This question, for me, is impossible to answer. There is so many great works out there, in so many different mediums and genre. Graphics arts, film, writing, sculpture… It depends on my mood. I tend toward the impressionists and post impressionists and the trends up to about 1950 in graphic arts because I just like the look. I also like the American and European history of the same period between 1850 and 1950, what was going on amongst artists, etc., etc.
I have one favorite piece, nothing special really, unless you’re batshit crazy like me. It’s a sculpture in marble by Auguste Clésinger, A Woman Bitten By a Snake. The life-size woman is reclining on a bed of cloth close to the floor. She is nude, and she appears to be writhing in orgasm. The sculpture is only knee-high at best, the woman is spread before you with her arms raised to her head, fingers entwined in her tresses, back arched, head thrown back, exposing her breasts, navel, mons pubis, and thighs in an extremely sensual, sexual way. As you stand over her, her full, upturned up lips tell you she is writhing in pleasure. Her body tells you it is agonizing. Yes, she definitely looks like she may have been bitten by some kind of snake. I get the joke, Monsieur Clesinger.
She is on the floor in the center of an atrium just inside the entrance of the Musée d’Orsay, a beautiful old railroad station just across the river from the Louvre. If you’ve got your nose in a book, or are looking up at the work on the walls, you can easily bang your shins and trip over her. The model who posed for this sculpture was a woman who, in her day, was a super star of sorts. Her name was Apollonie Sabatier and she was so beautiful, so gracious, so sensual, that she commanded the attention of all the French writers, artists, musicians, agents and producers of her day to her Paris salon. Hugo, Flaubert, Doré, Musset, Dumas, Monnier, Berlioz, Manet, … Beaudelaire’s unrequited love for her drove him to depression and at least one suicide attempt. She was one of four women honored in his work, Les Fleurs du Mal. Flaubert’s letters to Apollonie, are full of unfulfilled fantasies and longings, not least (with his fetishist interest in feet) his unfulfilled desire to make “obscene caresses” – whatever these may be – in the eyelets of Apollonie’s boots. In Gustave Courbet’s painting L’Atelier du peintre she is shown together with her longtime lover, the Belgian tycoon Alfred Mosselman. After his death she was the longtime mistress to art collector and donor to the Wallace fountains, Sir Richard Wallace, 1st Baronet.
She enslaved their hearts, but she was never herself enslaved. She was a diplomat, a most charming intellectual who could converse on any subject, and she was subject of many conversations. She also entered works of her own for the Paris Salon, and was among the artists rejected from the 1863 exhibition who chose to show their works in the Salon des Refusés, the first impressionists.
The more I read about her, the more I found myself falling in love with a woman who had died of old age 64 years before I was born. She comes to us in contemporary history as a mere courtesan, a high class horizontale. This actually angered me in those days, because it was patently unfair. She was so much more than a sex object, much more than just another Marie Duplessis. And in 1846, Clessinger was the one who captured her beauty forever in 3D, in such detail and realism, that it was a national scandal when he entered the work into the 1847 Paris salon. Before this, it was alright to enter nude female figures in the contest, but they had to be perfect goddesses, immortal beings, untouchables. Even the writhing, arguably due to the venom of some snake, was passable. But Clessinger’s figure, it was argued, was not of a goddess, but a mortal, and the proof presented at trial was the cellulite in the upper thigh of the figure just under her most charming gluteal fold. No goddess has cellulite it was argued, goddesses were perfect and therefore this was a representation of a mortal woman and it would be scandalous to allow it in the salon of 1847.
So, that is my favorite work, I suppose, if push came to shove. An old flame, a fantasy, a sculpture of a fascinating woman who had a salon full of amusing people 150 years ago, and a sculpture of interesting provenance. If I ever get back to Paris I’ll visit her again. I’ll stand over her and mourn the fact that I was born 170 years too late to meet her, speak with her, maybe even make love to her.
Yup. Batshit crazy, huh?
Composing members:
0
