On a Wednesday morning in November two weeks ago, I visited the Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition championing—for the first time in this or the last century, if ever—the work of 19th century painter Rosa Bonheur. Ever since learning about Rosa Bonheur via a Google Doodle on March 16 this year, she has thrilled me. Immediately I went to see her gargantuan Horse Fair at the Met. Up close, its heightened emotions and details (the horse butts!) are so overt, they become obscene, like pornography. I had seen the painting before, but never considered it had been painted by a woman, much less a masculine-appearing one, and for some reason, or some very obvious reason, this moves me, and this is why I am writing about her here, in my Gay Cahier.
I was moved seeing Bonheur’s portraits, and even more moved learning the odd details of her biography: given her modest background, Bonheur did not exactly need to fight societal restrictions to become a painter (unlike, for instance, impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, who emerged from the bourgeoisie and would ironically be part of the movement that displaced Bonheur), but it was her subjects that eventually dwindled out of vogue. Bonheur’s paintings, with their penchant for realism and subtle soulfulness, were a huge success in their time, especially in the United States, where the frontier imagination could identify with the broad metaphor offered by the depiction of animals. A household name in her lifetime, Bonheur bore a special permit for wearing pants, and took women as her companions, at least one of which she compared to a wife. She resided at an estate that was filled with a whole personal menagerie, including lions, tigers, monkeys, and horses. Given her character and how little attention she has received for over a century, Rosa Bonheur’s is truly a story of how tastes and ideologies shape our cultural history. We are living in a day and age in which a painter’s biography is stepping onto the canvas. A Lesbian painter, then, is exactly what we are looking for.
Whether Bonheur was actually a sexual being is up for debate—the written exchange on the matter, summarized insightfully at Hyperallergic, borderlines on the ridiculous—and shows the weirdly embarrassing vapidness that comes with tokenizing marginalized identities: are we looking at Bonheur because she did not conform to her gender and described her female companion as her wife, and what does that say about how we receive her art? Or are we looking at her because we are, in fact, suddenly astonished by these animals and natural landscapes she painted?
Bonheur certainly painted animals with the same verve a portrait-painter applies to people: though she was technically a naturalist, her works show a heightened, romantic realism, the colors wondrously pronounced, the ambiance slightly fantastical and dream-like, the physiques of the beasts noble and soulful. For the exhibition promotion, the museum chose Bonheur’s famous stag, the king of the forest, regal with golden eyes in a purple forest, stands shocked and real as if stumbling upon us on a dusky night, yet remains mute as portraits do—but in this hardly differs from the likes of Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s Madame Rimsky-Korsakov, across the hallway.
Women of all ages and parents with children bustled and pressed against each other in the small purple rooms of the exhibit. The art was marketed to the young, and I regretted not bringing my niece, who is four, and yet part of me found something patronizing in making the art of animals about children. There were Bonheur’s animals, wild, laborious, or, as in the case of her fox, warranting protection, and their nuanced emotions could offer enough for any grown-up to puzzle over. Though anthropomorphized for portraiture, Rosa Bonheur still gives animals their unreachable, feral distance, that cosmic whatever that appears in the forbidding eyes of an animal that cannot be translated.
Is this human-animal bond not one of our most common cases of frustrated and imbalanced relationships, the most romantic relationships of all? That we make animals work for us, that we eat them and make them our companions, that we love looking at and projecting onto them, but that we will never truly know them, and possibly they will not know us, though we suspect they somehow do, that they know things about us we could not possibly know… is that not, in the end, all that looking at art is about?
NOTES IN THE MARGINS
Links and other Morsels of Lesbian Culture I Recently Indulged And Would Love to Talk About
- The Whitney’s Edward Hopper’s New York exhibition not only allows a glimpse of a New York Cityscape long gone, its more fantastical pieces offer the kind of romance and mystery you can look for, but never find—specifically, it’s what we get from Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt/Carol, and so, at the Whitney, thinking of Carol, I melted a little.
- On a recent flight, I watched the entire second season of the Netflix-series Young Royals. It’s just the way I want my entertainment: pretty, earnest, and vapid, with the kind of soundtrack that recalls Succession’s baroque beats, and by the finale absolutely everything has happened and yet the world remains the same. In the middle of the season, the teenaged protagonists wrangle with a book report on Karin Boye’s Lesbian novel Kris (“Crisis”), and suddenly I wonder what other Lesbian culture I am missing for lack of readily accessible translations.