[I’ve become interested in The Egoist, which was published from 1914 to 1919 in London. It began as a women’s rights magazine, but transformed into a leading journal of English modernism with sympathies for anarchism and libertarianism. Digitized issues are available from the Modernist Journals Project. I am presenting a selection of essays from the magazine relevant to visual art or of note for some other reason, to be anthologized by Dissident Muse. This is the tag for the series. The following was written by critic and art historian Muriel Ciolkowska for the March 2, 1914 issue. The footnotes are mine.—FE]
In his atrocious exposure of woman in her erotic moods (“Le Gynécée,” with a gloss by Remy de Gourmont)1 M. Andre Rouveyre2 seems to show that he has had a revelation of the theory expressed as follows by Paracelsus: “The animal elements, instincts and desires existed before the Divine Spirit illuminated them and made them into man. … Animal man is the son of the animal elements out of which his soul was born and animals are the mirrors of man. Whatever animal elements exist in the world exist in the soul of man, and, therefore, the character of one man may resemble that of a fox, a dog, a snake, a parrot etc. Man is derived from the dog and not the dog from the man. Therefore a man may act like a dog but a dog cannot act like a man. … The same stars (qualities) that cause a wolf to murder, a dog to steal, a cat to kill, a bird to sing etc. make a man a singer, an eater, a talker, a lover, a murderer, a robber, a thief etc.” (“The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim known by the name of Paracelsus,” by Franz Hartmann, M.D.)3
Rouveyre’s pencil penetrates through to the animal in man and, especially, in woman. For this reason, perhaps, his portraits of women show them in baser, more organic aspects than those of men. Of the prettiest woman he makes a beast in chains—chained to her animal self. In “Le Gynécée” she creeps on all fours, is depicted rampant, biting, scratching, barking, howling, not only a grimace of herself but, also, of the animal she embodies in a human version. Here, she may resemble some apocryphal monster; there, a lion; elsewhere she is distinctly and unmistakably a goat, or an ape, or a dog, or a cat, or a toad, or a wolf—she has hind-legs and fore-legs, hoofs, claws, a mane; at her soberest and least (or most?) human she is on her knees, humble and servile. In only one drawing does she command the situation except in so far, as M. de Gourmont writes, as all the women here “yield, with the complaisance of slaves, to the design of their own passions and, while satisfying their curiosities, appear to give proof of feminine docility.” Thin and fat, tall and short, pretty and ugly, young and old, they are tragically, insatiably lascivious.
Rouveyre’s drawings have nothing in common with art, though they may be considered an art in themselves. Art, being occupied with form, renders the motions of the soul through attitude. Sometimes— as in Rodin—it seeks to render physical mobility itself. Caricature is occupied with—caricature, that is, the emphasis of obvious expression; the result is comic. Rouveyre chooses the morbid, material aspect. He sifts the divine soul from the animal soul and centres his attention on the latter. (In this interpretation I differ from one of Rouveyre’s exegetes, the late Mecislas Golberg, who, in his curious book, “La Morale des Lignes,” reverses the point.)
When Rouveyre finds himself vis-à-vis a model like Remy de Gourmont, this carnal impression, prevalent in most of his drawings, is minimised. He carefully appropriates the resources of his medium to the degree of spirituality or bestiality suggested in physical peculiarities; thus, thick lines serve to express the material; very fine ones, the ideal. An emphasised shadow will lay bare the skeleton.
When he dissects Mme. Réjane4 in her “passionate” parts, or the lewd antics of a nympho-maniac, he finds a rich field for the exploitation of the spiritus animalis. Woman, being nearer to nature than man—by which I do not mean she is his inferior, on the contrary, I think intimacy with nature, whether in man or woman, constitutes an advantage, for it does not involve the domination of the material, but that of the spiritual—woman is his pet victim; it follows that his drawings of her seem unfair (and, with respect to certain recently-published portraits, I think they are). Dr. Brandes5 has described his astonishment on finding M. Rouveyre a gentle, family-man with a predilection for his domestic hearth and the society of a charming wife and children! From the drawings he had seen he had, somewhat excusably, imagined Rouveyre to be a fierce misogynist.
Personally I question whether Rouveyre realises the horror of his work. He has no conventional ideas on beauty and is, perhaps, insensible to linear, static beauty, consequently to ugliness also. In his opinion nature is, probably, simply nature, deprived of either beauty or ugliness, to him mere words or concepts. To most of us “Le Gynécée” would seem to be a savage indictment of the “eternal feminine,” contemptuous of it like the views of a German philosopher. M. Rouveyre, I remember, appeared to be almost surprised that Mme. Réjane had taken offence at his “monograph” of her.
A “monograph” by Rouveyre (it should be noted that he has not done any of men) consists of a succession of graduated drawings beginning in a comparatively suave key to work up, through a riot, to a paroxysm of ungoverned passion in which the unfortunate victim seems to decay “layer by layer” (as Mecislas Golberg put it) until, a climax of putrefaction or devolution having been reached, serenity may suddenly re-ensue, like calm after the storm, or the peace which, in the dying, follows pain and torment. (This applies, at least, to the “monograph” of Mme. Réjane. The one of Mme. Marthe Brandès6 begins with a gentle portrait-sketch and is left at its most material and elemental.)
No one can keep his dress-mask on before Rouveyre. A surgeon becomes a butcher, the fundamental vulgarity of a face superficially intellectual or “gentlemanly” is as candidly expressed as the remark of an enfant terrible, and no face can hide its racial stamp, however faintly inherited, for Rouveyre's eyes see through walls. They see, as I have had occasion to mention, the animal resemblance which in a Darwin, for instance, can be so eloquent. Here we have the portrait of a young author who has obtained a reputation for his fables—he is exactly like a fox, and his clothes hang awkwardly on his shoulders as they do on a dressed-up dog; here, again, is the wise Aurel, the image of an owl; again, J.-H. Fabre, the entomologist, like a beetle; and, in spite of these abstractions, the likeness is appalling. How many people have I not recognised from a portrait by Rouveyre! He sees, also, the sign of death lurking behind our pathetic little attempt to play at life. The morbid core which eats the frame away, making of life a progressive death, is conspicuous to him, and, strange to say, whenever he tries to evade it, his sketches lack, precisely, in life and consequent interest. Rouveyre, when at his best, destroys to construct. This greatest of contemporary portraitists—perhaps the only portraitist we have to-day—breaks up the smooth lines of the individual form and, with a compound of his own making, sets free their expression and significance.
P.S.—It is a propos of a portrait by Rouveyre of M. Remy de Gourmont, the subtlest, most cultured, and honest of contemporary French intellects, that I have written the above lines. The subject of Rouveyre suggests a few lines anent M. Remy de Gourmont.
Interviews by correspondence are a feature of French journalism. A questionnaire is set to a certain category of personalities and their answers published. It is an ingenuous way of “making copy.” The Intransigeant has just put these two questions to a number of celebrated authors : “I. Which of your books is your favourite? 2. Which has been the most popular?” To the first question M. Bergson7 (to attend whose lectures society-women in Paris fight) has answered as follows: “My books wrote themselves, so to speak, each time I thought I had reached the solution of a philosophical problem. I put them all on the same line and prefer none. (2) ‘L’Evolution Créatrice’ has had the greatest number of readers.” To the same question M. Remy de Gourmont replied: “1. The book I will write. 2. None.”—M.C.
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Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism, edited by Jed Perl. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.
The title of this essay is footnoted thus in the original: “List of works by Rouveyre: 150 Caricatures Theatrales (Editions, Albin Michel). La Comédie Francaise (Editions Albin Michel). Carcasses Divines (Editions du Mercure de France). Le Gynécée (ditto). Phèdre (ditto). Mort de l'Amour (ditto). Visages des Contemporains (ditto).” Le Gynécée is French for Gynaeceum.
The spelling is typically “André Rouveyre,” given name accented. I have preserved The Egoist’s editorial choice here.
This sounds like a joke, but there really was a Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (c. 1493-1541), a Swiss physician and philosopher who wrote under the name Paracelsus.
Gabrielle Réjane (1856–1920), French actress.
Presumably Georg Brandes (1842-1927), Danish critic.
Marthe Brandès (1862-1930), French actress.
Henri Bergson (1859-1941), French philosopher.
This strikes me as fairly standard fin de siècle-adjacent self-conscious decadence. It apparently struck the chord it was aiming to strike.
Personally I question whether any of us realize the horror of our work...