this sculpture as aligned with the current Soviet ideal of eugenic motherhood, with the representation of the infant signifying the emergence of the New Person. What this sculpture fundamentally shares with Age Variability in Orang-utans is, I conclude, a projected, positive vision of what Foucault would call “docile bodies.” Objectified, medicalized, and “scientificised”, they were harnessed both to the ambitious interests of the Darwin Museum, and to the evolution of the new Soviet State. The archival research in Moscow and the USA on which this paper is partly based was funded by a British Academy Small Grant 2011-2012. I am also extremely grateful for the help and support provided by Olga Baird, former curator at the Pushkin Museum Moscow, and by the Moscow Darwin Museum staff: Director, Anna Kliukina; her Assistant, Nikolai Simakov; archivist, Irena Kalacheva; exhibition curator, Marina Lashko and her colleagues, as well as curator of the art collection, Vera Udaltsova.

Notes 1

D. Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008) pp. 31, 35, 38. 2 Ibid. pp. 27, 30-33, 36. 3 V. I. Lenin, “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky”, V. I. Lenin Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 47 vols, 1960-1980, Vol. 28) pp. 227-325. 4 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (1924), trans. Rose Strunsky (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968) p. 145.

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Beer, Renovating Russia, 2008, pp. 38, 45. L. Loison, “French Roots of French Neo-Lamarckisms”, Journal of the History of Biology (Vol. 44, No. 4, Winter 2011) pp. 713-744; D. Freeman et al, “The Evolutionary Theories of Darwin and Herbert Spencer (and Comments and Replies)”, Current Anthropology (Vol. 15, No. 3, September 1974) pp. 211-237; E. Haeckel, “Charles Darwin as an Anthropologist”, Darwin and Modern Science. Essays in Commemoration of the Centenary of the Birth of Charles Darwin and the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Publication of the Origin of Species, ed. A.C. Seward, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909) p. 140. 7 L. J. Jordanova, Lamarck (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) p. 107; Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859) p. 427; ibid. (London: John Murray, 1860) p. 246; ibid. (London: John Murray, 1861) p. 458; ibid. (London: John Murray, 1866) pp. xiii, 502; ibid. (London: John Murray, 1869) p. 505; (London: John Murray, 1872) pp. xii, 373; C. R. Darwin, “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties; and On the Perpetuation of Species by Natural Means of Selection”, Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society, London. Zoology (Vol. 3, 1858) pp. 46-50. C. R. Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World (London: John Murray, 1845, 1860) p. 52; ibid. (London: John Murray, 1890) p. 53. 8 A. Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought (Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 1988) pp.158, 162-163. 9 This includes the critical writer Nikolai Chernyshevskii, an avowed “Transformist”; the Anarchist theorist, Prince Peter Kropotkin, who for political reasons favoured Lamarck’s idea of cooperation and as he termed it, “mutual aid”, but nevertheless identified himself as a “Darwinist”, and also Pavel Kessler, Professor of Zoology and Dean of St Petersburg University (cited by Kropotkin in support of his own arguments). Staryi Transformist (pseudonym of N. Chernyshevskii), “Proiskhozhdenie terorii blagotvornosti bor’by za zhizn”, Russkaia mysl (Vol. 9, No. 2, 1888) pp. 79-114; Prince Kropotkin, Ethics. Origin and Development (1922), trans. L. S. Friedland and R. Piroshnikoff (New York, 1924) facsimile edition (Dorchester: Prism Press, nd.) p. 45, fn. 10; G. Woodcock and I. Avakumich, The Anarchist Prince. A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin (New York: Schocken Books, 1971) pp. 263, 335. 10 Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought, 1988, p. 163. 11 T. Dobzhansky, “The Birth of the Genetic Theory of Evolution in the Soviet Union in the 1920s”, The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology, eds. E. Mayr and W. B. Provine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982) pp. 229-342; Boris Gasparov, “Development of Rebuilding: Views of Academician T. D. Lysenko in the Context of the Late Avant-Garde”, Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment, eds. J. E. Bowlt and O. Matich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) p. 146. 12 See for example: Peter Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1989; 2009) pp. 246-247. 13 T. D. Lysenko, Agrobiology. Essays on Problems of Genetics, Plant Breeding and Seed Growing (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954) pp. 174, 183, 190, 243, 307, 518, 521, 526. 14 Vuchinich, Darwin in Russian Thought, 1988, pp. 157, 161-162. 15 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power”, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 by Michel Foucault, ed. C. Gordon, trans. C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mephan and K. Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) pp. 131-132; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by A. Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1979) p. 184; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge, trans. R. Hurley (London: Penguin 1998) pp. 77-80, 106, 116, 120-127, 131, 145, 154-157. 16 “Darvinovskii myzei”, Vol. 20, Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopedia, general ed. O. Yu Shmidt (Moscow: Aktsionernoe obshchestvo Sovetskaia Entsiklopedia, 1930) p. 472; A. F. Kots, “O muzee evoliutsionnoi istorii Moskovskikh Vyskikh Kursakh uchenii god 1913-1914”, May 6, 1914 (Arkhiv gosudarstvennogo darvinovskogo muzeia (AGDM) f.12430, o.32, khr.165); “From the History of the Museum: Chronic[k]le of Leading Events”, Darwin Museum Report 1996-2000, http://www.darwin.museum.ru/report/1996-2000-en/e_hist.htm, accessed 16/11/2008. 17 Ibid., “From the History of the Museum: Chronic[k]le of Leading Events”. 18 See for example: A. S. Serebrovskii Letter to A.F. Kots, June 10, 1920 (AGDM f.1041, o.253, Khr.1026); A. F. Kots, “Lamarkizm” n.d (c1928-32?) (AGDM f.10141, o.484, khr.81); A. F. Kots, “O teorii Darvina na svete sovremennoi genetiki faunistiki i sistematikii (t.VI, gl.10)”, August 1958 (AGDM f.10141, o.475, khr.52). 19 A. F. Kots, “Ob itogakh sessii vsesoiuznoi akademii s.kh. nauk po dokladu akad. Lysenko ‘O polozhenii biolog. Nauka’ v primenenii k eksponanture gosudarstvennogo darvinovskogo muzeia”, July 12, 1948 (AGDM f.10141. o.101, khr. 33). 20 See for example A. F. Kots, ‘O muzee evoliutsionnoi istorii’. 21 “From the History of the Museum: Chronic[k]le of Leading Events” 1996-2000. 22 Ibid. 23 P. S. Kogan, “Novaia sistema tvorchestva”. 3 May 1926, in Assotsiatsiia khudozhnikov revoliutsionnoi Rossii. Sbornik vospominanii, statei, dokumentov AKHRR, eds I.M. Gronskii and V. N. Perel’man (Moscow: izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, 1973) p. 227. 24 V. A. Vatagin, Vospominaniia. Zapiski animalista. Stat’i (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1980) pp. 10, 179, 187, 192-193. 6

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Ia.A. Tugendkhol’d, “Nasha skul’ptura”, Novyi mir (5 May 1926) pp. 161-167; A. V. Lunacharskii, “Po vystavkam”, Izvestiia TsIK i VTsIK SSSR, May 23, 1926, cited in Vatagin, Vospominaniia, p. 189. 26 Vatagin, Vospominaniia, p. 17. 27 Ibid., p. 59. 28 Ibid., pp. 10, 59,161,192. 29 Ibid., pp. 59-60; see also A. F. Kots, “O muzee evoliutionnoi istorii”, p. 16. 30 For example, Kots noted that the armature for Vatagin’s Seated Darwin (1928) comprised “a box, a barrel, two buckets, dozens of bricks and wooden beams”; see A. F. Kots, “Vasilii Alekseevich Vatagin i ego raboty v Darvinovskom muzee 1902-1952”, no date (AGDM, f.10141, o.623, ezd.khr.215). 31 Vatagin, Vospominaniia, pp. 65, 67. 32 Displayed on floor 2 of the Darwin Museum. 33 Vatagin, Vospominaniia, pp. 10, 26-28. 34 Iuon was, however, ejected from the group when it was reorganised in 1928 and its acronym was shortened to AKhR: see E. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art. The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (New York and Guildford, Surrey: Columbia University Press, 1989) p. 159. 35 Vatagin, Vospominaniia, p. 187; Art Investments.ru, Vasili Vatagin, “Biography”, http://artinvestment.ru/en/auctions/1420/biography.html accessed 01/08/12. It is, of course, entirely possible that Vatagin himself was not engaged with such ideas but was perceived to be so by GAKhN, which was a theoretical and academic organisation. 36 A. Dobrokhotov, “GAKhN: An aesthetics of ruins or Aleksej Losev’s failed project”, Studies in East European Thought (Vol. 63, No. 1, February 2011) pp. 31-42. See also N. Mislev, “Towards an exact Aesthetics”, Laboratory of Dreams, pp. 118-132. 37 Vatagin, Vospominaniia, 1988, p. 80. 38 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871) vol. 2, p. 389. 39 Darwin, The Descent of Man, Vol.1, pp. 61, 136, 154, 174, 180, 185, 257, 320; Darwin, On the Origin of Species, pp. 60-79. 40 This was possibly connected with his interest in the dance style of Isadora Duncan, which was the subject of some of his paintings in the 1920s; see Kathrina Szymborski, “Moving Muse”, The Moscow Times, September 8, 2006, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/printhttp://www.themoscowtimes.com/arts_n_ideas/article/movingmuse/356953.html, accessed 23/04/12. 41 Tugendkhol’d, “Nasha skul’ptura”, pp. 161-167. 42 While the contemporary critical acclaim appears to have centred on Vatagin’s naturalistic figurative and “scientific” works, some watercolour paintings recently offered for sale in the European art market indicate that he was also privately engaging with the non-objective abstract art of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde, which he had encountered at Vkhutemas, if not before. See for example Vasilii Alekseevich Vatagin, Abstraction Geometrique, 1925-1930, mixed media on cardboard, 68 x 58cm, Artnet.com.de. fr, http://www.artnet.com/artists/LotDetailPage.aspx?lot_id=081EB30B926619E9F737F74353ECEDDD, accessed 24/04/2012. 43 Vatagin, Vospominaniia, 1988, p. 70. 44 Ibid., p. 65. 45 I am grateful to Anthea Callen for this observation. 46 Subsidised by the Russian collector Nikolai Rybushinskii, the publisher of the Russian art journal, Zolotoe runo (Golden Fleece); see Camilla Gray, The Great Russian Experiment in Art (London: Thames and Hudson, (1962) revised edition 1986) p. 82. 47 Vatagin, Vospominaniia, 1988, p. 179; 187. 48 Shchukin’s art collection was sequestered on October 29 1918, and Morozov’s on December 18 1918. Initially the house collections were named the First and Second Museums of Modern Western Art but were merged as a single museum in 1923: “Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin”, Morozov Shchukin.com, http://www.morozov-shchukin.com/html/AhistoA.html, accessed 24/04/ 2012. 49 Vatagin, Vospominaniia, 1988, p. 65. This work is now in the State Pushkin Museum in Moscow. 50 “The General Staff Building. First Floor. 12: Maurice Denis’s decorative ensemble, The Story of Psyche. Room 2”, The Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, 2011. http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/08/hm88_3_1_12_2.html, accessed 24/04/2012. The works are now in the State Pushkin Museum in Moscow. For an image of Aristide Maillol, Spring 1912, Pushkin Museum, see the RIA Novosti website: http://visualrian.ru/en/site/gallery/#44135/context[q]=Maillol&context[types][0]=photo&context[types][4]=russia, accessed 03/08/12. For an image of Aristide Maillol, Summer, 1912, see A World History of Art website: http://www.all-art.org/Architecture/23-3.htm, accessed 03/08/12. 51 Tugendkhol’d, “Nasha skul’ptura”, pp. 161-167. 52 See for example: “Introduction”, Zolotoe runo katalog vystavki kartin, 1909, cited in Gray, The Great Russian Experiment in Art, p. 82. 53 Darwin, The Descent of Man, Vol. 1, pp. 275-276; Vol. 2, pp. 326-329. 54 Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 329.

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Lynne Attwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex Role Socialisation in the USSR (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990) pp. 127, 170-171, 177, 178, 205, 212. 56 Vatagin, Vospominaniia, 1988, pp. 64-65; Oleg Sopotsinsky, ed. Art of the Soviet Union: Painting, Sculpture Graphic Arts (Leningrad: Aurora, 1977; 1978) p. 402. 57 See Orangutan Foundation website, http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=Dyok+orang+utan&num=10&hl=en&safe=off&biw=1366&bih=553&tbm=isch& tbnid=9SQuGJs5rIbtgM:&imgrefurl=http://orangutanfoundation.wildlifedirect.org/tag/tanjung-puting-nationalpark/&docid=jqg096h7CkoZbM&imgurl=http://orangutanfoundation.wildlifedirect.org/files/2011/08/Dyok-PondokTanggui-Jenny-Aundrews300x225.jpg&w=300&h=225&ei=XOUbUOyfNaj80QXP3oDgCA&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=114&vpy=201&dur=27 19&hovh=180&hovw=240&tx=169&ty=102&sig=112866749503814702696&page=1&tbnh=143&tbnw=191&start= 0&ndsp=12&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0,i:75 , accessed 01/08/12. 58 Darwin, The Descent of Man, Vol. 1, p. 329. 59 Ibid., pp. 61, 136, 154, 174, 180, 185, 257, 320; Darwin, On the Origin of Species, pp. 60-79. 60 Ibid. pp. 70, 72-73, 75-76, 80, 84,100-101, 104; Vol.2, p. 391; see also Geoffrey Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union 1917-1991 (London: Fontana, final edition 1992) pp. 135-137. 61 Karl Marx letter to Friedrich Engels in Manchester, London, January 7, 1851, Marx and Engels. Selected Correspondence 1844-1895, ed., S.W. Ryazanskaya, trans. I. Lasker (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1955; 1975) p. 47; Karl Marx, Letter to Friedrich Engels in Manchester, London, June 18, 1862, ibid., p.120; Marx, letter to Ludwig Kugelmann in Hanover, London, June 27, 1870, ibid., p. 225; Engels, Letter to Friedrich Albert Lange in Duisburg, ibid., pp. 161-162; Marx, Capital, trans. E. and C. Paul (London and New York: Dent and Dutton, 1957; 1972, 2 vols.), Vol. 1, p. 393; Vol. 2, p. 574. For the Malthusian element in Darwin’s theories see for example, Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859, pp. 5, 63; Darwin, The Descent of Man, Vol.1, pp. 131-135. 62 Pat Simpson, “Imag(in)ing Post Revolutionary Evolution: The Taylorised Proletarian, Conditioning and Soviet Darwinism in the 1920s”, The Art Of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms and Visual Culture, eds. Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2009) pp. 231-232. 63 A. Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought, 1988, pp. 205-207, 387; Daniel P. Todes, “Darwin’s Malthusian Metaphor and Russian Evolutionary Thought”, Isis (Vol. 78, No. 4, 1987) pp. 537-551; T. Dobzhansky, “The Birth of the Genetic Theory of Evolution in the Soviet Union in the 1920s”, p. 229. 64 Vatagin, Vospominaniia, pp. 17, 24. 65 S. Sobol’, “Bor’ba za sushchestvovanie”, Bolshaiia Sovetskaiia Entsiklopedia (Moscow: Aktsionernoe obshchestvo Sovetskaiia Entsiklopedia, 1927) vol. 7, pp. 204-214. 66 Friedrich Engels, Letter to Friedrich Albert Lange in Duisburg, Marx and Engels. Selected Correspondence, pp. 161-162; Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954) p. 41; Daniel Todes, Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) p. 550. 67 Vatagin, Vospominaniia, pp. 60; 73-74. 68 N. N. Ladygina Kots, Infant Chimpanzee and Human Child (Moscow 1935) trans. B. Vekker, ed. F. De Waal, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) p. 393. 69 Ladygina Kots, Infant Chimpanzee and Human Child, p. 397. Regarding 1930s concerns with training and selftraining, see also P. Simpson, “Parading Myths: Im(ag)ining the New Soviet Woman on Fizkul’turnik’s Day July 1944”, Russian Review (Vol. 63, No. 2, 2004) pp. 187-211. 70 N. N. Ladygina Kots, “Prisposobitel’nye motornye naviki makaka v usloviiakh eksperimenta: k voprosu o “trudovykh protsessakh” nizshikh obezian c 24 foto tablitsami”, Trudy zoopsikhologicheskoi laboratorii, (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi darvinovskiii muzei, 1928) pp. 351-352. 71 “Soviet Backs Plan to Test Evolution: Experiments to be Carried Out at Pasteur Institute in Kindia Africa. Support Here is Alleged. Lawyer for American Atheistic Society Tells of Project and Will Go Observe it”, New York Times, June 17, 1926, p. 2; “Russian Admits Ape Experiments: Soviet paying for scientific researches in Africa” (special cable dated June 18), The New York Times, June 19, 1926, “Radio” section, p. 17; “Ape-child?”, Time, August 16, 1926, No.8, p. 7; K. Rossianov, “Beyond Species: Ilya Ivanov and his Experiments on Cross-Breeding Humans with Anthropoid Apes”, Science in Context (Vol. 15, No. 2, 2002) pp. 277-316; A. Etkind, “Beyond Eugenics: The Forgotten Scandal of Hybridising Humans and Apes”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (Vol. 39, No. 2, 2008) pp. 205-210. 72 Simpson, “Imag(in)ing Post–Revolutionary Evolution”, 2009, pp. 226-261. 73 Serebrovskii Letter to A. F. Kots. 74 A. F. Kots, “Darvinovskii muzei do oktyabrskoi revoliutsii 1907-1917” (no date), Trudy gosudarstvennogo darvinovskogo muzeya. K 100-letiu muzeya (Vol. 11, 2007) pp. 60-62. In the current display of the “History of the Museum”, on the first floor, Mikhail Alekseevich Kurbatov is identified as an “artist, sculptor and the best death-mask maker in Europe”. 75 See: Dobzhansky, “The Birth of the Genetic Theory of Evolution”, pp. 229-242; Boris Gasparov, “Development of Rebuilding: Views of Academician T. D. Lysenko in the Context of the Late Avant-Garde”, Laboratory of Dreams, p. 146; R. W. Burkhardt, Jr., “Lamarckism in Britain and the United States”, The Evolutionary Synthesis, pp. 82-89; Z.

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Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, trans. I. Michael Lerner (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1969); D. Lecourt, Proletarian Science: The Case of Lysenko, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1976; 1977). 76 Ladygina Kots, Infant Chimpanzee and Human Child, pp. 396-398; Ladygina Kots, “Prisposobitel’nye motornye naviki makaka v usloviiakh eksperimenta”, pp. 5-7. See also W. K. Gregory Letter to D. Morton, February 25, 1929, William King Gregory Papers, MSS G7441, Box 55 folder 12, American Museum of Natural History Archives, regarding an ape-hunting expedition to enable “the study of problems which deal equally with the evolutionary biology of mankind and with man’s physical welfare in the future”; R. Yerkes, Chimpanzees: A Laboratory Colony (New York: Johnson Reprint Company, 1943; 1971) pp. 3, 9-11; Partners in Research website, http://partnersinresearch.wordpress.com/health-research/animals/which-animals-are-used/primates/, accessed 01/08/12. 77 Vatagin, Vospominaniia, 1988, p. 60. 78 Kots, “Darvinovskii muzei do oktyabrskoi revoliutsii 1907-1917”, pp. 32-38; Shubina, Iuliia. “Peredannym kollektsiiam prisvaivaetsia nazvan’e ‘Museum Darwinianum’”, Darvinovskii muzei. 100 let so dnia osnovaniia. 19072007, ed. A. Trofimov (Moscow: Izdatel’skaia programma interrosa, 2007) p. 8. 79 Vatagin, Vospominaniia, 1988, p. 60. 80 Frances Bernstein, “Envisioning health in revolutionary Russia: The politics of gender in sexual enlightenment posters of the 1920s”, The Russian Review (Vol. 57, 1998) pp. 191-217; J. E. Muller et al, “The Soviet health system: Aspects of relevance for medicine in the United States”, New England Journal of Medicine (Vol. 286, 1972) p. 700. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM197203302861305, accessed 12/06/12. 81 Roger I. Glass, “The SANEPID Service in the USSR”, Public Health Reports (Vol. 91, No. 2, 1976) pp. 155-158; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1438525/pdf/pubhealthrep00155-0056.pdf, accessed 02/08/12. 82 N. A. Semashko, Health Protection in the USSR (London: Victor Gollancz, 1934) p. 39. 83 F. Engels, Letter to Friedrich Albert Lange in Duisburg, in Marx and Engels. Selected Correspondence, pp. 161162. 84 Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 145; N. I. Bukharin, Pravda, 11 October 1923; cited in A.K.Gastev, “Shatunovshchina kak metodika”, Krasnaia nov’ (January-February 1924) p. 237. 85 A. V. Lunacharskii, “VIII vystavka AKhRR”, Bor’ba za realism v izobrazitel’nom iskusstve 20kh godov:materialy, dokumenty, vospominanniia, ed. V.N. Perel’man (Moscow, 1962) pp. 225-227; cited in B. Taylor, “On AKhRR”, The Art of the Soviets. Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-party State 1917-1992, eds. B. Taylor and M. Cullerne Bown (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993) p. 63. 86 N. A. Semashko, “The Work of the Public Health Authorities in Soviet Russia”, extract from a speech of Comrade N.A. Semashko, Commissar for Health of the RSFSR, at a Conference of the Workers’ International Relief at Berlin, trans. E. T. Whitehead, The Communist Review (Vol. 4, No.2, June 1923); Marxist Internet Archive (2006), http://www.marxists.org/archive/semashko/1923/06/health.htm , accessed 01/08/12. 87 A. Kollontai, “The First Steps Towards The Protection of Motherhood”, From My Life and Work (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974) pp. 336-340. 88 Frances Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007) pp. 101-108, 111-128. 89 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 184. 90 N. K. Kol’tsov,“Evgenika”, Bolshaia meditsinskaia entsiklopedia (Moscow: Aktsionernoe obshchestvo Sovetskaiia Entsiklopedia, 1929) Vol. 9, pp. 682-692. 91 See for example T. I. Iudin, Evgenika (Moscow: Sabashnikov, 1925) p. 6; Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex, pp. 171-175; N. A. Semashko, Nauka o zdorov’e (Moscow: Obshchestva sotsial’naia gigiena, 1922; 1926) pp. 53-54. 92 N. A. Semashko, “Predislovie”, Fizicheskaia kul’tura v nauchnom osveshennii, Moscow, 1924, p. 3, cited in N. Krementsov, “From Beastly Philosophy to Medical Genetics: Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union”, Annals of Science (Vol. 68, No. 1, 2011) p. 75. 93 “Russian Admits Ape Experiments: Soviet paying for scientific researches in Africa”. The correspondent noted that Ivanov was working under the auspices of the “Kaltzof Biological Institute” which, given the random transliteration of Russian names in the West at that time, equates with the Kol’tsov’s Institute for Experimental Biology. 94 N. Kol’tsov, “Ulychshenie chelovecheskoi porody”, Russkaia evgenicheskaia zhurnal (Vol. 1, 1922) pp. 3-27; cited in Krementsov, “From Beastly Philosophy to Medical Genetics”, pp. 72-73. 95 Pat Simpson, “The Nude in Soviet Socialist Realism: Eugenics and Images of the New Person in the 1920s-1940s”, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art (Vol. 4, No. 2, 2003 & Vol. 5, No. 1, 2004) p. 115; Krementsov, “From Beastly Philosophy to Medical Genetics”, pp. 78-80. 96 M. V. Volotskii, Klassovye interesy i sovremennaia evgenika (Moscow: Zhizn’ i znanie, 1925); E. I. Kolchinskii, “Chem zakonchilas’ popytka sozdat’ proletarskuiu biologiiu, Sotsial’naia istoriia otechestvennoi nauki. Elektronaia biblioteka i arkhiv; http://russcience.euro.ru/papers/kol00vr.htm , 03/11/11; also see Krementsov, “From Beastly Philosophy to Medical Genetics”, pp. 66; 76. 97 The articles mentioned were N. Kol’tsov, “New attempts to prove the inheritance of acquired characteristics”, and S. Wermel, “Criminality of Jews”, Eugenical News (Vol. 10, November 1925) pp. 146-147.

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Ian Law, “Racialising Russia”, The Culture Craft (University of Leeds), August 2011, accessed 06/03/12, http://theculturecraft.wordpress.com/journal/racialising-russia/ 99 AGDM, f.11, o.1, ezd.khr. 2396. 100 For example: A. Kots to J. Huxley, January 10, 1932 (AGDM, f.12497, o.142, ezd. khr.1203). 101 W. Bateson to A. Kots, September 25, 1925 (AGDM, f.1014, o.501, ezd.khr.1182); A. Kots to W. Bateson, n.d. 1925 (John Innes Centre Archives, William Bateson Collection, G6e, 4). 102 For example: H. F. Osborn to N. N. Ladygina-Kots, March 25, 1930 (AGDM, f.12497, o.649, ezd. khr.1304). 103 Kammerer visited the Darwin Museum in 1926: See P. Kammerer, Letter to N.N. Ladygina Kots, June 19, 1926 (AGDM f.11.o.1, ezd.khr.2383). 104 The following books from Kots’ library were displayed in December 2010 at an exhibition at the Darwin Museum about Soviet eugenics entitled The Younger Sister of Genetics: Karl Pearson, Life and Letters of Francis Galton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2 vols, 1914 & 1924); Francis Galton, Natural Inheritance (London: MacMillan, 1889); F. Galton, Nasledstvennost’ talanta ee zakony i posledstviia [Hereditary Genius. An Inquiry Into Its Laws and Consequences, presumably a translation of the 1869 edition] (St Petersburg: red. Znanie, 1875); C. Lombroso, Genialnost’ i pomeshatel’stvo [Genius and Madness – Genio e Folia, 1872], trans. G. Tetiushinova (1885; 1892) and T. I. Iudin, Evgenika (Moscow: Sabashnikov, 1925). Aleksandr Kots’ handwritten personal library catalogue contains scientific books and papers by an array of American, German and British scientist/eugenicists as exemplified by the Americans, Vernon Lyman Kellogg, C. B. Davenport, H. F. Osborn, W. K. Gregory and H. J. Müller; the Germans, Auguste Weismann, Ernst Haeckel and the Austrian, Paul Kammerer; the British, R. C. Punnett and William Bateson, but shows a preference for British writings on eugenics, including a 1926 Russian translation of Reginald Ruggles-Gates, Inheritance and Eugenics (1923), as well as Julian Huxley and H. G. Wells, The Science of Life (1931; AGDM, Rare Books Room, N5. Inventarnaia kniga, C1, no. 2160). Nadezhda Kots’ library included significant works relating to eugenics by Yerkes including “Eugenic bearing of measurements of intelligence in the United States Army”, 1928: See Irina Kalacheva, Arkhivnyi fond Ladygina-Kots, Nadezhdy Nikolaevny (1889-1963), Opis no.1 (AGDM, 2010) p. 286. 105 Francis Galton (V. Vatagin, 1928); William Bateson (V. Vatagin, 1925); Henry Fairfield Osborn (Chester Beach, 1934 and copy by V. Vatagin, c. 1935); Robert Yerkes (V. Vatagin, 1929); Paul Kammerer (V. Vatagin, 1925); Nikolai Kol’tsov (V. Vatagin n.d; also a plaster bust by Vera Mukhina c.1927); also Ernst Haeckel and Auguste Weismann (V. Vatagin, late 1910s early 1920s). 106 Vatagin, Vospominaniia, pp. 10, 179, 192. 107 Timofeev-Resovskii was there as part of a scientific collaboration: See Vadim A. Ratner, “Nikolay Vladimirovich Timofeev-Ressovsky (1900-1981), Twin of the Century of Genetics”, Genetics (Vol. 158, July 2001) pp. 933-939. 108 Vatagin, Vospominaniia, p. 79. 109 Ibid.; A. M. Kuznetsov, “Russian Anthropology: Old Traditions and New Tendencies”, Other Peoples’ Anthropologies: Ethnographic Practices on the Margins, ed. A. Boškovic (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008) pp. 24; 26; Ian Law, “Racialising Russia”; Krementsov, “From Beastly Philosophy to Medical Genetics”, p. 80; Paul Weindling, “German-Soviet Medical Cooperation and the Institute for Racial Research 1927-1935”, German History (Vol. 10, No. 2, 1992) p. 197. 110 Ibid., Weindling, “German-Soviet Medical Cooperation”, p. 197. 111 A. F. Kots, “V. A. Vatagin 1902-1952”, draft (AGDM, f.10141, o.66, ezd.khr.244).

CHAPTER NINE NERVES LIQUEFY: DADA’S CHALLENGE TO EVOLUTION PETER MOWRIS FOR KATHERINE ARENS

“Let us rewrite life every day.”1

Zürich Dada challenged Europe’s fascination with regeneration. Rather than cultivate a version of culture in which regeneration was the result of a long and gradual process of reeducation, Dada’s usages of spontaneity and improvisation fomented image of the subject as one who could continuously and unpredictably remake him or herself. The group’s endeavours entailed reshaping concepts of physiological psychology in order to challenge conventional and forward thinking uses of it among regenerationist thinkers. The Zurich Dada riposte entailed redirecting concepts of physiological psychology in order to challenge conventional and forward-thinking regenerationist viewpoints toward art and society that had, in their eyes, become suspect in the new climate of World War I.

Völkerpsychologie: Wilhelm Wundt and Physiological Psychology Between 1880 and 1920, physiological psychology dominated the debate over links between nerves and mental activity that began in the nineteenth century.2 In 1879 at Leipzig, Wilhelm Wundt opened the first teaching laboratory of experimental physiological psychology and was the first to offer a concerted program of study that was largely responsible for training the first generation of psychologists.3 Wundt developed a series of experiments that proved the malleability of the nervous system. 4 During the phenomena of practice, what Wundt called Übungsphänomene, he discovered that repeated stimulation of nerves encouraged the growth of particular paths of conduction to the brain and inhibited changes that were too extreme and sudden. 5 Greater coordination between the moving body and conditions of space was the clearest manifestation of practice. For Wundt, this network of habitual motions indicated that, “certain processes of excitation are facilitated” in the nervous system as a result of frequent repetition.6 Practice marked harmony between the body and its surroundings, but this harmony was never total. Relying on laws of thermodynamics, Wundt reasoned that if new stimuli passed a certain threshold of intensity, then neural tissue would sooner change shape than expend unnecessary energy in resisting new stimuli. These processes of pathmaking [Bahnung] confirmed that the nervous system made it apparent that it “cannot be confined within fixed limits; elements . . . must be able, under the new conditions of practice introduced by the destruction of former conduction paths, to enter into new functional connections.”7 Wundt argued that new paths can be forged. Habitual conductive paths may inhibit the transmission of discordant charges to the brain, but if these new charges are repeated, he considered that the nervous system then reshapes itself and develops new conduction paths that transmit new stimuli of energy. 8 Wundt reasoned that

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repetition conditions response to stimuli and manifests itself in new forms of motion that gradually appear automatic or natural, indicating a successful process of conditioning. Techniques by which physiological psychologists studied the mind differed from psychoanalysis. In contrast to the psychiatrist’s couch, physiological psychologists tested each other and switched back and forth between three positions: the subject, who took the test, the experimenter, who conducted it, and the observer, who recorded the technical conditions of the test and its results. 9 This social dimension of collaboration projected a very potent view of consciousness. Kurt Danziger has argued that these collaborative experiments signified “evidence of … universal intraindividual processes and their special forms of determination.” 10 In other words, scientists believed that if they all had the same relative neurophysiological structures, then by testing each other, they could discern general laws of mental function. As a consequence of these techniques, mental formation was regarded as social, which immediately opened it for comparative historical inquiry or Völkerpsychologie (“psychology of peoples”). For his contribution to this field, Wundt used his experiments on nerves to plot the psychological evolution of human society, based on nervous adaptation to certain contexts. In general, he based the evolution of cultures on their development of basic motor reactions to the conditions of a unique context. These culturally specific motions enabled development of higher processes of volition or collective will, which cultural production—music, voice, dance, or plastic art— concretize, thereby confirming Wundt’s argument that “mental products are created by a community of human life and are, therefore, inexplicable in terms merely of individual consciousness, since they presuppose the reciprocal action of many.”11 This reciprocal action was a collective nervous energy, which was quantifiably higher than the energy of an individual. As societies evolved toward modern Western archetypes, which were believed to mark the pinnacle of social evolution, they came to recognize formal harmony in any media based on structures of sense perception and neural adaptation that had been built up over time in a specific environment. According to this theory, all forms of expression were forms of motion that originated in processes of neural stimulation/response. For Wundt, language was a system of articulatory motions that indicated a certain mode of adaptation to a particular context, so that each utterance was, at base, a continuously externalized system of motion that unfolded in connection to all other modes of bodily ambulation.12 The general message of these theories was that the human sensorium and mind are far more mutable than previous doctrine had it. Völkerpsychologie quickly attracted reformists who sought to refashion theories from the text into models of regeneration that could be applied generally to particular groups within different populations. They reasoned that if shared nervous formations provided the basis of collective thought and behavior, then a set of new practices could alter the way a group experienced and functioned in the world.

Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Laban and Émile Jacques Dalcroze's Eurhythmics At the turn of the century, the music teacher Émile Jacques Dalcroze trained his students to perform callisthenic exercises in connection to particular rhythms of music.13 His exercises, known as eurhythmics, were meant to generate more neural (and therefore, mental) energy for the learning of rhythm, as illustrated by Figure 1. In so doing, these processes were also meant to configure new paths of neural conduction, and facilitate more rhythmic expressions. Outside his intentions for eurhythmics, Dalcroze’s breakthrough involved veering from a nominally disinterested outlook of Kulturwissenschaft to a more active sphere of education or Bildung, which entailed using new collective practices to accelerate the motor bases of social adaptation toward specific, preordained goals of thought and expression. 14 A properly trained group of people exercised and trained together in order to regenerate itself and this process had consequences that went far beyond improved rhythmic acumen in the performance of music. As Dalcroze emphasized in an address to his students: “Let us therefore assume the responsibility which nature puts upon us, and consider it our duty to regenerate ourselves; thus shall we help the

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growth of a more beautiful humanity.”15 Across Europe and the United States, his ideas inspired health groups and instructors from regenerationist circles. In 1910 the German industrialist Wolf Dohrn invited Dalcroze to open a school at Hellerau, an industrial community outside of Dresden organized by the Deutscher Werkbund.16 As Michael Cowan has argued, Dohrn envisaged that eurhythmics would aid in regenerating a more harmonious and productive industrial workforce through synchronization of their labor leisure spaces.

Figure 9.1 Illustrations of eurhythmic exercises. After Dalcroze, Rhythm and Music in Education, 1918.

Hellerau was far from being the only initiative of regenerationist philosophy. Once it became clear from Völkerpsychologie that conventional expressive gesture arose from social conditioning, many radical groups decided to reconstruct the rhythms of work within the practices of everyday life, rather than emulate the frameworks of industrialized nationalism. By the outbreak of the First World War, Switzerland boasted considerable anarchist communes that utilized rhythmic group motion within the anarcho-communist philosophy of mutual aid. For the purposes of this essay, the crucial aspect of this melting pot of ideas is the inclusion of rhythmic motion at two of them near Zurich. These were the settlement at Dornach run by the occult philosopher Rudolf Steiner (18611925) and the dance troupe at Monté Verità near Ascona, overseen by Rudolf Laban (18791958).17 Both men were particularly fascinated by Wundt’s groundbreaking use of physiological experimentation to establish with exponential depth and breadth the preexistent philosophical tenet that the consciousness of the collective was stronger than that of the individual. For example, in a lecture of 1914, Steiner told an audience that Wundt’s social psychology had inspired him to see “in the group spirit something real … an organism and even a personality.” 18 These theories allowed them to cultivate new forms of group thought and expression that began by altering the mind through the body’s everyday habits. 19 Steiner was especially specific in his arguments that a new occultist orientation could regenerate society and save it from the mechanized Armageddon of World War One.

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Alongside cooperative labor and group meditation, Steiner’s program of social and spiritual reeducation included the practice of what he called Eurhythmie (Fig. 9.2). Steiner believed that proper training enabled a person to develop the ability to sense higher realities of the soul’s energy that existed beyond the world of immediate sense. As he argued in a lecture given at Dornach in 1920: “Eurhythmy shapes and moves the human organism in a way that furnishes direct external proof of our participation in the supersensory world.” 20 He considered that the motions of Eurhythmie would be able to train the body to grow new organs of higher perception [höheren Wahrnemungsorgane] that could capture and communicate the energies of spirit: These new organs of perception are first of all to be distinguished from those of the physical sense-world by being active organs. Whereas the eye and ear are passive, allowing light and sound to work upon them, it may be said of these perceptive organs of the soul and spirit that, while functioning they are in a perpetual state of activity, and that they seize hold of their objects and facts, as it were, in full consciousness. This gives rise to the feeling that psycho-spiritual cognition is a union with—a “dwelling within”—the corresponding facts.21

Figure 9.2 Eurhythmie performance at the Goetheanum, Dornach, 1921.

As the philosopher understood it, the adept individual would experience a personal regeneration of consciousness that could contribute to the group’s overall collective search for higher occult truths. Steiner’s use of Eurhythmie to grow organs of higher perception relied on the basic theory devised from physiological psychology that new practices of motion could change the body. As he explained: A regular course of training arranges and orders the separate exercises to be practiced by the occult student, so that these organs may either simultaneously or consecutively attain their suitable development.”22

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Once students grew these organs that could capture energies of the supersensory world, they could then learn how to transfer these impulses to their neuromuscular systems and communicate with expressive gesture the existence of higher worlds in public manifestations of Eurhythmy held at a large performance space at Dornach, known as the Goetheanum. In contrast to Steiner’s occult motivations, Laban’s career as a dancer led him to focus on Dalcroze-style eurhythmics to alter the expressive potential of dance. In achieving this goal, Laban relied heavily on his contact with women who had previously worked as student teachers for Dalcroze. They included the pianist and dancer Suzanne Perrottet (1889-1983) and the dancer Mary Wigman (1886-1973), although details of their contributions to Laban’s theories have never received sufficient consideration. 23 Their application of eurhythmics to dance in collaboration with Laban comprised the most extensive foray into physiological psychology that ever appeared in the context of Dada. Laban used Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie to inform his retraining of the neural body as the first stage of social reform.24 Pursuit of this communal mentality began with an improvisational exercise known as the free dance [Freitanz], in which students responded with spontaneous motion and shouts to a cacophony of drums, gongs, and tambourines as captured by the photograph in Fig. 9.3.

Figure 9.3 Rudolf Laban (in tunic) leading free dance, Monte Verità, Ascona, 1914. After Dorr, The Dancer of the Crystal, 2008, pages 136ff.

These improvised reactions were supposed to loosen the neural pathways with new sensations of the moving body in space for both the individual and the collective. The group format of the free dance allowed students to discover new ways to manipulate these energies of expressive motion into new arrangements that Laban called new sensations of spatial rhythm [Raumrhythmisches Empfinden]: The most important and meaningful element of bodily movement is certainly spatial orientation [awareness of space and oneself in it]. Through the alteration of spatial orientation, the energy that bestows shape allows the body to appear sometime expanded, exalted, and then again bent, compressed. Countless forms attest the [existence of] countless levels of irritation, which the body follows in its gestures.25

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These new sensations were regarded as arising not just from the gestures of the moving body, but from the voice. In his 1920 text The Dancer’s World, which compiled his pedagogy from Monté Verità, Laban encouraged his students to expand the potential of voice by seeing it as a gesture, so that in speaking or singing: the lips, tongue, and oral cavity ceaselessly form new gestures (Gebärden) – perform a dance. Breath creates a vibration of the surrounding air, which in our ear absorbs the image of the movement of the speaking organs as represented waves. Likewise the light waves of repeated movements of the entire body appear to our eyes.26

Laban’s framing of voice as a form of motion drew on Wundt’s theory that speech was a motor reaction to particular external and social conditions. 27 As spontaneous reactions, these new articulatory motions altered nerves and consciousness in unpredictable ways and steered the dancer toward new practices. Laban’s ultimate goal was for his students to perform “purpose plays,” heavily orchestrated routines of symbolic, rhythmic motion that suggested the aesthetic and expressive power of a more harmonious society as captured by Fig. 9.4. While Laban’s teaching began with improvisation, his artistic creations were the result of long and intense rehearsals around a preordained notion.

Figure 9.4 A more formalized “purpose play” featuring the Hamburg Movement Choir in Laban’s composition Der schwingende Tempel, 1922.

Rudolf Laban and Zurich Dada Finished works like this one, in combination with Laban’s painstaking theorization of his choreography, have left historians convinced that he contributed little to the intellectual formation of Zurich Dada. Neither Laban nor Wigman ever participated in a Dada performance, but they were frequent visitors to the Cabaret Voltaire and the exhibition space known as the Galerie Dada, and many of Laban’s students did participate in Dada activities, including Sophie Taeuber, Kathe Wulff, and Maja Chrucesz.28 Dadaists Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara described the activities of Laban’s dancers in a manner that spotlighted connections between expression and new neural

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sensations. In the November 15, 1917 issue of the Berner Intelligenzblatt, Ball argued that Laban brilliantly used eurhythmics to integrate all of the body’s expressive capacities: Today, the Laban school has . . . developed into an institute that allows not only for the development of abilities, but also the education of an artist. As education of the whole person, it spans the entire breadth of eurhythmy. It is a matter not only of technique; it is especially an art pedagogy, of which dance, tone, and word are only the practical domains of the culture of expression. Aside from the nurturing of his spiritual and physical talents, the student shall also have the opportunity to learn/grasp how his art relates to the rhythmic and cultural whole.29

For Ball, Laban’s expansive application of eurhythmics to dance and voice brought all of the body’s nervous energies into new proximity and connection, thereby increasing expressive power. In the first issue of Dada (July 1917), Tzara’s poetic reaction to performances by Wigman, Taeuber, and others lauded their use of dance to introduce new neural energies into the body and mind: L’école de danse Laban … Mary Wiegmann [sic]: finesse grandléger créatrice d’abstraites notions d’expression sans musique – pures. Vase pour les vibrations du silence … Mlle. S. Taeuber: bizarrerie délirante dans l’araigné de la main vibre rythme rapidement ascendant vers le paroxysme d’une démence goguenarde capriceuse belle.30

While Ball focused on Laban’s use of eurhythmics to integrate supposedly distinct expressive modalities, Tzara reminded readers that true expression was the office of his dancers, who encapsulated new neural intensities with gesture and became vessels of rhythmic vibrations. Immediately attracted to the neurophysiological nature of expression within Laban’s work, Dadaists nevertheless avoided its relationship to the developmental logic of communal anarchism in neutral Switzerland, although they did share with Laban a general distrust of capitalism and militarism. While scholars like Herbert van den Berg and Teresa Papanikolas have provided cogent analyses of the manner in which Dada relied in part on the antimilitarist and pacifist beliefs within anarcho-communist theories like those of Kropotkin, the group did retain misgivings concerning the nature of collectivist politics. During his time in Dada, Ball’s interest in anarchism underwent a continuous change that he never resolved. Like Laban, he had been deeply immersed in Munich’s anarchist circles before the War, but believed that Monte Verità suffered from a flawed anarcho-communist supposition of “the natural goodness of man,” which he felt the war had thrown into question.31 In his “Note on Poetry,” published in the May 1919 issue of Dada, Tzara was more obliquely dismissive, writing that, “Today the poet can go in for Swedish gymnastics. But for abundance and explosion he knows how to kindle hope TODAY.”32 In his own way, each writer called attention to something different in communal anarchist politics that they saw as flawed and both their reactions implicate major suppositions that surrounded rhythmic group motion: For Ball, it was the scientistic inevitability of cooperation and its promise of collective regeneration; for Tzara, it was the supposition that valid culture had to be the result of a long, developmental process of education and training, as it clearly was in the rhythmic motion or “Swedish gymnastics” of Dalcroze, Steiner, and Laban. The question of Zurich Dada’s political orientation, which has long been a matter of contention, then appears most clearly when considered outside the vacuum of its own productions and in comparison to the manner in which it responded to regenerationist uses of the neural body by Steiner and Laban. Dada addressed these movements in Zürich by creating works of art in which nervous change was the essence, rather than the precursor, of their finished work. The Dada group relied on chance, spontaneity, and improvisation as necessary parts of their artistic process. In doing so, the group provided its own notion of society as an entity that was continually regenerated or refreshed with new forms of spontaneous artmaking. As the artist Marcel Janco acknowledged: “All our sketches were of an improvised nature, full of fantasy, freshness, and the unexpected. There were few costumes, little direction, and few sets.”33 Even in scripted works, chance occurrence was always welcome. In a lecture on Dada from 1922, Tzara declared, “What we want now is spontaneity. Not because it is better or more beautiful than

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anything else. But because everything that issues freely from ourselves without the intervention of speculative ideas, represents us.”34 As Ball recounted in his diary, prior to a performance by some of Laban’s students at the Cabaret Voltaire on May 30, 1916, the Dadaists gathered to prepare the space for the event. 35 Janco even constructed some masks for the dancers to wear. When he arrived, the Dadaists participated in a collective and improvisational exercise that followed very closely the general characteristics of Laban’s free dance. Ball related what happened then: We were all there when Janco arrived with his masks, and everyone immediately put one on. Then something strange happened. Not only did the mask immediately call for a costume; it also demanded a quite definite, passionate gesture, bordering on madness. Although we could not have imagined it five minutes earlier, we were walking around with the most bizarre movements, festooned and draped with impossible objects, each one of us trying to outdo the other in inventiveness.36

The seeming chaos of this endeavor was, in fact, an inquiry of spontaneous action and chance reactions, which were regarded as able to generate new neural stimuli. Given that the group associated with and reviewed the work of Laban, it is likely that his idea that spontaneous motion triggered open-ended nervous change was a source for the group’s interest in exploring spontaneity and chance as collective experiences that altered nerves in unexpected ways. Yet in embracing chance as phenomena of neural change as the core of their artistic practice, Dadaists in Zürich avoided the graduated buildup of wholeness in Laban’s courses. On June 23, 1916, Ball brought these performances of spontaneous nervous change onto the stage during the premiere of his now legendary sound poems or Lautgedichten. While in Laban’s hands, chance had been a preparatory means, in Ball’s hands, the creative mechanism came to the fore as the essence of a public manifestation. Dressed in an elaborate costume, he recited the poems Labadas Gesang an die Wolken (named in honor of Laban, who attended the performance with Mary Wigman), Elefantenkarawane (also known as Karawane), and Gadji beri bimba. Before the audience, he moved back and forth between three easels that surrounded him on the stage, all the time, in his words, “flapping my wings energetically.”37 During the closing recitation of Gadji Beri Bimba, Ball spontaneously altered the style of his recitation, deepening and drawing out the vowel tones. 38 To accentuate the improvisational spirit of the entire performance, he stressed: “I do not know what gave me the idea of this music.”39 The discoveries triggered by the performance inspired Ball to compose a manifesto that he read on July 14, 1916. In it, he framed the voice as an instrument of bodily and mental change: All words are other people’s inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own … Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words.40

Unraveling this passage results in metaphors that localize a new body and mind within the performance space as the result of improvised vocal articulations. As forms of motion that were continually new, language changed the body through the nervous system. While he connected to Laban’s imagining of the body’s expressive capacities as neural, Ball favored a mode of expression in which the artist’s nervous change was a central aspect of the performance. Without any defined meter in his script, every performance could be different and unique in a manner that regenerated or refreshed the performer’s nervous system outside preordained intent. By linking the improvisational nature of his sound poems to dance, Ball accentuated their neural spontaneity. He then intensified this property of artmaking by introducing collaboration at a performance with Sophie Taeuber at the Galerie Dada on March 29, 1917, for which she performed an improvisational dance routine in coordination with Ball’s recitation of abstract tone poems that he accompanied with a gong, the same instrument Laban often used during his free dance exercises.41 Ball’s diary entry on the evening extolled the neurophysiological alteration that the improvisational combination of bodily and vocal motion could create within an artist: Abstract dances: a gong beat is enough to stimulate the dancer’s body to make the most fantastic movements. The dance has become an end in itself. The nervous system exhausts all the vibrations of the sound . . . a poetic

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sequence of sounds was enough to make each of the individual word particles produce the strangest visible effect on the hundred-jointed body of the dancer …. a dance full of flashes and edges, full of dazzling light and penetrating intensity.42

Ball and Taeuber’s collaboration increased the number of new experiences that were possible for an audience to witness. Reacting to sudden modifications of sensory and spatial conditions created chance configurations of gestural energy in space, so that making the work continuously regenerated the artist, rather than manifest an extent intellect. The continuous use of chance—that which dissolves habit—as a form of practice, or a repeatedly employed technique of expression, turned artmaking into a continuous activation of elemental neurophysiological change and encouraged the embrace of what Ball, in his description of Taeuber’s dance, refererd to as “penetrating intensity.” Although the term has received surprisingly little investigation, “Intensität” described the quantitative and qualitative level of nervous irritation or excitation [Erregung] in studies of physiological psychologists.43 This root word of neural and thought formation carried over to frameworks of collective thought and expression within Völkerpsychologie, because a person’s techniques of processing neural stimuli relied on historico-social context. Tzara shared Ball’s interest in the phenomenon and peppered his writings with calls for more of it. For example, in his “Manifesto of Monsieur Antipyrine” (1916), he stated unequivocally that, “Dada is our intensity.”44 Likewise, the lines in “Note on Poetry” that immediately follow his glib dismissal of “Swedish gymnastics” declare that the true artist’s “burning desire is for enthusiasm, that fecund form of intensity.”45 Nothing was more intense than chance. It was what regenerated and refreshed a situation in a non-programmatic manner. For Tzara, it indicated the strongest potential creative power, particularly for the intensity of nervous stimulation that it was able to cause. In a lecture on Dada from 1922, Tzara declared, “What we want now is spontaneity . . . because everything that issues freely from ourselves without the intervention of speculative ideas, represents us. We must intensify this quality of life that readily spends itself in every quarter.”46 Ball was as consistent in his consideration of the notion. In a diary entry from August 8, 1916, he focused on the body as the site of social change: “The levers to pry this stale world of ours off its hinges are in man himself.”47 This consideration relied on earlier reflections from June 1915 on the potential of a work of art to make experience more intense: The question is only if we can break through to this spark without tearing down the walls that confine and stifle it. From a sociological point of view, man is a crust formation. If the crust is destroyed, perhaps the core is too.48

New experiences were regarded as generating new intensities, sparks, or vibrations in the sphere of culture that altered nervous tissue. Viewing the human as a “crust formation” meant seeing him/her as porous and open to new nervous stimuli. While intensity received poetic descriptions in Dada writings, it is essential to understand that this quality of experience carried an open-ended political consequence.49 As the vibrations of stimuli traveled through space, they supposedly flooded the audience with new sensory stimuli, but did not contain a preordained idea that the work was intended to illuminate. Unlike other programs of group performance, no one was meant to receive an epiphany about how society could evolve from Dada performances. Nonetheless, these actions carried considerable political consequence. The audience was flooded with new nervous stimuli of voice, sound, and bodily motion that immediately thrust onlookers into a new group experience of uncomfortable newness. Papanikolas has argued, in contrast to van den Berg’s framing of Zurich politics as lackluster, that Ball’s and other Dada performances relied on anarcho-individualist values of self-directed change. 50 However theories of the mind and nerves from physiological psychology and its use among cultural figures outside of and antecedent to Dada had made the division between self and other decidedly inchoate in a manner not seen before, given the manner in which the neural mutability or growth of subject and collective was linked in accordance with the behavior of the nervous system as it made contact with spatial conditions. Thus the

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performances by Ball and his friends implicated the collective, but knit it to an experience of an ever-changing subject, which problematized a harmonious collectivist position and called into question the anarcho-individualist hope for a controlled manifestation of self-development in complete distinction to the morass of modern society. The space of the Cabaret was one in which these boundaries were probed and negotiated, but the group never favored self or collective. Rather, Dadaists were drawn to the feeling that emerged from experiencing unpredictable expressive motion as neural disruption that, as a corollary, openly challenged total reliance on any single political outlook. Thus while the group definitely shared with anarchism an overt antimilitarist and anti-capitalist belief structure, their inquiries of psychophysiology and spontaneity within performance couched suspicion of reliance on any single platform. With that porousness in mind, Dadaists were able to situate their use of shock, surprise, and improvisation as neural stimuli intended to awaken audience members to the new realities of a modern wartime environment. Tzara’s brief “Note 18 on Art,” which appeared a couple months after Taeuber’s performance in the first issue of Dada (May 1917), defined this new mode of artistically and politically aware subgroup: We want to make men better, make them understand that the only brotherhood lies in a moment of intensity in which the beautiful is life concentrated on the tip of a wire rising up to the bursting point, a blue trembling bound to the earth by our loving gaze which covers the peak with snow. A miracle.51

Within that intensity of new experiences, Tzara implied, an awakening in consciousness could occur. Instead of using art to replicate the neurasthenic and degenerative consequences of shell shock, as Berlin Dada was soon to pursue, or make art one branch of a larger pedagogical tree of social regeneration, as Steiner and Laban had done, Dada in Zurich focused more on using the nervous conditions of performance to trigger the awakening of its viewers toward potentialities of continuously experienced new sensations that were self-directed, rather than delivered in the contrivances of modern spectacle culture.52 That system of consumption had linkages to death and destruction in the trenches. Within the awakening was a message, as described by Ball in a diary entry from 1916: Our cabaret is a gesture. Every word that is spoken and sung here says at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect …. the grandiose slaughter and cannibalistic exploits? Our spontaneous foolishness and our enthusiasm for illusion will destroy them.53

Ball’s attention to spontaneity highlights the importance this quality played in calling attention to the chaos of wartime experience. Spontaneity was the way that an artist regenerated him or herself and maintained continuously fresh experiences of artmaking. It was the way that an audience was implicated in this new experience and connected to it by means of shared nervous stimulation. The anarcho-individualist flavor of these endeavors nonetheless couched a form of collective experience that openly questioned the forms of cooperative living that surrounded the group. But while communal living engendered a harmony that gradually unfolded in teleological fashion, chance was something entirely other and far more disruptive. A momentary sharing in new intensities became their solution to the gradual and deliberate cultivations of social formation in the reformist movements of their immediate instant. One may consider Dada spontaneity as a reaction to the anarchocommunist belief that regeneration had to entail gradual adoption of new cooperative habits that systematically altered the shared neural practices of the group and fomented a new collective consciousness. More specifically, spontaneity was, in its context, a form of expressive regeneration that stood as a non-developmental alternative to more conventional regenerationist models of culture. Dadaists did not believe that their developmental approach to artmaking and social reform was the most apt model for true social awakening, which occurred when intensity was at its highest – namely, when the works of art were entirely improvised. Only then was a body

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acting entirely outside of its former expressive habits and only then could a person make contact with art outside his or her comfort zone.

Notes 1

Hugo Ball, diary entry for March 12, 1916, Flight out of Time (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996) p. 56. 2 For instance, the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz had once famously described nerves as telegraph wires that passively transmitted sense data to the brain, but that unlike other tissues, never grew or changed shape. On its influence in culture, see Myles W. Jackson, Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2006); also see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press) pp. 56-64. From this analogy, Helmholtz argued that the real site of interest is the termination point of all these nerve paths in the brain; refer Rabinbach, pp. 52-56; Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus, Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) pp. 79-92. The best overall introduction to physiological psychology is still Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology. 1929; 2nd edition, Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1950. 3 In the light of science offering critical potentials, rather than unstoppable control, my study has benefited from the theories of Michel de Certeau, who encouraged historians to focus on how people work within and often according to the basic causality of an ideological or restrictive discourse, but knowingly, in order to deviate from its more normative structures in a manner that undermines its stated intent to establish societal laws. He called this mode of practice a tactic, which is the general manner in which artists approached physiological psychology. Michel Foucault, himself, offered a tactics of historiography that initially required withholding critical voices from the context under scrutiny. Certeau outlined why this silence made Foucault’s work a departure point rather than a model; refer Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988) p. xiv: If it is true that the grid of ‘discipline’ is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also ‘miniscule’ and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what ‘ways of operating’ form the counterpart, on the consumer’s (or ‘dominee’s’?) side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order. In Certeau’s model of tactics, one approaches a discourse with a knowing suspicion of its stated claims to objective authority and reshapes that discourse according to the base causality of its mainline epistemological conditions. 4 By 1890 Leipzig had become the center of physiological psychology. By this year, Wundt had succeeded in having, according to Edwin Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1929) p. 329: ... experimental psychology permanently established in the world of science. Wundt worked intermittently with Helmholtz while the latter was in Heidelberg. During the last two years of his stay, Wundt published the landmark Principles of Physiological Psychology. This text became the standard textbook for introductory courses in psychology and laboratories of experimental psychology throughout Europe, of which Wundt’s was the first. 5 Thermodynamics guided the functional reciprocity of these two phenomena. The complexities of Wundt’s subject of study required regulatory processes in the body and philosophies applied to it from outside that could aid one in comprehending the nature of its morphology. 6 Wilhelm Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen psychologie trans. E. B. Titchener, Principles of Physiological Psychology vol. 1 (fifth edition; London: Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan, 1904) pp. 75-76. 7 Ibid., Wundt, Titchener trans., 1904, p. 101. The sixth edition of this text fine-tunes the overall concept; Grundzüge, sixth edition, p. 141: Die Leitungsvorgänge in der zentralen Substanz uberhaupt nicht in feste Grenzen eingeschlossen sind, und daß daher Elemente, in denen zuvor die Erregungen gegenüber den gleichzeitig stattfindenden Hemmungen verschwanden, unter den durch den Hinwegfall der seitherigen Leitungswege eintretenden neuen Übungsbedingungen neue funktionelle Verbindungen eingehen können. 8 Ibid., Wundt, Titchener trans., 1904, p. 101. 9 David K. Robinson, Wilhelm Wundt and the Establishment of Experimental Psychology, 1875-1914: The Context of a New Field of Scientific Research (Berkeley, PhD Dissertation, 1987) pp. 101-102; 111. Kurt Danziger, “Wundt as Methodologist,” eds. G. Eckardt and L. Sprung, Advances in Historiography of Psychology (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1983) has shown how these roles and titles were anything but systematic, pp. 38-39: When one examines the published experimental reports from Wundt’s laboratory one finds that the social role system of the psychological experiment is so little developed that there is not even a general term that expresses the generalized role of the ‘experimental subject. The person acting in that role is usually referred to by his specific activity in a particular experimental context. He is ‘der Reagierende,’ ‘der Beobachter,’ ‘der Vergleicher,’ ‘der Associrende,’ etc. The term ‘Versuchsperson’ (experimental subject) occurs too, but not in any systematic and predictable way as it would in a modern report. 10 Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge Studies in the History of Psychology) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) pp. 34-35.

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Wilhelm Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology: Outlines of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind, trans. Edward Leroy Schaub (London: George Allen and Unwin and New New York: Macmillan, 1921) p. 3. Elements was Wundt’s own single-volume abridgement of his ten-thousand page behemoth, which he intended for more specialized perusal. Translating the term as “folk psychology” does not capture the basic connotations of the German term. “Folk psychology” connotes something for the modern reader like folk art and its charming naïveté, but a Völkerpsychologie could analyze the most ostensibly “civilized” cultures. An exception to the dearth of studies on VP is Robert Farr, The Roots of Modern Social Psychology (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996). 12 Speaking was not just a selective exercising of a pre-existent structure. It relied on moving organs. So for Wundt, speech was always a bodily process of created sound (Laut) that was, in fact, a sound movement (Lautbewegung) made in reaction to an outside impression; refer Wundt, Völkerpsychologie; die Sprache, vol. 1, pt. 1, 343: Hierdurch warden wir auf das hingewiesen, was den Laut selber erst erzeugt: auf die Lautbewegung der Sprachorgane. Unmittelbarsind es ja nicht die Laute, sondern die Lautbewegungen, die durch den äußeren Eindruck triebartig ausgelöst werden. As a process of moving sound, speech arose as a reaction to spatial phenomena and, at its most rudimentary level, seemed an attempt to replicate sounds heard in the environment (Lautnachahmung); refer Wundt, Völkerpsychologie; die Sprache, vol. 1, pt. 1, 343: Hier bieten aber offenbar alle Arten sogennanter ‘Lachnachahmung’ den den ausgezeichneten Fall dar, dass die Artikulation der Sprachorgane eine äußere Bewegung oder die Wirkung einrer solchen, die noch deutlich den Bewegungsmodus erkennen läßt, nachbildet. Wundt postulated that at its base, all language had connections to a rudimentary level of initial sound gesture (Lautgebärde) that formed the basis of all language in its beginnings as reactions to heard and felt sound: Nach diesem Zusammenhange mit den sonstigen Gebärden können wir eine solche nachahmende oder nachbildende Bewegung der Artikulationsorgane am zutreffendsten al seine Lautgebärde bezeichnen. This version of language may be compared to that of the linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, who described the formation of language as self-contained. Wundt framed it as dynamic. Not surprisingly, Saussure was a regular attendant at Wundt’s lectures on language given before, during, and after composition of the Völkerpsychologie. Saussure received his doctorate in philology at the University of Leipzig, where Wundt taught psychology; see Jonathan Culler, Saussure (Glasgow: Fontana Collins, 1976). 13 Michael Cowan, Cult of the Will: Nervousness and German Modernity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008) pp. 180-183. 14 In conventional descriptions of social psychology, even Völkerpsychologie, culture was always the result of a lengthy process over which people had little control. Alternatively, eurhythmics framed culture as a site of metamorphosis that could awaken the dormant capacities of a society. Performers could be harbingers of a new social form. This was Bildung in its most literal sense of the root verb — bilden — formation or structuring of the body. 15 “Address to Students,” Der Rhythmus 1 (1911); repr. and trans., The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze, p. 29 16 Michael Cowan has produced the best reading of Dalcroze’s time in Hellerau in specific relation to the broader political issues of German industrial reform; refer Cowan, Cult of the Will: Nervousness and German Modernity, 2008. For more on the Werkbund, refer the excellent overview by Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 17 Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (Oakland: PM Press, 1992) pp. 319-320. For a helpful contrast of this platform to Marxism, see Richard D. Sonn, Anarchism (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992) pp. 7-8. The essential source for Monté Verità is still Harald Szeemann, Monté Verità: Berg der Wahrheit, exh. cat. (Milan: Electra Editrice, 1978); see also Martin Green, Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins, Ascona 19001920 (London, UK and Hanover,NH: University Press of New England, 1986). 18 Rudolf Steiner, The Soul of the People Considered in the Light of Spiritual Sciences (1914), trans. unknown, (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 1998) p. 4. The emphasis is mine. 19 Born in an area in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that is in present day Croatia, Steiner studied in Vienna at the Technische Hochschule from 1879 to 1883 and from 1888 to 1896, worked at the Goethe Archives in Weimar. The most substantial intellectual biography of Steiner that makes the rare avoidance of falling into encomia is Perry Myers, The Double Edged Sword: The Cult of Bildung, its Downfall and Reconstitution in fin-de-siècle Germany (PhD Dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 2002). Myers examines Steiner’s broader historical and political context in relationship to the German cultural phenomenon of Bildungsideal, in which Lebensreform was one dimension. Steiner was originally a devotee of Theosophy, having first made contact with the overall doctrine in the 1880s and 1890s in the circle of the feminist, Marie Lang; refer Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the German Modern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) pp. 98-99. 20 Rudolf Steiner, The Supersensory Origins of the Arts, lecture given September 12, 1920 at Dornach, repr. and trans., Rudolf Steiner, Eurythmy. An Introductory Reader, trans. Christian Von Arnim (Forest Row: Sophia Books, Rudolf Steiner Press, 2006) p. 17. 21 Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science (1909) 4th ed., trans. Maud and Henry Monges (Chicago: Anthroposophical Literature Concern, 1922) p. 323. 22 Ibid, pp. 323-324. 23 Wigman’s fame as an independent artist came toward the tail-end of the 1910s when she left Laban’s circle and began performing on her own. 24 Evelyn Doerr, Rudolf Laban: The Dancer of the Crystal (Lanham, Toronto, and Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2008) p. 58. In describing Laban’s encounter with Völkerpsychologie, Doerr has argued: The choreographer found that his

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view of the world, in which humans and nature are ruled by fundamental principles and in which human life constitutes part of a cosmic movement of nature and forms a morphologically organized whole with this universe, was confirmed by all of these scientific discoveries. 25 Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, p. 17: Das wichtigste und bedeutungsvollste Element der Körperbewegung ist zweifellos die Raumrichtung. Formgebende Kraft läȕt durch den Raumrichtungswechsel die bewegte Form, den Körper, einmal gestreckt, erhaben, dann wieder gekrümmt, gedrückt erscheinen. Zahllose Formen sprechen von zahllosen Stufen der Erregung, denen der Körper in seiner Gebärde folgt. 26 Ibid., p. 14: Was ist der Wohlklang? Er entschwebt dem Munde des Sprechenden. Immer wieder bilden Lippen, Zünge und Mundhöhle neue Gebarden, vollführen einen Tanz. Der Atem erzeugt eine Erschütterung der umgebenden Luft, die das Abbild der Bewegungen der Sprechorgane als Wellengebilde in unser Ohr tragen. Ebenso trug vorhin die Lichtwelle das Abbild der Bewegungen des ganzen Körpers unserem Auge zu. 27 Laban conceived a threefold approach to language as word, tone, and gesture, which is deeply reminiscent of Wundt’s notions of the linguistic component; refer John R. Hodgson and Valerie Preston-Dunlap, Rudolf Laban: An Introduction to his Work and Influence (London: Northcote House Publishers, 1990) p. 35. This basic formula of language was part of a larger orchestration of all the senses in a trilogy of “Dance-Sound-Word,” that drew emphasis away from a single aspect of the body or, crucially for Laban, away from a distinct sense, and instead treated the body as an instrument of polymorphic, intermingled movement patterns or rhythms. 28 The dancers and Dadaists frequently socialized with one another. As Hans Richter recalled in his memoir on Dada, quoted in Timothy O. Benson, “Abstraction, Autonomy, and Contradiction in the Politicization of the Art of Hans Richter,” Hans Richter: Activism, Modernism, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Timothy C. Foster (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1998) p. 27: If the Café Odéon was our terrestrial base, our celestial headquarters was Laban’s ballet school. He was not exaggerating: The Cabaret was only open from early February 1916 to late June of that same year. Aside from the well-known soirees at the Galerie Coray (after March 1917, known as the Galerie Dada) and elsewhere, this and other cafés were the only places where artists from both circles could meet. Members of both groups became romantically involved, especially Tzara, who dated Maja Chrusecz from 1916 to 1923 and kept her letters for his entire life. For a full chronology of Zurich Dada endeavors, see the excellent compilation by Raimund Meyer, Dada in Zürich, ed. Hans Bollinger, (Zürich: Kunsthaus and Arche Verlag, 1985). A more general chronology of Dada as an international phenomenon may be found in Dorothea Dietrich, et al, Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York (Washington: National Gallery of Art and New York: DAP, 2006) pp. 417-458. Although Laban’s students participated in Dada performances at least ten times during 1916 and 1917 alone, historians have neglected the role that the dancer’s theories played in the formation of Dada; refer Annabelle Melzer, Latest Rage the Big Drum: Dada and Surrealist Performance (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980); Jan Schall, “Rhythm and Art in Germany,” PhD Dissertation (The University of Texas at Austin, 1989); Ruth Hemus, Women in Dada, and Bollinger et al, Dada in Zürich. Others who have acknowledged the importance of the relationship between Laban’s students and the Dadaists are Leah Dickerman, Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris, 2006, p. 36; Willy Verkauf, Dada: Monograph of a Movement (London: Alec Tivanti, 1957) p. 92; Doerr, Rudolf Laban: The Dancer of the Crystal, 2008, p. 83; Green, Mountain of Truth, p. 169; Meyer et al, Dada Global, p. 283; and Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon, p. 69. The manner in which these two groups appeared in the press, may be considered as constituting the public face of Dada. When the press reported on events that included Laban’s students as Dada artists, the two groups appeared as a single artistic manifestation called “Dada.” Tristan Tzara’s own collection of press clippings made him fully aware of this fact, as did the other artists reading about their performances in papers published in Zürich. The clippings from 1919 are now housed in the Fonds Tzara at the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris. In order to develop this association, I also drew on the collection of clippings amassed by Francis Picabia, which are also stored in this library’s archives. I would like to thank Yves Gaonach for his assistance with these materials. Tzara’s awareness of how Zürich activities appeared in the press puts to rest any notion that dance did not matter, or that anyone other than Laban viewed it as separate from Dada, as he says: ... erner wird ein Tanz mit dem vielversprechenden Titel Noir Cacadou von fünf Personen vorgeführt . . . Käthe Wulff Gedichte von Huelsenbeck und W. Kandinsky vortragen. Refer Holzarbeiter Zeitung, April 4, 1919: “Unter Leitung der Tänzerin Käthe Wulff wird ein dadaistischen Tanz in Masten vorgefuhrt mit bruitistischen Musik.” Neue Zurcher Zeitung, April 4, 1919: “Auch die abschliesende Tanzauffuhrung – eine Orgie fantastischer Berfleidungen – war ein Beweis dafur, das dass anfangs originell Scheinend einer Manie auf der Dauer unertraglich wird.” Berner Tagblatt (April 12, 1919): “Brachtig und ungeheuer waren da gegen schwarze Tanzerinnen in ubermenschlichen Gewandern, und eine ungluckliche und schone Dame musste am clavier frastlose Tone uben. Ihre Hande und Arme bewegen sich edel und still, und sie wendete das haupt ab.” “Zurcher Spaziergange,” Le Savoyarde de Paris (April 12, 1919). 29 Hugo Ball, “Über Okkultismus, Hieratik und andere seltsam schöne Dinge”, Berner Intelligenzblatt, (November 15, 1917); repb. Hugo Ball: Der Künstler und die Zeitkrankheit, ed. Hans Burkhard Schlichting (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984) pp. 54-55: Seit Herr von Laban seine Tanzschule von München 1913 nach Zürich verlegt hat, hat sein Institut an Bewußtsein und Umfang des Studienplans sehr zugenommen. Die Laban-Schule ist heute in notwendiger Ausgestaltung ihres Grundgedankes weit über das hinausgewachse, was eine Tanzschule herkommlicher Art dem jungen Eleven zu bieten hat. Sie hat sich einem Institut entwickelt, das sich nicht nur die Ausbildung des Könnens, sondern schon die Erziehung zum Künstler angelegen sein läßt. Mit der Erziehung zur Persönalichkeit umfaßt sie das ganze Geibiet der Eurhythmie. Es handelt sich nicht mehr um die Technik allein, sondern um die

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Kunstpädagogik, von der die Ausdruckskultur, in Tanz, Ton und Wort nur de praktische Teil ist. Der Eleve soll neben der Pflege seiner geistigen und physischen Talente auch Gelegenheit erhalten, die Zusammenhange seiner Kunst im rhythmischen und kulturellen Ganzen zu erfassen. In a letter to his sister Maria Hildebrand of January 13, 1914, Ball praised the ambitions of the Dalcroze Institute; refer Hugo Ball, letter to Maria Hildebrand, January 13, 1914, repr. Ball, Briefe 1904-1927, vol. 1, edited with notes by Gerhard Schaub and Ernst Teubner (Darmstadt: Wallstein Verlag, 2003) p. 37: Ich mochte ausserdem Besuche bei Hegner (Herausgeben der ‘Neuen Blätter’ in Hellerau). Sowie bei Dr. Dohrn (Hellerau). Dort draussen in Hellerau wohnen die ‘Modernsten’. 30 Tzara, “École de danse Laban”, Dada, no. 1 (July 1917), unpaginated, reprinted in Béhar, ed., Tzara: Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Flammarion, 1975) pp. 558-559. 31 Ball, diary entry for June 15, 1915, Flight out of Time, p. 19. 32 Tzara, “Note on Poetry,” Dada, nos. 4-5 (May 1919); refer Tristan Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, trans. Barbara Wright (Calder Publications, 1977; Oneworld Classics, 2011) p. 73. 33 Marcel Janco, quoted in Melzer, Latest Rage the Big Drum: Dada and Surrealist Performance, 1980, p. 60. 34 Tzara, “Lecture on Dada” 1922, in Robert Motherwell, ed. The Dada Painters and Poets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 247; quoted in Melzer, Latest Rage the Big Drum: Dada and Surrealist Performance, 1980, p. 68. 35 Ball, diary entry for May 24, 1916, Flight out of Time, p. 64. 36 Ibid.; also refer Erdmute Wenzel White, The Magic Bishop: Hugo Ball, Dada Poet (London: Camden House, 1998) p. 131. 37 Ibid, Ball, Flight out of Time, p. 71. 38 Ibid., p. 70. Ball claimed: If I wanted to remain serious (and I wanted to at all costs), my method of expression would not be equal to the pomp of my staging. 39 Ibid, p. 71. 40 Ball, Dada Manifesto (June 1916), Flight out of Time, p. 221. The emphasis is mine. 41 White, The Magic Bishop: Hugo Ball, Dada Poet, 1998, p. 131. Hemus mistakenly dates this event to 1916. 42 Ball, diary entry for March 30, 1917, Flight out of Time, p. 102. Arp later claimed that Ball wrote these lines in reaction to Taeuber’s performance. When he looked back on Dada, Arp recalled what Hugo Ball wrote, in an unpublished essay “Occultism and Other Things Rare and Beautiful,” on Sophie Tauber-Arp’s dancing at the Cabaret Voltaire; cited in Ball, “Occultism and Other Things Rare and Beautiful,” unpublished essay quoted by Hans Arp in Arp et al, On My Way, (New York: Wittenborn and Schultz, 1948) p. 40: It was a dance full of flashes and fishbones, of dazzling lights, a dance of penetrating intensity. The lines of her body break, every gesture decomposes into a hundred precise, angular, incisive movements. The buffoonery of perspective, lighting and atmosphere is for her hypersensitive nervous system the pretext for drollery full of irony and wit. This essay was posthumously published as “Über Okkultismus, Hieratik und andere seltsam schöne Dinge,” Ball, Der Künstler und die Zeitkrankheit, ed. Hans Burkhard Schlichting, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984) pp. 54-57. 43 The term has generally received very vague definitions; refer Jeffrey Schnapp, “Bad Dada (Evola),” The Dada Seminars, ed. Dickerman and Witkovsky (New York: Distributed Art Publishers and Washingon, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005) pp. 32-33. For the use of these terms in physiological psychology, Wundt described the varying speeds and strengths of neural movement in relationship to practice and the affirmation of concept; refer “Die Wiederholung, die grossere oder geringer Geschwindigkeit einer Bewegung, deutet nun ohne weiteres jene Modifikation des begriffs an.” “Die Sprache und das Denken,” in Essays, 2nd ed., (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1906) p. 300. 44 Tzara, “Manifesto of Monsieur Antipyrine,” Tristan Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, trans. Wright, p. 1. 45 Ibid., Tzara, “Note on Poetry,” p. 73. 46 Tzara, “Lecture on Dada (1922),” in Motherwell, ed. Dada Painters and Poets, p. 248; quoted in Melzer, p. 68. 47 Ball, diary entry for August 8, 1916, Flight out of Time, p. 75. 48 Ball, diary entry for June 20, 1915, Flight out of Time, p. 21. 49 The details of the Zurich group’s complex relationship to Anarchism is beyond the scope of this essay, refer to the useful recent appraisal by Theresa Papanikolas, Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada, 1914-1923 (Farnham, UK and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2010). Tzara was instrumental in the creation of Dada events in that city. 50 Ibid.: Papanikolas, Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada, 2010, p. 89. Papanikolas is responding to the tenet of Hugo van den Berg’s Avantgarde und Anarchismus. Dada in Zürich und Berlin (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1999) and maintains that Ball’s actions and those of his colleagues were a form of apolitical artistic anarchism. 51 Tzara, Note 18 on Art, May 1917, Dada, no. 1 (May 1917), unpaginated. 52 For Dada in Berlin see Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Brigid Doherty, “‘See We Are All Neurasthenics!’ or, The Trauma of Dada Montage”, Critical Inquiry (24, No. 1, Autumn 1997) pp. 82-132. 53 Ball, diary entry for April 14, 1916, Flight out of Time, p. 61.

CHAPTER TEN REGENERATIVE TANNING: PIGMENTATION, NEO-LAMARCKIAN EUGENICS AND THE VISUAL CULTURE OF THE CURE DE SOLEIL TANIA WOLOSHYN

Figure 10.1 Roger Broders, Le Soleil toute l’année sur la Côte d’Azur. Poster, c.1931. © Estate of Roger Broders, Art Resource, ADAGP and Sodrac.

Introduction Occupying two-thirds of the composition, the sun and its dramatic emanating rays fill the sky of Roger Broders’ poster, Le Soleil toute l’année sur la Côte d’Azur (c.1931, Fig. 10.1). Broders’ choice of yellow and white to represent a sky normally coloured blue serves to off-set the deeply pigmented skin of a female figure, dressed in a modern bathing costume, head scarf and heels. In the reverent pose of the laudate, she stands facing the sunshine directly and openly, with arms outstretched, and on the tip of her toes. In other words, she appears in an act of sun-worship, akin to the Swedish, Axel Emil Ebbe’s Solrosen (Sun-Rose) sculptures (c.1892 onwards); the German, Hugo Höppener known as Fidus’ Lichtgebet (Prayer to the Light or the Sun) (Fig. I.7) illustrated from 1894 onwards; the statues, Der Mensch (Man) and Gläserner Mensch (Transparent Man), from the Dresden Hygiene Exhibitions of 1911 and 1930, as well as the poster and booklet cover for the 1926 Reich Health Week in Berlin (Fig. I.8).1 Yet her pose is simultaneously phototropic, echoing the surrounding flora in the form of colourful flowers and oversized palm fronds that equally reach towards the sun. Together, they jubilantly celebrate the availability of the sun all year round on the Côte d’Azur. Compositionally the poster features at its very centre the highlighted torso and pubic region of the figure intersecting with dynamic, diagonal fronds, their naturally thick, opaque skin rendered translucent by the strength of the rays. That her skin is

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represented as deeply and evenly tanned suggests she is no stranger to the sunshine and has adapted to (or rather because of) its ardent, transformative powers. More than heliotropism, of movement following the sun’s daily path, this is phototropism, of growth towards the sunlight.2 Broders’ poster is a playful advertisement promoting year-round tourism on the French Riviera. At least this is what it overtly represents. To explore what it covertly conveys, in this paper I wish to contextualize the work within contentious, contemporaneous medical beliefs about the regenerative, stimulating, sexualizing, and even primitivizing powers of sunlight. Indeed I will argue that such beliefs are embedded within it. In his 2001 book, Sultry Climates, Ian Littlewood situates new desires for suntanned skin within the period of the 1920s and 1930s, of negrophilie and négritude.3 He posits that the suntan was, and continues to be, an act of emulation for all things “black”, the pigmentation or darkening process signifying a newly-obtained, “borrowed” primitivized sexuality. In this way the tan was perceived, and perhaps even today remains indirectly understood, as a “cultural sign of the savage and the sensual” associated with eroticism and hedonism.4 For this paper I would like to contextualize the practice of sun-bathing a little further, and a little earlier, by discussing not tourists’ but physicians’ views of pigmentation, specifically in the treatment of tubercular patients by heliotherapy (sun-therapy or the cure de soleil). Employed both curatively and preventively, heliotherapy was practiced by a disparate and international array of physicians, naturists and amateurs from the nineteenth century onwards, especially in the Alps and on the Côte d’Azur. The visual culture of heliotherapy, and in particular the ways in which the pigmentation of patients’ skin was represented, reveals tensions inherent in the issue of pigmentation itself: that is, the very legibility of the tan, its tone and its extent of coverage on the body, could equally be read in terms of regeneration–of healing, adaptation and growth–or degeneration–of primitivism, atavism, and base sexuality. That so many heliotherapists, who actively encouraged and desired pigmentation as the path to the regeneration of both individual and nation, were eugenicists brings such tensions to the surface.5 It is clear from historians like Anne Carol, Jacques Léonard, William Schneider, and Fae Brauer that French eugenics was geared towards “positive” rather than “negative” eugenics, of encouraging the population to work towards greater health, improved living conditions, better hygiene, and puericulture over mass segregation, sterilization or eventual genocide of those considered feeble-minded, degenerate or diseased.6 As such, French eugenics was heavily focused on social reform and was influenced by well-established perceptions of the transformative power of the environment; in other words, by Neo-Lamarckism.7 According to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), the environment could stimulate physical changes, which could then be passed on to subsequent generations.8 This belief corresponds well to the belief fundamentally driving natural therapies like heliotherapy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Namely, that the environment was powerfully and naturally transformative, and this could be utilized to beneficial curative effect. So could the body therapeutically transform itself, by means of these natural cures as well as the regenerative powers of sport. As Brauer has explained, A fusion of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s ‘Zoological Philosophy’ (1809) with Charles Darwin’s evolutionism, the new Lamarckism entailed the transmutation of species through cultural intervention and environmental action. Instead of Galtonian hereditary calculations, racial hygiene societies and lobbies for sterilization legislation, the somatic focus of Neo-Lamarckian eugenics entailed regenerating the body through the practice of modern sport and physical culture ... .9

Brauer included amongst these modern sports athletics, boxing, cycling, football, swimming and gymnastics, in addition to physical culture. French citizens were encouraged by NeoLamarckian eugenicists to engage in these activities in order to regenerate their bodies on behalf of the nation.10 So was heliotherapy called upon in this national aim, as one of several natural, regenerative cures of air, water and light.11 Evidence for the belief in the regenerative powers of light was sought and found by heliotherapists in the plant and animal kingdoms, in phototropism

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and in “primitive,” tribal practices. As the British natural therapist Henry Harper Hulbert stated in 1903: History tells us that uncivilised nations depended almost entirely upon the use of light, that is, the rays of the sun, fresh air, and warmth, for the alleviation of pain and the healing of their wounds. We are told, too, that during the Zulu War the wounded were carried to the top of a mountain, where their wounds were exposed to light and air, and that they recovered in a remarkable manner.12

References to the solar deities of Ra and Apollo, to ancient Roman solaria, and to the medicine of Hippocrates, Celsus and Galen are rife in heliotherapeutic literature, typically featuring in Introductions as the venerable, antique origins of modern sun-therapy.13 Yet, as Hulbert’s statement makes evident, this literature also included numerous references and comparisons to “uncivilised” habits, dark pigmentation and disease resistance as equal sources for emulation and justification. The aim of this chapter therefore is to explore, in words and images, a formative period of heliotherapy both within and outside of France, during which bronzed skin simultaneously signalled the darker skins of the “inferior races” and, in seeming contradiction, tantalized eugenicists as the external manifestation of the citizen’s regenerated blood. Its main argument, approached through primary heliotherapeutic images and texts, is that these tensions circulated around the specifically Neo-Lamarckian eugenic beliefs of these heliotherapists.

The Tan as “Barometer” of the cure de soleil When treating their tubercular patients by direct (lesion-specific) or total (full-body) heliotherapy, physicians in general believed that patients who pigmented well were those on the path to recovery. Heliotherapists therefore monitored patients’ skin pigmentation intensely, perceiving that the degree to which the skin tanned signified the progress and success of the cure. As the well-known promoter of “helio-hygiene” and smoke abatement laws in England, the NeoLamarckian eugenicist Dr. Caleb W. Saleeby, noted in his 1923 book, Sunlight and Health: …we must remember that pigmentation of the skin is a marked feature of the sun-cure, and that patients who do not pigment well do not progress well[;] no one who has seen and touched the typical pigmented skin of a heliotherapeutic patient can doubt that very active chemical processes are there occurring.14

Yet as early as 1907, Dr François Chiaïs, who practiced in Menton on the Côte d’Azur, posed the tanning process in starker terms: “If pigmentation does not develop, the prognosis is most dire.”15 In his Bordeaux medical dissertation of 1913, Jean-Antoine-Constant Lamaison concluded: Therefore, pigmentation appears as a major phenomenon, as regards to the sun-cure. It allows us to appreciate the progress of the cure in different cases; by observing it, we can measure out at leisure the necessary quantity of sun. We have in this respect a true dosage [posologie], just as Professor Landouzy has said, and it is not exaggerated, by proclaiming that pigmentation is the barometer of the sun-cure; it has contributed strongly to heliotherapy having left the domain of empiricism.16

For Professor Louis Landouzy, the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in Paris and one of the first Vice-Presidents of the French Eugenics Society,17 pigmentation considered as a “barometer” meant it became an invaluable tool to make heliotherapy a legitimate and progressive science beyond mere experimentation. Some took Landouzy’s views literally. In the 1930s, Dr. Jean Saidman, creator of the Turning Solariums of Aix-les-Bains, Vallauris and Jamnagar (India), paid strict attention to each individual patient’s sensitivity to ultra-violet (UV) rays in order to tailor his or her cure; Saidman would measure how rapidly the skin reacted to UV light, from seconds to minutes, using an artificial sun-lamp directed through a stencil with various, progressive openings onto the patient’s abdomen, before even beginning sun treatment. The tool was referred to as “Saidman’s sensitometric test” and the gradations of pigmented or erythematous markings on the

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flesh were measured and photographed.18 A barometer bordering on photometry, such skin-based readings of the individual’s photosensitivity conferred scientific authority and rigour to heliotherapy’s methods and techniques, complementing the complex, technologically-advanced structures of Saidman’s solaria.19 The pigmentation and photosensitivity of the patient’s skin were perceived as measurable reactions to the environmental stimulus of UV light and, subsequently, as the external manifestations of deep-seated, interior processes occurring within the body. Quite simply, as the skin tanned it signalled changes successfully underway beneath its surface. As an organ that absorbed the light and could be penetrated by it, the skin was understood as a transformative (semi-permeable) barrier that modified UV light so that it could be processed within the blood and transferred throughout the body’s organs and tissues, especially those infected by tubercle bacilli. As the German Dr. Hugo Bach explained, The stratum basale sive germinativum, the vital and active layer of the epidermis, is the organ which regulates the relation of the human body to light. It is a light-organ; the organ of bio-chemical relationship of man, and is the point of attack for that light which we have in mind when we speak of the effects of light on the living human body. It is, however, not only an organ for the reception of light, but also for the transformation of radiant energy of light; an organ of light-assimilation. It is an organ of secretory character, an organ which we must class on the same plane as the internal secretory glands.20

The American Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, in the 1927 edition of his book, Light Therapeutics, noted specific histological changes to the skin when exposed to light, including swelling of the collagen, increasing numbers of active tissue cells, and notable dilating of blood vessels.21 This was stated also by the most famous of heliotherapists, the Swiss Dr. Auguste Rollier, who added that, below the surface, sunlight catalyzed tissue repair, the elimination of pus and necrotic bone, and the production of haemoglobin and phosphorus in the blood.22

Figure 10.2. Anonymous, “Au Collège d’Athlètes: La course.” Photograph, in Dr P.-F. Armand-Delille, L’Héliothérapie, 1914, fig. 7, 32. Author’s collection.

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The French physician and eugenicist Paul-Félix Armand-Delille,23 who practiced at the RenéSabran children’s hospital in Giens (Hyères), on the Côte d’Azur, was a follower of Rollier’s method, a highly-scripted and gradual total heliotherapy, as well as of Georges Hébert’s “natural method” of physical culture.24 In his 1914 treatise on heliotherapy, Armand-Delille included photographs of suntanned athletes from Hébert’s Collège d’Athlètes, in Reims (Figs. 10.2 and 10.3). In the first image a group of athletes, clad only in loincloths or shorts, run around the track. Interestingly, those most deeply tanned are located at the front of the pack, their choice of white loincloths providing heightened contrast with their bronzed skin, while the largest figure stands off-track, posing his body for the camera. Next Armand-Delille included a photograph of younger participants at the Collège taking a sun-bath after a lesson (Fig. 10.3). Laid atop white sheets or directly on the grass, they perform total heliotherapy while relaxing or reading, again fully aware that the camera is on them.

Figure 10.3. Anonymous, “Le bain de soleil après la leçon.” Photograph, in Dr P.-F. Armand-Delille, L’Héliothérapie, 1914, fig. 9, 33. Author’s collection.

In the text, Armand-Delille remarked that: “Heliotherapy must not only be a therapeutic method; the exposure to the sun of the body’s entire surface is a powerful element of regulation of the organism’s functions as much as, it seems, of the aesthetic development of the muscular system and the bones.”25 Fusing the methods of Rollier’s heliotherapy with Hébert’s physical culture, the Collège produced a “véritable transformation” on the habits of its members with positive results both therapeutic and preventive in the fight against tuberculosis.26 But as is evident from his words, Armand-Delille read this transformation through the body’s aesthetic contours and lines. Choosing to show photographs of boys and men who appear far more like models of physical culture than ill patients, he made explicit the link between tanned skin and vigour. According to Albert Monteuuis, who was a naturist physician also based on the Côte d’Azur, “the accentuation of pigmented colour is a sign of the increase of nutritive activity and a result of vigour.”27

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Figure 10.4. Anonymous, “Pott’s Disease in dorsal insolation on his orthopedic frame,” c.1915. Photograph, in L. Jaubert, La Pratique héliothérapique (Paris: Baillière et fils, 1915), 67. Author’s collection.

Such “solar nutrition,” as Monteuuis put it, explained why “Negroes” could live with only minimum amounts of food in their natural habitat, writing in 1911: “Because of the colouration of their skin and their manner of living semi-nude, Negroes are better adapted to feed directly on the rays of the sun.”28 To that end, Monteuuis advocated: “In practice, one must therefore aspire to become as bronzed as Arabs [interestingly, not “Negroes”]; the degree of pigmentation indicates in general the degree of vigour of each [patient].”29 Armand-Delille effectively visualizes that vigour in the photograph (Fig. 10.2), not simply through bronzed skin, but through muscular figures proudly displaying their near-nude bodies. Having witnessed first-hand the Collège’s athletes and young trainees, Armand-Delille concluded: By putting our children in the sun, in exposing ourselves to it, we will battle efficiently against the numerous causes of degeneration creating modern life, and in this way we will regenerate our breed to make it more powerful, more robust and, by doing so, more propitious [heureuse].30

For the eugenicist Armand-Delille, heliotherapy presented real social promise in the fight against the perceived degeneration of France. But, as Monteuuis indicated, to tan was to emulate the dark skins of the so-called degenerate races. Some physicians were even impressed when white patients attained extreme pigmentation. Armand-Delille’s colleague at the René-Sabran hospital and later Mayor of Hyères (1937-1941), Dr. Léopold Jaubert, included photographs in his 1915 book, La Pratique héliothérapique, of healing patients who appear so deeply pigmented that they confound racial categorization (Fig. 10.4).31 Of the many foreign physicians visiting Rollier’s facilities in Leysin, the French Dr. Renon commented in 1913:

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I was extremely impressed to see patients as black as Negroes, with considerable and multiple healed tubercular wounds and with healed white tumours [tumours of chronic tubercular arthritis]; without the photographs of the lesions before the treatment, never would it have been possible to believe that the same disorders existed beforehand.32

Figure 10.5 (a) and (b). “Case of tuberculous peritonitis with effusion; also pulmonary tuberculosis and pleural effusion” and “The same one year later.” Photographs, in Auguste Rollier, Heliotherapy, 1923, figs. 29a and b, 98-99. Author’s collection, with the kind permission of Martine Gagnebin on behalf of the late Suzanne Chapuis-Rollier and the Rollier family.

Rollier’s various publications are replete with images, most frequently before-and-after photographs of his tubercular patients. Fig. 10.5, for example, shows a female patient who entered Rollier’s care in 1919 at age 16 suffering from peritoneal and pulmonary tuberculosis.33 Directing the reader to the first photograph, he described her condition as “miserable” and pointed out how distended her stomach had become due to peritonitis (inflammation of the peritoneum, the tissue layer of cells lining the inner wall of the abdomen and pelvis). The photograph, retouched to remove all trace of background and to outline the pallid figure in black, presents a woman propped but unable to hold herself fully upright, breasts exposed and stretch marks on her hips highlighting the distension of her abdomen. One year later, Rollier pronounced her cured noting: “The abdomen was completely supple and free from tenderness even on deep pressure. Haemoglobin 84/80. General health, see Fig. 29b.”34 Evidence of her health was once again readable in her portrait (complete with individualizing accoutrements like a necklace and bow in her hair), an “after” image of a woman whose bronzed flesh is offset by a white background. Now holding herself upright without the support of her arms, she possessed the strength and dignity to shield her breasts from view. Her stomach flattened and pulled taut, and with a slight smile on her face, this recovered patient appears transformed into a beautiful, happy and respectable citizen with the tan to prove it.35 How could a eugenicist advocating heliotherapy encourage his patients to regain their health by emulating the so-called “primitive” (and thus perceived degenerate) practices of living nude or semi-nude in direct, intense sunlight, seeking to tan their skin “like an Arab” or “like a Negro”?

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Perhaps it is simply one of the many contradictions inherent in French eugenics. Anne Carol opened her book on the subject by warning that approaching the historical development of eugenics in light of genocide (its direction by the Nazis) would be anachronistic.36 Rather than search for continuity and coherence, Carol asserted at the outset the necessity of avoiding fluid but reductive narratives and the temptation to uncover a conspiracy amongst French eugenicists.37 I suggest that the Neo-Lamarckian focus of French eugenics enabled such tensions and contradictions to coexist and to thrive, particularly Lamarck’s concept of Transformisme in which a living being could alter its physical make-up through the use or disuse of its muscles, organs (skin included), etc., or be altered by its external environment (milieu) to the evolutionary advantage or disadvantage of its offspring.38 Transformism, in other words, spoke equally to fears of racial degeneration as to desires for racial regeneration, making the tan a debatable acquired characteristic for the French body.

Resistance, Adaptation and Immunization by the cure de soleil The skin’s physiological reaction to the sun’s rays were perceived to initiate the body’s natural defences to withstand disease, seated particularly within the blood, and therefore the tan became not just a marker of renewed health for the invalid but also a marker of prophylaxis. Not only itself a protective measure for further surface exposure to light rays, it was a visual sign of ready preventive measures within the body, of the body naturally immunized. Kellogg wrote that “the skin may play an important part in defending the body against infection by raising the immunizing power of the blood under the influence of light rays.”39 But perhaps the Danish Jørgen Peter Müller, an ex-lieutenant and physical culturalist, put it most succinctly: ‘...without doubt the sunbath is the best means of ensuring good blood,”40 no doubt intending it to mean heliotherapy’s powers to produce both healthy blood levels in the individual and healthy bloodlines for his or her successive generations. As will be discussed later, that sunshine was perceived as beneficial to breeding had contentious ramifications. For some heliotherapists, pigmentation was a sign of defence, the body made resistant to infection. Landouzy regarded “the brown tint of the [implicitly white] skin” as indicating heightened resistance to tuberculosis, according to Jaubert.41 Rollier explained at length how pigmented skin could act as a defence against infection: The skin is an admirable protection against the invasion of micro-organisms, the locus minoris resistentiae being the pilo-sebaceous follicle, infections of which, such as acne, boils, or carbuncles, are by no means rare among civilised peoples. Placed in its natural surroundings, the skin remains entirely free from such invasions, and even when already invaded rapidly becomes sterile. The disappearance of all tendency to cutaneous infections corresponds fairly closely to the occurrence of pigmentation; it therefore appears not impossible that these phenomena may be in some way connected, and that the presence of pigment in the lower layers of the epidermis may confer a heightened resistance on the skin.42

For other heliotherapists, Rollier among them, pigmentation could also be considered a process of adaptation, evidence for which was found once again in the “primitive” races. Lamaison explained that, for Rollier, “black pigment plays the role of [a] sensitizing substance, and as such it possesses the property of transmuting certain solar rays, which ordinarily have no microbicidal power into rays ... having antiseptic properties.”43 In 1919 Dr Louis Estève stated that lupus and cancer occurred with decreasing frequency as one descended towards sunny coasts and the lightfilled tropics.44 Rollier similarly declared that syphilis was “benign” amongst “Negroes living in their natural naked condition”, and should be treated by heliotherapy as tuberculosis was, finding similarities in their disease aetiology.45 In this way black skin was perceived by these physicians as an acquired characteristic responsible for the darker races’ natural immunity to certain diseases. By means of adaptation, “il est bien vrai de dire que le nègre se promène à l’ombre de sa peau,” wrote Jaubert.46 This was an adaptation obtained through acclimatization. And yet, in seemingly contrary logic, he stated:

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This role explains to a certain extent the lowered resistance of the Negro race under our climates, less luminous than tropical climates. Their pigmentation stops too many of the chemical rays and their economy suffers from it. This role of the pigment would suffice, in particular, ... to explain the extreme frequency of rickets among the children of black race brought up under our climates, while Negroes are never struck by it in Africa. The same observation could be made for tuberculosis, at least to a certain extent. In order for perfect acclimatisation of the blacks under our climates to be possible, they would have to be able to de-pigment themselves [se dépigmenter].47

According to this statement, the white subject was perceived by Jaubert as more susceptible to tuberculosis because of the whiteness of their skin, making the tan a key form of protection. The black subject, because they had too much pigment, suffered because the healing rays of the sun could not penetrate their skin to combat tuberculosis (presumably already present within the body) or rickets. For successful or “perfect” acclimatization to European climates, the black subject would have to shed their natural pigmentation, discolour and de-pigment their skin, a sceptical conclusion that highlights that the very issue of pigmentation via UV light – to pigment or not to pigment – was indeed a white prerogative.48 The body’s ability to acclimatize to different environments and the perceived transformative powers of climate (sun included) were bound up with the Neo-Lamarckian notion of acquired characteristics within particular milieux. Indeed, John A. Campbell and David N. Livingstone have declared that “Neo-Lamarckism was quintessentially a physical environmental theory ... emphasizing direct environmental impress on the generality of local organic populations ... .”49 In the words of Lamarck: It is not the shape either of the body or its parts which gives rise to the habits of animals and their mode of life; but that it is on the contrary, the habits, mode of life and all the other influences of the environment which have in course of time built up the shape of the body and of the parts of animals.50

As such Neo-Lamarckian eugenicists and climatologists shared a long-embedded, Hippocratic belief that the environment shaped, and even “imprinted” upon its inhabitants’ unique physiologies, mental faculties, morals and customs.51 Physicians at this time, for instance, were adamant that southern, tropical climates accounted for earlier puberty in young girls, especially amongst Arabic and black women.52 As Dr. L. Revillet, a heliotherapist in Cannes, explained in a 1914 essay: “This precociousness becomes more marked as one approaches the Equator. Arab and black women have regular periods and are pubescent often before 10 years old.”53 Heliotherapists specifically made note of this, not simply holding the heat of this climate but its luminosity as responsible for early menstruation and thus early sexual maturity. According to Revillet this phenomenon occurred on the Côte d’Azur as well, as a particularly warm and sunny region: On the Mediterranean coast and in particular on the Riviera, menstruation is more precocious than in the climates of the North. Young girls in general have regular periods by 10 or 11 years old; and this is not a fact of atavism, the same phenomenon being observed amongst other children whose families, originally from the North, come to live on the Côte d’Azur, and it is to the great stupefaction of their parents.54

Finding direct correspondences between plants and humans, not simply in terms of acclimatization but phototropism, he added: “The same phenomenon of advanced blooming ... occurs amongst Northern plants transported to the South.”55 By no means was this unique to Revillet. Explaining in the caption of his photograph of young girls in the sunshine (Fig. 10.6), Dr. Charles Brody of Grasse wrote: “Four or five weeks of the sun-cure totally transforms the organism. Like a plant thirsting for air and light, the child living in the open air blossoms, its health bursting in joy, force”. This theory seems to have framed the photograph. Shot from above, four young figures appear like plants facing the light. Squinting from the intense sunshine, they smile as they look up towards the camera. Rather than seated on beds or chairs, such as the ones just visible in the right and left-hand corners of the frame, these “patients” are positioned sitting or lying directly on the sand, their backs pressed against the southern shrubbery, as though fundamentally part of the natural environment that nourishes their “blossoming.”

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Figure 10.6 Anonymous photograph, c.1938, in Charles Brody, “Technique de Brody: on peut considérablement raccourcir la durée du traitement héliothérapique,” Traité d’hélio- et d’actinologie: physique – biologie – thérapeutique. Rayons solaires; ultra-violets; infra-rouges. Paris: Maloine, 1938, fig. 310, 754, Tome I. Author’s collection.

For heliotherapists, the intense luminosity of the Côte d’Azur made it especially beneficial to women’s “functional troubles,”56 as Revillet put it, and he further noted that the “ovaries of young women, like those of young plants, are particularly sensitive” to the action of sunlight.57 Even earlier, in a medical dissertation of 1904, Dr. Thomas Nogier hypothesized that the role of pigmentation of the skin was analogous to chlorophyll in plants, transforming the sun’s chemical energy into “special energies”. This action of the sunlight in the south of France, he stated, provided a “rational explanation” for why its inhabitants – those races du Midi – were full of vivacity and exuberance, even on an insufficient diet, and resistant to tuberculosis.58 Other heliotherapists on the Côte d’Azur specialized in treating such female “functional troubles,” including Brody’s wife, an assistant physician at one of his établissements d’héliothérapie in Grasse. In her essay on gynaecology and light, Dr. Malvine Brody advocated the use of UV light for pregnant women, especially those experiencing a difficult pregnancy, because of the “eutrophic” (nutritious) action of the rays. Additionally, due to the “anti-rachitic” properties of these rays present in the milk through irradiation, she also advocated it for mothers breast-feeding their newborns.59 She even declared UV light could reverse premature menopause, restoring menstruation in mature female patients.60 Yet above all she recommended it for young girls experiencing poor menstrual function or delayed puberty, whether due to illnesses such as peritoneal tuberculosis (Fig. 10.5) or not. As she explained, this was the result of its action régulatrice: UV-therapy [in this case, artificial light by sun-lamps] acts as if it moved the patient towards the south [vers le midi]. The fact is that many young girls submissive to the UV rays see their first periods appearing even before those of their mother.61

Echoing Revillet, who cited parents stupefied by their daughters’ sudden onset of puberty when visiting the region, Brody equated the power of UV rays alone to that of the southern climate to

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initiate blood flow and procreativity in young women. At a time when France was rife with fears of depopulation and the French Eugenics Society was headed by the leading physicians of child care, including obstetrician Adolphe Pinard and paediatrician Eugène Apert, heliotherapists’ faith in the naturally procreative powers of UV rays should not be overlooked.62 Whether natural or artificially produced, UV rays could act as an unlimited resource in the service of governmentsanctioned pro-natalism. Such beliefs in the stimulating powers of the rays for women’s procreativity were not confined to doctors. Intriguing similarities exist in the realm of popular literature, particularly the work of D. H. Lawrence, who himself had tuberculosis and convalesced on the Côte d’Azur, in Bandol and Vence, where he died in 1930.63 In Lawrence’s short story, “Sun” (c.1926), the protagonist, Juliet, is sent to the Italian Riviera for her health. She is experiencing fatigue and “women’s troubles,” and her doctor has prescribed exposure to the sun. Lawrence portrayed this prescribed tanning process as a hedonistic experience by now characteristic of both Rivieras: Every day, in the morning towards noon, she lay at the foot of the powerful, silver-pawed cypress tree, while the sun strode jovial in heaven. By now she knew the sun in every thread of her body. Her heart of anxiety, that anxious, straining heart, had disappeared altogether, like a flower that falls in the sun, and leaves only a little ripening fruit. And her tense womb, though still closed, was slowly unfolding, slowly, slowly, like a lily bud under water, as the sun mysteriously touched it. Like a lily bud under water it was slowly rising to the sun, to expand at last, to the sun, only to the sun.64

Figure 10.7 Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac, La Cure de Soleil, 1927. Engraving. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013.

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Later, after continued exposure, he added: “Her womb was coming open wide with rosy ecstasy, like a lotus flower.”65 In Lawrence’s story, Juliet has nothing less than therapeutic sex with the sun. Both the strong sexual overtones and the plant similes correspond to alreadyestablished medical perceptions by heliotherapists about the transformative power of coastal sunlight on sexual functions as well as the supposedly natural, phototropic urge of humans towards the light. In the realm of modern art, representations of the hedonistic Côte d’Azur peopled with suntanned bodies can be found in the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, and André Dunoyer de Segonzac.66 The latter’s engraving, Cure de soleil (1927, Fig. 10.7), makes direct reference to the medical use of sunlight in its title.67 Depicting a bare-breasted female sunbathing on a beach in Saint-Tropez, Dunoyer de Segonzac uses bold contrast to suggest the brilliance of the sunlight with dramatic shading on the figure’s calf, breasts and pubic region. Twisted with legs partially open, breasts exposed, and eyes shielded under a sunhat, the figure offers her flesh to the viewer and the southern sunshine, in hedonistic revelry much like Lawrence’s protagonist. In such instances the act of bodily exposure to sunlight is represented simultaneously as a form of medical therapy and of touristic leisure. Away from the coast, high up in the Swiss mountains of Samaden near St. Moritz, Dr Oscar Bernhard demonstrated that the stimulating powers of sunlight were not confined to southern climates. Nor was he subtle about it. In Fig. 10.8, the photographer (perhaps Bernhard himself) artfully arranged a 24-year old female patient atop a bed on the terrace of his facility, with a dramatic backdrop of surrounding mountains and valleys. Turned onto her torso, legs crossed, and a scarf over her head that conspicuously ensures anonymity, the patient offers an obscured view of her bare buttocks, twisted tantalizingly towards the camera rather than away from it. The point, surely, is to examine the plaster cast containing her back and torso, and the small window cut out from it to allow the sunlight to penetrate a lesion below. The caption explains she is suffering from inflammation of the thoracic vertebrae (spondylitis dorsalis) and of the bones (osteitis), presenting fistulae in the sternum and the left clavicle. Bernhard concluded that after two years of heliotherapy, this patient was now the “mother of healthy children.”68 Like Lawrence’s character, Juliet, and Dunoyer de Segonzac’s figure, Bernhard’s patient has regenerated her body by submission to the sunshine. Significantly, in the caption the physician proclaimed her return to health not through the healing of the lesions, weight gain, blood tests, or mobility following the removal of the cast, but specifically through her ability to procreate. In this photograph pigmentation is discernible but not pronounced, while in others, Bernhard was explicit in visualizing and describing the tanned flesh of his female patients (Fig. 10.9). In Figure 10.9, the bronzed skin of a healed female patient positively glistens. At the age of 20, this patient entered Bernhard’s care emaciated and with “sagging, loose skin,” presenting tubercular fistulae of the cervical glands, already operated on several times, as well as osteitis of the lower jaw and right foot, the latter also resulting in fistulae. Only eight months later, she is transformed; ten kilos heavier by heliotherapy alone and fully healed, the caption proclaims her in an “excellent state of health.” It closes with the following sentence: “Revel in these recovered lush and beautifully-modelled curves of the body and the smooth, stunning bronze-coloured skin.”69 Like Armand-Delille’s attentiveness to the muscular outlines of the Collège’s athletes (Figs. 10.2 and 10.3), Bernhard reads the health of his patient by her aesthetic lines, surface texture and colouring–like an art connoisseur analyzing a painting. The figure’s position in the photograph allows for both the right side of her lower jaw and her right foot to be visible in one frame, the white markings indicating cicatrized tissue and thus the closing of the fistulae. It also retains patient anonymity, her face turned away from the lens. Yet while it may be composed for clinical observation, as an effective “after” image, the photograph equally presents to us a modern bronzed odalisque or Venus au soleil, the viewer’s eye immediately drawn to the figure’s pronounced, conical breasts and lithe form. Bernhard’s images (Figs. 10.8 and 10.9) are, in fact, as erotically charged as Dunoyer de Segonzac’s work (Fig. 10.7) and Lawrence’s writing on the solarized body. The intensity of the pigmentation, whether actual or produced by the lighting techniques,

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Figure 10.8 Anonymous photograph, c.1926, in Oscar Bernhard, Light Treatment in Surgery (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1926), fig. 86, 278. Author’s collection.

Figure 10.9 Anonymous photograph, c.1917, in Oscar Bernhard, Sonnenlichtbehandlung in der Chirurgie (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1917), fig. 51, 163. Author’s collection.

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developing process and retouching of the photograph, is made extreme. Additional white highlighting is actually visible in the reproduction. The white line contouring the figure’s face seems to have been added either to aid anonymity or to heighten contrast between flesh and surroundings. Due to this intervention her skin appears so dark in this photograph that the patient does seem to be, in the words of Renon, as “black as Negroes” (as cited above), disrupting racial categorization like the child in Figure 10.4. Euphoric, Bernhard “revelled” in this degree of pigmentation, the tone of his language and his photographs suggesting he found heliotherapy’s efficacy for his patients aesthetically and even sexually stimulating. However, more sceptical heliotherapists warned that excessive exposure to sunlight could lead to dangerous sexuality, while excessive pigmentation could culminate in racial transformation.

Dangerous Excess and Racial Transformation by the cure de soleil When Revillet discussed young females induced into early puberty by the Côte d’Azur’s sunlight, he stressed this was not an atavistic phenomenon. That this needed to be stated suggests underlying anxieties existed as to the extent of the sunlight’s transformative powers on such impressionable bodies. These concerns over the perceived degenerative, rather than regenerative, nature of sunlight – of its potency to produce hyper-sexualized, dark French bodies to the detriment of the race – emerge from the heliotherapeutic literature. Despite the severity of its national fears of racial degeneration, by no means was this specific to France.70 Müller’s English version of My Sun-Bathing and Fresh Air System (1927) included warnings about sunbathing being dangerous if overdone. His reason was that “the sex life is awakened too soon in children by too much sun-bathing.”71 Extreme pigmentation was an additional concern for German sunbathers ascribing to the Nackkultur (Naked Culture) movement. As Maren Möhring has discussed, the degree to which the German nudist pigmented was a prevalent concern. In the process of bronzing one’s skin, she explained: The ideal skin color was nevertheless a moderate bronze, for the sunbather was warned against excessive tanning that might make his or her body “look like a Hottentot’s body.” The dark skin of the “Hottentot” was considered as the embodiment of the ugly and as the effect of layers of dirt. Since skin color was one of the most important racial signifiers in theories of race circulating in the early twentieth century, the shade of one’s tan became a controversial point. Ongoing efforts to define a “healthy brown” or a “natural white” make apparent the ambiguity and permeability of the category of whiteness.72

Here then was that tricky border between sun-tanning to look like an “Arab” or “Negro” – for the tubercular patient an act of emulation through which to regain vigour, health and sexual function – and “atavistically” descend towards becoming “Arab” or “Negro” – an act of total racial transformation. Reassurances that the latter was not in danger of occurring during the process of pigmentation needed to be made. As far back as 1799 they can be traced, as demonstrated by Michel Bertrand’s Paris dissertation, Essai touchant l’influence de la lumière sur les êtres organisés, sur l’atmosphère, et sur différens composés chimiques [Essay touching upon the influence of light on organised beings, on the atmosphere, and on different chemical compounds], one of the earliest French references to sun-exposure as curative. Indirectly referencing the ideas of Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) who influenced the next generation of naturalists, Lamarck amongst them, Bertrand discussed racial pigmentation across the globe as dependent upon the effects of regional light. Buffon had argued that a European transplanted to the tropics, living in near-total nudity like its dark-skinned “primitive” inhabitants, would become increasingly dark in skin tone and that, by the eighth generation, this “mutation” from White to Black would be complete. Bertrand was sceptical about Buffon’s theory, stating that “it is impossible to confuse the colour of a White man, exposed to the intensity of the sunlight for several years and living moreover in the manner of Negroes [that is, nude], with those of the latter.”73 Later medical dissertations on sunlight by Doctors Jean-Baptiste Giard and EmmanuelPaulin Girard, of 1817 and 1819 respectively, similarly refuted Buffon’s claims, both of them

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using as an example the case of Spain’s Moorish population, who after twenty-eight generations, they pointed out, had not altered in colouring.74 Nevertheless one hundred years later, in his 1914 Montpellier dissertation, the heliotherapist Victor Roditi commented that under the influence of the sun the patient’s healing skin would acquire a beautiful, bronzed tint that varied from “mahogany to the brown tones of the skin of Negroes, without however attaining their ebony-black tone.”75 Echoing Bertrand, Giard and Girard, Roditi was careful to distinguish the surface effects of a moderate tan from the extremes of black pigment. Equally Renon (quoted above), having witnessed and described patients as “black as Negroes” at Rollier’s Leysin facilities, was compelled to defer to their “before” photographs as testaments to their originally pallid, diseased selves. These heliotherapists were unclear as to whether they understood pigmentation as a temporary physiological reaction of the individual or, as an acquired characteristic to be passed on to subsequent generations, a permanent outcome for the race. While it is clear, as Möhring argued, that skin colour was a key racial signifier, it was but one of many. Revisiting Fig. 10.5 as an example of the sort of photographic comparisons Renon required, the patient’s facial physiognomy and cranial shape appear unaltered in the “after” image.76 The slant of the forehead, skull size, distance between eyes, nose and lips, were all equally important elements of racial categorization. As Kellogg wrote, in 1910, of his own patients: “In some instances the skin has been darkened to such an extent that the individual might easily be mistaken for a mulatto or an Indian if only the color of the skin were regarded.”77 The word “only” indicates this racial confusion and highlights the fact that it was only skin-deep. Within this primitivizing rhetoric of returning to nature through natural therapies like heliotherapy, assurances were therefore made that tanning would lead to racial regeneration, not racial degeneration. Yet not all were convinced. Within France, the issue of excessive pigmentation led Dr. Charles Brody to address the matter directly. In the same essay in which he waxed lyrical about the phototropic blossoming of his young patients (Fig. 10.6, c.1938), he wrote that tanning was now too à la mode amongst tourists and patients in heliotherapeutic sanatoria on the Côte d’Azur, an indirect reference no doubt to the sudden rise in numbers to the region as a result of the newly-instigated law that allocated paid holiday leave for workers in 1936, les congés payés. For these tourists, Brody wrote, tanning had become the goal of sun treatment rather than merely a product of it.78 He promoted a new method of his design involving a de-pigmentation process at certain intervals of the cure de soleil so that his patients slowly weaned themselves off of sunshine. The reason, he stated, was that long, uninterrupted sunbathing, with the intention of producing extreme tans, was unnecessary to the healing process and even dangerous: It can even happen that the appearance of a sudden and intense pigmentation is the element of a severe prognosis and, sometimes even, the prodrome of a fatal, short-term outcome. Such is the case with sufferers of cachexia [general wasting disease]. Here we have noted that after a short exposure, even in an insignificant dose, a sudden and intense pigmentation of chocolate colour appears. Far from being a good omen, here this rapid and dark pigmentation signifies a tissular disintegration of the organism on the path to destruction and is comparable, for us, to a warning sign ... .79

In fact, he described pigmentation as a skin “allergy”, and viewed excessive tanning as the body overdosed and saturated by the sun.80 He wrote of “surpigmentation, surdosage, sursaturation solaire”, necessitating not simply de-pigmentation but désaccoutumance, the word accoutumance significantly meaning either “adaptation” or “addiction.”81 By shortening exposure times and assuring the well-being of his patients, Brody insisted that the advantages would be economic as well as social and moral.82 With this in mind, perhaps it is not surprising that the young patients in Figure 10.6 do not appear deeply tanned, or at least their skin colour is certainly not the focus of the photograph as it is in Bernhard’s (Fig. 10.9). The salacious language the latter enticed from Bernhard sexualizes not just the woman but the tan itself and its aesthetic effects to her form and surface. This is the tan gone too “deep,” of racial boundaries blurred, and strangely here the anonymizing tactic of turning

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her face away from the camera and the additional retouching only aids this blurring, denying visual access and even erasing her racially-specific physiognomic features. Unlike Bernhard’s image, in Brody’s photograph (Fig. 10.6) the figures’ union with nature does not threaten to become an aesthetic excess, laden with deep-seated fears of moral degeneration within his text. For Brody, the concern over pigmentation was for his own patients as well as the sun-loving masses flocking to the Côte d’Azur. He viewed the trend for tanning as too fashionable, and perhaps it is not coincidental that he wrote this during the late 1930s, when eugenics was at its most extreme and the Côte d’Azur’s identity synonymous with hedonism. While it is not clear whether Brody was a eugenicist and/or a Neo-Lamarckian,83 the social and moral implications of surpigmentation were certainly paramount to him. His perception of the tan’s role in heliotherapy was markedly different to that of Landouzy and other heliotherapists: Instead of a “barometer” of the sun-cure’s efficacy, pigmentation was defined by Brody as an insidious allergy, a negative byproduct of the treatment and even the sign of addiction.84

Conclusion With Charles Brody’s concern for the masses in mind, I wish to return to Roger Broders’ poster (Fig. 10.1). If, applying Littlewood’s argument, the tanned figure in Broders’ poster signals the erotic and hedonistic,85 I contend that the foundation for these perceptions of pigmentation resided not in tourist practices but in medical ones. That they were expressed, translated and popularized through southern tourism is clear,86 but they were embedded within an earlier, emergent practice of heliotherapy, produced by physicians-cum-eugenicists at once enthusiastic and troubled by the both regenerative and degenerative effects of the cure de soleil. For heliotherapists, bronzed skin visually denoted renewed vitality, awakened senses, and physiological adaptation stimulated by sunshine, especially on the Côte d’Azur. A stamp of health (renewed or perfected), the tan signalled individual physiological regeneration. As advocates for positive eugenics, these physicians attributed to heliotherapy true regenerative potential for the nation, not least because they viewed pigmentation as an indicator of procreativity. As a process of defence and of adaptation, pigmentation could be explained in Neo-Lamarckian terms as a characteristic acquired individually with the potential to affect subsequent generations. Fed by the nutritious solar rays, men, women and even unborn babies exposed to the sunshine could grow, revitalize, and transform themselves, to the benefit of the nation. Brody described and visualized this as a natural process based on the logic of the phototropism of plants (Fig. 10.6). Broders’ poster (Fig. 10.1) suggests as much by the dramatic pose of the female figure, who emphatically embraces the light with open arms while surrounded by phototropic flora. But Broders’ attention to the lithe, athletic lines – and tan – of his figure finds more resonance with the photographs illustrated in the work of Paul-Félix Armand-Delille (Figs.10.2 and 10.3), Auguste Rollier (Fig. 10.5b) and Oscar Bernhard (Figs. 10.8 and 10.9). In these images, the figures’ external contours and surface colour were the indices of interior physiological health read according to the physicians’ aesthetic criteria. Whether the tan was imprinted on the recovered malade – as a marker of cure and thus the return to health – or on the bien portant, such as the athlete – as a marker of prophylaxis – it was perceived as aesthetically desirable, and this had significant eugenic ends. As Brauer has argued, “Imperative to ‘rational procreation’ and ‘amelioration of the French race’, the licit Neo-Lamarckian body had to be represented and projected as erotically delectable.”87 This was integral to the way in which the visual culture of Neo-Lamarckian eugenics functioned, especially when it came to representing the female body as “delectable,” because “the representation of woman as a titillating eugenic body [signalled] her ripeness for procreative sex and nurturance of a new race.”88 In this context, Bernhard’s photographs (Figs. 10.8 and 10.9) visualize the “titillating eugenic body” as a tanned, procreative body on par with Dunoyer de Segonzac’s engraving (Fig. 10.7), far more overtly than Broders’ poster (Fig. 10.1). Yet while eugenic beliefs may not be directly articulated in Broders’ image, within these heliocentric regenerative discourses my point is that they do not need to be.89

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The poster (c.1931) was produced when heliotherapy, a treatment widely practiced by eugenicists and fuelled by a belief in the stimulating powers of sunlight, was thriving – indeed had been thriving for some twenty years. Contextually the poster cannot, to my mind, be analyzed without reference to that history, especially to the complex tensions within it. In a similar vein to Littlewood, Bernard Andrieu, in his 2008 book, Bronzage, spoke of the aesthetic desire to tan as “négritude solaire,” yet specified that the maintenance of a suntan – a pigmentation neither too light nor too dark – required strict management so as to preserve “un certain équilibre esthétique” and thus remained a constant worry.90 Both Andrieu and Littlewood describe the tan as a kind of aestheticized and sexualized racial appropriation. To obtain or to maintain a tan was, and remains today, a fine balancing act, in which racial categories threaten to collapse along with their correlative moral standards. Bernhard’s photograph (Fig. 10.9), and the language he used to describe his deeply-pigmented patient, slip between the “delectable” and the salacious. Eugenics, especially French eugenics, may have been particularly attached to NeoLamarckism, but its concepts enabled such tensions around the issue of pigmentation to exist because the transformative powers of milieu could engender regenerative or degenerative traits on impressionable bodies. When it came to tanning, it seems that emulating the “primitive” could go either way on the evolutionary ladder. I would like to thank Fae Brauer, Anthea Callen, Keren Hammerschlag, Mary Hunter, Serena Keshavjee, Peter Mowris, Gabriele Neher, and Natasha Ruiz-Gómez for their input on my paper. My thanks also go to Martine Gagnebin and the Rollier family, as well as Christopher Lyons and colleagues of the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, Montreal, for all their help and support. This research emerges from a postdoctoral fellowship held at McGill University and supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2010-2012, award no. 756-2010-0173). Every reasonable effort has been made to find the appropriate rights holders of the images reproduced. If you are the rights holder, or have information about these anonymous works, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Notes 1

For more on the Dresden Hygiene Exhibitions and the laudate pose, see Fae Brauer, “The Transparent Body: Biocultures of Evolution, Eugenics, and Scientific Racism”, A History of Visual Culture: Western Civilization from the 18th to the 21st Century, eds. Jane Kromm and Susan Benforado Bakewell (Berg, 2010) pp. 89-103 and Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890-1930 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). Interestingly, an image of Solrosen by Ebbe (1868-1941) featurs on the cover of Jørgen Peter Müller, My Sun-Bathing and Fresh-Air System (London: Athletic Publications, c.1927). 2 Heliotropism is the diurnal movement of a plant in response to the sun’s daily path across the sky, typified by sunflowers. Beyond movement only, phototropism is the directional growth of the plant towards the light. 3 Ian Littlewood, Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex since the Grand Tour (London: John Murray, 2001) p. 194. That the sensations of the skin should become the seat of being is central to the meanings that sunbathing was to acquire – erotic, amoral, libertarian. But if the tanned skin of the tourist denotes sensuality, this is not merely because getting a tan is itself a sensual process; just as important is the long tradition that associates dark skin with primitive sexuality. From this point of view, the crass racial assumptions of the nineteenth century have passed on an unrecognised legacy in the cultural significance we give to suntan. It is not coincidental that the period in which sunbathing first became popular was also a period of fashionable enthusiasm for jazz music, black entertainers and African art. To a [sic] get a tan was, and to some extent still is, to borrow a cultural sign of the savage and the sensual. See also Petrine ArcherStraw, Negrophilia: Avant-garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), which explores perceptions of Black culture as simultaneously therapeutic (p.18) and “epidemic” (p.113). 4 Ibid., Littlewood, Sultry Climates, 2001, p. 113. 5 These include: in France, Louis Landouzy, Henri Hallopeau (a specialist in syphilis who co-authored a paper on heliotherapy with the Swiss doctor, Auguste Rollier), Paul-Félix Armand-Delille, and François Victor Foveau de Courmelles (a self-proclaimed Neo-Lamarckian if not a eugenicist); refer Anne Carol, Histoire de l’eugénisme en France: Les médecins et la procréation, XIXe-XXe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995) p. 78. In America, they include John Harvey Kellogg, who was one of the founders of the American Eugenics society and the Race Betterment Foundation, in 1906. In England, they include Leonard Hill, Sir Henry Gauvain, and Caleb Saleeby (an outspoken Eugenicist and founder of the Sunlight League, of which Rollier was vice-president). For more on British

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heliotherapy and eugenics, see Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain, 1880-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 6 See the bibliography for the work of Carol, Léonard, Jacques, William Schneider, and, most relevantly, the extensive list of publications on Neo-Lamarckian eugenics and visual culture by Brauer. 7 As William H. Schneider, “The Eugenics Movement in France, 1890-1940”, The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia, ed. Mark B. Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) pp. 72-73, has stated: Neo-Lamarckism profoundly influenced the nature of eugenics in France. Throughout the entire history of the movement, there were eugenicists concerned about the effect of degenerative environmental and social influences because they would be inherited; it also made them presume that the inherited quality of the population could be improved by removing such influences. This was not just understood in the negative sense; there were clearly also environmental influences, such as sunlight, that were understood as powerfully regenerative. 8 Lamarck explained this with his notorious example of the giraffe’s neck, which he argued had lengthened over time due to the scarcity of food on lower tree branches; refer William H. Schneider, “Towards the Improvement of the Human Race: The History of Eugenics in France,” The Journal of Modern History 54: 2 (June 1982) p. 270. 9 Fae Brauer, “Eroticizing Lamarckian Eugenics: The Body Stripped Bare during French Sexual Neoregulation”, Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, eds. Fae Brauer and Anthea Callen (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2008) p. 98. Carol has explained that Galtonian eugenics did not take hold of the French imagination until after 1912 because French doctors simply did not know of his work, due to the fact that his work was not translated into French and because, unlike the majority of French eugenicists, Galton was not actually a physician: Carol, Histoire de l’eugénisme en France, p. 71. In “‘L’Art eugénique’: Biopower and the Biocultures of Neo-Lamarckian Eugenics,” L’Esprit Créateur (52: 2, Summer 2012) pp. 42-43, Fae Brauer, argues that the First International Eugenics Congress and Exhibition held in London from 24-29 July 1912 at which the French had one of the largest representations, was the catalyst for legitimating Galtonian eugenics in France. 10 Brauer, “Eroticizing Lamarckian Eugenics”, 2008, p. 109. 11 See Arnaud Baubérot, Histoire du Naturisme: Le mythe du retour à la nature (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004) and Tania Woloshyn, “Le Pays du soleil: The Art of Heliotherapy on the Côte d’Azur”, Social History of Medicine (26: 1, February 2013) pp. 74-93. 12 Henry H. Hulbert, Natural Physical Remedies: Light, Heat, Electricity and Exercise in the Treatment of Disease (London and Bexhill-on-Sea: Bexhill Publishing and Printing Company, 1903) pp. 1-2. 13 See, for example, Rollier’s first chapter on the history of heliotherapy, which typifies the introductions of light therapy literature by discussing Apollo, Roman solaria, Hippocrates, Celsus and Galen within the first page; refer Auguste Rollier, Heliotherapy (London: Oxford Medical Publications, 1923) p. 1. 14 Caleb W. Saleeby, Sunlight and Health (London: Nisbet & Co., Ltd, 1923) pp. 20-21. Schneider states that Saleeby was a Neo-Lamarckian in “The Eugenics Movement in France,” p. 75. Simon Carter described Saleeby as “a ‘reformist’ rather than a ‘conservative’ eugenicist” because he did not subscribe to the “better dead” school of negative eugenics promoted so forcefully by Sir Francis Galton; see Carter, Rise and Shine: Sunlight,Technology and Health (Oxford: Berg, 2007) p. 73. For the cultural and scientific proselytization of the “better dead” policy of eugenics by Karl Pearson, refer Fay Brauer, “Deadly Doubles: Degenerate and Regenerate Body Culture in Karl Pearson’s Modern Eugenics”, Being Modern: Science and Culture in the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Robert Budd (London: UCL Centre for Publishing, 2016). 15 François Chiaïs, “La cure solaire directe,” in Troisième Congrès Français de Climatothérapie et d’Hygiène Urbaine (Cannes: N.P. 1907) p. 30: Si la pigmentation ne s’accentue pas, le pronostic est des plus graves. 16 Jean-Antoine-Constant Lamaison, De l’Héliothérapie dans la Tuberculose (Bordeaux: Barthélemy & Clédes, 1913) p. 25: Donc, la pigmentation apparaît comme un phénomène capital, en matière de cure solaire. Elle nous permet d’apprécier la marche de la cure dans les cas différents; par son observation, nous pouvons doser à loisir la quantité de soleil nécessaire. Nous possédons à cet égard une véritable posologie, ainsi que l’a dit le Professeur Landouzy, et on n’a pas exagéré, en proclamant que la pigmentation est le baromètre de la cure solaire; elle a fortement contribué à faire sortir l’héliothérapie du domaine de l’empirisme. 17 In “Le premier Congrès international d’eugénique (Londres, 1912) et ses conséquences françaises,” Histoire des sciences médicales 2 (1983) p. 145, Jacques Léonard dates the foundation of the French Eugenics Society as 22 December 1912, while Carol, Histoire de l’eugénisme en France, p. 81, dates it to 29 January 1913. From her research of the journal, Eugénique : organe de la Société française d’eugénique, Fae Brauer has advised that the Société française d’eugénique was noted as having been formally founded on 22 December 1912, as Léonard indicates, but did not hold its first minuted meeting until 29 January 1913. For more on the French Eugenics Society, see also Schneider, “Towards the Improvement of the Human Race,” p. 275 and “The Eugenics Movement in France,” p. 78. 18 Illustrations and descriptions of the tool can be found in Dr. P. Stoïanoff, “Actinométrie, Héliométrie,” Traité d’hélio- et d’actinologie, ed. Charles Brody, 2 vols. (Paris: Maloine, 1938) p. 392 (Tome I), and Jean Saidman, Héliothérapie de la Tuberculose: Techniques Nouvelles (Paris: G. Doin et Cie, 1936). 19 See Thierry Lefebvre and Cécile Raynal, Les Solariums tournants du Dr Jean Saidman (Paris: Éditions Glyphe, 2010). 20 Hugo Bach, Irradiation with the Alpine Sun Quartz Lamp, trans. R. King Brown (Slough: The Sollux Publishing Co., 1931) p. 36.

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John H. Kellogg, Light Therapeutics: A Practical Manual of Phototherapy for the Student and the Practitioner, 2nd edition (Battle Creek: The Modern Medicine Publishing Company, 1927) p. 41. 22 Rollier, Heliotherapy, 1923, pp. 17, 31, 43, with Caleb W. Saleeby’s foreword, p. xvii, respectively. 23 See Baubérot, Histoire du Naturisme, pp. 118-119. When describing the first meeting of the French Eugenics Society, Carol, Histoire de l’eugénisme en France, p. 81, lists Landouzy and Armand-Delille present as specialists of tuberculosis. 24 On Georges Hébert, see Sylvain Villaret and Jean-Michel Delaplace, “La Méthode Naturelle de Georges Hébert ou ‘l’école naturiste’ en éducation physique (1900-1939),” Staps 1: 63 (2004) pp. 29-44, accessed 6 August 2012, http://www.cairn.info/revue-staps-2004-1-page-29.htm, doi: 10.3917/sta.063.0029. Villaret has also discussed Armand-Delille’s contribution to the development of open-air schools in France, in Villaret and Jean-Philippe SaintMartin, “Écoles de plein air et naturisme: une innovation en milieu scolaire (1887-1935),” Science et motricité (Movement & Sport Sciences) (1: 51, 2004) pp. 11-28, accessed 7 August 2012, http://www.cairn.info/article_p.php?ID_ARTICLE=SM_051_0011, doi: 10.3917/sm.051.0011. Similarly, Paul Carton’s école de plein air, in Brévannes, has been discussed by Arouna P. Ouédraogo, “Food and the Purification of Society: Dr Paul Carton and Vegetarianism in Interwar France,” The Social History of Medicine (14: 2, 2001) pp. 223245. He mentions in passing Carton’s eugenic beliefs. 25 Paul-Félix Armand-Delille, L’Héliothérapie (Paris: Masson et Cie, 1914) pp. 31: L’héliothérapie ne doit pas être seulement une méthode thérapeutique; l’exposition au soleil de toute la surface du corps est un élément puissant de régulation des fonctions de l’organisme aussi bien, semble-t-il, que de développement esthétique du système musculaire et osseux. 26 Ibid., Armand-Delille, L’Héliothérapie, 1914, p. 34. 27 Albert Monteuuis, L’Usage Chez Soi des Bains d’Air, de Lumière et de Soleil; leur valeur pratique dans le traitement des maladies chroniques et dans l’hygiène journalière (Nice: Librairie Visconti, 1911) p. 125: L’accentuation de la coloration pigmentaire est un signe d’augmentation de l’activité nutritive et par conséquent de la vigueur. 28 Monteuuis, L’Usage Chez Soi, p. 124: Ses effets sont si nutritifs que, plus la somme d’intensité lumineuse que nous recevons est forte, plus, par exemple l’été, la somme d’aliments que nous prenons peut être faible … A cause de la coloration de leur peau et de leur habitude de vivre demi-nus, les nègres sont plus aptes à se nourrir directement des rayons du soleil. J.-P. Müller, My Sun-Bathing and Fresh-Air System, 1927, p. 67, similarly spoke of “eating” sunshine: To get in a perfect state of health we should not only make an exterior use of the beneficial effects of the sunbeams, through sun-baths for the skin, but we ought also to make interior use, by eating plenty of fruits and fresh vegetables which contain chemical deposits from the ultra-violet rays. Especially oranges and bananas contain lots of ‘sunshine’ … . But significantly, Monteuuis here implied that sunlight replaced the need for food, providing enough nutrition to rectify a poor or insufficient diet. 29 Monteuuis, L’Usage Chez Soi, p. 137: Dans la pratique, il faut donc aspirer à devenir bronzé comme des Arabes; le degré de pigmentation indique en générale le degré de vigueur de chacun. The correlation of Arabs, moreso than Negroes, with vigour seems to have been substantiated by ergonometry, particularly as practiced by Jules Amar; refer Fae Brauer, “Representing “Le moteur humain”: Chronometry, Chronophotography, “The Art of Work” and “The Taylored Body””, Visual Resources (Vol. 19, No. 2, 2003) pp. 88-89. 30 Armand-Delille, L’Héliothérapie, 1914, p. 34: En mettant nos enfants au soleil, en nous y exposant nous-mêmes, nous lutterons efficacement contre les nombreuses causes de déchéance qui crée la vie moderne, et nous régénérerons ainsi notre race pour la rendre plus puissante, plus robuste et, par là même, plus heureuse. 31 For more on Jaubert, see Odile Jacquemin, Hyères, la formation d’un paysage urbain, entre terre et mer, de 1748 à nos jours, PhD diss., Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, 2006, and the online article, Odile Jacquemin, “Climatisme et héliotropisme”, accessed 16 August 2012, http://www.tpm-vistoria.fr/itineraire3/03.html#. 32 Emphasis original; Lamaison, De l’Héliothérapie dans la Tuberculose, 1913, p. 62: Le Docteur Renon parlant d’une visite faite par lui à Leysin, disait: «J’ai été extrêmement impressionné de voir des malades noirs comme des nègres, avec des plaies bacillaires considérables et multiples cicatrisées, des tumeurs blanches guéries; sans les photographies des lésions avant le traitement, jamais on n’aurait pu croire que de pareils désordres aient pu exister auparavant.» Pertinently, the word “impressionné” here can mean both “impressed” and “upset.” 33 Rollier, Heliotherapy, 1923, pp. 98-99. 34 Ibid., p. 100. 35 See my essay, “‘Kissed by the Sun’: Tanning the Skin of the Sick with Light Therapeutics, c.1890-1930”, A Medical History of Skin: Scratching the Surface, eds. Kevin Siena and Jonathan Reinarz (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013) pp. 181-194. 36 Carol, Histoire de l’eugénisme en France, p. 12. 37 Ibid., p. 13. 38 As Fae Brauer makes clear in her article “‘L’Art eugénique’: Biopower and the Biocultures of Neo-Lamarckian Eugenics”, L’Esprit Créateur (52: 2, Summer 2012) pp. 38: Neo-Lamarckian transformisme became the dominant evolutionary theory premised upon the dual principles of use and disuse of an organ: the more an organ is used, the more it is strengthened and improved and vice versa. This theory was also premised upon the hereditarian concept that characteristics that were developed through adaptation to an environment could be passed on to descendants. As

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distinct from Weismann’s theory of species fixity and Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism in which only the fittest survived, Lamarck’s zoological theory of transformisme struck a quixotic chord amongst Solidarists striving for cooperation rather than competition, altruistic association rather than egotistical rivalry, and the transmutation rather than elimination of species. To transmute lower forms into higher species, increase virility and fertility, and pass on greater vigour and health to the next generation, modern sport and physical education appeared the perfect strategy to achieve Neo-Lamarckian transformisme.” 39 Kellogg, Light Therapeutics, 1910, p. 43. 40 Müller, My Sun-bathing and Fresh-Air System, 1927, p. 116. 41 Léopold Jaubert, La Cure de soleil: pourquoi – où – comment la pratiquer (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1927) p. 70: La teinte brune de la peau d’autre part était considérée par Landouzy comme indiquant une certaine résistance à la tuberculose, tandis que les sujets à peau claire et à cheveux blonds paraissaient plus exposés. 42 Rollier Heliotherapy, 1923, p. 10. 43 Lamaison, De l’Héliothérapie dans la Tuberculose, 1913, p. 23: Processus d’adaptation, s’exclament Rollier et Rosselet (de Leysin). Selon leur avis, le pigment noir joue le rôle de substance sensibilisatrice, et à ce titre il possèderait la propriété de transmuter certains rayons solaires, qui, d’ordinaire, n’ont aucun pouvoir microbicide, en rayons de plus grande réfrangibilité, ayant des propriétés antiseptiques. 44 Louis Estève, Les Bains de soleil à l’usage de tous; précis d’héliothérapie. 2nd edition (Paris: A. Maloine et Fils, 1919) p. 36. 45 Rollier, Heliotherapy, 1923, pp. 273-274. 46 Jaubert, La Cure de soleil, 1927, p. 70. 47 Ibid., p. 71: Ce rôle explique dans une certaine mesure la moindre résistance de la race nègre sous nos climats, moins lumineux que les climats tropicaux. Leur pigmentation arrête en trop grande quantité les rayons chimiques et leur économie en souffre. Ce rôle du pigment suffirait, en particulier ... à expliquer l’extrême fréquence du rachitisme chez les enfants de race noire élevés sous nos climats, alors que les nègres ne sont jamais frappés en Afrique. La même observation pourrait être faite pour la tuberculose, au moins dans une certaine mesure. Pour que l’acclimatation parfaite des noirs sous nos climats soit possible, il faudrait qu’ils puissent se dépigmenter. 48 Pascal Ory, L’Invention du bronzage (S.I.: Éditions Complexe, 2008) pp. 88-89 states that the very ability to alter or “play” with one’s pigmentation is a “White phenomenon” denied to Blacks and Asians. Presumably he meant naturally, since chemical “brightening” and bleaching creams are tremendously popular globally. 49 John A. Campbell and David N. Livingstone, “Neo-Lamarckism and the development of geography in the United States and Great Britain,” [1982] Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 8: 3 (New Series, 1983) p. 268. 50 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy: An Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of Animals, trans. Hugh Elliot (Paris, 1820; Chicago, 1984) p. 127, cited in Brauer, “Eroticizing Lamarckian Eugenics,” p. 133, n. 65. Such a view is akin to climatotherapists’ and climatologists’ belief in the “imprinting” powers of climate as explained by Henri-Joseph-Auguste Sicard, De l’influence climatérique sur la tuberculisation pulmonaire (Montpellier: Boehm & Fils, 1861) p. 6: L’homme est soumis aux lois du monde physique dont il fait partie; il subit l’influence du milieu dans lequel il vit, et son organisme ne saurait se soustraire à celle des agents extérieurs; plus que tous les autres corps même, il y est soumis par son organisation plus complexe, plus délicate. Le physiologiste et le médecin ne doivent donc pas étudier l’homme seulement en lui-même, mais encore dans ses rapports avec tout ce qui l’entoure, avec le monde extérieur: c’est là une des branches les plus importantes des sciences biologiques; c’est sur cette étude qu’est fondée l’hygiène, cette partie de la médecine dont l’importance doit toujours aller croissant, car par son développement, en établissant les règles les plus propres à maintenir l’homme en santé, elle diminuera la fréquence des maladies et, en les prévenant, se substituera, pour ainsi dire, à l’art qui apprend à les guérir. Sicard, who became a professor of medicine at Montpellier and then Dean of the Faculty of Science and Medicine at Lyon, was the father of the Neo-Lamarckian eugenicist, Just Sicard de Plauzoles; refer Schneider, “The Eugenics Movement in France,” p. 87. 51 See Tania Woloshyn, “La Côte d’Azur: the terre privilégié of Invalids and Artists, c.1860-1900”, French Cultural Studies (20: 4, November 2009) pp. 383-402, and Tania Woloshyn, “Aesthetic and Therapeutic Imprints: Artists and Invalids on the Côte d’Azur, c.1890-1910,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 11: 1 (Spring 2012), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/spring12/aesthetic-and-therapeutic-imprints-artists-and-invalids-on-thecote-dazur-c-18901910. 52 Thomas Nogier, La Lumière et la vie: étude des différentes modalités de la lumière au point de vue physique, physiologique et thérapeutique (Lyon: Imprimerie Waltener, 1904) p. 317: La vie sexuelle commence beaucoup plus vite dans les pays où l’intensité lumineuse est plus grande. Les nègres deviennent adolescents vers 10 ou 12 ans. La menstruation est beaucoup plus précoce chez les femmes des tropiques. Par contre on la voit manquer chez les femmes esquimaux pendant les six mois de la vie polaire. 53 L. Revillet, “De l’Héliothérapie Marine dans les Tuberculoses abdominales, Organes Génito-urinaires,” Rapport présenté au Congrès de l’Association Internationale de Thalassothérapie de Cannes [1914] (Paris: Éditions de la ‘Gazette des Eaux,’ 1914) p. 20: Cette précocité s’accentue à mesure que l’on se rapproche de l’équateur. Les arabes et les négresses sont réglées et pubères souvent avant 10 ans. 54 Ibid., Revillet, pp. 19-20: Sur le littoral méditerranéen et en particulier sur la Riviera, la menstruation est bien plus précoce que dans les climats du Nord. Les fillettes sont en général réglées de 10 à 11 ans; et ce n’est pas un fait

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d’atavisme, le même phénomène s’observe chez les enfants, dont les familles, originaires du Nord, viennent habiter la Côte d’Azur, et cela à la grande stupéfaction de leurs parents. My emphasis. 55 Ibid., Revillet, p. 20: Le même phénomène de floraison avancée...se produit chez les plantes du nord transportées dans le midi. For more on Lamarckian beliefs in the organic connectedness of plants and humans, and its visual representation in art, see Serena Keshavjee, “Natural History, Cultural History, and the Art History of Elie Faure,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 8: 2 (2009), accessed 5 August 2012, http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/ index.php/autumn09/natural-history-cultural-history-and-the-art-history-of-elie-faure. 56 Ibid., Revillet, p.17. 57 Ibid., Revillet, p. 19: A l’action de la lumière solaire, les ovaires des jeunes filles, tout comme ceux d’une jeune plante, sont particulièrement sensibles. C’est un fait de physiologie générale, qu’on observe aussi bien dans le règne végétal, que dans le règne animal. 58 Nogier, La Lumière et la vie, p. 327: Peut être même, mais c’est une pure hypothèse, le pigment animal joue-t-il un rôle analogue à la chlorophylle chez les végétaux. Peut-être transmet-il à l’organisme des énergies spéciales résultant de la transformation de l’énergie chimique. On aurait ainsi une explication rationnelle de la vivacité, de l’exubérance des races du Midi, de la quantité de travail qu’elles peuvent fournir avec une ration alimentaire souvent bien insuffisante, de leur résistance aux maladies et en particulier à la tuberculose. Emphasis original. 59 M. Brody, “Gynécologie et la lumière”, Traité d’hélio- et d’actinologie, 1938, ed. Ch. Brody, Tome II, both p. 1464: Chez la femme enceinte, les U.-V. peuvent rendre de grands services, comme il est logique de l’attendre de leur action eutrophique. Ainsi chez les jeunes femmes qui font difficilement les frais du travail de leur grossesse. And also: Les travaux expérimentaux ainsi que les observations cliniques s’accordent pour attribuer aux U.-V. une action favorable pour la jeune femme qui allaite, tant pour la mère dont la sécrétion lactée se trouverait augmentée, que pour l’enfant, grâce aux propriétés antirachitiques acquises par le lait sous l’influence de l’irradiation de la mère. 60 Ibid., M. Brody, p. 1466. 61 Ibid., M. Brody, p. 1465: L’actinothérapie agit comme si elle déplaçait la malade vers le midi. Le fait est que beaucoup de fillettes soumises aux U.-V. voient apparaître leurs premières règles plus tôt même que leur mère. 62 Schneider, “Towards the Improvement of the Human Race”, 1982, p. 278. Romy Golan, Modernism and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) p. 21, has explained that fears of dénatalité prompted an “aggressive pro-natalist campaign” involving the creation of a Conseil Supérieur de la Natalité, in 1919, and the Exposition nationale de la maternité et de l’enfance, in 1921. The latter year coincides with Pinard’s election as President of the French Eugenics Society and ongoing government legislation from the 1920s onwards to increase fertility, criminalize abortion [1923], and deny women the right to vote. My thanks to Fae Brauer for pointing this out. 63 Patrick Howarth, When the Riviera was Ours (London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977) p. 125. 64 D. H. Lawrence, “Sun” [c.1926], D. H. Lawrence: Selected Short Stories, ed. Brian Finney (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1985) p. 428. 65 Ibid., Lawrence, “Sun,” p. 433. 66 See Kenneth Silver, Making Paradise: Art, Modernity and the Myth of the French Riviera (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001). 67 While the title is unique, the twisted pose of the recumbent figure occurs repeatedly in Dunoyer de Segonzac’s work during the 1920s and 1930s: See Aimée Lioré and Pierre Cailler, Catalogue de l’Oeuvre Gravé de Dunoyer de Segonzac, vol. 1: 1919-1927 (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1958); Cure de Soleil is No. 182 in this book, with no further information about its title, the series, or its context. François Fosca, Dunoyer de Segonzac: Provence (Lausanne: International Art Book, 1969) p. 22, explains that to avoid prying eyes when posing his models nude outdoors, Segonzac built an artificial beach on his own property in Saint-Tropez. In A. Dunoyer de Segonzac (Paris: Flammarion, 1980) p. 82, Anne Distel does mention this series of engravings of nudes on the beach of 1927-1928, but writes only that: Il ne faut pas oublier que c’est à cette époque qu’on commence à découvrir le plaisir du ‘farniente’ au soleil d’été de la Côte d’Azur ... . I continue to search for information on this engraving, particularly because its title makes direct medical reference to heliotherapy or the “sun cure.” While in this chapter, I concentrate specifically on photographs of heliotherapy, in the future I would like to explore these convergences between art and medicine in early twentieth-century “solar” paintings, sculptures and illustrations; see, for example, the essay on Edvard Munch (1863-1944) by Pascal Rousseau, “Radiation: Metabolising the ‘new rays’”, Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye, exhibition catalogue, Angela Lampe and Clément Chéroux, eds. (London: Tate Publishing, 2012) pp. 161-169. On p. 167, Rousseau describes Munch’s fascinating “solar” paintings, such as The Sun (1910-1913), New Rays (1912-1913) and Men Turning Towards the Sun (1914-1916) as: populated by translucent silhouettes that levitate in a chromoluminous fairyland in which the artist takes care to link the body’s exposure to the sun with the awakening of consciousness. In focussing on such representations of sunlight as transcendental, he mentions the work of Fidus (Hugo R. K. J. Höppener), whose first of many artworks entitled Lichtgebet (Prayer to the sun) is discussed in this book, pp. xxxv-xxxvi. Rousseau also mentions František Kupka, whose artwork is discussed in relation to “becoming simian” in Chapter Seven of this book. The pursuit of such a project extends from my previous research on the NeoImpressionists, particularly Henri-Edmond Cross (1854-1910) and his fascination with both the aesthetic and therapeutic properties of the Côte d’Azur’s sunlight.

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Oscar Bernhard, Light Treatment in Surgery, trans. R. King Brown (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1926) p. 278, figure 86. 69 Oscar Bernhard, Sonnenlichtbehandlung in der Chirurgie (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1917) p. 163, figure 51: Man beachte die wieder gewonnenen vollen und schön modellierten Körperformen und die glatte, prächtige Bronzehaut. I would like to thank Dr. Gabriele Neher for kindly translating this phrase. 70 On anxieties of the perceived degeneration of France, see the bibliography for the work of Robert A. Nye, Richard Thomson, Richard Tomlinson, and Eugen Weber. 71 Müller, My Sun-Bathing and Fresh-Air System, 1927, pp. 21-22. At this point in the text he was quoting himself from a letter solicited by an unnamed large periodical in Germany, during a lecturing tour of March 1926, in an attempt to distance himself from Hans Surén’s Nachtkultur (Naked Culture) movement. 72 Maren Möhring, “Working Out the Body’s Boundaries: Physiological, Aesthetic, and Psychic Dimensions of the Skin in German Nudism, 1890-1930,” Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality, eds. Christopher E. Forth and Ivan Crozier (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005) p. 234-235. The “Hottentot” (Khoi) Venus, usually a reference to the South African Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman (d.1815), was famous for her perceived abnormally-enlarged buttocks and elongated labia, and as such was exhibited as a spectacle in Britain and France. In citing the “Hottentot,” Möhring references the work of the German naturists K. Bol, “Schönheit und naturgemässe Lebensweise,” Die Schönheit 3 (1905) p. 720, and J. Große, Die Schönheit des Menschen: Ihr Schauen, Bilden und Bekleiden (Dresden: Gerhard Küthmann, 1912). There are significant correspondences and intersections with the German movements of Lebensreform (Life Reform), Nachtkultur, and Freikörperkultur (Free Body Culture), though unfortunately they are beyond the scope of this chapter; I defer to Peter Mowris’s essay within this volume as well as Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in Germany Body Culture, 1910-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 73 Michel Bertrand, Essai touchant l’influence de la lumière sur les êtres organisés, sur l’atmosphère, et sur différens composés chimiques (Paris: H. Y., 1799) p. 35: Il peut se faire que des torrens de lumière aient d’abord altéré insensiblement la couleur des hommes qui résidaient sous l’équateur, et que cette altération primitive, transmise à leurs descendans, se soit accrue à chaque génération ; mais il est impossible que l’on confonde, après plusieurs années, la couleur d’un blanc, exposé à l’ardeur du soleil, et vivant d’ailleurs à la manière des nègres, avec celle de ces derniers. 74 See the medical dissertations of Jean-Baptiste Giard, De l’Influence de la Lumière sur les trois règnes de la nature (Paris: Didot Jeune, 1817) pp. 17-18, and Emmanuel-Paulin Girard, Considérations générales sur l’heureuse influence du soleil (Paris: Didot Jeune, 1819) pp. 15-16. 75 Victor I. Roditi, Contribution à l’étude du traitement des brûlures par l’héliothérapie (Montpellier: Firmin et Montane, 1914) p. 19 : Sous l’influence du soleil progressivement dosé, et en dehors de tout accident d’insolation, les téguments présentent rapidement une pigmentation progressive et généralisée, et ils prennent une belle teinte bronzée qui, suivant les sujets, varie des tons acajou aux tons bruns de la peau des nègres, sans cependant atteindre le noir d’ébène de ceux-ci. My emphasis. 76 I would like to thank Dr Keren Hammerschlag for this astute observation. 77 John H. Kellogg, Light Therapeutics: A Practical Manual of Phototherapy for the Student and the Practitioner (Battle Creek: The Good Health Publishing Company, 1910) p. 54. 78 C. Brody, “Technique de Brody: on peut considérablement raccourcir la durée du traitement héliothérapique”, Traité d’hélio- et d’actinologie, p. 800: La pigmentation est maintenant trop à la mode, aussi bien dans les traitements médicaux que sur nos plages. C’est à cela que beaucoup d’auteurs attribuent les guérisons obtenues, et l’on perd complètement de vue que la pigmentation n’est qu’un phénomène qui accompagne la cure solaire, mais non le but poursuivi et encore moins la cause de guérison. 79 Ibid., C. Brody, p. 799: Il peut même arriver que l’apparition d’une pigmentation subite et intense soit l’élément d’un pronostic sévère et, quelquefois même, le prodrome d’un dénouement fatal et à brève échéance. C’est le cas des cachectiques. Chez eux, nous avons constaté qu’après une courte exposition, à dose insignifiante même, il se produisait une pigmentation subite et intense de couleur chocolat. Loin d’être de bon augure, chez eux, cette pigmentation rapide et foncée signifie une désintégration tissulaire de l’organisme en voie de destruction et est comparable, pour nous, comme signe avertisseur ... . 80 Ibid., C. Brody, p. 802: On fait entièrement fausse route en attribuant au pigment des effets curatifs et non pas à l’allergie cutanée et aux substances anti-inflammatoires circulant dans le sang. 81 Ibid., C. Brody, p. 804: Une cure de dépigmentation et de désaccoutumance doit être désormais pratiquée systématiquement. Also: Surpigmentation, surdosage, sursaturation solaire et continuité de la cure sont responsables de la très longue durée du traitement héliothérapique classique nécessitant de longs mois, le plus souvent même plusieurs années d’hospitalisation, fait déplorable connu seulement des spécialistes héliothérapeutes et sur lequel les auteurs, dans la littérature médicale, restent entièrement muets. 82 Ibid., C. Brody, p. 812. 83 I have discovered very little about Brody, even after hiring a professional genealogist. 84 Currently this “addiction” to the euphoric feelings of light, whether natural or artificial, is referred to as “tanorexia.” 85 His exact words are “erotic, amoral and libertarian”; refer Littlewood, Sultry Climates, p. 194.

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For more on Côte d’Azur tourism and naturism, see Stephen L. Harp, “Demanding Vacation au naturel: European Nudism and Postwar Municipal Development on the French Riviera”, The Journal of Modern History (83, September 2011) pp. 513-543. 87 Fae Brauer, “Eroticizing Lamarckian Eugenics”, 2008, p. 128. 88 Fae Brauer, “Making Eugenic Bodies Delectable: Art, ‘Biopower’ and ‘Scientia Sexualis,’” 2008, p. 9. 89 As Fae Brauer says, “‘L’Art eugénique’”, 2012, p. 37: Eugenics appeared less like a political policy and more like an art that was implicit not explicit, dissuasive not didactic, and, following Foucault’s theory of ‘docile bodies,’ unofficial, insidious, and coercive. 90 Bernard Andrieu, Bronzage (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2008) p. 27-28: Le souci constant d’entretenir son bronzage, et de n’être ni trop blanc ni trop noir maintient toujours une peau provisoirement basanée dans un certain équilibre esthétique. L’apparente négritude d’une société métissée donne le change au multiculturalisme, et le blanc n’est plus perçu comme colonial. Le bronzage mêle les corps sans les confondre, car l’hiver débronze les peaux.

CONCLUSION VISUAL CULTURES OF HOPE AND FEAR: DEGENERATION AND THE THREAT OF DEHUMANIZATION SERENA KESHAVJEE

In his 1892 book Entartung (Degeneration), Max Nordau observed that cultural degeneration was first noticed in France.1 The loss of the Franco-Prussian War, the questioning of the role of traditional religions, and France’s decline as a leader within the sciences, all contributed to a sense of ending by the fin-de-siècle. Predicated upon evolutionary theory, especially its Neo-Lamarckian variant, this concept of degeneration and devolution flourished in France after the 1870s. The agency of Lamarck’s ideas and the possibility of extinction laid out in Darwin’s theories made them seem applicable to paranoiac concepts concerning the degeneration of the species and its corollary, regeneration. While Nordau tracked evidence of physical and mental degeneration in France, especially among avant-garde artists, the overriding purpose of his book was a plea for the renewal of European society. It is the great irony of Degeneration that Nordau compared avant-garde artists to degenerates as indicated by his declaration: “Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists.”2 Nordau dismissed the possibility of avant-garde artists being also interested in regenerating European society and Western culture. Although Nordau identified tribal cultures as unevolved and uncivilized, Modernists embraced them as forms of “primitivism”, untainted by the pretentiousness of civilization, that could act as catalysts for renewal. In Chapter Nine, “Nerves Liquefy: Dada’s Challenge to Evolution”, Peter Mowris documents this positive valence of “primitivism” within the avant-garde. He explains how Rudolf Laban, inspired by Wilhelm Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie, created improvisational dance to facilitate the expansion of the mind through generating new neural pathways. These free-form dances, with spontaneous choreography were, as he shows, known to the Dada artists and played a major part in their performances. As Mowris points out, Marcel Janco even constructed masks for the dancers to wear in order to enhance the “primitiveness” of their scenes and encourage spontaneous performativity. Mowris’ chapter, like the other nine chapters of Picturing Evolution and Extinction, examines popular, cultural and scientific responses to evolutionary theories in relation to degeneration and regeneration. Since the culmination of degeneration was perceived as decivilization and dehumanization, this threat was played out mostly upon the human body as revealed by modern visual culture. Transformism, as Neo-Lamarckian theory was called in France, implied that the human body was consciously mutable. Yet this mutability could work in reverse: If species could evolve, conversely this meant that they could also devolve. In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, many believed that French society was ailing. In Chapter Two, “Cormon's Cain: Man between Primitive and Prophet”, Isabelle Havet argues that these fears coalesced in the powerful painting of Cain (Fig. 2.1) by Fernand Cormon, exhibited at the Salon in 1880. At first glance the figures seem to envisage the progressive evolutionary journey of Homo sapiens, a subject that was becoming popular with artists at this time. However, as Havet explains, the artist’s adroit combination of brutish physiognomies and lumpen bodies alongside more classically proportioned figures, instead presents the possible regression of humans. These fears of latent atavism and devolution seemed to be corroborated by science.

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The Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, to whom Nordau dedicated Degeneration, sought out the physical characteristics that might indicate criminality. At the same time, BénéditeAugustin Morel was documenting cretinism in swampy areas of France.3 Hence one of the many paradoxes arising around the concept of degeneration is that while science, technology and civilization were progressing, more and more individual illnesses and pathologies were being documented by physicians and neurologists in specific environments. Evolutionary theory allowed for the possibility that atavistic remnants lurking within homo sapiens were responsible for criminal behavior, despite the strides made by civilization in general. Degenerate humans could also be in danger of devolving into a bestial state. Chapters Three, Six, Seven and Eight in Picturing Evolution and Extinction deal directly with the fear that atavistic and animalistic tendencies were deeply rooted within humans. In Chapter Three, “Mouths that Bite: Rabies and Louis Pasteur's Public Face”, Mary Hunter proposes that the disproportionate fear around rabies in France had more to do with the perception of a virus that reduced humans to animals than a real threat of catching the disease. Described as a beasts’ affliction that plagued humans, Hunter explains that by suggesting that rabies victims were afflicted with animalistic traits, French doctors were contributing to the debate about degeneration. In Chapter Six, Oscar Vásquez demonstrates that Carles Mani y Rogi’s sculpture, Els Degenerats (Embrutecimiento) (Fig. 6.1), is one of the most direct confrontations of the beast within. Before our very eyes these figures seem to slide into the brutishness associated with lesser primates. This is why Vásquez notes that Mani used the term “degeneration”, rather than the more common terms “decay” or “decline” in the naming of his sculpture, in order to emphasise the notion of individual degeneration in Spain at the fin de siglo. While the interaction between humans and apes became fodder for high art and other visual cultures by the turn of the century, there were varying responses to the evolutionary notion that Homo sapiens evolved from apes and to the paranoiac concept that degenerate Homo sapiens could devolve back to this or other dehumanized states. In Chapter Eight, “Beauty and The Beast: Imaging Human Evolution at the Moscow Darwin Museum in the 1920s”, Pat Simpson analyses Vasili Vatagin’s monumental sculptural pairing of a family of women and a family of apes for the Darwin Museum in Moscow. As Simpson explains, Age Variability in Orang-utans (Fig. 8.2) evidences the Soviet experimentation in eugenics and euthenics during the 1920s. Vatagin’s anthropomorphized family of apes demonstrates the eugenic potential of all animals to evolve and as a correlative of this proposition, all humans. As Simpson concludes, these orangutans were given human qualities as a utopian parallel for the evolutionist goal of shaping the “new human” in the Soviet Union. By contrast, in Chapter Seven, Fae Brauer considers how a number of Paris-based Modernists embraced aspects of dehumanization, striving to develop the instinctive qualities associated with animals, particularly simians. In “Becoming Simian: Devolution as Evolution in Transformist Modernism”, Brauer draws out a nuanced reaction to fin-de-siècle research on primates, one that transgressed the trope of anthropomorphization and pushed beyond into new interspecies subjectivities. Following Edmond Perrier’s exploration of primate colonies as embodying some of the highest forms of Neo-Lamarckian cooperative evolution, and the ways in which this was pursued by Anarcho-Communists and appropriated by Léon Bourgeois (French Prime Minister 1895–1896) to organicize and render more scientific his policy of Solidarism, Brauer argues that the artists Dufau, Kupka, Picasso and Rousseau created empathetic images of monkeys (Figs. 7.14 to 7.19). Not only did their efforts seem designed to defuse the fear of devolution, but also to reveal how this trajectory of devolution could become equivalent to one of creative evolution, in keeping with Henri Bergson's theory, in which the creative intuition of human primates could be unleashed in an interspecies model of subjectivity. Havet, Vasquez and Simpson also note the paradoxical artistic responses to the fear of dehumanization and the celebration of instinctual behaviour. To my mind some of the most exciting research in this anthology involves understanding how discoveries about cells and proto-cellular structure were taken up by intellectuals and artists. Scientists looking to substantiate evolutionary theory thought much about the origins of primeval

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life. In France, fueled by Pasteur’s breakthroughs in microbiology and Berthelot’s experiments in organic chemistry, a new discourse about the infinitely small microscopic world was disseminated within popular culture. The basis of Neo-Lamarckian Transformism, the progressive development from the simple cell to the complex organism through association and attachment moved beyond the confines of science to become a social metaphor. Remarkably, as Brauer and Jessica Dandona lay out, Bourgeois applied fundamental concepts of Transformism to render scientific his Socialist policies and, in so doing, to bolster them. While Brauer demonstrates how Bourgeois adapted these ideas from Perrier’s Les Colonies animales et la formation des organismes to his political doctrine of Solidarism,4 in turn Dandona notes the influence of Solidarism behind Emile Gallé’s efforts to create a modern, organic and regional French decorative art. In Chapter Five, “Evolution and Organicism in the art of Emile Gallé”, Dandona explores Gallé’s identification as an artistscientist, and examines how his experiments and drawings of orchids enabled him to apply Transformism to his hand-blown glass objects. Gallé’s “naturalist decoration” that drew upon the evolution of fauna and flora that was distinctive to Nancy was also designed to serve the political rehabilitation of the region of Lorraine in light of its partial annexation by Germany after the Franco-Prussian war. Not only was Transformist evolutionary biology then regarded by such Solidarist Republicans as Gallé as a cooperative and organic model for nationhood within the Third Republic, but also as an alternative to xenophobic and Anti-Semitic models of nation in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, one that was best able to commemorate rather than assimilate regional distinctiveness, particularly that of Gallé’s native city of Nancy. Ernst Haeckel’s stunning images of the social Moneron, “myxodictyum sociale”, as the basic proto-cellular substance of all life, appeared influential for artists and scientists alike, including Perrier, Gallé and Besnard. In Chapter Four, I make the case that Besnard also sought out scientific processes to develop a modern style. In 1896, in his large-scale mural for the new Sorbonne Chemistry Amphitheatre, Besnard jettisoned naturalist tendencies to personify science, instead visualizing chemical and Transformist theories about the origins of life being proposed by scientists such as Haeckel, Perrier and Camille Flammarion. To capture the formlessness of the primordial soup and the structure-less protoplasm of Monera, Besnard invented a new pictorial language for La Vie renaissant de la mort (Fig. 4.1). The sense of flux, flow and the dynamism of the vital force, so often commented upon in Besnard’s mural, represents his effort to create an informe aesthetic able to mimic the never-ending transformation central to Transformist evolution. One of the most important elements to develop out of this anthology is a better understanding of how different strains of evolutionary theory were received. It was Darwin who brought attention to the possible extinction of species in the title of his 1859 treatise, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. In this treatise, as in his subsequent one, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin warned that species unable to adapt would soon become extinct. In her introductory chapter to this volume, Sarah Thomas details how this Darwinian primitivizing attitude, culminating in the “doomed race theory”, was applied to indigenous populations in Australia and North America. Through close visual readings of the paintings produced by the two academically trained German artists, Eugene von Guérard and Albert Bierstadt (Figs. 1.1 to 1.8), she reveals how the seemingly ordained demise of indigenous populations in these countries appeared to arise from their apparent inability to adapt to the harsh reality of imperial occupation. Yet this anthology also illuminates the paradoxical inversion of attitude that occurred in the twentieth century when devolution became equivalent to evolution for many Modernists. In Chapter Ten, “Regenerative Tanning: Pigmentation, Neo-Lamarckian Eugenics and the Visual Culture of the Cure de Soleil”, Tania Woloshyn focuses on the paradox of the treatment of tubercular patients through heliotherapy. While sun bathing became a form of medical healing in the twentieth century, there were tensions inherent in therapeutic pigmentation. Dark skin could still signify primitiveness, licentiousness and a disposition to devolve in line with other degenerate stigmata. Yet by this time it could also be viewed as an indicator of good health and a prime signifier of regeneration. This was as much the case in interwar France as it was in Weimar

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Germany from the time that Freikörperkultur (nudism) emerged in 1898.5 So important was health achieved through natural living in the Weimar Republic, particularly by its Race Hygiene Societies, that for the Reich Health Week (Reichsgesundheitwoche), the public was bombarded with hygiene exhibitions, films and lectures.6 Although the natural therapies that Woloshyn explores in France and Switzerland were not officially incorporated into this Week in Germany, it was launched with a poster of a black muscular figure reproduced in the Introduction (Fig. I.8), saluting the golden sunrays in much the same way as the woman in Roger Broders’ poster does (Fig. 10.1 and cover). Hence while this book opens with the picturing of Australian and North American indigenous people as “doomed races” inspired by the first publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species, it closes with the quest by 1930 for a regenerative suntan, as embodied by the woman opening her body to the sun on the cover. Although Darwinian theory continues to dominate much of the analysis of the visual culture inspired by evolution, Picturing Evolution and Extinction makes clear that there were diverse perceptions of evolutionary theory. Science historians now agree that by the fin de siècle, the dominant evolutionary discourse in France was a version of evolution that played down Darwin’s randomized “natural selection”, instead emphasizing Lamarck’s idea of agency. In striking such an uplifting note amidst the fears of catastrophism, many of the chapters in this book illuminate why Lamarck’s evolutionary theories and the late-nineteenth-century art and science of Transformism proved so appealing in France, overcoming all challenges posed to it by August Weismann’s “germ plasm” and Mendelism. This book also illuminates why visual cultures of regeneration became as dominant in the twentieth century, as the picturing of degeneration had been in the nineteenth-century. Yet this intensive exploration of the impact of Lamarck’s ideas and of Transformism upon both art and science is unprecedented in the literature of art history and visual culture, including those publications that have recently engaged evolutionism. Compared to literary historians, art historians have been relatively slow to use evolutionary theory as a lens through which to study nineteenth and twentieth-century French visual culture. When they did catch up to literary historians, with few exceptions, Darwinian evolution was privileged even as science historians were debating the non-Darwinian revolution.7 This is demonstrated by Darwinian theory being stressed in the titles of some of the most important arthistorical texts published from 2003 onward, even while some individual authors revealed the presence of Transformism.8 Yet as early as 1927 in his book The Spirit of Forms, French art historian Elie Faure summed up the melange of evolutionary ideas in this way: Lamarck, enlightened by the analogy which he established between universal forms, affirms their original unity, and delegates to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, to Darwin, to Huxley, to Spencer, to Haeckel, to Cope, to Samuel Butler, to Bergson, to the interminable future, the task of pursuing the proof from form to form, from the protozoan to the spirit.9

From this list it is made very clear that Darwin was regarded as just one of many scientists contributing to evolutionary theory. Robert Stebbins’ 1974 article on France in The Comparative Reception of Darwinism and Patrick Tort’s more recent comments in “The Interminable Decline of Lamarckism in France” detail misunderstandings of Darwin’s ideas, and conscious efforts to conflate Darwinism with Lamarck’s theories well into the twentieth century.10 Stebbins and Tort point to Nationalism, Catholicism, the contentious French translation of The Origins of Species in 1862, and the hagiographic attitude towards savants, including Cuvier and Pasteur, as all contributing to the eclipse of Darwin in France. The range of reasons and emotions that Stebbins and Tort lay out are, of course, the same as those that Nordau identified to argue that France exemplified the “dusk” of European nations. That a complexity and confluence of evolutionary theories between 1860 and 1930 inspired hope and fear, optimism and phobia, not just in France but in America, Australia, Britain, Germany, Russia, Spain and Switzerland, is then betrayed and portrayed by the modern visual cultures featured in Picturing Evolution and Extinction.

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One of the reasons that Fae Brauer and I undertook this project, first as a session at the Association of Art Historians Conference in 2012, and then as this anthology, was to shed light on this entanglement of Lamarckian and Darwinian theories within visual culture.11 As one of the first books to focus upon Transformism as an object of study not only in the sciences but also in politics and art, it unravels how the theories of Darwin, Lamarck and Haeckel, as well as a diverse range of theories furnished by an array of Neo-Lamarkian scientists, physicians, obstetricians and therapists, interacted to forge not just a culture of Transformism, but a visual culture of Transformism.

Notes 1

Max Nordau, Degeneration (London: William Heinmann, 1895); Dégénérescence, trans. Auguste Dietrich (Paris: Alcan, 1894, 2 vols). 2 Nordau, Degeneration, 1895, p. vii. 3 Cesare Lombroso, L’Uomo delinquente in rapporto all anthropologia. (Torino: 1888). B.-A. Morel, Traité des dégénérescences physiques: Physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l'espèce humaine et des causes qui produisent ces variétés maladives (Paris: Libraire de l'Académie impériale de médecine, 1857). 4 Edmond Perrier, Les Colonies animales et la formation des organismes (Paris: G. Masson, 1881). 5 Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) Deutsche Gesellshaft für Rassenhygiene and Reichsgesundheitwoche, pp. 408-422. I thank Fae Brauer for this information. 6 Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890-1930 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003) pp. 130-131. 7 See Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 8 See “The Darwin Effect: Evolution and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture”, eds. Linda Nochlin and Martha Lucy (Special Issue, Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, vol. 2, iss. 2 (Spring 2003); Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts, eds. Diana Donald and Jane Munro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Darwin: Art and the Search for Origins, eds. Pamela Kort and Max Hollein (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle, 2009); The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms and Visual Culture, eds. Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer (Hanover and London: University Press of New England Press, 2009). Neo-Lamarckism is also laid out in Oliver A. I. Botar, “Prolegomena to the Study of Biomorphic Modernism: Biocentrism, László Moholy Nagy’s ‘New Vision’ and Ernö Kállái’s ‘Bioromantik’” (Ph.D. thesis University of Toronto, 1998). 9 Elie Faure, History of Art: The Spirit of Forms, trans. Walter Pach (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1937) p. 246. 10 Robert E. Stebbins, “France”, The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, ed., Thomas F. Glick (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974) pp. 117-167; also refer Patrick Tort, “The Interminable Decline of Lamarckism in France”, The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, eds., E. M. Engels and T. F. Glick (London: Continuum, 2008) pp. 329-353. 11 This was previously explored by Fae Brauer, “Making Eugenic Bodies Delectable: Art, ‘Biopower’ and ‘Scientia Sexualis’, Introduction, and “Eroticizing Lamarckian Eugenics: The Body Stripped Bare during French Sexual Neoregulation”, Chapter Three, Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, eds. Fae Brauer and Anthea Callen (Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2008); refer also Stuart M. Persell, Neo-Lamarckism and the Evolutionary Controversy in France 1870–1920 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, Press 1999).

BIBLIOGRAPHY COMPILED BY SYLVIE BOISJOLI

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INDEX

Artistic, literary or scientific works are referenced in italics under the entry for the artist or author. References to Figures are given in brackets. Aboriginals, xvii, 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12. Aborigines, see Aborginals. abolitionism, see slavery, abolition of. aboulia , xxvi, 113, 114. abulía, see aboulia. About, Edmond, 25, 31. acquired characteristics, xxiii, xxiv, 23-4, 74, 157, 158, 167, 171, 200, 201, 207, 208. See also, Lamarck, JeanBaptiste; Lamarckism; Neo-Lamarckism; Transformism. Academic art, xviii, xxx, 20, 21, 23-5, 31. aceras hircine (Lizard’s Tongue Orchid), 84, 85 (5.1), 86 (5.2), 87 (5.3), 88-9, 91, 94, 96. See also Gallé, Émile. Adams, Brooks, 114. adaptation, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxxiii, 1, 74, 88, 89, 95, 96, 158, 180, 194, 200, 208. aestheticism, 112. Africa, 51-3; “scramble for”, xix, 127, 129; wildlife, xix, 31, 127, 159. Alcántara, Francisco, 111. Alexandre, Arsène, 148. Algeria, 51. See also Algerians. Algerians, 50-3. allegory, xxiii, xxvi, 5, 11, 12-13, 14, 30, 107, 114, 137. Alsace, xxxi, 46. Altamira, Rafael, 113. America: North, xviii, xxvi, xxxiii, 1-8, 10, 14, 219; South, xviii, 10, 11. American Revolution, the, 6. Americans, native (‘Indians’), 2, 5-8, 11, 14. See also indigenous peoples. anarchist, xxxv, xxxix, 181. anarchism, xxv, 113, 185, 188. anarcho-communism, xxxi, xxxix, 127, 139, 143, 181, 185, 218, 219. anarcho-cosmic utopia, xli, 156, 226. Anderson, Nancy K., 14. Andrieu, Bernard: Bronzage, 209. animal colonies (les colonies animales), xxix, xxxi, xxxii, 71, 127-32, 142-3, 146-8, 218. See also Perrier, Edmond; solidarism. animaliers, les artistes, 115, 135, 142, 145. animalism, xxx, xxxii, xxxiii, 28, 163, 218. animal magnetism, 139-40, 148, “magnetic love”, 148. animal rights, 128, 139-40. animal welfare, xxix, xxxiii, 128, 139. anthropology, 12, 22, 26, 30, 31, 114, 116, 118, 133. Anthropocene, the, xv, xxix, xxxvi, xxxvii. anticolonialism, xxx, 127. anti-vivisection, 49, 128, 139. apes, see simians. Apert, Eugène, 203. Apollinaire, Guillaume, 140, 146. Le Bestiaire ou cortège d’Orphée, 140; Les Saltimbanques, 140. Armand-Delille, Paul-Félix, 197-8, 206, 209. Arnold, Matthew, 113. Art Nouveau, xxvii, 83, 88, 96-8. Arts and Crafts Movement, 98. associationism, xxiii-xxiv, xxvii, xxxi, 127-32, 146, 148, 219.



Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AkhRR), 159, 160, 161, 170. atavism, xviii, xx, xxx, 35, 41, 42, 43, 56, 110, 114, 116, 117, 118, 120, 194, 201, 207, 217, 218. Australia, xviii, xxxiii, 1, 2, 5, 8-9, 11-12, 13, 219, 220. Australian indigenous people, xxxvi. Azorín (José Ruiz Martínez): La Voluntad, 113. Bach, Hugo, 196. Ball, Hugo, xxxii, 184-8. Barcelona (1907 5th International Exhibition), 109-11. Baratay, Eric, 135. Barye, Antoine-Louis, 115, 134. Bastian, Adolf, 2. Bateson, William, 171. Beard, George Miller, xxvi, 111. “becoming animal”, xxvi, 42, 148, 149. “becoming simian”, see simian. Beer, Daniel, 157. Bell, Charles, 7. The Anatomy of Expression in Painting, 118. Bellermann, Ferdinand, 10. Bennett, Charles, 108, 109 (6.3). Benton, Ted, 13. Bergson, Henri, xxx, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxv, 133, 149, 220. L’Évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution), xxxv, 70, 128, 156, 218, 225. Berman, Judith, 32. Bernhard, Oscar, xxxv, 204-6, 208, 209. Berthelot, Marcellin, 68, 70, 75, 219. Science et morale, 62. Bertillon, Alphonse, 44. Bertillon, Jacques, xix. Bertrand, Michel, 207. Besnard, Albert, xxx, xxxiii, xxxv. The Chemistry Lesson, 63 (4.2); La Vie renaissant de la mort (The Rebirth of Life in Death), xxvii, xxx, xxxi, xxxv, 61 (4.1), 62-4 (4.3), 65 (4.4), 66 (4.5), 67 (4.6), 68, 70, 71, 74-5, 76 (4.13). Bierstadt, Albert, xviii, 1-7, 8, 10, 11-14, 219. Indian Encampment, Shoshone Village, 2, 3 (1.1), 11; The Last of the Buffalo, 14; The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 2, 4 (1.3), 7; Sunset Light, Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains, 5, 11; Toward the Setting Sun, 2, 3 (1.2), 5. biodiversity, xv, 90. “black legend”, the (la leyenda negra), 119. Bloc des Gauches, le, 140. Bolshevik Revolution, the, xxvi-xxvii, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163, 164, 165, 167, 169-70, 173. Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, see Napoléon III. Bonnat, Léon Joseph Florentin, 47. Pasteur et sa petite fille Camille, xxvi, 43-4 (3.1), 46-8, 49, 56. Bonnejoy, Ernest: Le Végétarianisme et le régime végétarien rationnel, 139. Borie, Jean, 140. Bosio, François Joseph: The Restoration Guided by Peace, 29. Bouguereau, William-Adolphe, 24. Young Girl Defending Herself Against Eros, 25 (2.3).

254 Bourgeois, Léon, xxxi, xxxii, 84, 93, 96, 99, 127, 128, 132, 134, 140, 218, 219. Lettres sur le mouvement social, 132; Solidarité, 132. Bowler, Peter J., xxi, xxiv, 13. Brantlinger, Patrick, 1, 6, 14. Brauer, Fae (Fay), xxxvii, xxxviii, xxxix, xl, xli, 17, 35, 37, 57, 58, 59, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82, 103, 104, 105, 116, 120, 123, 149, 150, 155, 156, 176, 194, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 218, 219, 221, 226, 227, 233, 239, 242, 248. Brenton, Ted, 13. Brinkmann, Edward, 11. Britain, xxxiii, 220. See also England. British empire, 9. Broca, Paul, xv, xx, xxi, 19, 22, 23, 26, 35. Broders, Roger: Le Soleil toute l’année sur la Côte d’Azur, 193 (10.1), 194, 208-9, 220. Brody, Charles, 201-2, 207-8. Brody, Malvine, 202. Broussais, Casimir, 44. “brutishness” (el embruticimiento), 108-10, 111. Buffon, Comte de (Georges-Louis Leclerc), 207. Bugatti, Rembrandt, 135. Hamadryas Baboon, 146. Bukharin, Nikolai, 170. Bunak, Viktor, 172. Burke, Edmund, 10, 117. Burkhardt, Richard, xxi, xxiii, xxv. Cabanel, Alexandre, 24. Cabaret Voltaire, le, xxxiv, 184, 186, 188. Caenozic stage of the earth’s evolution, 145. Campbell, John A., 201. Canada, 6. capitalism, xv, xxx, xxxii, 46, 132, 140, 157, 170, 185. Carabin, Rupert, 96. Carol, Anne, 194, 199-200. Carrière, Eugène, 134. catastrophism, xv, xvi, xvii, xxiii, xxxiii, 220. Catlin, George, 6-7, 163. Letter and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians, 6. Cézanne, Paul, 20. Charcot, Jean Martin, xix, xxv, xxvii, xxviii, 54. See also hysteria; Salpêtrière, hôpital de la. Charpentier, Alexandre, 98. Charpentier, Armand: The Story of a Monkey, 138. Chateaubriand, François-René de, 113. chemical evolution, 62, 70-1, 75, 219. chemistry, xxxi, 62-4, 68, 70-1, 74, 75, 76, 218. Chéret, Jules, 136 (7.5), 137. Chevalier, Nicolas, 11. Chiaïs, François, xxxv, 195. christianity, xx, 23, 53, 62, 145. christian iconography, 65, 68. Chrucesz, Maja, 184. Church, Frederic, 2, 10. civilization, xvii, xviii-xix, xxviii, xxxii, 5, 27, 28, 33, 35, 42, 114, 131, 139, 217, 218. “civilizing mission”, xxx, xxxiii, 51, 127; see also “syphilizing mission”, xxx. Clemenceau, Georges, 139. Clément, Armand-Lucien, 73 (4.11), 130-1 (7.1, 7.2). Clément, Charles, 23-4. Clifford, James, 2, 5, 12, 13. Cold War, xv. Cole, Thomas, 6, 10. Scene from "The Last of the Mohicans”, 6. Colette (Sidonie-Gabielle Colette): Dialogues des bêtes, 140.



Index colonization, xvii, xviii, xxix, 1, 8, 13, 14, 51, 53, 56, 119, 139. Colour line, xxxi. Combes, Émile, 140. Commune, Paris, xvii, xix, xx, xxii, xxv, 19, 24, 29, 31, 35, 43, 119, 128. congés payés, les, 207. Congo: Belgian, xxix; French, xxix, 129. Cooper, James Fenimore: The Last of the Mohicans, 6. cooperation, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxvii, xxxi, 19, 24, 24-7, 35, 84, 93, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131-3, 142, 148, 158, 165, 170, 185, 219. See also associationism; solidarism. Cormon, Fernand, 133. Cain, xx-xxi, xxvi, xxvii, 19, 20 (2.1), 21-8, 30-2, 35, 217. Corsi, Pietro, xxi, xxiii. Cosmic magnetism, 148, 156. Côte d’Azur (France), le, xxx, 193, 194, 195, 197, 201-2, 203, 204, 206, 207, 208. See also hedonism. Coupin, Henri: Singes et singeries, 147. Courbet, Gustave, xix. Cowan, Michael J., 181. creationism, xxii, xxx, 62, 128, 141, 144, 149. creative evolution, see Bergson, Henri. Crespi, J.H., 52. cretinism, xvi, xxv, 217. criminality, xvii, xxv, xxxiii, 116, 217. Cro Magnon Man, xvi. Crossley, Ceri, 139. Crutzen, Paul, xv. cure de soleil, le, see heliotherapy. Cuvier, Georges, xvi, xxiii, 115, 133, 220. Dada: Berlin, xxxii, 188; Zurich, xxxiii, xxxiv, 179, 184-8, 218. Dagen, Philippe, 28 Danziger, Kurt, 180. Darwin, Charles, xv-xviii, xxxiii, 1, 13, 28-9, 70, 71, 74, 217; and Bourgeois, 132; and Cormon, xx, 19, 20, 235, 26, 27; and Engels, 165, 170; and Gallé, xxxii, 84, 89-90 (5.4), 91; and Garnelo, 118; and Haeckel, 70-1, 95; and Humboldt, 1, 13; impact of theories in France, xix-xxiv, 19, 20, 23, 31, 43, 74, 128-33, 43; impact of theories in Russia, 157-9, 161-7, 170-2; impact of theories in Spain, 114-16, 118; and Kropotkin, 132, 142; and Lamarck, xxii-xxiv, 20, 74, 133, 157-9, 21920; and Perrier, 129-132; on simians, 136, 138 (7.10), 145, 146, 148, 164, 165; and Taine, xx, 19, 31, 43; on women, 163-4. The Descent of Man, xvi, xviii, xix, xxii, 13, 19, 26, 28-9, 31, 114, 129, 132-3, 142, 163, 172, 219; The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilization, xxii, 129; The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals xvi, xxii, 129, 131, 165, 172; The Fertilization of Orchids by Insects, xxii, 129; Insectivorous Plants, 129; The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants, xxii, 129; On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, xvi-xvii, xviii, xxiv, xxxi, xxxiii, 1, 2, 13, 26, 89, 114, 116, 172, 219, 220; The Power of Movements in Plants, xxii, 129; The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, xxii, 129; On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, 89-90. See also: Darwinism. Darwinism, xxiv, xxx, 29-33, 74, 95, 108, 114-15, 118, 128, 142, 146, 162, 163, 219-20; Social, 114-17, 132; Soviet, 158, 165, 167, 171. See also Darwin, Charles. Darwin Museum (Moscow), xxvi, 157-73. Daston, Lorraine, 91. Daum, Antonin and Auguste, 96. de Brazza, Pierre, 129. decadence: artistic, 96; of Spain, 111-20. decadencia, la, see decadence.

Picturing Evolution and Extinction de Chennevières, Philippe, 22. decorative arts, 83, 89, 91, 94, 98, 219. See also Art Nouveau; Gallé, Émile. Degenerate Art Exhibitions, xxxv. degeneration, xxi, xxvii, xxviii,. xix, 62, 67, 118, 119; fear of, xv, xvii, xvii, xxiii, xxxi, 41, 116, 117, 119, 128; and France, xvii, xxi, xxii, xxiii, 19, 35, 41, 43, 47, 55, 98, 119, 196, 198; and Modernism, xxv-xxvi, xxxi; nineteenth century phenomenon, xxix, xxxi; racial, xviii, xx, xxx-xxxi, 96, 112, 114, 116, 198, 200, 206, 207; and Russia, xxiv, 157-8, 169, 170, 173; social, xxiii, 29, 31, 35, 113-14, 117, 119, 132; and Spain, xxiv, 108, 111-14, 118-20; and suntanning, 194, 198, 199, 206, 208, 209. See also devolution; Lombroso, Cesare; Mani y Roig, Carles. Delage, Marie-Yves, xxii, xxiv. de Lanessan, Jean Marie Antoine, xxii, xxiv. de las Casas, Bartolomé, 119. de la Tourette, Gilles, xxvi. Delaunay, Robert, 148, 156. Deleito y Piñuela, José, 112-3. Deleuze, Gilles, 127, 148, 156. de Lostalot, Alfred, 48. de Mortillet, Gabriel, 21. Deniker, Joseph, 135. Mammifères, singes, prosimiens, chiroptères, carnivores, 136; Les Races et les peuples de la terre, 136. Deniker, Nicolas, 136. Denmark, 46. depopulation, xxv, 29; of France, 19, 47, 203; of Russia 169-170, 173; of Spain, xxvi, 112. de Quatrefages, Armand, 146. de Quevedo, Francisco, 112. de Quirós, Bernaldo: Modern Theories of Criminality, 116. Derain, André, 146. Deraismes, Maria, 139. Derrida, Jacques, The Beast and the Sovereign, xxix, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 148, 156. de Unamuno, Miguel, 113, 119; En torno al casticismo, 113; The Sphinx 110. devolution, xv, xviii, xx-xxiv, xxvii, xxix, xxx-xxxiii, 35, 117, 128, 132, 139, 149, 217, 218, 219; and France, xxv, 35, 47, 132, 217; and Modernism, xxv, xxvi, xxviii; and Spain, xxvi, 114. See also decadence; degeneration. de Vries, Hugo, 84. The Mutation Theory (Die Mutationstheorie), 84. Diefenbach, Karl, xxxv, 154. Dohrn, Wolf, 181. Dornach (Switzerland), 181, 182, 183. See also Steiner, Rudolf. “doomed race” theory, xvi, xviii, 1, 2, 6, 14, 219, 220. Doomsday clock, xv. Dresden Hygiene Exhibitions, xxxi, xli, 193, 209. Dreyfus affair, the, xxxi, 83, 93. Du Camp, Maxime, 115. Du Chaillu, Paul: Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, 127. Dudin, Ivan, 161, 163. Dufau, Clémentine-Hélène, xxx, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxv, 127, 128, 133, 134, 135, 136, 145, 149, 218. Zoologie, 144 (7.16), 145. Dunoyer de Segonzac, André: La Cure de soleil, xxxiii, xxxv, 203, 204 (10.7), 206, 209. Durand, Marguerite, 139. Durkheim, Émile, 93. Durville, Hector, 148. Düsseldorf Art Academy, 2, 5, 8, 10, 13. Dutert, Charles-Louis-Ferdinand, 134.



255

Ebbe, Axel Emil: Solrosen (Sun-Rose), 193. Echegaray, José, 112. École de Nancy, xxix, xxx, xxxi, 83-4, 92-4, 95, 96, 99, 148. See also Gallé, Émile. Ecology, xxx, xxxi, xxxiv, xli, 71, 75, 81, 202. Ecological catastrophism, xv, xxxvi. Edelfelt, Albert: Louis Pasteur, xxvi, 43, 44, 45 (3.2), 4853, 56. Electromagnetism, 148, 156. Emery, Elizabeth, 46. endangered species, xv, xxix, 128. Engels, Friedrich, 165, 170, 173. England, xxiv, 22, 95, 112, 158, 195. See also Britain. eroticism, 194, 208. Espinas, Alfred, 131. Des Sociétés animales: Études de psychologie comparée, 129. Estève, Louis, 200. eugenics: French, 194, 201, 203, 209, 210, 212, 215, 226, 247; and heliotherapy, 208-209, 210-215; NeoLarmarckian, xxxiii, 158, 170-2, 173, 210; American Eugenics Society, 210; Soviet, 170-171, 178, 194-5, 197, 198, 199-200. eurhythmics, xxxiii, xli, 180-5, 190, 237. See also JacquesDalcroze, Émile. evolution, xv-xvi, xx-xxv, xxvi, xxix, xxx, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxv, 13, 19, 20, 23-9, 31, 35, 43, 62, 68-71, 74, 75, 76, 83, 84, 88-9, 93-9, 113-16, 127-9, 131-3, 139, 142-4, 146, 148, 157, 158, 161, 162, 167, 171, 173, 180, 218, 219-20. See also: Darwin, Charles; Darwinism; evolutionism; Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste; Lamarckism; Neo-Lamarckism; Transformism. evolutionism, xxii, xxiii, xiv, 128, 129, 133, 146, 148, 149, 194, 220. See also Darwin, Charles; Neo-Lamarckism. Eurocentricism, Eurocentricity, xxx, xxxi, 11, 30. exile, xxi, 22, 27, 19, 142. Exposition d’Art décoratif (1904), 99. Exposition Universelle (Paris), 53; of 1867, 21, 31; of 1900, xxix, 84, 92 (5.5). expressive fallacy, xxx. extinction, xv-xviii, xxi-xxiii, xxv, xxvi, xxix-xxxii, xxxiv, 1, 2, 6-9, 11, 13, 14, 29, 113, 168-9, 170, 172, 217, 219. Fabre, Jean-Henri: Souvenirs d’un entomologiste, 140. Faure, Élie: The Spirit of Forms, 220. Fedulov, Fedor, 159, 162 (8.3). Ferry, Jules, 51, 53, 129. Fidus (Hugo Reinhold Karl Johann Höppener, 1868-1948): Lichtgebet, xxxiv, xxxv, xxxvi, xli, 193; 213-214. Field, Barron, 8. Figuier, Louis, 68. Filipchenko, Iuri, 171. fin de siglo, xxvi, 108, 112, 116, 119-20, 218. fin-de-siècle, xvii, xxv, xxvii, xxix, 62, 70, 71, 74, 217, 218, 219, 220. First Republic (France), xix. First World War, see World War One. Flammarion, Camille, xv, xxxv, 69, 71, 75, 219. Le Monde avant la création de l'homme, 68-9 (4.7, 4.8), 71-2 (4.10), 74; The Unknown, 74; Uranie, 75. Foster, Hal, xxxi. Foucault, Michel, 158-9, 170, 173, 174, 177, 189, 215, 232. Fouillée, Alfred, 93, 96. L’Évolutionnisme des idées-forces, 113; Psychologie du peuple français, 113. Foveau de Courmelles, François Victor, 148. Fox, Robert, 62. France, 28, 29, 46-7, 75, 88, 95, 112, 115, 128, 137, 146, 148, 158, 203, 218, 219, 220; and colonies, xxix, 51, 53, 127, 129, 132; and degeneration, xviii-xxi, 47, 98, 119, 198, 206, 217; fascination with prehistory, 19-22, 35; modernity of, 51, 83, 96, 99; rabies in, 41, 42, 53;

256 regeneration of, xxi-xxiv, xxvi, 43, 46, 96, 157; scientific prowess of, 42, 46, 49, 51-3, 62, 70, 71, 74, 218; Taine on, xx, xxi, 31-33, 43. Frenchness, 79. “free dance”, xxxiii. Franco-Prussian War, xviii, 19, 24, 29, 43, 83, 119, 128, 217, 219. Fredet, G.E., 41. Freikörperkultur, xxxiv. Frémiet, Emmanuel: Gallic Warrior, 34; Gorilla Carrying off a Woman, 115 (6.5), 116-17, 168; Gorille enlevant une negresse, 115, 127, 134, 168; Orang-outangs et sauvage de Bornéo, 134. French Revolution(s), xx, xxii, 31-35, 43. See also Taine, Hippolyte. Galerie Dada, 184, 186. Galerie des Singes, la, 131, 134 (7.3). Gallé, Émile, xxix, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxv, 83-5 (5.1), 86 (5.2), 87 (5.3), 92 (5.5), 94 (5.6), 99, 219. Galison, Peter, 91 Galton, Francis, 28, 171, 194. Gambetta, Léon, 129. Ganivet, Angel, 113. Gargallo, Pau: La Bestia del hombre, 118. Garnelo, José R.: El hombre ante la estética, 118. Garner, Richard, 145. Gaudi, Antoni, 107. Gaudry, Albert, 134. Gauguin, Paul, xxviii, xxx. Geison, Gerald L., 48. “generation of 1898” (el generación del 98), xxvi, 112, 113. germ theory, 48. Germany, xxiv, xxix, xxxiii, 2, 22, 83, 95, 158, 219, 220. Giard, Alfred, xxii, xxiv. Giard, Jean-Baptiste, 207. Girard, Emmanuel-Paulin, 207. Girard, Eugène: La Femme émancipée répandant la lumière sur le monde, xix (1.3), xx. de Gobineau, Arthur: Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines, 113. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 71. Goldwater, Robert: Primitivism in Modern Art, xxx, xxxi. Golubkina, Anna (1864-1927), 164. Mound, 164, 165 (8.4). Gordon, Rae Beth, 136. Gould, Stephen J., xv, xxiv. Goutière-Vernolle, Émile, 96. Goyart, Dr. 139. gradualism, xvi. Grammont Law, the, 128, 139. Grand, Jules, 139. Grandville, J.J.: L’Homme descend vers la brute, 108 (6.2). Granier de Casagnac, Paul Adolphe, 54. Green, Christopher, 136. Gregg, W.R., 28. Gruber, Jacques, 96. Grünewald, Matthias, 67. Gsell, Laurent Lucien: Le Laboratoire de M. Pasteur, xxvi, 43, 45 (3.3), 49-50; La Vaccine de la rage au laboratoire de M. Pasteur, 50-3, 55-6. Gsell, Paul, 47. Guattari, Félix, 127, 148, 156. Güell, Hortensi, 117. Gulidjan people, the, 8. Haacke, Wilhelm: Animal Life on Earth, 142. Haeckel, Ernst, xv, 70-2, 73-6, 95-6, 128, 129, 130, 158, 219, 220. Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature), 95, 96; Monographië der Moneren, 73 (4.12), 74;



Index Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The History of Creation), 70-2 (4.9), 95. Hamy, E.T., 136. Haraway, Donna, 149. Hartmann, R., 131, 136. The Anthropomorphic Monkeys and their Organization compared to that of Man, 131. Haussmann, Georges, 29. Hébert, Georges, 197. hedonism: on Côte d’Azur, 194, 203, 208. Hegel, Georg, xviii. heliotherapy, xxx-xxxi, xxxiv-xxxv, 193-209. Heliotropism, xxxv, 194, 209, 211. Hellerau, xxx, xxxv, 181, 192. Henri, Charles, 119. Hildebrandt, Edouard, 10. history painting, 20, 23, 24, 31. Holocene, the, xv. Hudson River School, the, 2, 6. Hugo, Victor, 47, 139. L’Art d’être grand-père, 47; La Légende des siècles, 19, 22, 27-8. Hulbert, Henry Harper, 194-5. Humboldt, Alexander von, xviii, 1, 2, 5, 10-14; Cosmos, 10, 11. Huot, Marie, 139. Hurley, Kelly, 116. Huxley, Julian, 171. Huxley, Thomas, xv, xx, xxi, 26, 80, 81, 129, 135-6, 142, 220. Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature, xx, xxi (1.4), 23, 26; The Struggle for Existence in Human Society, 142. Huysmans, J. K.: À Rebours, xxix; Là Bas, 67. hypnotism, 148-9. hysteria, xix, xxv, xxvii, xxviii, xxxiii, 41-2, 128. imperialism, xvi, xviii, xxx, 1, 5, 11, 14, 43, 112. indigenous people(s), xvi, xviii, xxix, 1, 2, 5, 6, 11-14, 53, 119, 219. Informe, style, 70, 74, 76, 219. International Hygiene Exhibition, Dresden, xxxi, xxxi, xli, 193, 209; see also Dresden Hygiene Exhibitions interspecies relationships, 127-8, 145, 146, 148-9. Iron Age, the, xxi, 22, 24, 35. Iudin, Tikhon, 171. Iuon, Konstantin, 161, 163. Ivanov, Ilya, 167, 171. Jacob, Max, 139, 146. Jacobsen, J.C., 46. Jacolliot, Louis, 137. Jacques-Dalcroze, Émile, xxx, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxv, 180-1, 183, 185. Jammes, Francis: Le Roman du lièvre, 140. Janco, Marcel, xxxiii, 185-6, 192, 217. Janicot, J., 51. Jardin du Roi (Paris), le xxii. Jardin des Plantes (Paris), le, xxxii, 133-5 (7.4), 136, 168. Jaubert, Léopold, 198 (10.4), 200-1. La Pratique héliothérapique, 198. Jaurès, Jean, 132. Jouve, Paul, 135. D’après Nature : l’Artiste et son modèle au Jardin des Plantes, 145. Julius Caesar, 22, 34. Kammerer, Paul, 171. Kane, Paul, 6-7. Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America, 6. Keller, Charles, 93. Kellogg, John Harvey: Light Therapeutics, 196, 200, 207. Kelly, Alfred, 71, 172. Kete, Kathleen: Beast in the Boudoir, 41.

Picturing Evolution and Extinction Khnopff, Fernand: Brutishness, 110. Khrishna, 145. Kogan, P.S, 159. Kol’tsov, Nikolai, 171-2. Kollontai, Aleksandra, 170. Kots, Aleksandr, 159-60, 162, 167, 168, 171-3. Kropotkin, Peter, 127, 136, 185. Mutual Aid, 127-9, 131, 132, 142-3, 146. Kuhnert, Friedrich Wilhelm, 141 (7.11, 7.12), 142, 146, 147. Kupka, Frantisek (1871-1957), xxviii, xxx, xxxi, xxxv, 1278, 133-7 (7.7), 139, 143-4, 149, 214, 218. The Ancestors, 143 (7.14), 144; Origins, 143 (7.13); The Sphinx and a Monkey Drawing a Portrait of Adam and Eve with a Serpent, 144 (7.15), 145. Kurbatov, Mikhail (1874-1959), 167, (8.6). Laban, Rudolf (von), xxxiii, xxxvi, xxxv, 181-6, 188, 190, 191, 192, 218, 238. The Dancer’s World, 84. Ladygina-Kots, Nadezhda, 159, 162 (8.3), 164, 165-7, 168, 170, 171, 173. Lafenestre, Georges, 48-9. laicization, 129, 140. La Libre Esthétique, 83. Lamaison, Jean-Antoine-Constant, 195, 200. Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, xv, xxi-xxiv, xxxi, 20, 26, 71, 74, 115, 118, 129, 131, 133, 141, 157-9, 161-2, 166, 167, 171, 194, 200, 201, 217, 219, 220. La Philosophie zoologique (Zoological Philosophy), xxii, xxiv, 129, 158, 194. See also acquired characteristics; Lamarckism; Neo-Lamarckism; Transformism. Lamarckism, xvi, xxiii, xxiv, 128, 145, 158, 167, 217, 219, 220. Lander, Frederick West, 2, 7. Landouzy, Louis, 195, 200, 208. Larson, Barbara, 14, 115. Latour, Bruno, 43. Laurencin, Marie, 140. Laurent, Ernest, 145. Lautrec-Toulouse, Henri de, 138. Lawrence, David Herbert: Sun, 203, 204, 206. Lea, Henry Charles, 111. Lebensreform, xxxiv. Le Bon, Gustave, xx, 113. Leclercq, Julien: La Physionomie: visages et caractéres, 446. Lecomte, Georges, 64, 75, 82, 239. Leconte de Lisle, Charles Marie René: Poèmes barbares, 27. Le Dantec, Felix, xv, xxiv-xxv. Lenin, Vladimir Illich, xxvii, 160, 169. Léonard, Jacques, 194. Le Play, Frédéric, 21. Le Tacon, François, 89. Ligue populaire contre les abus de la vivisection, 139, Linnaeus, Carl, 10. Littlewood, Ian: Sultry Climates, 194, 208, 209. Livingstone, David N., 201. Loir, Adrien, 49. Loisen, Laurent, xxiv. Lombroso, Cesare, xv, xvii-xviii, xxv, xl, 116, 117, 118, 119, 123, 124, 171, 178, 218, 240, 241, 246. L’Uomo Deliquente (Criminal Man), xvii (Fig. I.2), xviii, xxv, 116. Lorraine (France), 83, 84, 92-3, 95, 96, 97, 98, 219. See also École de Nancy; Nancy. Loti, Pierre, 139. Lubbock, John, 23. Prehistoric Times, 23. Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 159, 170. Lutaud, Auguste, 44-7. Lyell, Charles, xv, xvi, xxiii.



257

Lysenko, Trofim, 158, 159, 167. Maeterlinck, Maurice: La Vie des abeilles, 140. Magnan, Valentin, xxv, 44. magnetism, 145, 148, 156, 231. Maillol, Aristide, 163, 173. Flora, 163; Pomona, 163; Spring, 163; Summer, 163. Majorelle, Louis, 96. mal du siècle, le 113. Mallada, Lucas, 112. Malraux, André, 134, 136. Mani y Roig, Carles: Els Degenerats (Embrutecimiento), xxvi, xxvii, xxx, xxxv, 107 (6.1), 108-110 (6.4), 111 (6.4), 114, 116-20, 218. Manolo (Manuel Hugué), 135. Maori, the, xviii. Marcel, Henry, 99, 145. Marchais, Henri, 42. Mariana, Juan de, 112. Marion, Antoine-Fortuné, 20-1 (2.2). Martins, Charles, 128. Marx, Adrien, 43, 58. Marx, Karl, 103, 165, 176, 177, 190, 241, 247. Marx, Roger, 60, 68, 75, 81, 82, 75. masculinity, xix, 43, 47, 116. See also virility. materialism, xxix, xxx. Matisse, Henri, 146, 163. Mauclair, Camille, xxxi, 62, 67-70, 75. McClintock, Anne, 116. McGregor, Russell, 2, 12. Meissonier, Ernest: Ruins of the Tuileries, 29-30 (2.4); Siege of Paris, 30. Méliès, Georges: Le Savant et le chimpanzé, 139. Mendel, Gregor, xxiv, 157. Ménégaux, M.A., 141-2, 146-8. mesmerism. See neo-mesmerism. Metchnikoff, Élie, 128, 136. Michel, Émile, 24. Michelet, Jules, 139. Michurinist biology, 158, 167. miserabilismo, el, 119. Millet, Aimé: Vercingétorix, 34 (2.7). Milne-Edwards, Alphonse, 133-4. Milne-Edwards, Henri, 133. Mitchell, W.J.T., 5, 14. modernism, xxv, xxvii-xxxiii, 96, 98, 112-13, 127, 128, 135, 140, 218, 219. modernismo, el, 112-13. Modernist Transformism, xxxiii, xxxv, 99, 127, 128. Möhring, Maren, 206, 207. monera, xxxi, 71-4, 129-30, 219. See also Haeckel, Ernst; Monism, 72 (Figs. 4.9-4.10); 73 (Figs. 4.11-4.12). monism, 71, 128. “monkeyana” xxxiii, 127, 128, 133, 136-8. See also simian. Monogenesis, 146. Montaigne, Michel de, 128. Monté Verità, xxxiii, xxxv, 181, 183, 184, 190, 249. See Laban, Rudolf. Monteuuis, Albert, 197-8. Moral Order Regime, the, xxxii, 128. Morange, Michael, xxiv. Morel, Bénédict-Augustin, xv, xxv, xxvi, 116, 118, 119, 218. Traité des dégénérescences physiques, xvi (1.1), xvii-xviii, 157. Morozov, Ivan, 163. Mountain Meadows Massacre, the, 7. Mourey, Gabriel, 75, 76, 77, 79, 82, 242. Mukhina, Vera, 171. Müller, Jørgen Peter, 200, 206. Munch, Edvard, xxviii.

258 Murphy, Monica, 42. Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro (Paris), xxx, xxxiii, 136. Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (Paris), xxii, xxiv, xxxi, xxxii, 115, 129, 131, 133-6. Museum of National Antiquities (Paris), 22. Mutationstheorie, die. See de Vries, Hugo. myxodictyum sociale, 71, 73 (4.11), 74, 219. See also Haeckel, Ernst. Nackkultur, die, 206. Nancy (France), 83, 88; school of, 148. See also École de Nancy. Napoléon III, 22, 33, 34. L’Histoire de Jules César, 22. nationalism (in France), 19, 22, 35, 46-7, 83, 181, 220. natural selection, xvi, xviii, xx, xxiii, 11, 20, 26, 28, 74, 90, 219. See also Darwin, Charles; evolution. naturalism, xxvii, xxxiv, 30, 63, 52. Naturphilosophie, 71. See also Haeckel, Ernst. Nazi Germany, xxxv. Nazism, xxxiii, 200. Neanderthal, xx, 167. négritude, 194, 209. négrophilie, 194. Neo-Darwinism, xxx. Neo-Lamarckism, xxii-xxv, xxx, xxxi, xxxiii, 26, 38, 67, 71, 74, 81, 82, 128, 129, 133, 146, 148, 149, 158, 165, 167, 174, 194-201, 208, 209, 210, 212, 217, 218, 219, 221, 227, 240. neo-magnetism, 148, see magnetism. neo-mesmerism, 148. Neumayer, Georg von, 11. neurasthenia, xxv, xxvi, xxxiii, 111-2, 114, 121, 192. New South Wales (Australia), 2, 8. New Soviet Person, xxvii, 173. “New Woman”, the, 98. New World, the, 1, 5, 10, 12, 13, 119. New Zealand, xviii, 11. See also Maori. Nicolas, Émile, 95, Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxx, 112. Nogier, Thomas, 202. Noguès, Mateo Bonafonte, , xxvi, 111. Nordau, Max: Entartung (Degeneration), xxv, xxvi, xxviixxix, xxxiii, 96, 112, 113, 119, 217, 218, 220. Nude air bathing, xxxv. Nudism, xxxiv, xxxv, 215, 236, 242. Oersted, Hans Christian: Der Geist in der Natur, 74. Oettingen, Hélène (Roch Grey), 135. Olmer, Georges, 47. Oparin, Alexander, 70. organicist solidarity, xxx, xxxi, 82, 83, 84, 92, 93, 99. See also solidarism. Osborn, Henry Fairfield, 171. Otis y Esquerdo, Vicente, xxvi, 111. Overland Trail, the, 7 Owen, Richard, 131. Pacifism, xxxiii. Papanikolas, Teresa, 185, 187. Paris: after the Commune, xx, 29-30; scientific and medical centre, 55. See also Commune, Paris. Pasteur, Louis, xv, xviii, xxiv, xxvi, 42-3, 46, 47, 48-56, 62, 70, 218, 220. Études sur la bière, 46. Pearson, Karl, 171. Pelletier, Madeleine, 139. Pergaud, Louis: De Goupil à Margot, 140. Perrier, Edmond, xv, xxii, xxiv, xxxi, 67, 127-35, 136, 1412, 146, 147, 148, 218, 219. The Anatomy and Physiology of Animals, 131; Animal Transformations, 131; Les



Index Colonies animales, 71-73 (4.11), 74, 127, 128, 129-30 (7.1, 7.2), 131-2, 143, 147, 219; Transformism, 131. Perrot, Émile, 88. Persell, Stuart, xxiv. Peter, Michel, 53-4. petroleuses, les, xix (1.3), xx. phototropism, xxxv, 194, 201, 203, 207, 208, 209. phrenology, 44, 46. Picavea, Ricardo Macías: El problema nacional, 119. Picasso, Pablo, xxi xxx, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxv, 127-8, 133-6, 139, 140, 145-6, 148, 149, 218. Circus Family with Violinist, 145 (7.17), 146; Clown with a Monkey, 138 (7.9), 140; Family of Acrobats with a Monkey, 145 (7.18), 146, 148; Picasso par lui-même, 137 (7.8), 138. Pick, Daniel, xxv. Pinard, Adolphe, xxxv, 203. Pinel, Philippe, 44. Piñole, Nicanor, 117. Plato, 117. Plumet, Charles, 98. Poincaré, Raymond, 52, 139. polymorphism, xxxi, 84-9, 91, 96. Postcolonialism, xxx. Pouchet, Félix, 70. Pratt, Mary Louise, 10. prehistory, xxi, 19, 20-3, 24, 26, 27, 31-2, 35, 62. primates, see simians. primitivism, xxx, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxix, xxxv, xl, 2, 37, 38, 127, 133, 139, 149, 194, 217, 229, 234, 240, 243, 246. Primitivism in Western Art, xxx. Proctor, Robert, 95. Prussia, xix, xxvi, 46. See also Franco-Prussian War. psychoanalysis, xxxii, 180. Puericulture, xxxv, 75, 82, 194. Puvis de Chavanne, Pierre: Ludus Pro Patria (Patriotic Games), 24. Rabier, Benjamin, 138 (7.10). rabies, xxvi, xxxiii, 41-3, 47, 48, 49, 51-5. Rabinach, Anson, 111. race(s): Celtic, 35; and Darwinian theory, 1-2, 13, 28-9, 219; ‘degenerate’ 112-4, 116, 198, 206; extinction of, 6-8, 13; Germanic, 35; Humboldt’s view of, 11; and skin colour, 195, 198, 200-1, 202, 206-7; Taine’s concept of, 33. See also degeneration, racial; “doomed race” theory; race-milieu-moment; racism. race-milieu-moment, xx, 33. See also Taine, Hippolyte. racism, 14, 111, 172. See also degeneration, racial; race. Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery), 140. Radical Republicans, the, xxiv, xxxi,vxxxii, 22, 26, 84, 128, 133, 140, 148, 149. Rappel à l'ordre, le, xxxv. rationalism, 19, 29. Raulin-Cercau, Florence, 70. Raven, Peter, xv. realism, xxvii, 48, 160. Reclus, Élisée, xv, xxx, 93, 127, 128, 146. Évolution et révolution, 132-3; L’Homme et la terre, 143, 146; La Nouvelle Géographie universelle, 93; À Propos du Végétarianisme, 139-40. redemption, 13, 19, 22, 27, 35. Redon, Odilon, 115. Cain and Abel, 32, 33 (2.6). regeneration, xxi-xxv, xxvii, xxix, xxx-xxxiii, 43, 47, 62, 64, 67, 70, 96, 119-20, 157-8, 173, 179-82, 185, 188, 194, 200, 207, 208, 217, 219, 220. Reichsgesundheitwoche, xxxiv, xxxvi. Reichsausschuss für hygienische Volksbelehrung, xxxiv. ReisekĦnstler, der 10. See also Humboldt, Alexander von. Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 203.

Picturing Evolution and Extinction Renon, Louis, 198, 206, 207. Republic of Republicans, the, 128, 139. Revillet, L., 201-2, 206. Reynolds, Henry, 1. Ribot, Théodule-Armand: Les Maladies de la volonté, 113. Richards, Robert, xxi. Richer, Paul, 134. Rilke, Rainer Maria, xxx. Riviera (France), the, see Côte d'Azur. Rocky Mountains (USA), the, 2, 4, 5, 7, 11. See also Bierstadt, Alfred. Rochefort, Henri, 54. Rodin, Auguste, 163, 164, 173. Eternal Springtime, 164; Eve, 163; The Thinker, 32; Toilette de Venus, 163. Roditi, Victor, 207. Rollier, Auguste, 196-9 (10.5), 200, 207, 209. Romanes, George J., 136. Animal Intelligence, 131. Romantic Nature philosophy, 62, 71, 74, 75. Roosevelt,Theodore, xxix. Rostand, Edmond: Chantecler, 140. Rothfels, Nigel, 127. Roubinovitch, Jacques, xxv. Rouget, Charles, 128. Rousseau, Henri, xxx, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxv, 127-8, 133, 1346, 140, 149, 218. The Hungry Lion throws itself on the Antelope, 146, Monkeys in the Jungle, 128, 146-7 (7.19), 148. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 137. Rousseau, Pascal, 148. Roux, Émile, 49. Rublev, Andrei, 160. Rugendas, Johann Mauritz, 10. Ruggles-Gates, Reginald, 171. Russia, xxiv, xxv,xxvi, xxxiii, 51, 52, 157-71. See also Bolshevik Revolution; Soviet Union. Saidman, Jean, 195-6. Saint-Hilaire, Albert Geoffroy, 133, 202, 220. Saleeby, Caleb W.: Sunlight and Health, 195. Sales y Ferré, Manuel, 113. Salmerón, Nicolás, 112. Salmon, André, 148, 156. Salon (Paris): of 1880, xxi, 19, 22-3, 25, 28, 31; of 1886, xxvi, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49-50, 51, 53, 56; of 1887, 43, 54, 56; des Artistes Français, 24, 42, 56; d’Automne, xxvii, 146, 147; des Indépendants of 1908, 140. Salpêtrière: hôpital de la, xix, xxv, xxviii; school of, 148. See also Charcot, Jean-Martin; hysteria. “salvage ethnography”, 6, 14. Sardner, James, 137. Saunders, Gill, 88. Schneider, William, 194. Schopenhauer, Arthur, 112. “Scramble for Africa”, xxx. Second Empire (France), 29, 34. Second Republic (France), 33. Selmersheim, Tony, 98. semaine sanglante, la, xx, 29. Semashko, Nikolai, xxvii, 169, 170. separation of Church and State (France), xxxi, 128, 140-1, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148. Serebrovskii, Aleksandr (1892-1948), 171. Serpette, Gaston, 137. Seurat, Georges, 119. Shchukin, Sergei, 163. Shellshock, xxxiii, 188. Shipley, Arthur Everett, 41. “sick cities”, xxvi, xxvii, xxix. Signac, Paul, xxix. Silvela, Francisco, 114.



259

Silver, Kenneth, xxxv. Silverman, Debora, 93, 96. simians (see also apes; primates): “becoming simian”, xxx, xxxii, 128, 148-9; link with humans, 26, 28, 128, 135-9, 143-6, 148, 149, 167, 168, 172; Modernists and, xxx, xxxii, 127-8, 134-9, 145-9, 218; “simian tongue” and music, 145; representations of, xx, xxvi, xxvii, xxx, 24, 31, 110, 114-120, 127-8, 142, 146-8, 159; social complexity of, xxxii, 131, 142-3; study of, 134-6. See also “monkeyana”. Sixth mass extinction, xv, xvii, xxxvi, xxxvii. slavery, abolition of, 9, 11. Smith, James, 12. Smith, Johnathan, 89. Smithsonian Institute, the, xxix. socialism, xxvi, xxvii, xxx, xxxi, 93, 128, 133, 137, 159, 165, 169, 170, 219. Société Française contre la vivisection, la, 139, Société Protectrice des animaux (SPA), la, 128, 139. Société Végétarienne de France, la, 139. Society of Anthropology, 22, 31. Sokolowsky, Alexander: Observation on the Psyche of the Great Apes, 127. “solidarité simiesque”, 140, 147, 148. solidarism, xxi, xxii, xxiv, xxix, xxx, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, 26, 99, 127, 128, 132, 140, 148, 149, 218, 219, 236. Sontag, Susan: Illness as Metaphor, 42. Sorolla y Bastida, Joaquín: Sad Inheritance, xxviii (1.6), xxix. Sorbonne, la, xxiv, 49, 133; New Sorbonne, xxvii, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 76, 78, 144, 145, 219, 243. See also Besnard, Albert. Soviet New Person, xxvi-xxvii, xxxi, 158, 170-1, 173. Soviet Union, xxvii, 157, 158, 159, 168, 169, 171, 173, 218. Spain, xxvi, xxxiii, 20, 108, 111-15, 118, 119-20, 207, 220. Spanish-American War, 111, 114-15, 119. Spanish Revolution of 1868, 114. Spencer, Herbert, 158, 220. Spinoza, Baruch, 71. spontaneous generation, xxiii, xxxiii, 62, 70-1, 145. See also Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste. Stalin, Josef, xxvii, 165. Stanley, John Mix, 5. Steiner, Rudolf, xv, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxv, 180-3, 185, 188. Stoermer, Eugene, xv. Stone Age, the, xxi, 20, 23, 24, 31, 35, 133. “straightening-up”, xxxv. Strauss, Jonathan, 67, 75. struggle for existence, xxxi, 1, 11, 14, 23-9, 35, 129, 132, 133, 142, 158, 162-70, 172, 219. See also survival of the fittest. Strzelecki, Paul, 8. Stubbs, George: Horse Attacked by a Lion, 14. Stückgold, Stanislas, 148. Sublime, the, 10-11. See also Burke, Edmund. suggestion, theories of, 148 suntanning, see heliotherapy. survival of the fittest, xvi, xviii, xxiii, xxiv, xxx, xxxi, 129, 132, 138, 142. See also struggle for existence. Switzerland, xxiv, xxxii, xxxiii, 181, 185, 220. symbolism, xxviii, 110, 112, 119, 163. symbolisme scientifique , le (scientific symbolism), 62, 68. See also Besnard, Albert. Taeuber, Sophie, xxxiii, xxxv, 184-8. Taine, Hippolyte, xv, xx, xxi, 19, 31, 32-3. Les Origines de la France contemporaine, 31, 33. Talbot, Eugène, 114. Talbot, Robert Arthur, 133.

260 Third Republic (France), xix, xxiv, xxvi, 29, 34, 35, 47, 62, 63, 68, 76, 83, 84, 128-9, 219. Timiriazev, Kliment, 165. Timofeev-Resovskii, Nikolai, 171. Topinard, Paul, 35. tourism, 194, 203, 207, 208. transformism (transformisme): and Besnard, xxxi, xxxvi, 62, 75-76; Lamarck’s theory of, xxx, xxiii-xxiv, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxv, 70, 84, 200, 219, 220; Ecole de Nancy, xxx; modernist, xxxi, xxxix, xxxii, xxxiii, 127; NeoLarmkarckian, xxiv, 26, 71, 74-5, 108, 128-9, 131, 134, 141, 217; and solidarism, xxxi, 128, 219. See also Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste; Lamarckism; NeoLarmarckism; Perrier, Edmond. transmutation, xx, xxiii, xxiv, xxx, xxxi, 24, 194. See also Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste; transformism. Tribal cultures, xxix. Trotsky, Leon, 170. tuberculosis, xxxiv, xxxv, 128, 197, 211, 202, 204, 206; heliotherapy for, 194, 195, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203. Tugenkhol’d, Yakov, 162, 163. Tuileries (Paris), les, 29, 30 (2.4). Turquet, Edmond, 22. Tzara, Tristan, xxxii, 184, 185, 187-8. Übungsphänomene, 179. See also Wundt, Wilhelm. vaccination, 28, 42-3, 53. See also Pasteur, Louis. Vallotton, Félix, 148. van den Berg, Herbert, 185, 187. van de Velde, Henry, 83. Van Gogh, Vincent, xxviii. Vatagin, Vasili, xxii, xxiv-xxv, xxviii, 157-73. Ages of Life, xxvi, xxvii, xxxi, 160 (8.1) 161 (8.2), 163-5, 166 (8.5), 167, 168, 170-2; Blind Lamarck and his Daughters, xxv, 161, 162 (8.3), 166; Cro-Magnon Man, 168 (8.7), 171, 173; Enraged Gorilla, xxvii, xxxi, 168-9 (8.8), 172. Masks of the Peoples of the USSR, 172; Memoirs, 160, 162. Vauxcelles, Louis, 146. vegetarianism, xxxiv, 128, 139-40. Vendôme Column (Paris), the, xix. “venereal peril”, xxx.



Index Vercingétorix, xxi, 22, 34 (2.7). Victoria (Australia), 2, 8. vitalism, xxx, 95. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel, 34. virility xix, xxxiii, 47; lack of, 112. See also masculinity. Vlaminck, Maurice de, 146. Vogt, Oskar, 171-2, 179. Völkerpsychologie, xxxiii, 180, 181, 183, 187, 217. See also Wundt, Wilhelm. Volotskii, Mikhail, 171. voluntad, la, 112-13, 120. See also Azorín. von Guérard, Eugene, xviii, 1-2, 4-5, 8-10, 11-13, 219. Aborigines Met on the Road to the Diggings, 9-10 (1.7); North-East View from the Northern Top of Mount Kosciusko, 11-12 (1.8); Stony Rises, 2, 4 (1.4), 5, 8-9 (1.6), 11, 13. von Krafft Ebing, Richard: Psychopathia Sexualis, xxv, xxvii. von Max, Gabriel, 115. Vucinich, Alexander, 158. Wallace, Alfred Russel, 28. Waller, John, 48. Walls, Laura, Dassow, 11. Wasik, Bill, 42. Weismann, August, xxiv, 157. Wells, H.G., 116, 171. Wigman, Mary (Marie Wiegmann), 183, 184, 185, 186. World War One, xxx, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxv, xxxvi, 99, 128, 169, 179, 181. Worpswede (Germany), xix. Wulff, Käthe, 184. Wundt, Wilhelm, xv, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxv, 179-84. Yerkes, Robert, 171. Zamkov, Aleksandr, 171. Zidler, Charles, 138. Zola, Émile, 30, 54; and naturalism, xxvii, 30-1. L’Assommoir, xxv; La Bête humaine, 118; L’Oeuvre, 31; Les Rougon-Macquart, xxvii, 31. zoophilia, 128, 139, 140. zootherapy, 148.