Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-Portrait at the Easel, ca. 1556−57

Ernst Gombrich, likely the most influential art historian of the twentieth century, is ripe for revisiting. His outlook on what constituted important art was white, elite, male, and Eurocentric. In his seminal The Story of Art (1950), which set out to track the entirety of art history, from ancient times to modernity, he included not a single female artist. In one of his final interviews, before he died in 2001, he defended his assessments, implying that, for better or for worse, white, European men with means, from Watteau to Picasso, had been the artistic geniuses throughout history. “Not everyone can do what a genius can,” Gombrich told the Independent, “and not everyone can produce a masterpiece even after long training.”

In a perverse way, Gombrich was right, because the problem has always been in the way we define genius. The Artistic Genius is certain of his talents; he is certain of his project. These men were emotionally brutal, sure in their vision, often blustering and quick to anger. When Gauguin abandons his family for Tahiti, he does so with confidence that his wife and children will understand that their lives are of minimal importance compared with the vast number of lives he and his art will touch.

Because the understanding of artistic genius has been so closely linked to privileges and traits associated with masculinity, women have forever been locked out of the conversation. “Why have there been no great women artists?” asked Linda Nochlin in her 1971 essay. “But like so many other so-called questions involved in the feminist ‘controversy,’ it falsifies the nature of the issue at the same time that it insidiously supplies its own answer: ‘There have been no great women artists because women are incapable of greatness.’ ” The very notion of genius is gendered, and thus defining it becomes a tautology: The Artistic Genius is male because men are most fit to be Artistic Geniuses. The goalposts of greatness are hyper-specific, socially manipulated, and ultimately less interested in the aesthetics of the work produced. And they are seldom scrutinized.

Sofonisba Anguissola, Lady in a Fur Wrap, ca. 1577-79

The first time I saw art by Sofonisba Anguissola, King Philip II of Spain’s court painter, and Lavinia Fontana, arguably the first-ever professional female painter in the West, a number of their works were not attributed to them. Anguissola’s painting Juana of Austria and a Young Girl (1561–62) was long attributed to Titian (it still hangs in the Titian Room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, according to the museum’s materials). Up until just a few years ago, her Lady in a Fur Wrap was—and in many circles still is—attributed to El Greco (art historian Maria Kusche continues to contest the question). Fontana had a number of works attributed to Carracci. Detective efforts by Nochlin, Kusche, Ann Sutherland Harris, and a few other art historians have since mostly straightened the record. Now, Anguissola and Fontana are at the center of an exhibition called “A Tale of Two Women Painters” at the Prado in Madrid. But these misattributions show the degree to which the legitimacy of an artwork is bound to both a cult of personality and to a specific understanding of gendered greatness. Fontana, for one, had “risen above the usual course of those of her sex, for whom wool and linen are the sole materials appropriate for their fingers and hands,” said the priest and historian Andrés Ximénez in 1764. But she had not risen so high as to achieve greatness—only female greatness, which was an altogether different qualification.

Yet their artworks, when misattributed to men, suddenly became genius, canonical. Such a mix-up speaks to the common desire to view the qualities of an artwork through the lens of the qualities of the artist. In a recent study, a group of people were shown a series of computer-generated paintings and told that the works were made either by a man or by a woman. The participants—but especially men from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, who, not so incidentally, are also the most frequent buyers of expensive art and therefore help set the prices and perceived value of those works—rated the randomly generated art said to be created by male artists as more “compelling” and “valuable” than the art said to be created by female artists. “Participants are unable to guess the gender of an artist simply by looking at a painting,” conclude the study’s authors. “Women’s art appears to sell for less because it is made by women.”

But when it comes to defining artistic greatness, the underlying issue is that the history of art has long been centered on the mythos of the artist rather than on the artworks themselves, a fact that almost always works against women. When we begin to question the personal qualities of artists like Picasso or Chuck Close, it feels as though we’re questioning our notions of art itself, rather than those specific artists, so bound together are the artwork and the cult of the artist.

Nochlin saw this obsession with the artist for what it was. It is “a naive idea that art is the direct, personal expression of individual emotional experience, a translation of personal life into visual terms,” she wrote. “Art is almost never that, great art never is … The language of art is, more materially, embodied in paint and line on canvas or paper, in stone or clay or plastic or metal—it is neither a sob story nor a confidential whisper.”

To overcome the bias toward white male artists requires seismic social shifts, but it also requires a reangling of how we view art history—as a history of the art, rather than of the artists.

Lavinia Fontana, Portrait of a Noblewoman, ca. 1580

Portraiture presents itself as an extreme example of the centrality of the artist. Although there is subjectivity in all art, portraiture, especially self-portraiture or portraiture of one’s family, is the clearest. Any divergence from reality in the artist’s depiction tends to hold significance. Writes Oscar Wilde: “The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself.” If most painting is akin to fiction, portraiture is something approaching autofiction, nearly memoir.

For female portraitists, gendered social expectations often come explicitly to bear on what the art “can” and “cannot” be. The photographer Sally Mann, for instance, was heavily criticized after publishing Immediate Family in 1992, a series for which she took pictures of her young children, Jessie, Virginia, and Emmett, in the nude or in otherwise vulnerable positions on their family farm in Lexington, Virginia. When an essay in The New York Times Magazine titled “The Disturbing Photography of Sally Mann” ran later that year, the controversy exploded, and Mann was accused of creating child pornography and promoting incest. The response was largely stoked by the expectations of her as a woman and a mother: that she exist not to document or to invent but instead to protect.

Defending herself from these accusations, Mann tried to disassociate her personal self from herself as a creator of artworks, writing, “The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on a silvery paper slivered out of time. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph.” She added that Wilde “insisted that it is senseless to speak of morality when discussing art, asserting that the hypocritical, prudish and philistine English public, when unable to find the art in a work of art, instead looked for the man in it. But as much as I argued this point, other voices still insisted that the rules were different for a mother.” In her memoir, Hold Still (2015), Mann cited Gauguin, (the anti-Semite) Ezra Pound, and (the misogynist) Hemingway: these men were permitted to make great art, she argued; why must her role as a mother come so intensely to bear on her work? Indeed, why must her personhood and identity have any relevance to her artwork at all?

Lavinia Fontana, Mars and Venus, ca. 1600–1610

Fontana, who came of age in the middle of the sixteenth century, did not initially stand out as a boundary-pushing woman. She met the gendered expectations of her time as a painter in that she was skilled at depicting jewelry and the intricacies of lace. But the reason she most deserves to be remembered was her masterful portraiture, particularly her female nudes. Women were generally forbidden from painting nudes, but Fontana circumvented these rules by painting works like Mars and Venus, in which a god feels up the exposed rear of a goddess, by making it a mythological scene—for which female-painted nudity was more permissible—rather than a historical or biblical one. After she had proved herself within thematically masculine grounds, Fontana’s artistic commissions took off. She created over twenty altar paintings throughout her life, another genre that, given its religious importance, was also generally off limits to women. Though there were successful women painters like Plautilla Nelli slightly before Fontana’s time, Fontana was the first Western professional female portraitist working in mainstream society, as opposed to in a convent or other religious context. She also proved to be an outlier in her educational and domestic life, getting a doctorate from the University of Bologna and financially supporting her family while her husband mostly raised their children.

It is tempting, however, to fall into the trap of praising Fontana for forging a path outside of society’s expectations. In the context of the sixteenth century, her life was exceptional and noteworthy, yes. But the reason she should be considered important, from the perspective of a new kind of art history, is not for who she was but because of what she accomplished on the canvas.

Anguissola, on the other hand, was an Italian noblewoman and never made money off her art—work for pay was considered unbecoming for a woman of her social stature. She had perhaps the most rigorous artistic training of any woman of the sixteenth century: she apprenticed with two painters and, by her twenties, had drawn the attention of Giorgio Vasari and Michelangelo. She became Philip II’s de facto court portraitist, although the king, not wanting his judgment to be questioned, appointed her officially not as his painter but as lady-in-waiting to his third wife, Elisabeth of Valois. Like Fontana, because of her gender Anguissola had to clear an incredibly high bar in order to become successful as an artist—to become the king’s portraitist. Her contemporaries described her as virtuous, an exceptional conversationalist, musician, and dancer; and she was beloved by both the Spanish and Italian nobilities. When Anguissola was ninety-two, a young Anthony van Dyck spoke with her at length while painting her portrait, later claiming that she was the most brilliant artist he had ever met.

Sofonisba Anguissola, Portrait of the Artist’s Sisters Playing Chess, 1555

But again, it is what Anguissola painted that most deserves our attention: in Portrait of the Artist’s Sisters Playing Chess, she depicts three young girls as they play chess together. Lucia Anguissola looks out at the viewer, having just defeated Minerva, while the youngest sister, Europa, smiles. Anguissola details the girls’ aristocratic clothes—their ruffled lace collars, the braids around their heads—as well as the way they lean over the table and the chessboard. Had Anguissola’s art been placed within the art historical canon, this painting would likely be seen as a lead-in to much of Caravaggio’s work—the girls’ limbs and the table’s corners pushing out of the frame, nearly infringing on the audience’s space. The painting is foremost about the intellectual potential of these girls.

Through the lens of contemporary criticism, what seems most salient about Fontana and Anguissola is that they broke through the sexist mores of their time to become two of the most significant portraitists in history. But even more impressive—and this is an argument against both modern ways of doing criticism and of doing art history—is the way in which they fit neatly into the art historical canon as vital precursors of the likes of Caravaggio, Jacob van Loo, even Rembrandt (in the way that Fontana lights and frames a hand on a rear, in the way that Anguissola collapses psychological space and time at the chessboard).

Lavinia Fontana, Self-Portrait at the Spinet, 1577

Women or not, their omission from art history is glaring. And yet it is not enough to simply plug them into the canon and carry on. The history of art is generally presented as a straight line (Giotto leads to Matisse leads to Rothko). In order to maintain the line, underlying assumptions of what is worthy of the canon must also therefore be maintained. To engage in any kind of historical revisionism—to highlight new, non-Gombrich-approved artists, for instance—is to briefly interrupt the flow, but the line eventually reverts to its original formulation because the popular understanding of what constitutes greatness hasn’t changed.

Even respectable attempts to include more women in galleries and museums make little lasting difference when the notion of genius itself is not also changed. Although there has been a sharp increase in museum and gallery exhibitions highlighting women—in Los Angeles in 2018, for instance, there were more solo exhibitions for female artists than male—the market remains skewed toward men. In 2018, male artists created 95 percent of the total value of art sold at major auction houses across the world. And from 2008 to 2018, only 11 percent of the artworks actually bought by major American museums were by women. The art world can posture but, where it counts, less is changing than it might seem, because the underlying idea of the Artistic Genius maintains its hold.

In our dilapidating world, there are few comforting narratives, and it’s pleasant to think that there are near-deities of creative wisdom, a select few of these Artistic Geniuses who have access to the highest realms of art, a kind of superior humanity—souls in secular times. That this myth has been placed onto the most cantankerous, people-hating men makes sense: they flout the rules, they place themselves above everyone else. We let them stay there—we let the myth of the Artistic Genius prevail—because their place in the collective imagination provides hope for the rest of us that at least someone has answers, at least someone is living a more rarefied human experience.

But so long as we continue to play along with this myth, the course of art history won’t be shifted; revisions we make won’t stick. Even Gombrich might have been onto this in his own way. “The question of whether Michelangelo was a man or a woman really doesn’t interest me,” Gombrheich said in 1991. “Historians have to take things as they are and as they were.” Historical emphasis must be returned to the art rather than the artist. The gods of art are blind to the hands through which they move, and a pair of portraitists need not have been blustering or brutal or male in order to have created work that shifted the course of history.

Cody Delistraty is a writer and critic in Paris and New York.

Edgar Degas, La Loge (cropped), 1885. © Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

The opera is an ideal place to be distraught. You’re surrounded by characters who are on the brink of emotional collapse, performing some exaggerated version of a familiar feeling: it gives perspective. It’s also an ideal place to dupe yourself, to tell yourself stories about who you are. You can go alone, sip your drink elegantly at intermission, as if waiting for someone just out of sight.

Edgar Degas was particularly in his element at the opera house. In 1875, Charles Garnier designed what might still be Paris’s most beautiful building, the Opéra Garnier. It was a place of cultural but also social and political power, set at a major crossroads of Baron Haussmann’s Second Empire boulevards. In the mid-nineteenth century, opera was embraced as a focal point for the burgeoning movements of realism, Romanticism, and Orientalism, and was viewed as the ultimate art form—a place to work out human potential and ambition: as heroes and villains, as cultures and nations, the grandest of stories. But as the Garnier was going up, opera’s sociocultural power was going down. France didn’t have a great singer and the dancers were just okay. Perhaps the Garnier’s beauty wasn’t fair to the performers: they had such rarefied surroundings, how could they ever live up to them? Degas preferred Paris’s old opera house, the one on the rue Le Peltier that burned down in 1873. The Garnier, he found, was too overwhelming.

François Debret, Plans de l’Opéra de la rue Le Peletier : coupe longitudinale, 1821. Paris, BnF, Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra © BnF

“Degas at the Opera,” on at the Musée d’Orsay until January 19, includes dozens of his behind-the-stage scenes and explores the way in which the Paris opera was the Studio 54 of its day, the place to see and be seen and, crucially, to catch people at their most charismatic in the audience and at their most honest backstage, where the public wasn’t watching. Behind the curtain a number of stories transpired, and Degas, throughout his life, was the ultimate voyeur. He preferred the wily characters, the creepy men who held their top hats steady as they walked about the foyer de la danse, allowed to share space with the dancers backstage so long as they attended the opera three days a week. Technically, they weren’t allowed to touch, but invariably they did. In 1882, Degas wrote to his friend Albert Hecht, a known art collector, asking for a day pass to the opera’s backstage; eventually, he would subscribe himself. He began coming all the time, even when shows were not on. “He comes here in the morning,” a friend noted. “He watches all the exercises in which the movements are analyzed, and … nothing in the most complicated step escapes his gaze.” He was obsessed with the women of the opera, but according to his friends and by his own admission, he was celibate. Manet spun it differently: “Incapable of loving a woman or even telling her he does.” Or Van Gogh: “Degas lives like some petty lawyer and doesn’t like women, knowing very well that if he did like them and bedded them frequently, he’d go to seed and be in no position to paint any longer. The very reason Degas’ painting is virile and impersonal is that … he observes human animals who are stronger than himself screwing and fucking away and he paints them so well for the very reason he isn’t all that keen on it himself.” Degas only watched the stories unfold; he did not partake. And it was only by not taking part that he gained such a complex grasp. He recognized the artifice of the opera and of life—the business of the backstage, how the stories being told in front of the curtain were not the same as the stories happening behind it.

Edgar Degas, La Classe de danse,1873. Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt

Mostly, the stories were of class. The men chasing the dancers around were of a higher social stratum—the age-old trade of wealth and status for beauty and youth. The dancers were almost exclusively from the lowest classes, and the glamour bestowed upon them by the opera was just enough to make them desirable as mistresses or even as wives. Degas did not like this. Having come from a wealthy family (he never had to work for money; his father a banker, his mother an heiress of a New Orleans cotton fortune), Degas advocated a rigid class structure: the ballerinas should be nowhere near lawyers and diplomats.

Edgar Degas, Le Rideau, vers 1881. Photo © Washington, DC, The National Gallery of Art – NGA IMAGES

But the stories were also of gender. John Richardson, that cheeky art historian, was particularly tough on the performers’ looks. “Photographs,” he once wrote, “confirm that Degas was not exaggerating when he revealed his dancers to have been a depressingly dog-faced bunch. No wonder he preferred to show us a maître de ballet teaching a class or conducting a rehearsal rather than a ballerina strutting her stuff.” Degas likewise said harsh things of women. When he learned a female friend wouldn’t be attending a dinner party he was throwing because she was “suffering,” Degas wondered aloud, “How does one ever know? Women invented the word ‘suffering.’” About his supposed friend Berthe Morisot, he declared, “She made paintings as she would hats.” Was Degas a misogynist? In front of the curtain, in the way he spoke about women, he was, but behind the curtain, in the way he painted them, perhaps not.

Edgar Degas, La Classe de danse,1873-76. Photo © Washington, DC, The National Gallery of Art – NGA IMAGES

Certain female scholars like Carol Armstrong and Norma Broude have concluded that Degas’s depictions of women are generally disinterested in what a male viewer might think. Others, though, like Hollis Clayson and Anthea Callen see him as just the prototypical man, maintaining the male gaze on his female subjects. So, too, the critic J. K. Huysmans didn’t buy the idea of Degas’s protofeminism. Degas, Huysmans wrote, wanted to “humiliate” and “debase” the dancers by painting them. He “brought an attentive cruelty and a patient hatred to bear upon his studies of nudes,” depicting them in pain, as they stood tall on their delicate toes, washing away their innocence for the supposed banality of the stage, for the supposed chance at a top-hatted man.

Edgar Degas, Ludovic Halevy et Albert Boulanger-Cavé dans les coulisses de l’Opéra, 1879

Degas framed his pictures untraditionally, going for odd perspectives, looking where he shouldn’t look: a woman askew, a seemingly key player cut out, as if photographically cropped from his canvas. The poet Paul Valéry, as noted by the American artist Paul Trachtman, thought of Degas as “divided against himself.” “On the one hand,” Valéry wrote, “driven by an acute preoccupation with truth, eager for all the newly introduced and more or less felicitous ways of seeing things and of painting them; on the other hand possessed by a rigorous spirit of classicism, to whose principles of elegance, simplicity and style he devoted a lifetime of analysis.”

Degas ultimately thought that his paintings of the women who performed at the opera cut through the stories they were telling themselves, about their claims to beauty, status, and talent. He believed that was the goal of the artist: to separate what we tell ourselves from what is true. “Women can never forgive me,” he told the painter Pierre-Georges Jeanniot. “They hate me. They can feel that I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry, in the state of animals cleaning themselves.”

Edgar Degas, Répétition d’un ballet sur la scène, 1874. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

Degas might have been a misogynist, but he was right about the nature of human performance. We all tell ourselves stories, many of them conflicting, but, so long as we’re not irredeemably deluded, we know they are, at least in part, necessary fictions. Sometimes the cracks show between what we tell ourselves and what we know to be the truth. Nuance is key. At times, the curtain comes up before the dancers have had a chance to ready themselves, before the top-hatted men have made their way back to their seats. Some of us tell ourselves closely accurate stories, others turn themselves into victims or aggressors, kindly souls or crafty louts. We crave identity, selfhood—to have a story is to be human. Friends, therapists, lovers—they tell us our stories are correct. To affirm a person’s story is to affirm her significance.

The scope of opera is such that nearly any other story can fit inside. La Traviata is about a courtesan who falls in love, betrays her lover, loves him again, is forced to live modestly, then, only on her deathbed, receives his forgiveness. It was set in the eighteenth century, then the late-nineteenth century; today, it’s the most frequently performed of all operas, and it’s often set in the fifties. It’s elastic. Betrayal, love, and death are its constants. Or Carmen: a gypsy seduces a soldier who abandons his post and his first love; then, when he is betrayed by the gypsy, he murders her. Again: betrayal, love, death. The holy trifecta, the trinity of human experience. For the most classic opera, like the most classic stories, you can turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to the specifics because there really are no specifics. Their point is their grandeur, and in this way opera is an exercise in spectacular sameness. It is an umbrella over all possible stories and emotions.

Edgar Degas, Le foyer de la danse, 1890 -1892.

One of my favorite paintings by Degas, which is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art but is sadly seldom on view, is “The Ballet from ‘Robert le Diable’,” in which Degas depicts men in the audience distracted and bored as the performance rumbles on. One has even turned his binoculars to others in the audience, looking for different entertainments, different stories.

I’ve been going to the opera frequently lately—La Cenerentola, Manon Lescaut, Madama Butterfly—sitting in the cheapest seats at the Met, where only unwitting tourists and NYU students go. When I was younger, I didn’t enjoy the opera because I didn’t know how to watch; I didn’t know that sometimes what is happening off stage is as intriguing as the show itself. On a recent evening, I looked around my row to watch people watching, as the man in “The Ballet from ‘Robert le Diable’,” does. Have you ever watched others watch something? At first, they look like machines, and it’s difficult to think that they are feeling things as layered and intimate as you are. But then it takes you out of yourself. You see that what you are seeing and what they are seeing is both exactly the same and entirely different. You begin to see yourself in them because it is impossible to watch yourself watching. As the story goes on onstage, you see that we have all neared some form of emotional death; we have all been beaten down and raised up.

Edgar Degas, La Loge, 1880. ©The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Albert Sanchez, photographer

Degas could not see himself in the women he painted. He called the female performers “little monkey girls,” and he depicted their innocence leaving their bodies as their feet cracked and bled while they performed. He extrapolated backward. He could not see the individuality of those who comprised the great scenes at the Garnier. Huysmans found that Degas could translate what he considered society’s “moral decay” into his depicted “venal female rendered stupid by mechanical gambols and monotonous jumps.” Huysmans thought Degas could make the universal into the individual, but they both knew he could not find the individual in the universal.

Edgar Degas, Etude de danseuse le bras tendu, 1895-96. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris © photo Bnf

Opera asks us to manufacture our own empathy. Because it is disjointed, it cannot manipulate emotions like music or movies or television can. With opera, you opt in or out of catharsis. But most of us don’t want to think too hard. To reflect is, almost invariably, to regret. We are all animals in the process of trying to clean ourselves, trying to get our stories straight. The trouble is that we need our stories. We cling to them madly. Go to the opera, tell yourself stories as you must, and leave knowing we’re all the same: our stories have overlapped for centuries, long before these elaborate palaces were erected. Palace of love, of death, of betrayal and of all the rest. The curtain goes up. The curtain goes down. In the end, acting or watching or painting—no matter what side we’re on—we’re all performing for ourselves.

Cody Delistraty is a writer and critic in Paris and New York.

Miguel Rio Branco, Untitled, Tokyo, 2008  © Miguel Rio Branco

 A few years ago, Monica Gagliano, an associate professor in evolutionary ecology at the University of Western Australia, began dropping potted Mimosa pudicas. She used a sliding steel rail that guided them to six inches above a cushioned surface, then let them fall. The plant, which is leafy and green with pink-purple flower heads, is commonly known as a “shameplant” or a “touch-me-not” because its leaves fold inward when it’s disturbed. In theory, it would defend itself against any attack, indiscriminately perceiving any touch or drop as an offense and closing itself up.

The first time Gagliano dropped the plants—fifty-six of them—from the measured height, they responded as expected. But after several more drops, fewer of them closed. She dropped each of them sixty times, in five-second intervals. Eventually, all of them stopped closing. She continued like this for twenty-eight days, but none of them ever closed up again. It was only when she bothered them differently—such as by grabbing them—that they reverted to their usual defense mechanism.

Gagliano concluded, in a study published in a 2014 edition of Oecologia, that the shameplants had “remembered” that their being dropped from such a low height wasn’t actually a danger and realized they didn’t need to defend themselves. She believed that her experiment helped prove that “brains and neurons are a sophisticated solution but not a necessary requirement for learning.” The plants, she reasoned, were learning. The plants, she believed, were remembering. Bees, for instance, forget what they’ve learned after just a few days. These shameplants had remembered for nearly a month.

The idea of a “plant intelligence”—an intelligence that goes beyond adaptation and reaction and into the realm of active memory and decision-making—has been in the air since at least the early seventies. A shift from religion to “spirituality” in the sixties and seventies unlocked new avenues of belief, and the 1973 bestseller The Secret Life of Plants catalyzed the phenomenon. Written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, the book made some wildly unscientific claims, such as that plants can “read human minds,” “feel stress,” and “pick out” a plant murderer. Mostly, it proved to be a touchstone.

Wrapped in pseudoscience, these claims, the authors said, were “proven” by “experiments.” Cleve Backster, a polygraph tester for the CIA, did one such experiment in 1966 when, “on a whim,” he attached a galvanometer (a machine that registers electrical currents) to a dracaena, a tropical palm houseplant. Silently, Backster imagined the plant was on fire. The galvanometer flickered. Backster concluded the plant was feeling stress from his thoughts. “Could the plant have been reading his mind?” ask Tompkins and Bird in the book. In another experiment, Backster had a friend stomp on a plant. Then, that friend and five other human “suspects” walked out in front of the plant that had “witnessed” the stomping. The plant was hooked up to a galvanometer. When the killer entered the room, the plant sent out a wave of electricity, thereby “identifying” the murderer.

Cássio Vasconcellos, A Picturesque Voyage Through Brazil, #28, Courtesy of the artist, Gadcollection, and Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo © Cássio Vasconcellos

Richard Fortey, a former professor of paleobiology at Oxford and paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, scorns the idea of “smart plants.” “It’s so anthropomorphized that it’s really not helpful,” he told Smithsonian. “Trees do not have will or intention. They solve problems, but it’s all under hormonal control, and it all evolved through natural selection.” These “magical” notions of plant intelligence are worrisome, he says, because people “immediately leap to faulty conclusions, namely that trees are sentient beings like us.”

But while it is easy to dismiss lonely men conducting electrical experiments on their houseplants and savvy authors taking advantage of a gullible public, there may, in fact, be some truth to the idea.

Darwin floated the first modern ideation of plant intelligence in 1880. Writing in The Power of Movement in Plants, he concluded that the root of a plant has “the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts” and thus “acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense organs and directing the several movements.” Darwin was talking about how plants react to shifts in vibrations, sounds, touch, humidity, and temperature—but these are just adaptive reactions. Facing toward the sun or closing at a touch does not require quasi-neurological abilities. There is no processing or choice involved—unlike the apparent memory shown by Gagliano’s experiment. (Many of the Ancient Greeks—like Plato, Anaxagoras, Democritus, and Empedocles—shared the belief that plants have a kind of brain where sensitivities could be “processed.”)

Cássio Vasconcellos, A Picturesque Voyage Through Brazil, #37, Courtesy of the artist, Gadcollection, and Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo © Cássio Vasconcellos

Recently, more findings have seemed to support—or at least point toward—a more restrained version of plant intelligence. Plants may not be capable of identifying murderers in a lineup, but trees share their nutrients and water via underground networks of fungus, through which they can send chemical signals to the other trees, alerting them of danger. Peter Wohlleben, a forest ranger for the German government, has written extensively on trees, about diseases or insects or droughts. When Wohlleben came across a tree stump that had been felled probably half a millennium ago, he realized—scraping at it and seeing that it was still bright green beneath—that the trees around it had been keeping it alive, sending it glucose and other nutrients.

This plant communications system works similarly to the nervous system of animals. Trees can send out electrical pulse signals underground as well as signals through the air, via pheromones and gasses. When an animal, for instance, begins chewing on a tree’s leaves, the tree can release ethylene gas into the soil, alerting other trees, whereupon those nearby trees can send tannins into their leaves so that if they, too, get their leaves chewed, they might be able to poison the offending animal.

José Cabral Cabo Delgado, Tete, 2002.  © José Cabral (Photo © Cyrille Martin)

Trees can differentiate between threats, as well. They respond differently to a human breaking off one of its branches than they do to an animal eating at them—with the former, it will try to heal; with the latter, it will try to poison. Plants even share space with one another. In a 2010 study, when four Cakile edentula, or “sea-rocket plants,” were put in the same pot, they shared their resources, moving their roots to accommodate the others. If the plants were just acting evolutionarily, it would follow that they would compete for resources; instead, they seem to be “thinking” of the other plants and “deciding” to help them.

Even the slightest possibility of a proven plant intelligence would have massive scientific and existential implications. If plants can “learn” and “remember,” as Gagliano believes, then humans may have been misunderstanding plants, and ourselves, for all of history. The common understanding of “intelligence” would have to be reimagined; and we’d have missed an entire universe of thought happening all around us.

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On a recent afternoon in Paris, I felt particularly disconnected from nature. Across the street from the hulking glass facade of the Fondation Cartier is the famous, and very green, Montparnasse Cemetery. But the historical humans beneath its grounds, like Charles Baudelaire and Simone de Beauvoir, define the space far more than any of its plant life.

The exhibition “Nous Les Arbres” (“We the Trees”) at the Fondation Cartier attempts to show that humans are a just small part of a world that belongs to plants. (Plants, after all, make up about 99 percent of earth’s biomass.) There are installations of herbariums with bits of trash scattered throughout, videos of countryside pensioners discussing their favorite trees and how they care for them, and massive jungle canvases by the Brazilian painter Luiz Zerbini. Nearly every appeal to nature, however, evokes only a sense of alienation. The older people fawning over their favorite trees come off as fanatics with hyperniche interests, and the installations showing the human impact on the environment are so distressingly common that it’s difficult to engage with them as if for the first time. More than anything, the exhibition accidentally proves that humans are so accustomed to viewing ourselves as fundamentally separate—even insulated—from the environment that we must make a museum show within a major urban capital to try to reconnect with it.

Sebastián Mejía, Série Quasi Oasis, 17, Santiago du Chili, 2012 © Sebastián Mejía

A notable exception: In the Chilean photographer Sebastian Mejia’s black-and-white images, trees burst through houses and gas station roofs in Santiago. A massive palm grows in the middle of a car dealership. A tilted pine threatens to crash onto a street. Similarly shocking is a film called EXIT by the architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which shows the destruction of major forests. These works succeed because they make no attempt to appeal. Instead, they accost the viewer with nature’s power and its fragility. Our houses, stores, and filling stations can be overrun and destroyed by a single palm; a centuries-old forest can be decimated by a single fire. Our lack of respect for nature is at once astounding and ordinary. It allows us to remain in the comforts of late-stage capitalism. If we were to be honest with ourselves about our individual capacity for harm, we would no longer eat meat, live in big homes, drive cars, use plastic water bottles or bags. But rather than numbing ourselves, we might at least allow ourselves to feel some pain at our complicity. Over the long-term, this might push us toward change.

If we respected nature more—the power it has to not only be destroyed by us but to destroy us in turn—would we see more clearly how imbricated we are? Would we be more hesitant about growing plants in monocultures, genetically manipulating them for our pleasure, destroying forests? Would we try harder to protect the environment, if we understood that by protecting plants and trees we are protecting ourselves?

If plants can learn, as Gagliano suggests, they may be able to slowly adapt to fight climate change on their own, adopting and passing down traits of hardiness, stockpiling nutrients, sharing and alerting. This kind of learning would, in a way, be the ultimate intelligence: the ability to actively reshape their existence in order to survive.

Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi, Fraxinus excelsior L , 1963-1982  © Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi

Intelligence is really the central question in all of this. What, precisely, is it? Must the ability to remember, learn, and decide come from neurons and a “brain,” as we tend to think of it, or should we broaden the definition to include a “mindless mastery,” as Anthony Trewavas, an emeritus professor of biological sciences at the University of Edinburgh, calls it? The crux of the question rests on whether we think we are the center of the universe and that our mechanisms for remembering and learning, are superior. Or, might we be willing to see that there are other, nonneurological modes of thought? Might we be willing to de-center ourselves and view the environment through a nonhuman lens?

Plants, as Gagliano concluded, might have a far greater sentience than we’d ever thought possible. The implications of plants that “remember” being dropped and “decide” it’s safe to not protect themselves aren’t best expressed in anthropomorphic terms, but we don’t yet have other language. In truth, we know so little even about ourselves; our science cannot fully explain how humans learn and remember. Why not consider that plants have been doing the same for far longer than we have been around, with an intelligence that is radically different from ours?

Cody Delistraty is a writer and critic in Paris and New York.

Fra Angelico, The Crucifixion with Saints, 1441

In the summer of 1873, Henry James visited a former monastery on Piazza San Marco in Florence. Surrounded by a scattering of low-slung, washed-out government buildings and conical Tuscan cypresses, the church and convent were in what is still the city’s center. When James first entered the convent, he saw Fra Angelico’s The Crucifixion with Saints in the chapter room. A brightly colored, semicircle fresco about thirty feet wide, Crucifixion depicts Christ and the two thieves on either side of him, nailed to their crosses, as saints and witnesses grieve below. “I looked long,” James wrote. “One can hardly do otherwise.” As the author moved throughout what had then just become a museum, he felt a spiritual urge, even though he had rejected his Christian upbringing. “You may be as little of a formal Christian as Fra Angelico was much of one,” he wrote in Italian Hours. “You yet feel admonished by spiritual decency to let so yearning a view of the Christian story work its utmost will on you.” Even Angelico’s colors, he added, seem divinely infinite, “dissolved in tears that drop and drop, however softly, through all time.”

Earlier this summer, I visited the convent-museum. It is not difficult to get to—there’s a city bus stop in front—but tourists tend to leave it off their itineraries in favor of better-known cultural attractions like the Uffizi and the Duomo. In part, my reason for going was unrelated to art: a person of particular specialness to me went last summer, and I regretted not having gone with her. I wanted to see what she had seen, to stand where she had stood.

Fra Angelico, The Taunting of the Christ, cell number 7. Photograph © Robert Polidori

The art quickly took me in. Some of Angelico’s works are so emotionally stunning that one almost freezes in front of them, as if being whisked away to another world in which there is only faith, in which there is a single, abiding truth. Hegel, the German philosopher, believed that Angelico had invented artistic interiority. The ancients had relied on sculpture, Hegel said, which could provide the idea of bravery (as with a sculpture of Diana the Huntress) or the idea of sexual love (as with a sculpture of Aphrodite), but what these sculptures lacked was the ability to actually conjure those emotions in the viewer. Angelico, however, could capture not just a scene but the feelings of that scene—what Hegel called “the investigation of inner coordination, the indwelling meaning of facial expressions.”

Fra Angelico, Descent from the cross

Born just to the north of Florence in the Mugello region in 1395, Angelico committed himself to the monastery in his mid-twenties, after likely apprenticing as a painter for the Benedictine monk Lorenzo Monaco. Upon becoming a friar, he changed his name from Guido di Pietro to Fra Giovanni. (“Angelico” came posthumously. In Italy, he’s known simply as “Beato Angelico,” since Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1982.) Angelico was one of the most devout monks in the Dominican Observance, where adherents were required to keep mostly silent, wake every morning at three o’clock for prayer, go days or sometimes weeks without food, and inhabit rooms—known as “cells”—which had only a chair, a narrow bed, and a prayer desk. Angelico was known to always pray before taking up his brushes, according to his contemporary, the art historian Giorgio Vasari. Whenever he painted Christ in pain, Vasari wrote, he wept.

He worked first in a pre-Renaissance stylistic mode, even when the Renaissance was underway in Italy, relying on a Gothic style of flatness that evoked what W.H. Auden called “the understanding of suffering.” This style changed though when Angelico began to borrow from Masaccio, the painting prodigy of late-fifteenth-century Italy, who ushered in the High Renaissance, and who, as noted by the critic Arthur C. Danto, was the first to apply the rules of perspective that the architect Filippo Brunelleschi had innovated only shortly before. Masaccio, and subsequently Angelico, became adept at grouping figures in ways that added depth and individuality while also creating a dimensionality around them by manipulating the depiction of light, techniques that would later ground Leonard da Vinci’s chiaroscuro.

Fra Angelico, Noli me tangere

Although Masaccio’s art-historical contributions are perhaps clearer since they have to do largely with technique, Angelico’s contributions have been longer lasting and more shocking in their affect. His figures, in their faces and, almost especially, in their hands, transmit their inner feelings, their emotional and existential weight. The hands touch delicately, as if everything in the world is instilled with great significance. When John Ruskin, the art critic and historian, visited the convent in 1848, before it had become a museum, he wrote that the emotional power of Angelico’s paintings and frescos was more profound than mere art. Not works but “visions,” Ruskin called them.

Angelico had found a way to imbue his own piety into his images. He was, in a way, the first artist to ever really transmit his own feelings into a work, and while art can exist without acute emotion—as with an artwork of ideas or of politics, like ancient sculpture—Angelico’s was the kind of art that might make us weep or yell or find within ourselves beliefs and thoughts and depths that we did not otherwise know we had. His contribution is perhaps the most important contribution ever made to art: the transmission of emotions from the mind of the artist to the mind of the viewer.

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The cells in San Marco are tiny with low ceilings. The walls are white, like powdered clay, and the floors are a cool terra-cotta. Walking through the monastery, with its modern bathrooms and the bus stop outside, it is difficult to remember that the building is over eight hundred years old—and that Angelico put his brush to its walls more than half a millennium ago. Even more difficult to square is looking at Angelico’s artworks and seeing in them both an artist and an entire society who had no doubts about this alternate universe of angels and demons, of capital-G good and capital-E evil.

Fra Angelico, Transfiguration, cell six, 1440-1442

It is often easy to look upon European religious art, especially medieval and early Renaissance art, and find it familiar, since we are so habituated to it as a part of Western history. But there is really nothing familiar about the grotesque violence of the Crucifixion or the impossible miracles done by Christ or the brutal, God-inflicted eternal punishments of hell or even the fasting, flagellating self-inflicted punishments of the most devout in this life. Walking quietly through the corridors and cloisters is as close as I have ever felt to that level of faith. Angelico essentially created the convent along with Michelozzo, the architect, and Cosimo de’ Medici, the patron, and spun it out of his own beliefs. Imbued throughout are his views of sacrifice, heaven, hell, God, the Immaculate Conception, and all those other dogmas that seem to feel familiar, in that we’ve heard them so many times, but actually feel, when investigated more thoroughly, desperately far away.

Upon walking up the main staircase, you’re accosted and shocked by an Annunciation fresco, which forces you into spiritual reflection. In his thirties, funded by de’ Medici, Angelico painted a fresco in each of the monks’ cells, which was meant to aid in devotion. “There is no other picture of heaven that could be as great and rich and gripping,” wrote Rainer Maria Rilke, while standing in front of one. Nearly every Angelico artwork is gripping, and one’s devotion to the beauty and emotional power of Angelico’s works feels achingly close to a divine devotion; the barrier between religious belief and the shock of beauty is the thinnest line. In each cell, the simplicity or complexity of the fresco’s theme was related to the seniority of the friar: for someone new to the convent, the image might simply be of a saint; for more seasoned adherents, perhaps there would be a narrative scene; and, for the most senior and educated, like a priest, the fresco would depict a metaphorical image through which the devout could derive his own interpretations.

Fra Angelico, Annunciation, 1438

In one of the best, Annunciation, in Cell Three, the Virgin Mary kneels in front of the Angel Gabriel, who tells her that she will give birth to Christ. Behind them, Tuscan cypresses, like the ones just outside the convent, rise. But on the painting’s left, a thirteenth-century saint of the Dominican Order named Peter Martyr watches them. The fresco is not depicting the event itself because Martyr, of course, was not in the original Biblical story of Mary and Gabriel. Instead, Angelico provided an invented scene in which the inclusion of a nondivine figure invites the viewer to mentally place himself within the situation.

This, too, was part of Angelico’s artistic emotional intelligence: the ability to provide the space for the viewer to put himself in the minds of the characters. To further maintain the scene’s possibility, the fresco is not opulent. Mary’s clothes are pale. There is a seriousness, an intimacy, to the scene, and there are few symbolic objects: no memento mori or crown of thorns. This is not an artwork that tells you how to feel; rather, it summons you into its world.

Just a few decades later, when Pope Julius II asked Michelangelo to add gold and jewels to the robes of the apostles who dotted his Sistine Chapel ceiling, Michelangelo refused, citing Angelico. He told the Pope that the apostles were not men of means and should thus be depicted more modestly, as Angelico had done. Michelangelo went on to paint them without their usually ascribed decadence; in making these godly figures more ordinary, they also became more relatable. In turn, he inspired Rembrandt, Zurbarán, and El Greco, whose religious depictions took on an unadorned clarity, allowing their figures to convey an authenticity and realism.

Fra Angelico, The San Marco Altarpiece, 1438-1443

In the past century, Mark Rothko found explicit inspiration in the calibrated emotional effect of Angelico’s works. Rothko spent days in the San Marco monastery on his first trip through Europe in 1950. After touring nearly every major museum in Western Europe, only Angelico’s art moved him. “I looked at hundreds of Madonnas, but all I saw was the symbol, never the concrete expression of motherhood.” Angelico’s Madonna, however, was different. While the standard Gothic altarpiece is separated into sections, with a number of saints to the side and the Madonna and child in the center, Angelico collapsed the distance between Mary and the saints who surrounded her, placing them all against a more relaxed, naturalist landscape. The physical collapsing of the work functioned as a kind of emotional collapse as well. Rothko had the same goal as Angelico: to create a sense of transcendence, to inhabit a faraway world that felt like a close one. Angelico did this through the emotions of divine figures placed beside the nondivine, while Rothko achieved it by creating color portals to different emotional dimensions, breaking down ideals of abstraction and color theory.

Perhaps the greatest artists are those who are especially certain in their view toward chaos. Vladimir Nabokov kept an unframed reproduction of one of the Annunciation paintings on his writing desk. He, like Rothko, was not religious, yet he also believed in an ordered universe. Nabokov said he spent a great deal of mental time and effort convincing himself of the patterns of the world, even as he admitted that “common sense” said that the world was chaotic, godless, and entropic. “What do you call ‘genius’?” asks a character in his Look at the Harlequins! Answers another, “Well, seeing things others don’t see. Or rather the invisible links between things.” His writing was emphatically structured, every detail eventually tied together, and he was always searching for patterns and rhythms to provide a clarity of meaning. “Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm,” Nabokov wrote in Ada, “not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.”

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Fra Angelico, The Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, 1435

Later in the summer, I saw a small Angelico exhibition at the Prado. The enormous The Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden comes from the high altarpiece in the San Marco museum, but it belongs to the Prado now and had just undergone a years-long restoration. In it, two angels—one of whom has come to expel Adam and Eve after Eve’s transgressions, and the other who has come to tell Mary she is pregnant with Christ—are not robed in gold but are instead delicately clad in light pink, closely matching the color of Mary’s dress.

The painting glistens, freed of the grit and grime it had accrued in its nearly six hundred years in the monastery, and its cleanness underscores how subtly Angelico handled his colors and characters. Standing in front of The Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, I saw the way that Angelico was able to layer his paintings with meaning so that they are almost timed to flip a switch in the viewer’s mind. The painting is quiet and understated, but it bursts with hidden meaning: the fine gold leaf that he lays onto the painting, for instance, seems to transform the entirety of the work, the way a squeeze of citrus over food unlocks the palate. With it, his blues become velvety; his pinks and yellows look like the sunset in the night sky; all of the tiny bits of gold shine.

To look at a painting by Fra Angelico is to feel your own faith unfold. The Gothic flatness of the work belies its emotional complexity. What at first seems relatively sterile and standard—a Biblical scene: I’ve seen this before, one thinks—opens up into something so striking that, like Nabokov and James and Rilke, we’ve no choice but to stare, to feel its transcendence in ourselves.

Even more than achieving emotional interiority, Angelico’s best works demonstrate faith. To look at a work such as The Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden is akin to how one feels with a lover: to see life—suddenly, madly, violently—through her eyes. In his certainty of the world and of virtue, Angelico tells us that everything matters. In this certainty, he makes us ask, What if each movement, each story, each person is weighted with significance? What if the movements of time might be able to collapse onto one another? What if, standing in the Florentine monastery, I was seeing the world precisely as Angelico saw it, precisely as she had seen it, precisely as we would all eventually see it: perfect in its order.

Cody Delistraty is a writer and critic in Paris and New York.

Édouard Manet. Woman Reading, 1880 or 1881. The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection.

The halo effect is a type of cognitive bias in which your initial superficial assessment of a person influences your perception of their other, more ambiguous traits. In the name of cultural journalism, I conducted an informal experiment to test this. I posted five different photographs of myself to a website called Photofeeler, which people mostly use for their acting headshots, company photographs, and online dating profiles. Strangers vote on your attractiveness, trustworthiness, and intelligence, and, using a weighted algorithm, the website tells you the percentile you’re in compared with the rest of the people on the website so you can choose the best photograph. The photo of mine that was voted the most attractive—my fingers awkwardly crinkled around a wineglass on a terrasse—was the one in which I was voted smartest and most trustworthy. The photograph in which I was deemed ugliest—sitting in a cab—was the one in which I was voted dumbest and least trustworthy. In every photograph, my perceived attractiveness determined my perceived trustworthiness and intelligence, traits that, of course, are impossible for anyone to actually know from a picture.

The notion of the halo effect and the idea that “beauty is good”—meaning that we assume people who are prettier must also be cleverer, kinder, more moral than uglier people—were first tested in 1972 by the psychologists Karen Dion, Ellen Berscheid, and Elaine Walster. They found that people almost uniformly believed that those who they found more attractive on the basis of three small photographs were also more generous and more stable and had better marriages, better jobs, and better families than less attractive people. A similar study from just a few years ago found that people trust those they consider more attractive significantly more quickly than those they consider less attractive.

Is beauty, therefore, the most useful trait one might have?

From the amount of money people spend on skin care, makeup, haircuts, clothes, and the like, it seems that we may have already subconsciously accepted this as a truth.

In his Essays, Montaigne took stock of the ancients’ wisdom and his own experiences and concluded the same: there is no more persuasive and influential trait than beauty: “I cannot say often enough how much I consider beauty a powerful and advantageous quality,” he wrote.

Socrates called it “A short tyranny,” and Plato, “The privilege of nature.” We have no quality that surpasses it in credit. It holds the first place in human relations; it presents itself before the rest, seduces and prepossesses our judgment with great authority and a wondrous impression.

Beauty circumvents our logic. It “prepossesses our judgment.” Against our better instincts, we succumb to the halo effect again and again. Keats bought into it (“beauty is truth, truth beauty”). Rilke was more suspicious (“beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror … it serenely disdains to destroy us”).

Édouard Manet. In the Conservatory, about 1877–79. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie.

Is ugliness the absolute biggest setback one might be born with? Of course not. The idea that ugliness might be more of a handicap than race, gender, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, or some combination thereof is a slippery slope toward the kinds of arguments incels and “proud boys” like to make. But looks are still a significant factor in one’s life. There’s no question that for those on the extreme side of the attractiveness scale—either very beautiful or very ugly—their lives will be fundamentally altered by their looks.The history of beauty is broken into two parts. For the ancients through the medievals, beauty was an empirical and objective concept. The belief, put forth first by Plato, was that beauty was a fundamental property of a person or an object; beauty was inherent and had been “created.”

But in his 1757 essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” David Hume undermined all this forever. The Scotsman set forth the notion that beauty is actually about perception, that the way the mind thinks about an object or person has little to do with the object or person itself. “Beauty is no quality in things themselves,” he wrote: “It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.” In other words, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The only explanation for why we even discuss beauty as a trait at all is because of how it makes us feel.

Hume’s ideas about beauty fueled new ideas about art, too, many of which the Viennese art historian Ernst Gombrich explored in his hundreds of essays, books, and lectures. In his 1960 book Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Gombrich made the Humean argument that art is based solely on perception, that there is no objective art just as there is no objective beauty.

“There is no reality without interpretation,” he wrote; “just as there is no innocent eye, there is no innocent ear.”

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This understanding of art—in which beauty is solely about individual perception—is what makes Édouard Manet’s final artworks so confusing and enigmatic. Throughout his forties, the French painter’s health had been suffering, and, in 1879, at age forty-seven, he began hydrotherapy treatments out in Meudon, to the southwest of Paris. The treatments weren’t taking. His doctor in the capital believed that he had a circulatory issue, which caused intermittent paralysis in his legs and pains throughout his body so severe that he often had trouble sitting up. What he actually had, as would be later discovered, was locomotor ataxia, which made him unable to control his bodily movements or to feel his arms and legs. It’s a side effect of syphilis—and a brutal one at that. He would die just four years later, unable to stand for more than an hour or two, experiencing terrible, constant pain in his limbs.

Édouard Manet. Portrait of Émilie Ambre as Carmen, 1880. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of Edgar Scott, 1964. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Those final years marked a significant shift in his painting style. He reoriented how he both conceived of and depicted beauty. In his early thirties, he had taken on the massive Modernist projects of Olympia and Déjeuner sur l’herbe, questioning the very fundamentals of formalism and art history. Toward the end of his life he turned to small-scale projects—tiny still lifes of fruits, such as Bunch of Asparagus and The Lemon, and portraits of society women, such as Jeanne (Spring) and Autumn (Méry Laurent). His final project was a series of roughly twenty still lifes of flowers in crystal vases. When he painted them, he was so sick he could not stand and he could barely lift his arms.

What were these seemingly meaningless, end-of-life confections?, many critics have wondered. Most determined that he had capitulated to the comforts of prettiness. The art historian John Rewald wrote, “Manet had to fight frequently against a dangerous tendency to faire joli,” to prettify everything. “Now that he was tired and ill, an opportunity was given to him to obey his whole instinct, to capture his frequently suppressed charm and frivolity.” Jacques-Émile Blanche, a portrait painter and contemporary of Manet, wrote similarly: “It seems that, as the invalid became less able to go out, the society of lively young women of easy virtue and their lovers became an increasingly compelling attraction for him.” The art historian Douglas Cooper, in his monograph of Manet, simply called his last works “a charming diversion.”

While the Frenchman had tended to look toward historical subjects for his paintings—and, with A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, sporadically continued to do so—his end-of-life paintings were almost exclusively smaller in scale both in size and in subject matter. Floral paintings, portraits of bourgeois women—weren’t these the realms of women artists? Why is it that the artist who spent much of his life overturning expectations of vantage points, proportions, framing, even race was now expending his final brushstrokes on painting pictures of pretty women and flowers?

Édouard Manet. The House at Rueil, 1882. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1926.

It wasn’t until a feminist mode of art history came into vogue in the 1990s that some began to reason that Manet hadn’t been dumbing down his work or yielding to vapid prettiness; rather, he was redefining art and beauty altogether. The art historian Carol Armstrong identified the “femininity” of his works as a progression of his style rather than a surrender to his illness. Helen Burnham, an art historian and curator, saw his interest in fashion as an epitomizing depiction of modernity, a way for him to make grander points about French society.

Manet was widening the definition of beauty. He was reinventing his own style while using otherwise superficial beauties to fight his illness, his depression, his existential dread. Beauty, he knew, was not something that could be determined by critics or gallery-goers. It was whatever he wanted it to be. And what he wanted was an escape.

“His heightened interest in pretty parisiennes, the still lifes of fruits and flowers … all of these show the ailing artist’s passionate attachment to the delicate beauties and fleeting pleasures of this world,” writes Scott Allan, one of three cocurators of “Manet and Modern Beauty,” which is currently on at the Art Institute of Chicago. “Manet’s last works are among the most gorgeous and vibrant he painted but also, given his personal circumstances, the most poignant, and they reveal a more intimately human side of an artist so often lionized as one of the great heroes and rebels of modern art.”

Beauty, Manet seemed to be saying, can be a philosophy in and of itself. Does looking at these flowers ease your pain, too?, he seems to ask.

Édouard Manet. Autumn (Méry Laurent), 1881 or 1882. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy. Photo: P. Mignot.

The viewer, as Hume reasoned, determines what is beautiful. Even the creator of the universe understood this relative nature of beauty, as brilliantly pointed out by Ken-ichi Sasaki, a professor of aesthetics at Nihon University in Tokyo, in his essay “Politics of Beauty.” After God creates the world in six days, he stops and looks at it in order to deem that “it was very good.” One might think that, for God, the beauty and the goodness of the world would be predetermined, that these traits would be a given. But God needed to take a second look at his creation in order to determine its aesthetic and moral quality. He needed not just to create its beauty but to perceive its beauty as well. “Beauty cannot be determined a priori with concepts,” Sasaki writes; “it needs always to be verified a posteriori. In other words, beauty is not made but given.”

Those who criticized Manet’s final works could not see past their own limited definitions of beauty. The macho critics thought of beauty as necessarily including grander meanings or art-historical significance. When their expectations were not met, they classified Manet’s works as superficial, as ultimately pointless other than as his coping mechanism.

A cohesive “philosophy of beauty” is, of course, impossible. We cannot find a universal consensus on that which is beautiful. What, indeed, even is beauty? This is what Gombrich struggled with: what makes good art? One must—simply and not so simply at all—just see it. One must decide for oneself.

There have been attempts at codifying notions of beauty. Lord Shaftesbury, the seventeenth-century writer, thought that a philosophy of beauty might be the solution to all of society’s ills, that if everyone could aspire toward and live with beauty, man’s inherent virtuousness would come through. But Shaftesbury was caught up in a pre-Humean worldview in which he believed beauty to be universal.

Édouard Manet. Boating, 1874–75. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929.

Even as we cannot agree on the terms of beauty, beauty continues to run society in myriad ways. Beauty is almost always subservient to—or otherwise tangled up in—money and power. The causality works the opposite way, too: those who are wealthier and of a higher social status can make themselves more beautiful.

This is why Manet’s final investigations into beauty remain so important: they begin with a look at the beautiful and powerful (the portraits of bourgeois women) and end with the beauty of nature (the flowers). Although the portraits tie up beauty with wealth and cultural notions of womanhood, his final series of flowers is free of any other context or characteristics. These paintings are natural, simple. To some, this is endlessly frustrating because they want more— they want to be able to see the world more widely through beauty’s lens.

But perhaps beauty really can stand alone. Perhaps those bouquets in their crystal vases, which sit on gray and brown backgrounds, their flowers’ colors muted but real, their water dirtied and darkening, are anything you want them to be. Perhaps their backgrounds’ drabness is a harbinger of the artist’s imminent death. Perhaps the winding brushstrokes and the bursts of vivid floral colors point toward the infinite legacy he would be leaving behind. They contain all of this and none of this. The controversy Manet created is the crux of beauty itself—the infinite variations on a single petal.

Édouard Manet. Flowers in a Crystal Vase, about 1882. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection.

Cody Delistraty is a writer and critic in Paris and New York.

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, 51″ x 75″. Presented at the 1865 Salon. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, RF 644. Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt.

Around the time that Édouard Manet was painting Olympia, in 1863, a liberating politics was underway in France. Napoleon III had become so distracted with foreign affairs—handling the Second French Intervention in Mexico, breaking up a burgeoning Roman Republic in order to restore the Pope’s power, and making colonial conquests throughout Central Africa, Asia, and the South Seas—that he had little time to resist many of the political pressures back home. And so he was actually carrying out some of the promises he’d made in the run-up to his Second Empire coronation, such as reducing media censorship and allowing workers to strike. By 1870, Napoleon III, under the pressure of the Liberals, even assented to a parliamentary legislature in France, which would ultimately serve as the basis of the Third Republic.

In the late nineteenth century, Paris began to seem like an integrated and relatively racially equitable city. After the 1848 Revolution, slavery had been abolished in France’s territorial colonies; Caribbean people moved en masse to the French capital. Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, and his father, Thomas-Alexandre—who was one of the most important black military men in European history—were viewed as unassailably prominent members of French society. Racism, of course, still existed, even at the highest levels of government: in 1884, Jules Ferry, who served as both prime minister and as president of the senate, was espousing his eugenics-based racism, saying things like, “The higher races have a right over the lower races … a duty to civilize the inferior races.” But for a moment, the scene seemed to be set for a fresh form of liberty and relative equality.

Gustave Le Gray, Portrait d’Alexandre Dumas en costume russe, 1859, oval proof laminated on gray paper, itself laminated on cardboard, 10″ x 7 1/2″. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, PHO 1986 11. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay) / image RMN-GP.

Art, naturally, was both driver and recipient. The poet Charles Baudelaire was dating Jeanne Duval, a French Haitian actress so beautiful she was often called the Black Venus and was painted by Manet. Manet, meanwhile, was fashioning himself as a recorder of the contemporary social scene. A number of his paintings depicted the black people who had immigrated to the northern neighborhoods of Paris. In his studio notebook, he described the black maid whom he painted standing next to the lounging white prostitute in Olympia and the black caregiver in his Children in the Tuileries Garden (1862) as “Laure, très belle négresse, rue Vintimille, 11, 3éme étage.” Manet’s depiction of Laure wasn’t exoticized—not the kind of nude caricature that had been standard of European depictions of black women. Instead, with her voguish neckline and bouquet of flowers, Laure modeled a typically “white role,” as a clerk in a department store or a server at a café. Also: whereas in Titian’s Venus of Urbino (ca. 1532), a clear forerunner of Olympia, the maid, who is white, is turned away from the nude, lounging women in the foreground; in Olympia, Laure is just as much a part of the scene, in both the amount of the canvas she takes up and her foregrounded placement.

A few years ago, Denise Murrell, an African American woman studying for a doctorate in art history at Columbia, found that excerpt about Laure in Manet’s studio diary. Murrell was studying the depiction of black women from Olympia—the painting that is often considered the founding work of Modernism—to the modern day. Murrell’s dissertation, which she completed in 2013, served as the basis of the exhibitions “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today,” which she curated at the Wallach Art Gallery in New York, and “Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse,” which is currently on at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris as an expanded iteration of the New York exhibition. (The Orsay exhibition includes a number of works on view only in France, like Olympia. Murrell co-curated the Orsay show, along with Cécile Debray and Stéphane Guégan.)

Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait de Madeleine (also known as Portrait d’une femme noire), 1800, oil on canvas, 32″ x 25 1/2″. Presented at the 1800 Salon. Paris, Musée du Louvre, INV 2508. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Gérard Blot.

The Orsay exhibition includes paintings of black women by Manet, Géricault, Matisse, Delacroix, Gauguin, Picasso, Bonnard, and Cézanne. Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of a Negress has been, in this exhibition, temporarily renamed Madeleine, after the black model’s name, an act of humanization. But it is Laure, Manet’s model, who is at the center of both the Orsay exhibition and Murrell’s dissertation—a founding symbol of the overlooked centrality of black women in Modernism.

“The small body of published commentary about Manet’s Laure, with a few notable exceptions, generally dismisses the figure as meaning, essentially, nothing—except as an ancillary intensifier of the connotations of immorality attributed to the prostitute,” Murrell writes in her dissertation. She suggests, however, that Laure demonstrates that the history of Modernism is also, in part, the history of an “evolving cultural hybridity.” Ultimately, she writes, “what is at stake is an art-historical discourse posed as an intervention with the prevailing historical silence about the representation and legacy of Manet’s Laure.” “The black female figure,” she concludes, “is foundational to the evolving aesthetics of modern art.”

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Pourquoi naître esclave?, after 1875, polychrome plaster, 24″ x 18″ x 14 1/2″. Reims, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 941.1. © Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Reims.

It’s a similar idea to that championed by the artist Lorraine O’Grady in her seminal 1992 paper “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” in which she argues that black models are far more than formal constructs, as was often claimed—their color meant to bring to the fore the white models in contrast. Olympia was indeed a formally revolutionary artwork in its flatness and the washed-out color of the white woman in the foreground. But as O’Grady hints, and as pointed out by the doctoral student Kaegan Sparks, Laure’s blackness also blends into the background, creating, as Sparks writes, a kind of “proto-abstraction,” another tenant of this nascent Modernism.

Placing black models at the center of—and the beginning of—Modernism also works to overturn the idea that high art is the sole purview of white, European culture. “One of the central claims to European supremacy,” writes Kehinde Andrews, a professor of black studies at Birmingham University, is that “art galleries and museums are the embodiment of whiteness—at times, it seems, conceived solely to prove that ‘high’ culture is the possession of those of European descent.” This remains a core claim of conservative thinkers today and is the not-so-subtle implication of those who cling to so-called Western values.

Frédéric Bazille, Femme aux pivoines (originally titled Négresse aux pivoines, 1870, oil on canvas, 23 1/2″ x 29 1/2″. Washington, National Gallery of Art, collection de M. et Mme Paul Mellon, 1983.1.6. © Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, NGA Images.

For a long time, and even very recently, artworks with black models—or by black artists—were collected sparingly by museums, in part because they weren’t considered to fit into any standard art-historical narratives. Between 2008 and 2018, for instance, only 2.4 percent of purchases and donations in thirty of the best-known American museums were works by African American artists, according to an analysis by In Other Words and ARTNews. Only 7.6 percent of exhibitions concerned African American artists. From Modernism through postwar Abstract Expressionism, work by black painters still represented a catch-22: they were either too much about the black experience and thus didn’t seem to fit into the European timeline of art history, or they were too reliant on the abstract when the few museums that did collect black artists wanted figurative works that represented “the black experience.” “It’s pretty hard to explain by any other means than to say there was an actual, pretty systemic overlooking of this kind of work,” said Ann Temkin, the curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in a recent interview.

Henri Rousseau, La Charmeuse de serpents, 1907, oil on canvas, 66″ × 74 1/2″. Paris, musée d’Orsay, RF 1937 7. Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Hervé Lewandowski.

To upset this rigid art history, therefore, has been a great—and recent—feat. The Orsay show isn’t quite the solution it could be. It is not so radical as to be only about black artists, since the artists depicting black people are mostly white, but it functions as an impressive and vital bridge, placing black figures at the center of European art history. It also comes on the heels of a recent rise in interest in black artists by museums. Between 2018 and now, there’s been a significant uptick in exhibitions centered on African American artists, thanks in part to the rising popularity of the Obamas’ portraitists, Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley, as well as to increasingly market-friendly African American artists like Mark Bradford, who represented the U.S. at the previous Venice Biennial, in 2017, and the enigmatic David Hammons, whose current show at Hauser and Wirth in Los Angeles is a marvel in both beauty and marketing strategy. (His last major exhibition was in 2000 at the Prado in Madrid, and rumor has it that part of his reason for choosing Hauser and Wirth for this current exhibition, “Harmolodic Thinker,” was that the gallery agreed to pre-purchase all of the works to be shown. But again: rumor …)

The market has been instrumental in bringing black artists to the fore: it is now a financial risk for museums and individuals not to collect work by black artists. Just a few years ago, a collector (or a museum) could have gotten a large, collaged work by Bradford for under a million dollars. Today, one would be lucky to get that kind of Bradford at auction for under ten million. Hammons, a few years ago, sold a basketball-hoop chandelier for $8 million, Sam Gilliam’s Lady Day II realized $2.17 million at Christie’s last fall, and then there’s Jean-Michel Basquiat, an almost impossibly bankable artist. From a market perspective, African American male artists have been on a precipitous rise.

Henri Matisse, Dame à la robe blanche (femme en blanc), 1946, oil on canvas, 38″ x 24″. Des Moines, Des Moines Art Center, 1959.40; donated by M. John et Mme Elizabeth Bates Cowles. © Photo: Rich Sanders, Des Moines, IA. © Succession H. Matisse.

It seems strange, then, to think about how long even basic facts about the relationship between blackness, black culture, and certain Modernists, like Manet and Matisse, have been omitted from the timeline of art history. Matisse, the exhibition shows, was enormously inspired by the Harlem Renaissance when he visited New York throughout the thirties. He had a great love for black theater and for jazz, and it’s clear in the exhibition, albeit ultimately circumstantial and implicit, that Matisse found inspiration in African American art. To illustrate the 1947 edition of Baudelaire’s famed poetry collection Les fleurs du mal, Matisse enlisted black models like the Haitian dancer Carmen Lahens to act as his model and muse.

The Orsay exhibition concludes with recent works by black women artists like Elizabeth Colomba and Ellen Gallagher. The implication is that, today, black women, rather than merely being depicted, are now wielding the brush, controlling their own narrative. As we enter a time of decreasing liberalization with more and more checks placed on women’s bodies—and increasingly overt racism condoned by governments from the U.S. to Hungary to Brazil and beyond—it’s vital to realize that black women have always been a part of the art-historical narrative. It’s just that now galleries and museums are finally beginning to make a space for the history that was there all along.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Étude d’après un modèle féminin pour « À vendre, esclaves au Caire », ca. 1872, oil on canvas, 19″ x 15″. Private collection. © Photo courtesy of Galerie Jean-François Heim – Bâle.

Cody Delistraty is a writer and critic in Paris and New York.

Stéphane Mandelbaum, Arthur Rimbaud. 1980

To understand the Belgian artist Stéphane Mandelbaum, it is best to begin at the end of his life. Few agree on how he lived, but most agree on how he died. It was garish and violent. He was shot in Namur, in central Belgium. Acid was splashed on his face to make his body harder to identify. His corpse was thrown into a landfill. He was twenty-five years old. His bright, brief life and his art-brut style are often compared to those of Jean-Michel Basquiat, but whereas Basquiat found his way to the center of the art world, Mandelbaum was always an outsider. His life was a mixture of realities and self-imposed fictions that were so potent that even he forgot who he was. At the crucial moment of his death, Mandelbaum thought he was a hardened criminal when, in truth, he was closer to a doughy artist, a controversial but ultimately bashful poet of the visual.

His death came in December 1986 when he had attempted to steal a painting by Amedeo Modigliani called The Woman with the Cameo from an elderly woman’s home in Ixelles, a tony suburb of Brussels, along an avenue studded with art deco buildings. He had been promised money for the painting from friends who had connections to the black market. Having made almost no money from selling his own art, which was largely deemed too perverse and risqué, he desperately needed the funds. The problem was that there is no such painting by Modigliani called The Woman with the Cameo. What he stole was entirely fake. It is impossible to know whether Mandelbaum was aware of this or not—or whether or not the woman who owned it knew—but, when he turned it over, his buyers realized the truth and murdered him. That is, at least, the most agreed upon story. Almost nothing about Mandelbaum is certain.

Stéphane Mandelbaum, L’Empire des sens, 1983

The Mandelbaum retrospective on through May 20 in the tucked-away gallery of graphic art in Paris’ Centre Pompidou is preceded by a series of warnings that the exhibition is particularly vulgar and violent. It is composed of about a hundred of his works, most of them works on paper, done in ballpoint pen, charcoal, and colored pencil. The exhibition is a rarity: never before has he been given a major museum show. And for good reason: Mandelbaum is a curator and historian’s nightmare. Sorting through what is true and what his false about Mandelbaum is an enormous challenge. Even in his own diaries he lied about what he had done, claiming, for instance, that he had frequented a prostitute who never lived, and that he had robbed a home on a street where no such home exists.

Mandelbaum was born in Brussels in 1961. He was diagnosed as dyslexic as a boy, so his parents enrolled him in an alternative boarding school, from which he came home only on weekends. Learning to write was difficult, and he turned to drawing as an easier means of expression. His drawings frequently incorporated writing, though, and like Basquiat, the text was often riddled with spelling errors, both intentional and unintentional. At sixteen, he began studying at the Academy Fine Arts De Watermael-Boitsfort, where he began to draw more pornographic works. He called his notebook “my pigsty.” He began training in combat sports, dressing more sharply, and drawing increasingly sexualized figures.

Stéphane Mandelbaum, Der Goebbels. c. 1980

In 1979, he transferred to the School of Plastic and Visual Arts in Uccle, where his style developed further. He became focused on tragic histories, mediated through the comic and the outrageous. He drew mostly profiles. In one of his best, “Der Goebbels,” from 1980, he drew Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda. Mandelbaum depicted him with great strength and heft but also as evil: his eyes dark with charcoal, his fists clenched and raised. He is yelling something. From his mouth come white circles, like a comic-strip balloon. The features are exacting—Goebbels’s hairline is receding slightly but perfectly combed, his face shadowed ominously. His teeth are invisible, his mouth open wide. Whatever he is saying—the bubble is left blank—is of great power and importance. Mandelbaum used white space to depict the historical void. His drawings are so packed with words and precise details that these blank expanses become all the more powerful. In another drawing, also from 1980, called “Composition (Portrait of Bacon),” which he drew using ballpoint and felt pens, he depicted various angles of Francis Bacon, whom he greatly admired, leaving white space only in the top left corner. The rest of the work is full of images of Bacon as well as versions of figures Bacon had drawn, done in Mandelbaum’s sickly, pornographic style, which evokes Egon Schiele. Mandelbaum drew words within words. He wrote “FOU” (meaning “crazy”) creating the shape of the letters with words that describe the colors Bacon favored (“blanc, rouge, vert”). Other words scattered throughout the drawing seem to track a shifting set of feelings. “Vive la vie” (“Live life”), he writes; then, in enormous lettering: “Salope” (“Bitch”). One imagines the white space he leaves to soon be filled by new, spontaneous feelings and emotions: fresh views of Bacon, his own latest thoughts and frustrations.

Stéphane Mandelbaum, Composition (Portrait of Bacon). 1980

Mandelbaum’s art gives the impression of constant motion—the shifting feelings of a single work jumble together and on top of each other. This might be why he so quickly gave up on engraving (of which there are several examples in the Pompidou show), favoring the ease and speed of drawing instead. In the period between 1980 and his death in 1985, Mandelbaum saw a huge amount of art in Brussels, reading widely, especially on Japanese art and Jewish history, and worked tirelessly, often sleeping for only a few hours each night. Between 1980 and 1982 especially, he created the vast majority of his oeuvre, what would ultimately be his legacy.

It’s frankly difficult to judge the life and works of an artist who lived to only twenty-five. His interests jumped between exotic Japanese images of octopuses performing cunnilingus to faux-fawning depictions of Nazis. But his interest ultimately centered on outsiders: thugs, war criminals, artists intrigued by the perverse and unaccepted, like Arthur Rimbaud and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In 1980, he drew a profile of Pasolini, perhaps sensing a similarity between himself and the Italian director who was both gay and known for directing perhaps the most grotesque film of all time, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, an updated version of the Marquis de Sade’s libertine classic. Next to his drawing of Pasolini, Mandelbaum pasted a small picture of Christ, blood streaming from his chest, a winged cherub on his back. In the style of Pasolini’s films, Mandelbaum perverted this image, pasting another small cutout of an uncircumcised penis over Christ’s waist. In another drawing, from 1983, called “Dream of Auschwitz,” Mandelbaum depicted an erect penis next to the gates of the camp; in another, from 1982, “Kischmatores: Portrait of Arié Mandelbaum,” he drew a black-and-white image of his father, Arié—a known painter and art teacher—above a colorful picture of a Nazi officer. In one of his most disturbing works, “The Nazi, Saint Nicholas, the Brothers, and the Grandmother,” from 1978, he painted his family portrait but gave himself, as a boy, a yellow Star of David and added in a Nazi officer and the Catholic bishop St. Nicholas standing next to his family.

Stéphane Mandelbaum, Composition (figure au masque)

Mandelbaum’s art was about these kinds of additions—a penis to Christ, a Nazi general to his family portrait. These things existed—Christ had genitalia; Mandelbaum’s Jewish family had been persecuted—but they had also been buried, whether out of decorum or grief. Mandelbaum, however, saw it as his artistic task to dredge up everything. His desire to depict the people he most admired was not just about veneration but about testing his own versions of himself against those he most respected. In the case of Bacon, Anne Montfort, the exhibition’s curator, writes in one of the catalog essays, “These, however, exceed simple homage because they offer the artist the opportunity to measure himself against the British painter.”

Stéphane Mandelbaum, Pierre Goldman. c 1980

In 1985, Mandelbaum had his first two exhibitions, one at the Galerie Hugo Godderis in Furnes, in northwest Belgium, and then, later in the year, one at the Galerie Christine Colmant in Brussels, the latter of which he dedicated to his father (and also to an infamous pimp and sex trafficker whom he had never met). In these shows the year before his death, his works start to enter into a kind of crossover genre that had already begun to define his life: a mix of truth and untruth. The transgression was less about any kind of particular crudity than it was about creating a transgressive, shifting identity. Around this time, he had fallen in with the Brussels underworld, at first through painting their portraits, and then through living their lifestyles. He spent time with thugs in the then-shady Brussels neighborhood of Matonge, stole a series of netsuke statuettes, assaulted and robbed a car collector. In 1986, he went to Zaire, to visit the childhood home of his wife, Claudia. The real intention of the trip, however, was to illegally traffic rare African artifacts back to Belgium and to sell them to collectors on the black market. On October 12 of that year, he stole the fake Modigliani. It was almost as if he couldn’t help translating the transgressive nature of his art to his own life.

Stéphane Mandelbaum, Francis Bacon (dessin n°1). Vers 1980

The process of self-creation is a fundamental one to art. Mandelbaum sliced his entire mode of being into distinct contradictions. He came from a Jewish family, but he drew and painted fetishized images of handsome Nazi generals. His sexuality was uncertain, but he was married to a woman, and his artworks abounded with a rejection of these truths: “fucking Jew,” “fucking gay Jew”—these words scrawled largely and crudely behind small figures of painters and poets he admired. He was not a criminal when he began to paint portraits of prostitutes, thugs, pimps, and gambling bosses, but perhaps they led him to become one. He bragged of robberies he had never committed—until he began to commit robberies. He created a self that did not exist until it did. In January 1987, children discovered his body—his face chemically disfigured, two bullets in his skull. His life took the shape of a myth, the distance between truth and fiction still nearly impossible to parse.

Cody Delistraty is a writer and critic in Paris and New York.

Pierre Bonnard, The Bath, 1925

For years, Pierre Bonnard juggled the love of two of his models. The women were Marthe de Méligny, who would eventually become the artist’s wife, and Renée Monchaty, who would kill herself in spurned grief. In Young Women in the Garden, Bonnard painted them both. They are in a bourgeois backyard garden, like something out of a Renoir or Manet, at a large table adorned with a basket of fruit. Monchaty is the focal point of the scene. She sits in a chair, turned toward the viewer; her head rests innocently in her hand. She appears contented, at ease. In the bottom corner of the scene, looking not at the viewer but toward Monchaty, de Méligny looks quietly bemused, her profile nearly cut out of the frame.

Bonnard ultimately left Monchaty for de Méligny. Sensing that his marriage to de Méligny was imminent, and that his affections were fading, Monchaty fatally shot herself on her bed. More sensationally, another version has it that Monchaty slit her wrists in the bath so that Bonnard would arrive to find her dead. Whatever the case, Monchaty’s suicide was one of the central definers, tragedies, and regrets of Bonnard’s life.

Pierre Bonnard, Young Women in the Garden, ca. 1921-23, reworked 1945-46

Bonnard lived with de Méligny for close to fifty years, and he painted her for longer. Even after she died, he conjured her from memory on his canvas. Five years after she’d died, he depicted her just as he had before. Here she is applying makeup at her toilette or soaking in the tub, still alive on his canvas. Bonnard portrayed her nearly four hundred times, but there is not a single portrait in which she is clearly shown. In Young Women in a Garden, she is cut partially out of the scene. In the numerous paintings of her lying languidly in a tub or walking about nude or in a towel or sitting in the sunroom, she is defined by the light striking her; it mystifies her, confuses her. If her face is shown at all, its particulars change frequently. It is only her body that stays the same, though sometimes even that begins to disappear. In Bonnard’s representations, de Méligny is hyperflexible, almost boneless, her form like that of a ghost. She looks about thirty years old in every painting, whether she was twenty-five or seventy or dead at the time. De Méligny, unlike anyone else Bonnard painted—besides, perhaps, himself—existed in the ethereal space of Bonnard’s own memory. His wife was the vehicle through which he could remake his past. Perhaps, these paintings seem to say, Monchaty never did commit suicide because of him. Here is the evidence: a beautiful, phantom woman is enjoying the silver-blue waters of a bath right here. This is the present and the future; with sufficient will, the past might no longer have power.

André Ostier, Pierre Bonnard 1941 © André Ostier

How do any of us make sense of our past? Bonnard’s past was particularly messy: a former lover’s suicide and a wife whom he never seemed to know fully. “How can we live without our lives?” wrote Steinbeck. “How will we know it’s us without our past?” “Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory,” currently up at the Tate Modern, is a retrospective that looks mostly at his work from the turn of the twentieth century and beyond. Paintings by fauvists like Matisse, as well as photographs of Bonnard, round out the show. (The best photograph of Bonnard is of him with one of his six dachshunds, Poucette, a name which translates to something approaching “Thumbelina.”) The central takeaway from the exhibition is that Bonnard’s fervent, inventive, sometimes bizarre use of color in his mid-t0-late career was his solution to piecing together his broken past. Two years before he died, Bonnard returned to “Young Women in the Garden.” The last time he’d touched the painting had been in 1923, when both de Méligny and Monchaty had been alive. Now, twenty-two years later, on the precipice of his own death, he changed an aspect of it: he painted the ground a dirty, golden yellow. Bonnard had begun using yellow in a mode similar to Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. In Gauguin’s Nevermore, yellow becomes the color of escape—to other rooms, to dreams, to alternate realities. The painting is of a Tahitian woman that combines an inverted posing of Edouard Manet’s Olympia with references to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” But it is the colors of the room that were of greatest interest to Bonnard: the room is composed of vibrant blues and reds, and their designs appear to be pulled from a Japanese ukiyo-e print. The woman’s head lies on the only spot of yellow in the painting. She is in a waking dream—both here and not. With the yellowing of the ground in Young Women in the Garden, Bonnard used the color as a symbol of escape. He gave the central women in his life a way out of this garden. With this change of color, he seemed to finally let them go.

Pierre Bonnard, Nude in an Interior c. 1935. Courtesy National Gallery of Art

Color was Bonnard’s arbitrator of emotion but it was also his arbitrator of space. For years, Bonnard painted the rooms of his childhood home; later, after he had married de Méligny, he painted the rooms of their shared home in Le Cannet in the South of France. These rooms were “analogues of human experience. They contained memories and told stories about their inhabitants’ lives and status,” wrote Nicholas Watkins in his late-nineteenth-century monograph of the artist. Bonnard’s painted rooms were separated by colors rather than walls—a bright red, for instance, might imply an indoor space and a pale blue might imply an outdoor one. With his use of color, there was no need for typical figurative structuring. Color itself would also become the subject of a piece, with the viewer meant to follow the light as it colored and highlighted space, taking one’s eyes outside of a house until, for instance, it landed on the sea so that one might feel as though he’s just flown through a dream. “It’s almost as if he’s trying to capture the mood as it passes into the past,” Matthew Gale, the head of displays at the Tate Modern, said of Bonnard’s use of color, “trying to fix it before it gets out of reach.”

Bonnard’s work hasn’t always been respected—nor is it necessarily universally respected now—and his use of color has been castigated for its supposed indecisiveness and meaninglessness. Picasso was perhaps his greatest detractor, once snapping to a reporter, “Don’t talk to me about Bonnard. That’s not painting what he does.” Clement Greenberg felt similarly—“smells permanently of the fashions of 1900-14”—but it was Picasso who was most merciless, telling a reporter:

He never goes beyond his own sensibility. He doesn’t know how to choose. When Bonnard paints a sky, perhaps he first paints it blue, more or less the way it looks. Then he looks a little longer and sees some mauve in it, so he adds a touch or two of mauve, just to hedge. Then he decides that maybe it’s a little pink too, so there’s no reason not to add some pink. The result is a potpourri of indecision. If he looks long enough, he winds up adding a little yellow, instead of making up his mind what color the sky really ought to be. Painting can’t be done that way. Painting isn’t a question of sensibility: it’s a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice.

Picasso could not be more wrong. Bonnard was constantly changing his paintings, particularly the colors, because he was adjusting the painting’s mood. Bonnard was not responding to nature, he was responding to himself in nature and the changes he saw therein. When he painted his wife phantasmal and languorous in the tub, he was not interested in transcending what a bathtub might look like or even what his wife might look like; he was seeing his own self in her figuration, leaking out, ceasing slowly to exist. If he changed, so, too, did the image. This is why de Méligny was never depicted the same twice; she was never the same because she wasn’t herself. She was Bonnard’s shifting projection of himself. Bonnard understood that beauty is not reliable; what is beautiful one day might be rotted, decayed, destroyed the next. An addition of blue or silver was not a response to a change in the color of the water; it was, instead, Bonnard’s shifting response to his own mortality, his own regrets of his past, his own dynamic feelings.

Pierre Bonnard, The Bowl of Milk, c.1919

The English author Julian Barnes wrote an extensive essay on Bonnard in which he claimed that minimal attention should be paid to Bonnard’s personal life when considering his art. “A little biography is a dangerous thing,” Barnes wrote, adding: “It doesn’t really matter whether an artist has a dull or an interesting life, except for promotional purposes.” When I spoke to him at his house near the Hampstead Heath a few years ago, Barnes told me that Bonnard is his favorite artist, but in his essay he seems to miss the critical fact that while doting too long on the personal lives of artists can indeed be distracting, no artist works in an emotional vacuum, especially not one like Bonnard who worked almost exclusively by drawing from—and rewriting—his own life.

Bonnard, like many artists, was working to find himself and sort through his past. He lingered on days and moments, looking for clues as to what had gone wrong and what to make of himself. His self-portraits are testaments to this search. In them, Bonnard is isolated, his face raw and red, the colors searingly alive as they perform the inverted task of showing just how dead he was inside. The shelves and tiles in the bathroom around him glisten fluidly, but his face is worked into a permanent expression of grief—a perverse rigor mortis. In one bathroom-mirror self-portrait called Boxer, the artist raises up his small, almost-emaciated fists, as if he wants to fight either himself or this idea of himself. In another self-portrait, he looks confused as to who he even is; he is bald, exceptionally disordered, unsure even of his own reflection. He is not holding his paintbrush. The viewer has not caught him faithfully representing himself; he has, instead, reconstructed his feelings of inconsolable loneliness. And yet, even by looking at and reflecting upon his own self, he seems to realize that he has come no closer to understanding. That he lets the viewer in on this process of failure is the principle achievement of his self-portraits.

Pierre Bonnard, Self Portrait, c.1938

Perhaps this is also why he was so insistent on depicting de Méligny. By capturing her in the web of his own mood, he hoped to divine his own feelings through her. Like a writer who does not know what he feels until he begins to write about it, Bonnard took stock of himself through painting de Méligny from memory. To Picasso, this was a mark of indecisiveness and a lack of control; to Bonnard, it was a form of therapy, dynamic and changing.

In John Banville’s The Sea, the protagonist, Max, is an art historian writing a monograph of Bonnard. Max constantly compares his own wife, Anna, to de Méligny. Anna has “helpless hands with palms upturned”; de Méligny in the tub, in Max’s supposition, has hands “stilled in the act of supination.” Max has, essentially, no personality; he does not have a center from which to guide his decisions and moods. He creates a sense of his self through his wife. He struggles to write the monograph because he has nothing to say; he wants only to live in the life of Bonnard and de Méligny rather than to create something from it. And just as Banville draws a parallel between Anna and de Méligny, Max is also a kind of stand-in for Bonnard: rudderless and voided of a personality and selfhood. Banville makes his point explicit: “We are defined and have our being through others.”

Pierre Bonnard, Nude in the Bath, 1925

De Méligny is the key to Bonnard’s personality because she was his personality. She became the vehicle through which he existed. As she, in his painted depictions, slumps in the tub, looks out onto their property in Le Cannet, stands naked in her room, or sits calmly next to the fireplace, their selves intermingle. He is not looking at her so much as inhabiting her. Throughout nearly all of his paintings, de Méligny remains surrounded by darkened yellows. Sometimes she is clad in brighter reds, and the space-separating color technique he used shows her existential separation but also the separation of her mind as at once his and hers. It wasn’t until he’d known her for thirty years that he found out she was not, in fact, born Marthe de Méligny, but instead had the more pedestrian name of Maria Boursin.

Approaching the end of his life, at age seventy-eight, when Bonnard went back to add that bit of yellow to the ground in Young Women in the Garden, he added one more color change as well: a gilded, yellow shine to Monchaty. Bonnard made Monchaty even brighter. She stood out, even more, as the center of the work. Perhaps, having failed to find himself in his late wife, Bonnard thought that Monchaty might have been the key. But still, that was never the issue. He was, like so many of us, unable to see himself fully—whether he was looking at himself straight on in his mirror self-portraits or projecting himself onto de Méligny, who was, of course, never even Marthe de Méligny at all.

Cody Delistraty is a writer and critic in Paris and New York.

Jean Renoir, still from La Chienne, 1931 © Les Films du Jeudi

The Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir rarely spent time with his second son, Jean. Whenever Pierre-Auguste was around the house, he demanded to be called patron—“the boss”—rather than the more typical papa, and Jean grew to view him more as a boarding school headmaster than as a father. As for the actual parenting, that was mostly left to the family’s nanny, Gabrielle Renard. Renard, who was only sixteen when she moved into the Renoirs’ home in Paris, spent years with Jean—taking him to the movies and to puppet shows, playing with toys and strolling the winding streets of Montmartre and the seaside in Cagnes-sur-Mer, where Pierre-Auguste moved the family. Ultimately, Renard became one of the central influences on Jean’s filmmaking career: where his father’s paintings often portrayed their French aristocratic class in an earnest, sentimental light, Jean’s films cut deeper, thanks to the influence of Renard’s critical sensitivity. “She taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes,” Jean wrote at the beginning of his 1974 memoir, My Life and My Films. “She taught me to detest the cliché.”

The strained relationship between Renoir père and fils manifested itself in their art. Pierre-Auguste was most present when he was painting his son. His portrait of a one- or two-year-old Jean from 1895 depicts the boy in gauzy, halcyon strokes as he smiles and coos in Renard’s arms and plays with toy farm animals. Pierre-Auguste painted from behind his easel, watching his son at a remove, as though the childhood of the boy he was painting were already part of the past. Other times, he was strict with how his son acted and looked. He forbade Jean to get a haircut until he was sixteen, forcing him to grow out his reddish hair and dressing him up in the regalia of the bourgeoisie—a pair of equestrian trousers, a bright foulard—for the sake of his paintings. 

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gabrielle et Jean, 1895. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée de l’Orangerie)/Hervé Lewandowski

When he did permit his son a haircut, even that was tied to his art: he wanted to depict Jean as a hunter for his painting Jean comme chasseur (1910), one of the most emotionally loaded paintings the elder Renoir ever crafted. Jean’s noble pose and his hunting outfit were meant as shorthand for his coming of age and his place within a larger artistic and aristocratic lineage. Stylistically, the work is evocative of Peter Paul Rubens and, even more so, Diego Velázquez’s commissioned portraits of young royalty. For Jean, however, this kind of portrait would become, as epitomized in his 1950 satiric film The Rules of the Game, a perfect encapsulation of the aristocracy’s—and his father’s—absurdity and, eventually, their self-inflicted demise.

There is always a good deal of tension within creative families. When calculating the causes for an artist’s creative success, what is the balance between DNA and family affluence and influence? And what are the emotional challenges within the family itself?

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean comme chasseur, 1910 © Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles

History has known many creative families. There are novelists such as the Waughs, the Brontës, the Amises, and the Dumases; musicians like the Marsalises; filmmakers like the Coppolas; painters like the Holbeins and the Brueghels. More rare, however, are families who succeed in separate creative pursuits—like Quincy Jones in music and his daughter Rashida in acting. Creativity, however, is often a wellspring, and children can be encouraged by their artist parents to “be creative” rather than pushed toward a specific medium. Kazuo Ishiguro, for instance, wanted first to become a musician before becoming a novelist. The author John Banville wanted first to become a painter (and his daughter Ellen is a singer). Even Pierre-Auguste first tried his hand at porcelain painting before moving to canvas.

Jean and his father rarely saw eye to eye, and while the son’s films would eventually prove themselves to be more compelling and existentially inquisitive than the paintings of his father, his work drew on their tumultuous relationship. Perhaps all creativity is, in some way, created in the crucible of family tension. Perhaps it comes from the desire to define oneself in opposition to one’s family while also living up to its expectations. Perhaps what we try to escape is invariably what defines us.

Jean Renoir in his father’s studio, 1911 (photographer unknown) © UCLA Library Special Collections

At the Musée d’Orsay in Paris—and, earlier, at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia—an exhibition called “Renoir Father and Son: Painting and Cinema” attempts to divine the secrets of their creative dynamic, although it mostly displays their similarities. It is true that, on the surface, the father’s paintings and the son’s films had numerous connections. Jean shot frequently in the South of France, especially in Cagnes-sur-Mer, and sometimes in Montmartre, where the elder Renoir tended to paint. Jean was also one of the first filmmakers to normalize shooting outdoors, taking after his father, who had been a pioneer of painting en plein air. They shared source material, too: both had a penchant for the novelist Émile Zola. Both were interested in questions of Realism and, in Jean’s case especially, the role of memory.

François Florit, poster for Jean Renoir’s Nana, 1926 © La Cinémathèque française

But the apparent similarities between the two Renoirs can be misleading. Often, what look to be resemblances are actually more devious acts of appropriation. Take, for instance, Andrée Heuschling, whom Pierre-Auguste met while she was a young girl modeling in Nice at the School of Decorative Arts. Heuschling became one of the elder Renoir’s main models, appearing in several of his seminal paintings, such as Les baigneuses (1918–19). He took particular pleasure in her company, especially as he went through a rough patch near the end of his life. His wife, Aline Charigot, had recently passed, World War I had just started, and his health was in steep decline. He nicknamed Heuschling “Dédée,” and she became not only one of his most important models but also, for a time, his central confidante. Jean knew of this intimacy and, just weeks after his father died, he proposed marriage to Heuschling. He gave her the lead role in his film Backbiters, encouraged her to change her name to Catherine Hessling to become a more marketable star, and, ultimately, put her into four more of his films. He made her his muse but also his wife, his partner, his lover. Jean had found a way to give her more than his father could. She had been prominent in Pierre-Auguste’s paintings and kept him company in dire times. Jean, taking her as wife and muse, co-opted his father’s source both of inspiration and of intimacy.

Catherine Hessling, 1926 © La Cinémathèque française

Indeed, Jean took freely from his father—in themes, in source materials, even in the people with whom he was close. But where Renoir père largely celebrated and embraced the leisurely life of the bourgeoisie, Renoir fils questioned, parodied, even disparaged it. Jean’s film A Day in the Country was one of his most finely tuned repudiations of his father’s honey-soaked values. The movie, which was based on the short story of the same name by Guy de Maupassant, depicted a bourgeois Parisian family who spend a day in the countryside, where a pair of boatmen seduce the mother and daughter. Shooting the film in Marlotte—where his father had often painted—and filming mostly at magic hour—so that golden light drenched the lakes and the grass as in many of his father’s paintings—Jean created a movie that borrowed the surface-level aesthetic of his father’s work while perverting its underlying message. At one point in the movie, the daughter looks to her mother and asks, “Did you feel a sort of tenderness toward the grass, the water, the trees?” She says this sincerely, but it comes across as anything but: the supposed aristocratic tenderness toward the natural world had always been a canard to Jean, who saw it as a place in which humans acted on their darker, lustier desires while merely dressing with decorum.

Left: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La balançoire, 1876  © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt
Right: Eli Lotar, On Set of Jean Renoir’s ‘A Day in the Country,’ 1936  © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Jean-Pierre Marchand 

Near the end of his life, Jean became more aware of how much of his self had been constructed in opposition to his father. “I have spent my life trying to determine the extent of the influence of my father upon me,” he wrote. “I did my utmost to escape from it, to dwell upon those when my mind was filled with the precepts I thought I had gleaned from him.” It seemed to slowly dawn on him that to rebel against his father was still to enter into a dialogue with him. To reject something or someone is to give it power—to admit that it merits rejection at all. “If certain landscapes, certain costumes, bring to mind my father’s paintings, it’s for two reasons,” Jean wrote: “First, because it takes place during the period and in a place where my father worked a great deal in his youth; second, it’s because I’m my father’s son.”

Sanford Roth, Photograph of Jean Renoir with one of his father’s portraits © Museums Associates/LACMA

He rarely admitted it so explicitly, but Jean had been hurt by his father’s coldness toward him as a child. They got to know each other a little better during World War I, when Jean, who had enlisted in the French army, returned to their home in Montmartre after having been shot in the leg. A picture taken in 1916 by Pierre Bonnard, the painter and a friend of the family, shows Pierre-Auguste, then in his mid-seventies, sitting in a wheelchair, while Jean, looking spry in his early twenties, sits behind him, clad in his military uniform. Pierre-Auguste’s wife had just died (he would die only three years later), and, in this photo, he looks regretful, as though, now left with so little, he mourned the lack of the filial relationship he could have had. Jean, however, looks energized. Even with his injury, he appears keen to move on, to recover and to continue with his life. In the late fifties, many years after his father died, Jean left for the United States, never to return to France. He felt the time had finally come to separate himself once and for all. “For our peace of mind,” Jean wrote, “we must try to escape from the spell of memories. Our salvation lies in plunging resolutely into the hell of the new world.”

Pierre Bonnard, Pierre-Auguste et Jean Renoir, circa 1916 Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt

Of course, the irony for the Renoirs—as for all parents and children—is that Pierre-Auguste, who watched his son grow up from behind his canvas, was able to define Jean, while Jean could only respond and react. No matter how much Jean rejected him, Pierre-Auguste had the upper hand: he had been there first. No matter how wrong he might have been, his ideas were the originals; Jean’s, even in opposition, were inevitably derivations. “We are in a period of searchers,” the elder Renoir once said, “rather than of creators.” The past always has the advantage.

Cody Delistraty is a writer and critic in Paris and New York.

Egon Schiele. Standing Female Nude with Blue Cloth, 1914. [Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg. Picture: © Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg]

Egon Schiele first began hosting teenage girls at his studio in Neulengbach, Austria, around 1910. About thirty miles from Vienna, he had a small painting studio with a garden out back. Boys and girls, often from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds, would come spend time there with him and his model-slash-lover Walburga Neuzil, whom he called Wally. Schiele was only twenty at the time. Wally was seventeen. The age of consent in Austria was fourteen (as it is today), and their relationship wasn’t much of a scandal. What was a scandal was Schiele’s painting the children and teenagers who came by his studio and, as would be written in his arrest warrant two years later, his “failing to keep erotic nudes in a sufficiently safe place”—that is, exposing these young people to his supposedly pornographic paintings and drawings.

In April 1912, Schiele was arrested and accused of “seducing” Tatjana Georgette Anna von Mossig. Mossig, a thirteen-year-old girl from Neulengbach whose father was an esteemed naval officer, had asked Schiele and Neuzil to take her to Vienna to live with her grandmother. Like many young people, she wanted to escape her provincial town. The artist and his lover agreed to take her, but once they got to Vienna, Mossig had a change of heart and wanted to return home. The next day, Schiele and Neuzil dutifully returned her. In the meantime, however, her father had gone to the police and filed charges of kidnapping and statutory rape against Schiele. That the young man was an artist—and one who depicted younger women—helped fuel the father’s suspicions. A third charge was leveled, too: public immorality for exposing young people to his art.

When the police came to arrest Schiele, they took around 125 of his drawings, classifying them as “degenerate”; as a symbolic gesture, a judge burned one of them in court. In total, Schiele would spend only twenty-four days in prison after the first two charges—kidnapping and statutory rape—were dropped, but the charges of degeneracy stuck, as they have stuck to his legacy.

Time has a way of either absolving or confirming the alleged transgressions of historical figures. Schiele, however, remains a particular enigma given the opposing interpretations of his art. Was he exploiting young people by depicting them pornographically, or was he questioning the nature of desire and adolescence without inflicting any harm?

Working at precisely the time that fin-de-siècle decadence and excess was giving way to prewar conservatism, Schiele found that degeneracy would become a key term in his damnation. Degeneracy, of course, was also the term that the Nazis would use to describe so much of modern art, from works by Vincent van Gogh to Paul Klee to Edvard Munch. “Degenerate races,” “degenerate sexualities”—any kind of aberration from white, heterosexual, “traditional” values and identities had already begun to be condemned by Austrian high society by the time Schiele began working. In 1905, Sigmund Freud was already trying to counter this idea as it entered the zeitgeist, writing in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, “It may well be asked whether an attribution of ‘degeneracy’ is of any value or adds anything to our knowledge.” Freud’s implication was that accusations of degeneracy were mere political tools and had no legitimate substance. Through this lens, Schiele’s arrest in 1912 can perhaps be seen as a political statement in a changing culture more than anything else.

But while this social shift from decadence to conservatism caught Schiele in its wake, his art was exceptionally racy, even by today’s standards. Nudity is nudity, and yet when it is handled with the beautiful lines, sickly colors, and emotional evocation that Schiele achieved, it is clear to most viewers that it is also art, not pornography. Still, his apparent interest in prepubescent girls in particular gives his work a darker quality for which it is now known.

One of his favored ways of painting or drawing a model was to have her lie on a mattress on the floor. He would ascend a ladder or a step stool and depict her from above. Jane Kallir, an art dealer and curator who oversaw Schiele’s recent catalogue raisonné, argues that this method gave agency to his models.

“By omitting any surrounding detail from his drawings and frequently giving recumbent figures a vertical reading, he created a profound sense of spatial dislocation,” Kallir writes. “The resulting tension between the subject and the edge of the picture plane calls into question the ability of the latter to contain the former. Even by today’s standards, these drawings grant women an uncommon degree of sexual agency.” Kallir admits that Schiele was not “what you would call a feminist,” but then again, few men in early twentieth-century Vienna were. She also wonders whether his female models could have been empowered by his hypersexual depictions. “Is that sexuality truly a kind of superpower,” she asks, “or does feminine allure inevitably entail capitulation to the patriarchy?”

Egon Schiele. Reclining Nude Girl in Striped Smock, 1911. (Picture: © Kunsthandel Giese & Schweiger, Vienne)

By capturing a moment in which both artist and model contend with bubbling sexual tension—these undressed girls coming of age; Schiele staring literally straight down at them—his pictures were not only a stylistic revelation but a social one as well. As Hugh Hefner started Playboy after reading about Alfred Kinsey’s report that found Americans thought about and had far more sex than “traditional society” seemed to claim, so Schiele had put the underlying decadence of Viennese society on unnerving display.

And yet Schiele’s staunchest defenders tend to omit that many of the models he painted were not exactly “women” but teenage girls. In Nude Girls Reclining (1911), for instance, Schiele drew two girls, who are probably in their early teens, if not younger. One of them looks outward at the viewer while the other looks down with a blush. Their bodies are drawn sharply; their hair flows downward. It looks pornographic, as if the viewer is being invited to take sexual pleasure in these girls’ bashfulness. But there was more going on.

Édouard Manet, Luncheon in the Studio, 1868

At the time, the conception and artistic depiction of adolescence was undergoing a significant shift. In the Middle Ages, adults were often painted playing children’s games; children were frequently depicted in adult outfits. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that a more contemporary concept of childhood emerged, and children were shown mostly as children, as in Édouard Manet’s Luncheon in the Studio (1868). Although even in this painting the sixteen-year-old boy in the foreground sports a tie, sweater, and straw hat, as would befit a middle-aged gentleman. It really wasn’t until 1895, when Munch finished painting Puberty, in which he shows a young, naked girl covering her genitalia with crossed arms, that an adolescent was first depicted as adolescents tend to be shown now: vulnerable and undergoing “the pain of transition,” as the historian John Neubauer writes in his excellent Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Adolescence.

For their part, Schiele’s depictions of adolescence seem to stem directly from Munch’s sensibilities, which were also picked up by Die Brücke, meaning “The Bridge,” a group composed of a smattering of German Expressionists, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Otto Müller, and Emil Nolde. The key difference, however, between Schiele’s depiction of adolescence and that of Munch and Die Brücke is that, as Neubauer writes, “the Brücke artists portray sexuality using the face, whereas Schiele displays it at its very seat”—that is, he showed his figures’ sexual organs. Schiele was not coy.

Egon Schiele. Striding Torso in Green Blouse , 1913. (Picture: © akg-images / Erich Lessing)

During this brief period from about 1895 to 1920, adolescence was viewed as a period of transition in a way that came to be representative of the Austro-German political climate at large. Schiele took the provocative depiction of vulnerability that was voguish at the time a step further by depicting some of his figures exposed. But his fundamental conception of adolescence was—like Die Brücke—intrinsically linked to politics. In Schiele’s time, adolescence was, in many ways, only beginning to be conceived of as a fundamentally different stage than adulthood. It is the quintessential error of the armchair historian to assume a contemporary mindset necessarily applies to the past. And here, an understanding of that fallacy is vital in determining what was the thematic exploration of a new life stage and what was exploitation.

Schiele’s popular quick, single-take drawings, like Nude Girls Reclining, weren’t merely passive vessels for the male gaze. His nude models—often depicted as staring out at the viewer with a mix of sensuality and trepidation—are indeed a locus of tension. But rather than be simply pornographic, his works require the viewer to question his or her desires much as the artist questioned his own. “Have adults forgotten how corrupt, sexually driven and aroused they were as children?” Schiele once wrote. “Have they forgotten how the frightful passion burned and tortured them when they were children? I have not forgotten, for I have suffered terribly under it.” He died when he was still quite young, in 1918, at age twenty-eight, of the Spanish flu. His last words, allegedly, were Der Krieg ist aus, und ich muss geh’n: “The war is over, and I must go.”

Egon Schiele, Nude Girls Reclining. 1911

We all have our demons, our tensions, our underlying destructiveness. Schiele used his in his art in order to criticize what he saw as an exceptionally hypocritical society, overtaken by a new movement that cast sexuality as immoral, deviant, and degenerate. From this perspective and the way in which he considered adolescence not only in political terms but as a fundamentally new life stage to be explored, Schiele’s work, paradoxically, is perhaps more morally justifiable than the historical context in which he lived.

However, in the past few years in particular, museums that exhibit Schiele’s art have generally felt compelled to include revised placards or wall texts that warn of the controversy around his personal life. A wall text at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for instance, which had a dual exhibition of Schiele and his mentor, Gustav Klimt, earlier this year, read: “Recently, Schiele has been mentioned in the context of sexual misconduct by artists, of the present and the past. This stems in part from specific charges (ultimately dropped as unfounded) of kidnapping and molestation.” At a Schiele retrospective at the Albertina Museum in Vienna that ended in June of last year, the curator explained that viewers are meant to feel slightly disturbed by the works, as this is part of their power to subvert; they’re meant to make one think about one’s own desires and relationships to social taboos. “Whereas Schiele depicted boys without any attempt at eroticization, he did sexualize his female nudes,” one wall text reads.

The representation of the female body is always erotic and seems to establish a rapport with the observer, as if a secret pact had been struck between the young seductress and the seduced spectator. In these nudes, everything is arranged to achieve the effect that its contemplation was intended to trigger. Defiantly breaking the taboos of the day, these works show the repressed sexuality of children in an openly aggressive manner.

This year marks the centenary of Schiele’s death. I made my way to two European shows on Schiele. The first was at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. The show, arranged by Suzanne Pagé (the museum’s artistic director) and Dieter Buchhart (the curator), contains over a hundred of Schiele’s works and runs concurrent with a Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective. Pagé and Buchhart do not apologize for Schiele. The focus of the show is on his style, not on accusations against his personhood. The exhibition is arranged chronologically, and the wall text encourages us to think about how his use of lines shifted throughout his career.

Another recently opened Schiele exhibition, at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, goes further. Rather than apologize for the controversy, the show implicitly defends the artist’s treatment of women. One wall text reads:

Schiele showed women to be more than just projections for passions by assigning them diverse roles, allowing them to sound out their own inner lives and presenting sexuality with the greatest possible frankness. His renderings of women are characterized by the quest for truth.

The text also claims that the models depicted “are aware of their own feelings,” underscoring the sense of agency referred to by Kallir. Schiele’s works at the Leopold exhibition are juxtaposed with those of contemporary feminist artists like Louise Bourgeois and Sarah Lucas in what seems to be an attempt to contextualize his work as, perhaps surprisingly, a kind of early feminism. Schiele’s art, writes Verena Gamper, the director of the Egon Schiele Documentation Center at the Leopold, held up “motherhood as the archetypal image of the most intimate bond.” “Traumatic separation,” she adds, “is strongly interwoven with an approximation of sexuality and death, the mainsprings of life.”

Posters on the London Underground

Other important defenses of Schiele have been aggressively mounted. Late last year, in anticipation of the centenary of Schiele’s death, the Viennese tourist board launched a series of advertisements on Facebook and on billboards across Cologne, Hamburg, London, and New York in which the artist’s nude portraits were censored with phrases that condemn the censorship. (On Facebook, and in all of the aforementioned cities except New York, nudity is forbidden in advertisements even if it’s in paintings or drawings. Only one uncensored nude Schiele mural has made it into the public world: on Spring and Lafayette Streets in New York.) On one billboard, which shows Schiele’s Girl with Orange Stockings (1914), the phrase “Sorry, 100 years old, but still too daring today” is written across the girl’s private parts, hiding them. On others, the hashtag #DerKunstihreFreiheit— “ToArtItsFreedom”—is written above the work, with a bar censoring the girls’ genitalia.

In the 1964 Jacobellis v. Ohio case, which ruled on the line between art and obscenity (specifically in regard to the Louis Malle film The Lovers), Justice Potter Stewart famously stated of pornography, “I know it when I see it.” Although a number of Schiele’s works are sexually explicit, with figures’ legs and vaginas spread, they are not strictly pornographic. This does not absolve them of their potentially exploitative nature, but it does serve to make the discussion more complex.

Egon Schiele, Eros, 1911

It is a hyper-narrow view to see his works as solely about sexuality, as these current exhibitions have done well to mention. In Eros (1911), for instance, Schiele draws a self-portrait in which he is hunched over, looking ill, with his swollen, red penis taking up much of the frame. It is an intentional reference to his supposed degeneracy. The real decrepitude, he seems to say, is not in his art but in the world. Schiele’s works reflected his time, and to censor him is to ignore both history and the devious desires we all have. By putting these dark longings out in the open, Schiele helped zap them of their power.

Perhaps not every work of art that touches on morally objectionable subjects is itself objectionable. Humbert Humbert’s morality is not Lolita’s morality. One can depict something horrid without endorsing the horror. Art is a way of contending with life, even, or especially, in its shadiest corners. If we cannot face ourselves in art, then we cannot face ourselves at all—and that is a prospect far more dangerous than any drawing.

Cody Delistraty is a writer and critic in Paris.