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Men in Black: Portraiture and Materiality in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Monday 23 November 2015, 4.30PM

Speaker(s): Marcia Pointon (Manchester)

In his Little History of Photography (1931), Walter Benjamin writes about the reification of a sitter’s clothing in early photographs, and Degas and Evariste de Valernes, Painter and a Friend of the Artist. c.1865. Oil on canvas. Musée d'Orsay, Paris, Francehow that fixes the sitter into a kind of permanence. ‘Consider Schelling’s coat’, he exhorts, ‘it will surely pass into immortality along with him: the shape it has borrowed from its wearer is not unworthy of the creases in his face.’ This notion of a man’s dress as a kind of portrait imprint, one that is lasting, is in marked contrast to the preoccupations of the teinturiers responsible for dyeing cloth into dark colours and the tailleurs who cut and sewed that cloth into the fashionable forms of men’s coats, trousers and waistcoats. While black pigment was at this date extremely stable, the dark dyes required for men’s outer garments remained highly unstable. Moreover, the dissemination of fashion along with the contiguous principles of tailoring (all of which underwent fundamental change in the nineteenth century) proselytized an ideal in which folds, crumples, creases and rumples were all but eradicated.

Through close examination of a sequence of paintings by Degas, Manet and Fantin-Latour, I attend to the ways in which ideas about stability and impermanence are embedded in these canvases in what is represented but equally in how it is represented. There exists in these images a poetry of the crease, inviting the conclusion that the dialogue between fashion and male portraiture cannot be reduced to the assumption that  ' “His” eternally inconspicuous dark suit provides the ideal matt background before which “she” can spring into life with the brilliance of silk, the sparkle of jewels, the shimmer of naked skin ….” (Barbara Vinken, 2005). The aura that Benjamin observes to have ‘seeped’ into the folds of a man’s clothes is powerfully present in paintings that, in their palpable insistence on an intimate relationship between body and dress, open up questions about presence, longevity and the relationship between the materials of painting and those of clothing.

Image: Degas and Evariste de Valernes, Painter and a Friend of the Artist. c.1865. Oil on canvas. Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France

Location: The Bowland Auditorium, Berrick Saul Building