Emily Braun is Professor of Art History at Hunter College and also teaches at the Graduate Center CUNY. In 2002-03 she was a Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is the author of Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics und Fascism and of numerous essays on late nineteenth and twentieth century art. Her latest project is The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and their Salons 1780-1945, an exhibition for the Jewish Museum, New York 2005.
This essay was written while on fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. I am indebted to Rodney Philips for introducing me to the work of Stan Brakhage and the Berg Center's collection of Beat literature. My research benefited from discussions with Thomas Bender, Caleb Crain, Roger Keyes, and Peter Gay. Thanks to Marcia Vetrocq and Edward Weisberger for their editorial comments, and especially to Julia Blaut who generously shared her discoveries of Rosenquist's source images from Life magazine.
1. Robert L. Chapman (ed.), New Dictionary of American Slang (New York: Harper and Row, 1986). One must also refer to the standard source, Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English: Colloquialisms and Catch-Phrases, Fossilised Jokes and Puns, General Nicknames, Vulgarisms, and such Americanisms as Have Never Been Naturalised, 8th edition,ed. Paul Beale (London: Routledge, 1984): "pop n.—9. an orgasm, usu. of the male: low coll.: perhaps from the mid-c. 19. (c.f. the c.p. pop goes the weasel.) Yet—my ignorance!—I hadn't seen it in print before Xaviera Hollander, The Best Part of a Man, 1975."
2. Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, book design by George Maciunas (New York: Film Culture Inc. 1963), n. p.
3. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987; New York: Bantam Books, 1993), 3; henceforth abbreviated as TS.
4. Rosenquist cited in Gene Swanson, "What is Pop Art? Part II: Stephen Durkee, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann," Art News 62 (Feb. 1964), 64; henceforth abbreviated as "WIPA2."
5. "The Brothel-without-Walls" serves as the chapter epitaph on "The Photograph" in Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 188. McLuhan goes on to identify his source for the phrase, p.189: "In a word, photography has inspired Jean Genet with the theme of the world since photography as a Brothel-without-Walls." The promiscuity of the camera image is one of the underlying themes of Susan Sontag's On Photography (1973; New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1977).
6. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," in Dialectics of Enlightenment (1944; New York: Continuum, 1990), 120-67. Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage, 1998) and "The Ecstasy of Communication," in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1983), 126-34. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
7. In 1966 Rosenquist served on a panel discussion with McLuhan in Toronto along with critic Gene Swenson, who recounted their meeting in Gene Swenson, "James Rosenquist: The re a Man Makes," The Register of the Museum of Art4 (24 October-5 December 1981), 53-81; part of a special issue "Gene Swenson: Retrospective for a Critic," The University of Kansas, Lawrence, 58. Henceforth abbreviated as "TFAMM." The passage is worth quoting at length because it is filled with clever allusions to McLuhan's recent Understanding Media and offers proof that both Swenson and Rosenquist were very familiar with McLuhan's theories, his witticisms, and pronouncement style of writing: "He brought McLuhan a fly swatter with a plastic sunflower attached to one of its sides. . . . The sunflower swatter politely but firmly refused, on more than one level, to convey a message through its medium, at any rate as I understand that phrase; the message it conveyed as a gift was, shall we say, tropical. 'Nature,' transformed into a plastic sunflower, was used to decorate and in some sense modernize an old-fashioned pest killer. Nature, in the form of a rainstorm, once caused the paper suit to disintegrate in Japan, leaving the artist high and dry."
8. At this point in the text, the first of many images should have been inserted. Due to copyright reasons, this is not possible. Readers are requested to refer to the Appendix to this essay for a full list of planned illustrations and where to find them.
9. Sontag, On Photography, 14.
10. Rosenquist alludes to Duchamp's influence in Jeanne Siegel "An Interview with James Rosenquist," Art Forum 10 (June 1972), 33-4, [henceforth abbreviated as "IWJR"] where he also recalls attending a lecture by Richard Hamilton on Duchamp's "glass piece," The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even . On numerous other occasions, Rosenquist mentions having met Duchamp: for example, in Gene Swenson, "Social Realism in Blue: An Interview with James Rosenquist," Studio International175 (February 1968), 79; henceforth abbreviated as "SRIB." Craig Adcock, "An Interview with James Rosenquist," in James Rosenquist: The Big Paintings: Thirty Years, Leo Castelli (New York: Leo Castelli and Rizzoli, 1994), n.p. In 1979 Rosenquist painted yet another subversive homage, Dog Descending a Staircase.
11. On Rosenquist's paper suit, part "technological" invention, part performance piece, see Swenson, "TFAMM," 58 and Judith Goldman, James Rosenquist (New York: Viking Press, 1985), 44-5.
12. Michael Lobel argues in Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 1, that the esthete Lichtenstein "came to be read as the consummate detached formalist," and, 23, that he and Warhol "were cast, respectively, as the good boy and bad boy of Pop art." Cécile Whiting, A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 128-32 reads Lichtenstein's public persona as a renegotiated masculinity —neither the camp dandy of Warhol nor the aggressive virility of Pollock, he represents "both the potentially emasculated" American middle-class father and the "cerebral, professional" artist. Oddly, despite the title of her book, Whiting gives no attention to the work of Rosenquist with its obvious engagement with commodity culture and advertising. On Warhol see Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz (eds.), Pop Out: Queer Warhol(Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
13. Kenneth E. Silver, "Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art," in Russell Ferguson (ed.), Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-62 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992), 179-203. Silver analyzes Jasper John's Painting with Two Balls, 180-8, as an ironic illusion to the presumed sexual potency and ballsy identity of the Abstract American painters, and to the subtext that only heterosexuals can make authentic high art.
14. In an interview with the artist, Mary Anne Staniszewski, "James Rosenquist," Bomb 21 (Fall 1987), 29 [henceforth abbreviated as "JR"] directly addressed the representation of sex in Rosenquist's pictures: "Do you see your paintings as images of hetero-male desire? In the Eighties a lot of people might ask those kinds of questions as they look at your work. Are these paintings directed at a traditional notion of male desire? Do you ever think about these questions?" The artist skirted the issue and proceeded to talk about "getting the energy to work" within the paintings.
15. Thomas Crow in "Warhol's Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol," in Modern Art and the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 49-65 argues that Warhol's images of death and disaster have more personal meaning and more social commentary than are normally credited to the artist.
16. Here I disagree with Christin J Mamiya in Pop Art and Consumer Culture. American Super Market (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992, [henceforth abbreviated as PACC] who argues on page 4 that Pop art "ultimately deflected or absorbed social and political criticism about consumer culture" because it merely reflected the system and participated in it through its own marketing practices. In Rosenquist's case, there is no ambiguity; moreover, Mamiya rules out the possibility of critique from within, a distinct possibility, given the minimum demarcation between public and private in the late capitalist period. Mamiya's claim on page 79 that the work of the Pop artists shows "no visible transformation from news photo to canvas" is also questionable. Of course, every generation differs as to what constitutes a politicized art: Rosenquist's contemporaries and his earliest champions stressed the ideological dimension of his work, most notably Lawrence Alloway, "Derealized Epic," Artforum 10 (June 1972), 35-41; Gene Swenson in the interviews conducted with the artist in the 1960s noted below, and in "TFAMM"; and Lucy Lippard, "James Rosenquist: Aspects of a Multiple Art," Artforum 4 (December 1965), 41-6. The overt protest of Rosenquist's F 111 is researched by Edward Jerome Adler, "American Painting and the Vietnam War," unpublished Ph.D dissertation, New York University, 1986, 273-92.
17. Rosenquist cited in Swenson, "WIPA2," 63.
18. Rosenquist cited in Swenson, "SRIB," 76. For Rosenquist's early years see the indispensable monograph on the artist by Goldman, James Rosenquist, 14-26.
19. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama , transl. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1985); Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1964); Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism , 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187-228.
20. Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986) and Ellen Lupton, Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (New York: Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design and Princeton Architectural Press, 1993).
21. Herbert Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of the Industrial Man (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1951), henceforth abbreviated as TMB. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1963).
22. The tomato is featured in Taxi . The lush image of a juice exuding tomato is taken from an advertisement for Campbell Soup, "The Tomato that ripens from the inside out—The Cambell Tomato," that appeared in Life 37 (18 October 1954), 39.
23. McLuhan, "The Mechanical Bride," in TMB, 98.
24. McLuhan, "The Mechanical Bride," in TMB, 98.
25. Erving Goffman, on hands, 29 and on smiles, 48, in Gender Advertisements, introduction by Vivien Gornick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). See also Judith Walters and George Ellis, "The Selling of Gender Identity," in Mary Cross (ed.), Advertising and Culture: Theoretical Perspectives (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996 [henceforth AAC]), 91-103 and Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements. Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (London: Boyars, 1978).
26. Rickie Solinger, "The Smutty Side of Life: Picturing Babes and Icons of Gender Difference in the Early 1950s," in Erika Doss (ed.), Looking at Life Magazine (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002 [henceforth abbreviated as LALM), 200-19.
27. Kaoru Yanese and Shunichi Kamiyama "Interview with James Rosenquist," The Graphics of James Rosenquist (New York: Center for Contemporary Graphic Art and Tyler Graphics Collection, 1977), 45-6.See also Michael B. Goodman, "Burroughs and Advertising: Fractured Language, Fractured Time, Fractured Image as the Universal Language," in Cross (ed.), AAC, 85-96.
28. McLuhan, "Love-Goddess Assembly Line," in TMB, 97.
29. Thomas B. Hess, "Pinup and Icon," in Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin (eds.), Women as Sex Object Studies in Erotic Art, 1730-1970 (New York: Newsweek, 1972), 223-37, and Hess, "De Kooning Paints a Picture," Artnews52 (March 1953) 30-3; 64-7, where it is noted that De Kooning used cigarette ads that promoted the "T-Zone" area of pleasure around the woman smoker's mouth, as did Rosenquist later.
30. Lincoln Kirstein, "Marilyn Monroe," The Nation (25 August 1962). Rosenquist also painted Marilyn's visage in Two 1959 People .
31. The theme of loss of identity in the sexual act as depicted in I Love you with My Ford was previously noted by Swenson in "TFAMM," 64-5.
32. Judith Goldman, "An Interview with James Rosenquist," in James Rosenquist: The Early Pictures 1961-1964 (New York: Gagosian Gallery and Rizzoli, 1992), 101.
33. Lupton, Mechanical Brides, 43-61.
34. Stuart Berg Flexner, "Preface to the Dictionary of American Slang," xvii-xviii in New Dictionary of American Slang, ed. Robert L. Chapman. Based on the Dictionary of American Slang by Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner.
35. On food and sex in slang, see Flexner, "Preface," xxvi- xxvii. As Mary Cross observes, "advertising in the pornography of its excess eroticizes words into images," ("Reading Television Texts: The Postmodern Language of Advertising") in Cross (ed.), AAC, 2.
36. Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images. The Politics of Style in Consumer Culture (1988; New York: Basic Books, 1999), expands on numerous observations on advertising and the media initially articulated by McLuhan.
37. The term media jammer is taken from Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), 154, who differentiates it from the ironist: "irony, which began as a defense against clutter now clutters the media."
38. Ernest Dichter, The Psychology of Everyday Life (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1947), vii. See also his Handbook of Consumer Motivations: The Psychology of the World of Objects (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964).
39. Life 30 (21 May 1951), 68.
40. Ernest Dichter, The Strategy of Desire (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1960), 11-21, addresses the criticism and big brother conspiracy theories leveled at him by Edward Murrow and Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: David McKay Co., 1957), henceforth THP.
41. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 229. On page 389, note 1, Friedan confirms that during her research she had full access to files and interviews at Dichter's Institute for Motivational Research based in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.
42. Siegel, "IWJR," 32. "There was more throb, more action, and I begin to think there was more power and more massive things in advertising than there was in the intellect of a person making a painting in a studio. Also, I saw soap boxes being designed in advertising agencies and they used to pin the soap boxes on the walls to see who would look at them the most and I thought there's more visual things worked out there than there is an artist's studio working singularly. . . . " Most recently, Rosenquist recollects, "I could paint any kind of advertisement that would sell something because I had years of experience doing it. I could make something that would sell a product and make money for somebody. But art for me is something different from that. . . . And I thought . . . How can I use the same energy to do something different?" in Paul Taylor, "Interview with James Rosenquist," Parkett28 , 117, 118-9.
43. ". . .And the Hooks are Lowered" is a chapter title of Packard's The Hidden Persuaders and refers to the depth probing of the consumer's subconscious, 38-45. McLuhan used the term homo boobiens in his first scathing critique of the Henry Luce press empire and its readership: "The Psychopathology of Timeand Life ," Neurotica5(Autumn 1949), 5-16. It is also worthwhile noting that in his Handbook of Consumer Motivations, 246, Ernest Dichter analyses fishing as a sport that "has retained its traditionally masculine characteristic"—it represents the "incomparable thrill of the actual catch," and "a form of mastering the outside world, comparable to hunting." Rosenquist also used a bamboo fishing pole in Two 1959 People and indicates the use of one in the source collage forMorning Sun although it does not appear in the final version.
44. John Ibson, "Masculinity under Fire: Life's Presentation of Camaraderie and Homoeroticism Before, During and After the Second World War," in Doss (ed.), LALM, 179- 99.
45. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996), especially Chapter 7, "Temporary about Myself: White Collar Conformists and Suburban Playboys," 223-57. Jane Sherron De Hart, "Containment at Home: Gender Sexuality and National Identity in Cold War America," in Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert (eds.), Rethinking Cold War Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 124-55. The literature on the crisis of masculinity in the 1950s is also summarized by Whiting, in A Taste for Popin her discussion of Lichtenstein's reputation, 130-1.
46. The source materials derives from a feature article on Truman's ties, no less, although the absence of an identifying caption in the final painting underscores how men's fashion homogenizes the image of Presidents and office clerks alike, especially by comparison to the illusion of variety afforded women. "The President's Clothes," Life 31 (10 December 1951), 67. The text reads in part: "Experts may carp, but HST has become a better dressed man. . . . " His ties from 1938 to 1951 "show no particular trend toward conservatism. He wore quiet ones as a senator in 1938 and 1942 but has had no repressions since."
47. The ad "Up from the Ranks" appeared in Life 47 (11 October 1954), 16-7.
48. David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997). In an eery replay of Stalin's procedures, Alexandr Rodchenko used black ink to efface his own photographs of Soviet party bosses published in his Ten Years of Uzbekistan after many of them had been liquidated (see King 126-9).
49. Silver, "Modes of Disclosure," 194. In 1963 Rosenquist was also commissioned to do a mural for the same pavillion, as documented in Philip Johnson, "Young Artists at the Fair and at Lincoln Center," Art in America 4 , 116-7.
50. "Up from the Ranks," Life 37 (11 October, 1954), 16-7. Rosenquist described the making of the source collagein his interview with Paul Cummings, "Interview: James Rosenquist Talks with Paul Cummings," Drawing 5 (July-August 1983), 32-3: "When something caught my eye, I would attach it to the wall. I saw a picture of telephone executives in a magazine, so I erased all their faces. They looked like eggs in a carton. It was a kind of autobiographical answer to 'What am I doing here?'" In a recent interview with Julia Blaut, in his Chambers Street studio, 31 May 2002, Rosenquist said: "I thought it was a pun. . . . They're up from the ranks to nowhere." Julia Blaut, "James Rosenquist: Collage and the Painting of Modern Life," in Walter Hopps & Sarah Bancroft (eds.), James Rosenquist: A Retrospective (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2003).
51. The advertisement for Golden Yellow Shaving Cream came from Life 42 (17 June 1957), 73. On the source photograph Rosenquist writes: "blue man with shaving cream as negative space; disappearing face while shaving."
52. Rosalind Krauss, "Photography's Exquisite Corpse," in T. A. R. Neff (ed.), In the Mind's Eye: Dada and Surrealism(Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Abbeville Press, 1985), 42-55. According to Krauss, 50-1, Ubac's Portrait in a Mirror 1938, a silver gelatin print, was an illustration for "Miroirs" by Pierre Mabille, which was published in Minotaurein 1939.
53. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman , quoted and discussed in Kimmel, Manhood in America, 236.
54. "The Top Men in American Sport," Life 26 (2 May 1949), 50-1.
55. McLuhan, TMB, 131. McLuhan's observation is worthwhile comparing to Rosenquist's statement in G. R. Swenson, "The F111: An Interview with James Rosenquist by G.R. Swenson," Partisan Review32 (Fall 1965), 595 [henceforth abbreviated as "TF111"]: "If a company or institution is using people like digits and massing them in schools of learning towards appreciating new ideas and new inventions, I react to that and try to pose a problem to think in terms of humanity again."
56. Rosenquist cited in Swenson, "SRIB," 80 in reference to a picture "with a rug and a hand." The canvas in question may be Taxi with its fragmented image of a hand running its fingers through the deep pile of grass, although the "itinerant image of home-sweet-home" is equally applicable to Nomad. As Gitlin argues in Media Unlimited, 59 and 107, "nomadicity" is also the condition of the electronic information age, since we are "never away but always at home"; moreover "the fully equipped nomad, seeking freedom of access at will, becomes fully accessible to other people's wills."
57. John Alan Farmer, The New Frontier. Art and Television 1960-65 (Austin: Austin Museum of Art, 2000). "The new frontier" was the dominant metaphor of Kennedy's nomination victory speech, broadcast live on 15 July 1960, but as Farmer notes, 17, it was equally applicable to the new age of television. See also Christin Mamiya's discussion of Pop images related to the Kennedy campaign in PACC, 74-9.
58. Packard, "Politics and the Image Builders," in THP, 181-200. Norman, Craig & Kummel, had also built up the TV quiz show, The $64,000 Question to its all-time high ranking.
59. Packard, THP, 200. David Halberstam, The Powers that Be (New York: Knopf, 1979).
60. Goldman, James Rosenquist: The Early Pictures, 101.
61. Rosenquist cited in Swenson, "WIPA2," 63.
62. Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne Jules Marey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 219-22; 315-6.
63.  (Jeff Koons and James Rosenquist talk with Christian Rattemeyer at Parkett's New York Office on 2 February 2000)," in Parkett58 , 40. Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, n.p. Brakhage disparages the notion of cinema as "absolute realism. . . . what reflects from the screen is shadow play. . . . Nowhere in its mechanical process does the camera hold either mirror or candle to nature. . . . it remains a fabricator of a visual language, no less a linguist than the typewriter." Fred Camper "Brakhage's Contradictions," Chicago Review 47 and 48 (Winter 2001 and Spring 2002), 69-96.
64. The full citation is found in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1964), 183. In TMB , McLuhan writes of the "Ballet Luce," (Time, Fortune and Life) that they shape a new set of attitudes and "wallop the subconscious" without appearing to do. His finest lines are reserved for Life, 11: "The initial layout consisted of heavy doses of pictorial violence, mayhem, and death plus equally heavy rations of strip tease (in ads and news alike), plus a wodge of pseudo-science in the form of pictorialized 'wonders of modern science.' Girlie art remains the heavy staple, but violence and mayhem have been somewhat reduced and religious art given a place beside pseudo-science. The twenty million or more Life readers are not given the same encouragement to think of themselves as a tight little club of knowing sophisticates as are Timereaders."
65. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Thesis on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). On the writing and representation of history in the modern period see Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge(Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1997); John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier and Roy Rosenzweig (eds.), Presenting the Past. Essays on History and the Public (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).
66. McLuhan, in "Front Page" in TMB, 3-4 observes how the modern newspaper with its simultaneous juxtaposition of distant materials inspired the "a new art form of universal scope" in the works of Joyce and Picasso. See also Patrice Petro, "After Shock / Between Boredom and History," in Fugitive Images. From Photography to Video (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 265-84 and Jean-Luc Nancy "Finite History," in The States of "Theory": History, Art, and Critical Discourse (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 149-72.
67. On Siqueiros's technique see Desmond Rochfort, Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera, Siquieros (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993), 146-58. Siqueiros's aggressively baroque compositional devices centered on machine imagery can also be seen in his Man, Master of the Machine and Not the Slave, 1952 National Polytechnical Institute, Mexico City, and Glorification of the future Victory of Medical Science over Cancer , 1958, Centro Médico, Mexico City. Eva Cockcroft "The United States and Socially Concerned Latin American Art 1920-1970, in The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920-1970 (New York: The Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1988), 189 covers the influence of the Mexican muralists on American painting of the thirties, fifties and seventies but not the Pop generation.
68. Hine, Populuxe, 128-9; see also Miyama's discussion of Rosenquist's Pushbutton and Pad in PACC, 26-30; 115-6.
69. The fear of the Bomb and its influence on Beat culture and Sixties radicals is summarized by Gitlin in TS, 21-6.
70. In "TF111," 599, Rosenquist states: "To me it's now a generation removed, the post-Beat young people. They're not afraid of an atomic war and think that sort of attitude is passé, that it won't occur. The Beat people, like Kerouac and Robert Frank, Dick Bellamy, Ginsberg and Corso, their first sensibility was of it being used immediately and they were hit by the idea of it, they were shocked and sort of threatened. Now the younger people are blasé and don't think it can happen. So this is a restatement of that Beat idea, but in full color." The artist also mentions his personal contacts with the Beats in Staniszewski, "JR," 28 and Yanese and Kamiyama "Interview with James Rosenquist," 45-46.
71. Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems 1947-1980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). "Howl" (1955-56), 132-3.
72. In "TF111," 596, the artist recalls his wallpaper roller technique, used first in Silver Skies : "I saw the pattern in an elevator lobby and thought of a solid atmosphere; you walk outside of your apartment into what used to be open air and all of a sudden feel that it has become solid with radioactivity and other undesirable elements." In the same interview Rosenquist goes on, 599, to discuss the umbrella imagery in the F111, though it is equally applicable to its initial appearance in A Lot to Like. Swenson asks: "Is that about fallout?" to which the artist replies, "I suppose the umbrella could be something about fallout, but for me it's like someone raising his umbrella or raising his window in the morning; looking out the window and seeing a bright red and yellow atomic bomb blast, something like a cherry blossom, a beautiful view of an atomic blast. . . . The umbrella is realistic, it's a realistic vision, with frost or snow on top of it." Hiroshige's Fifty-three Stations on the Tokaidowas published in 1833-1835 and contains numerous scenes of umbrellas in wind, rain, and snow.
73. Peter Bacon Hales, "Imagining the Atomic Age. Life and the Atom," in Doss (ed.), LALM, 102-19.
74. Robert Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns. A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956). Hess, Pinup and Icon, 224. The seamed stocking advertisement used by Rosenquist "The Most Exciting News Since Nylon. Bur-Mil Cameo / Fine Powder Finish / 60 Gauge Stockings," comes from Life 31 (19 November 1951), 6.
75. Dwight Eisenhower, "Farewell Radio and Television Address to the American People by President Eisenhower, January 17 1961," in Robert L. Branyan and Lawrence H. Larsen (eds.), The Eisenhower Administration 1953-1961. A Documentary History (New York: Random House, 1971), 1375.
76. Swenson, "TF111," 590. Of the anonymous man who makes the bomber, Rosenquist opines, "He is just misguided. Masses of people are being snagged into a life and then continue that life, being enticed a little bit more and a little bit more in the wrong direction."
77. James Rosenquist interview by Craid Adcock, 25 March 1989, in James Rosenquist's Commissioned Works (Stockholm: Painters Posters in Association with Wetterlang Gallery, 1989), 42.
78. Swenson, "TF111," 590; Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac James Rosenquist: The Serenade for the Doll After Claude Debussy or Gift Wrapped Dolls & Masquerade of the Military Industrial Complex Looking Down at the Insect World. Essay by Ann Hindry (Paris: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 1992), 39.
James Rosenquist: A Retrospective, ed. Walter Hopps & Sarah Bancroft (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2003), abbreviated as Gugg. The exhibition opened in Houston this May (it opens in NYC this fall 16 October) and the catalogue is available from the Menil Collection and Houston Museum of Fine Arts.
Judith Goldman, James Rosenquist (New York: Viking, 1985), abbreviated as JR.
Look Alive (Blue Feet, Look Alive) 1961. Oil on canvas with mirror,
67 x 58 1/2", Private Collection.
Gugg. Plate 10, 71; Goldman, JR, 84.
Sightseeing . Oil on canvas with mixed media, 48 x 60";
St. Louis Art Museum; purchase funds given by the Shoenberg Foundation
Inc.
Gugg. Plate 27, 93; Goldman, JR, 103.
Bedspring . Oil on canvas with painted twine and wood
stretcher bars, 36 x 36". Collection of the artist.
Gugg. Plate 18, 82; Goldman, JR, 95.
Woman I. Oil on canvas, 6 feet 1/8" x 7 feet; Will Hokin
Family Collection.
Gugg. Plate 19, 83.
Marilyn Monroe I. Oil and spray enamel on canvas, 7 feet 9"
x 6 feet 1/4"; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Sidney and Harriet
Janis Collection.
Gugg. Plate 23, 88; Goldman, JR, 101.
I Love you with my Ford . Oil on canvas, 6 feet 10 3/4 x
7 feet 9 1/2"; Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
Gugg. Plate 8, 69; Goldman, JR, 88.
Ad from LifeMagazine "Test Drive a '50 Ford" (24 April 1950). Gugg., 40, 29.
Pushbutton . Oil on canvas, 6 feet 10 3/4" x 8 feet 9 1/2";
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Panza Collection.
Gugg. Plate 5, 66; Goldman, JR, 82.
In the Red. Oil on canvas, 5 feet 6 1/4" x 6 feet 6 1/4";
Stefan T. Edlis Collection.
Gugg. Plate 17, 81; Goldman, JR, 89.
Pad . Oil on canvas; 6 feet 4" x 5 feet 2 1/4"; Private
Collection
Goldman, JR, 128
Lanai . Oil on canvas, 5 feet 2" x 15 feet 6"; Collection
Kimiko and John Powers.
Gugg. Plate 43, 112-3. Goldman, JR, 138-9.
The Light that Won't Fail I . Oil on canvas, 5 feet 11
3/4" x 8 feet 1/4"; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington D. C. Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation,
1966.
Gugg. Plate 7, 68; Goldman, JR, 90.
Waves . Oil on canvas and twine; 4 feet 8" x 6 feet 5". The
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Panza Collection.
Gugg. Plate 16, 80; Goldman, JR, 109.
Up from the Ranks—Source Collage. Magazine clippings
erased by the artist; 14 x 11 3/4". Collection of the artist.
Gugg, 155, 287.
Shave. Oil on canvas, 58 x 49 7/8"; Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; the Panza Collection.
Four 1949 Guys . Oil on canvas, 60 x 48" Hara Museum of
Contemporary Art, Tokyo.
Gugg. Plate 22, 87 (Collage for 4 -1949 Guys Gugg. 42, 31);
Goldman, JR, 31.
Untitled (Blue Sky). Oil on canvas; 7 x 6 feet; Private
Collection.
Gugg. Plate 29, 96; Goldman, JR, 107.
Growth Plan . Oil on canvas, 5 feet 10" x 11 feet 8";
The Gallery of Modern Art, Iwaki City Art Museum, Japan.
Gugg, Plate 63, 141; Goldman, JR, 145.
President Elect (1960-61). Oil on masonite; 7 feet 5 3/4" by 12
feet Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Gugg. Plate 11, 75; Goldman, JR, 81.
Horse Blinders (1968-69). Oil on canvas and aluminum panels;
10 x 84 feet 6"; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Ludwig Donation, 1974.
Gugg, Plate 71, 152-5; Goldman, JR, 146-9.
Siquerios, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, Electricians Syndicate, Mexico City, 1939-40.
A Lot to Like . Oil on canvas, 7 feet 9" x 17 feet. The
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Panza Collection.
Gugg. Plate 25, 90-5; Goldman, JR, 100.
Silver Skies . Oil on canvas, 6 feet 6" x 16 feet 6 1/2". The
Chrysler Museum, Norfolk Virginia, Gift of Walter P. Chrysler Jr.
Gugg. Plate 20, 84-5; Goldman, JR, 104.
Brighter than the Sun . Oil on canvas, 4 feet 9" x 7 feet
6"; Private Collection.
Gugg. 45, 32; Goldman, JR, 85.
F111 (1964-65). Oil on canvas and aluminum panels, 10 x 86 feet;
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman
and Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (both by exchange), 1996.
Gugg. Plate 54, 129-32; Goldman, JR, 130.
Car Touch , Gugg. Plate 59, 137; Goldman, JR, 143.
47.
, 48, 50, 61 , Goldman, JR, 29.
Blue Spark , Gugg Plate 31, 98; Goldman, JR, 96.
Nomad, Gugg. Plate 40, 109; Goldman, JR, 116.
Win a New House This Christmas , Gugg. Plate 50, 121;
Goldman, JR, 136.
Front Lawn ; Goldman, JR, 127.
Rainbow , Goldman, JR, 92.
House of Fire , Gugg. Plate 97, 192-3; Goldman, JR,
174.
Swimmer in the Economist (1997-1998), Gugg, Plate 136, 253.
"You could say that a society is translated in a very natural way by its favorite dance." "The Perfume of the Black Woman," Fantasio, 15 March 1910"Arrayed only in the usual leopard and buck skins. . . .  To describe it is quite impossible, but . . . there was a good deal of tossing of legs and double-shuffling."
H. Rider Haggard, She
It is 1903, a year after the black American dance, the Cake-Walk, arrived in Paris and immediately became as popular a dance as the Charleston would be in the Roaring Twenties. From the circus to the music-hall, the Cake-Walk attraction was de rigeur. Across town from the Moulin-Rouge, at the Jardin d'Acclimatation, Ashanti villagers were providing an equally popular attraction. A review in the Courrier Français of the floor show currently at the Moulin-Rouge defends the genre of the Grande Revue , accused of incessantly repeating itself. The "grotesque or charming dances" where the art of "voluptuousness" reigns is the principal element there designed to give Parisians an hour of "pure pleasure." The pretty legs, splendid decor, and lighting may be trivial (léger), but they represent a specifically Parisian art. This art is epitomized by the Moulin Rouge, and the Moulin Rouge is known the world over by blacks, whites, Asians, 80 year-olds and virgins: "It's a subject of conversation in Tchad and in Tanganyika." But that is not the only glory of the Grande Revue: the Moulin Rouge actually contributes to the cause of colonialism! "You can be sure that at this very moment, heroic . . . explorers, feverish and tired, deep in the darkness of Africa and among the grimacing blacks, see in their dreams, rising on the infested swamps the lights and gracefulness of the Moulin Rouge. And these strong men find in these trivialities an influx of courage. . . . The raised skirts contribute a little, just a little, to discoveries a little more important than the revelation of pretty legs." 1 One institution—the music hall—nurtures another—colonialism.Read this essay in light of the fact that the music-halls and their predecessors, the café-concerts, are one of the primary sites for the influx of African, Caribbean, and black American newcomers in Paris, on-stage as well as off. Turning around the idea expressed in the above article, here we will see how colonialism contributed to the music-hall. The images and fantasies that made up the extraordinary popularity of "grimacing blacks" in the music-hall, café-concert, and circus, beginning in the late 1870s with minstrels and African dancers, had a far greater influence on popular entertainment between 1878 and 1910 than has previously been thought.
Every time that the Belgian artist Félicien Rops came to Paris, he was astonished by the fantastical look of the contemporary Parisian woman, "who seemed to come from another world, as foreign as a Hottentot." 2 As I hope to show here, the distance between the image of the Hottentot and the persona adopted by white music-hall singers and dancers was not as far as one might imagine.
In previous work, I have drawn an analogy between hysterics, epileptics, and café-concert performance. The startling rise in cases of hysteria coincided in time with the creation in 1875 of a new genre of café-concert performer called the Epileptic Singer. Mark Micale has noted that "around 1878, the name of the Salpêtrière invaded even the popular magazines and newspapers." 3 The first sensational displays of African dance and of half-naked black bodies date from 1878 when Zulus danced at the Folies-Bergère. 1878 is also the year that Darwin's theory of evolution was officially recognized in France. It is a year to which I will have occasion to return. The simultaneity of these three spectacular phenomena—hysteria, Epileptic Singers, and African dance—all highly médiatique displays of the body in movement which reached mass audiences, could not help but create some degree of amalgam in the popular imagination. Journalistic descriptions show that this is precisely what occurred, and one of the effects was to inspire a fear of contagion: of gesture, of hysteria, of regression. That is the crux of this essay: I want to show how the three attractions are interconnected. By looking at the extremely popular re of the Epileptic Singer between 1875 and 1907, we can observe the fusing of the Hysteric and the Savage in the media and in the minds of the average French citizen. Colonialism and medicine; science and popular entertainment; the hysteric and the savage. 4 Celebrity provides a lens for discovering what people admire, desire, and deride: in short, for what magnetizes them. How much the celebrity of these performers might have to do with the self-image of French spectators will be taken up in the last section of this essay. It is fair to say that the image of the savage—so often emphasized in the way people saw cancan dancers, semi-nude chorus girls, and the Epileptic Singers I am going to discuss here—was in fact the predominant re of the sexually desirable woman in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth. Exotic articles of strangeness, the hysteric and the African dancer were awe-inspiring, repulsive to some, and sexually exciting to nearly all. The attraction of the Savage Woman in France can be dated as far back as the beginning of the century with the notoriety of Sartjie Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus. The body of the Hottentot Venus was by far the most popularized image of a black woman in the nineteenth century, from cartoons to the theater, and the primitive sexual appetites of this black woman were supposedly displayed most clearly by her buttocks, which constituted the primary visual attraction when she was exhibited. 5 In the vaudeville play, "The Hottentot Venus or the hatred of French Women," the African woman performs a song and dance routine which is "a little grotesque." Nonetheless, this image of Woman did not become a staple of popular entertainment until the 1870s with the Epileptic Singers. Why? The two reasons were the tremendous popular interest in Darwinism and in Charcot's hysterics. ( 1) The text, "Darwin!," by Louis de Gramont that accompanies this 1878 drawing by André Gill informs readers that "there are few people among the general public who don't know the name of Darwin, and his ideas are summarized in one sentence: 'man descends from the ape.'" Darwin himself is jokingly rumored to be rehearsing for his debut at the circus. We read: "Where will the magnificence of the Hippodrome end? They're talking about hiring the celebrated Darwin who would come to furnish the proof of his genealogy by exhibiting the prestigious agility that he inherited from his forefathers (the monkeys).—M. Littré, who shares his faith and the ancestors of the English savant, will assist him in his exercises." The drawing by André Gill shows the naturalist jumping through a hoop called "Credulity," while the author of the dictionary, Littré, holds the second hoop labeled "Superstitions, Errors, Ignorance." Their heads are on the bodies of orangutans. 6
The fascination with the hysterical body's uncontrollable epileptic contortions coalesced with the fascination for the excess of agitated movement in African dance. In both cases, the attraction is to the "animalistic" and the "savage." As Marianna Torgovnick has written, the primitive is represented as "libidinous, irrational, violent, and dangerous," res of our own "wild selves" and unconscious drives. 7 The characteristics attributed to the primitive are the same traits assigned to female hysterics in the nineteenth-century, a correspondence that Sander Gilman has examined in the context of medicine and criminology. Popular spectacle played a powerful role in creating, reinforcing, or changing these stereotypes. The Other may well be the secret self of taboos, of hidden desire, but thanks to the nineteenth-century media, the spectacular bodies of the Other are hypervisible. The convergence of primitivism with the connections forged between neurosis and modernity in the fin de siècle suggests that we situate the emergence of modernity squarely in the cabaret aesthetic of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, an aesthetic penetrated by contemporary psychiatric and biological definitions of Low.
The belly dance first enthralled and scandalized spectators at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, with the vogue for Spanish dancing following close behind; among the exotic dancers performing in Paris were la Belle Otero, Mata Hari, Colette and her intimate friend, Polaire. Along with Mistinguett, Polaire rose to stardom as an Epileptic Singer, and her popularity eclipsed that of Mistinguett until around 1910. A close look at Polaire reveals an underlying association with racial stereotypes, an important, but now lost, component of her appeal—an association with not only African women who were exhibited in Paris in the nineteenth-century, not only with photographs and drawings of African women that appeared in popular, middlebrow, and highbrow magazines, but also with black American entertainers beginning with touring minstrel shows and culminating in the explosion of a new dance rage in 1902: the Cake-Walk. To what extent did white singers and dancers incorporate black traits? Were their motives simply exploitative, or was there a conscious or unconscious identification with black Americans or Africans? Some answers should emerge in re-examining performances, memoirs, and interviews. I begin, then, with Polaire's predecessors and fellow Epileptic Singers, as well as with the African dancers who shared the spotlight in the same period.
As noted in Why the French love Jerry Lewis, "nothing was more modern, more fashionable between 1880 and 1900 than nervous pathology, whose jerky rhythms and movements define popular song and performance style in the period." 8 In the present essay, I want first to focus on aspects of the ugly and grotesque that coincided with the representation of nervous pathology.  9 Another commentator had a more pessimistic view of the deleterious effects of the café-concert: "we no longer have simply the café-concert with its raucous and slightly mad familiarity, but now the café-cancer with its hideous and stinking leprosy that eats away at us, that devours our society and that threatens . . . to make our members fall off in putrefaction." 10 As emphasized in Why the French love Jerry Lewis, if the cabaret and café-concert were low culture, that had to do as much with their direct appeal to the body as it did with the proportion of working-class spectators in the audience. The aesthetic categories of High and Low take on an unsuspected perspective when one takes into account psychological theories of the lower faculties (sensory-motor functions, automatisms, instinct) that were so widely disseminated in the period. Songs like "Nervous," "Too Nervous," "Tata's Tic," and "La Parisienne épileptique" were sung by Epileptic Singers, while "Peas," "The Hole in my Quai" and "I'm a Neurasthenic" were sung by Idiot Comics like Dranem and Darius M. They were preceded by Paulus, who invented the genre of the Agitated Singer in 1870. André Chadourne wrote in 1889 that "the public is thirsty for these songs . . . it can't get enough. And cases of pathology like this are met with more often than one would think" (LCC, 277). These performers, along with many others in the last quarter of the nineteenth-century in France, modeled their performance style on the tics, grimaces, contortions, and convulsive movements and gestures of epileptics and hysterics. Thanks to phenomenal media attention on hysteria, the great majority of spectators recognized this source. The extraordinary popularity of Epileptic Singers and Idiot Comics exactly coincided with the startling rise in cases of hysteria in Parisian hospitals, feeding into and capitalizing on a cultural phenomenon which was just getting underway. It is not by chance that the style fell out of fashion in France in 1907, at around the same time that Charcot's spectacular version of hysteria was supplanted by that of Babinski, and hysterics were no longer being exhibited at the Salpêtrière. One of Charcot's successors, Déjerine, boasted that the Salpêtrière hysterics' ward was as quiet as a monastery. In fact, the epileptiform attack no longer occurred and actors and singers thus no longer found it of interest to visit and to observe gesture. The journalist Georges Montorgueil was only one of many to point to the relationship with hysteria. He wrote, "A good half of today's hit songs . . . belong to the late Dr. Charcot's jiggling pit for the agitated.  They have gesticulatory hysteria." 11 Conversely, the theatrical exhibitions of specialists in nervous pathology inspired analogies with agitated café-concert singers: Dr. Luys and three colleagues demonstrating the effects of hypnotic suggestion are compared to "Paulus . . . presenting his most hysterical women." Indeed, the hysterical subject Esther begins to sing an air from an operetta when Luys approaches. 12 In its restructuring of the body, hysteria became a cultural phenomenon and created a new form of expression in the arts. More precisely, the theme of hysteria in popular entertainment produced a novel form of spectacle. Contained in the unpretentious but nonetheless extraordinary modernity of this new form of spectacle were the seeds of Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism.
For the last quarter of the century, the chanteuseépileptique was one of the biggest draws in Parisian night-life. The genre was created by Emilie Bécat at the Ambassadeurs in the summer of 1875. For the novelist, J.-K. Huysmans, Mlle Bécat is "that epileptic doll bleating and twisting her hips in those inept convulsions that made her a quasi-celebrity."  13 Mlle Bécat was the first (but not the last) Epileptic Singer to call forth a comparison with the simian species. Her costume as well as her movements would be imitated by a host of scantily-clothed young women.   Polaire hops around, trembles, quivers, dances with her hips, pelvis, and navel, mimes all forms of shocks and shaking." 14 Singers routinely used the word "epilepsy" to describe their style: when Mistinguett adopted a new persona, she explained that she "was tired of the daily epilepsy." I have described this performance style in detail elsewhere. 15 Here, I want to show that under the clowning and the frothy white petticoats there was more than a little of darkest Africa. (. 2-3)
The chanteuse épileptique created a style of sexual lewdness combined with clowning and extreme corporeal contortions and grimaces: the creation of a female grotesque, to use Mary Russo's term. 16 Montorgueil wrote that they were "so stupefying, so unexpected! And what clown-like poses!" Some even adopted the clown's hairstyle with a point at the top, the same hairstyle that could also be seen on minstrels performing in Paris. "With the contortions of a strangling chicken, a woman . . . bleated out a popular song." 17 The "nervous" gommeuse, Foscolo, "was not afraid . . . to be ridiculous, to make herself ugly." 18 Ugliness made singers distinctive and gave them great physical presence. Similarly, the can-can dancers led by Nini-les-Pattes-en-l'air "wagered on an exhibition that is the funniest in terms of ugliness."  You have to be brave to disre yourself like that: . . . me, the more I'm ridiculous, the happier I am." 20 (The Phenomenon, Brunin, was an uncommonly tall, emaciated man who danced in a tutu.) "Mlle Abdala, taking advantage of her exceptionally skinny physique, made the grimace into an art form." 21 Montorgeuil wrote that Mlle Abdala was "ahead of her time."  22 The Courrier Français published a long poem on Mlle Abdala in 1893.
[She is] a miracle, a prodigy, an artist. She's not like the other singers that you see everywhere. No. She is a lot rarer, certainly more bizarre.  Here she is on stage: it's an apparition that surprises and troubles you, then hypnotizes your attention. When I saw this crazy woman I thought I was seeing [something supernatural]. With cynicism and candor, forgetting that she's a woman, she triples her ugliness. She tortures the mask of her face, she makes herself as horrible as she can; she ignites the desire for some fantastic witches' Sabbath. Her neck stretches out, the head floats above it, the arms resemble the paws of an animal or anything else you want them to resemble. Her eyes bug out and hermouth grows bigger to such a point that she can put herfist into this fearful pit. It is Beauty in Deformity and in excess, the enormous comedy of lugubriousgaiety. 23
What Montorgueil saw in Mlle Abdala's ugliness was her resemblance to the black minstrels who were stealing the spotlight in the fin de siècle; Ponchon's vocabulary reiterates and elaborates on the analogy, but also underlines the singer's status as prodigy. Prodigy is the English term for the French "Phenomenon," a category of performer that will take on new meaning in the wake of Darwinism. The genre included Siamese twins, giants, midgets, hunchbacked singers, emaciated comics like Brunin, and the Pétomane, all of whom performed in the nineteenth-century café-concert. The taste for Phenomena existed before the advent of Darwinism in France; already in 1851 the café-chantant le Grand Concert des Arts, precursor to the café-concert, hired giants to sing. "Limp, be one-eyed, extraordinarily thin, fat to bursting, and, in addition, sing . . . [and] you'll easily earn 1,200 francs a month." The genre ofPhénomène was at times indistinguishable from the genre of freak. 24 In an 1867 article entitled "Women Phenomena," an outraged journalist excoriates the American and English equestrian stars, Adah Isaacs Mencken and Cora Pearl, predicting that this taste for women who were not only joined to a horse, but whose sexuality was on exhibit would lead to "Italians climbing a greased pole, which brings us to Lapps and Hottentots, we will come to that. . . . acrobats, tightrope walkers, horse-women . . . women with two heads, androgynes, monsters, this is what we need." 25 The amalgam of Phenomena and Hottentots should not surprise us: in fact, performing Africans and black Americans were often viewed as Phenomena, and it will be important to look at this effect on white singers who adopted black characteristics.
The attraction to ugliness is not present solely in popular culture, but is, of course, an extremely important characteristic of decadent literature of the last two decades of the century; it is found in middle-brow magazines as well. In the Courrier Français of 15 August 1897, a prose piece entitled "Ideal Ugliness" delineates the "peculiar aesthetics brought about by the love of the unexpected and the horror of banality."  The woman who meets this description is Darwinesque: "she singularly pleased him by the unexpected expressions that her simian physiognomy took on, running the gamut of the different sensations she felt. . . . instead of a lovely smile, she had a ferocious sneer and contortions of the cheeks." He loves her "receding forehead, without a brain." 26 Desire is aroused in women as well; a short piece entitled "The Lover who makes you Laugh" describes the attraction of "a pretty performer, a bit crazy," for a comic in a second-rung theater whose grimaces are rewarded by her kisses.   If more proof of the attraction of this constellation in popular spectacle is wanted, one could cite a review of Ouvrard by Jean d'Arc: "He's a skinny little man with . . . no stomach and an unfinished thorax, pointed knees, angular arms; oh! there are angles everywhere on this runt's body, something automatic in his gestures. . . . a face that is admirably simian, crazily planted on top of a package of nerves." 28
Thus, new forms of the grotesque—always a magnetic element in popular spectacle from the Middle Ages on—re-emerged in the mid-nineteenth-century as the allure of ugliness in singers and comics. Minstrels were able to capitalize on this fascination in the 1880s. In fact, black minstrels and the black-face genre dubbed "Les Exotiques" were becoming so popular with audiences that the journalist Montorgueil predicted they might one day triumph and singers disappear (see below). His assessment would prove to be right on the money, as will become clear when we discover how eagerly white musical singers seized upon the association with blackness that became part of their aura. Despite the décolleté, the lavish display of undergarments and the sexual content of the songs, the erotic appeal of some of the singers is, as we see, at best a curious one. This essay will suggest that the attraction of the erotic fused with the comic, extending even to a delight in ugliness, was at the heart of the popularity of both black entertainers and of the Epileptic Singers. Certainly, it is the attraction of novelty. Yet its pleasures are riskier than simply experiencing the new.
The mixture of contorted corporeal poses, comical grimaces, and unabashed sexuality in lyric, movement, and dress may be difficult to understand today. It had certainly never been seen before on stage. However, if the combination of grotesque comedy and eroticism was new to the stage, the very same mix existed in the hysterical attacks of a great many female patients at the Salpêtrière Hospital. An 1878 case history of a hysteric describes her curious attack of hysterical chorea:
The face grimaces horribly, [resumes its ordinary expression, and grimaces again . . . She gets up, walks around dragging her leg and] then begins the habitual jolts and shaking. Her left leg contracts and the entire member is taken over by a stamping movement. Finally, she suffers a fit of manic agitation where she laughs without reason, gesticulates, jumps and dances.  29
Chorea, a dance-like mania involving chronic agitation of the members, was associated with hystero-epilepsy beginning in 1878, just three years after Emilie Bécat created the genre of the chanteuse épileptique, and case observations of hysterics and epileptics with chorea in the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (such as the one just cited) and in the Nouvelle Iconographie could easily have served to describe the performances of those singers. "In jumping chorea, patients jump in rhythmic fashion, absolutely as though they were dancing." 30 Pierre Janet's hysterical patient Rose sings and takes a little bow after her attack of chorea: "She was a café-concert singer [before her confinement at the hospital] and she probably thinks that she's on stage, for she sings very funny little songs for us." 31 Conversely, Jane Avril was a patient at the Salpêtrière before becoming a star of the Moulin Rouge.
The can-can, in the view of many commentators also replicates hystéro-epilepsy. For Jules Claretie, "This epilepsy is to dance itself what the hideous couplet shouted from the depths of filthy dives is to song. And it becomes even more atrocious when the epileptic is a female dancer. Out of Woman's charm, this crazed abandon makes a hard-to-qualify unhealthy stamping and bizarre bonelessness that recall the attacks of nervous disease in that period of shaking and convulsions that science itself has named the period of clownism." He asks, "What has all this can-can flesh become? In what concierge loges, in what corners of the Salpêtrière do these quadrille dancers drag themselves along?" 32 In 1899, novelists and journalists were still comparing the can-can to hystero-epilepsy. After describing the annual Ball of Madwomen and Hysterics at the Salpêtrière, Georges Montorgueil writes, "The real Mad Ball is at the Moulin-Rouge, when the quadrille led by Rayon d'or or la Goulue unleashes that hystero-epilepsy that female clowns translate into the indecent skirt-raising [of the can-can]." 33 ( 4)
Dancing itself was far from being considered an innocent corporeal expression, and in the 1870s, alienists insisted on the relationship of dance to hysteria. 34 Dr. Paul-Max Simon wrote in 1877 that "one put one's nervous system in unison with the jiggling and stamping of the music of Offenbach, and one invariably became hysterical and sometimes insane." 35 The theory of unconscious imitation to which the psychiatrist's hyperbolic observation is indebted drew on experiments in psycho-physical stimulus response and experiments in hypnotic suggestion; the unconscious impulse to imitate directional forces and gesture, psychiatrists concluded, came from the unconscious. This theory continued to hold sway in the popular imagination in the early twentieth century. A 1907 song entitled "La Cinématomagite," interpreted by the epileptic comic, Darius M., illustrates it in the context of early cinema: "When I was employed in the cinema business [as a projectionist], I quickly caught a strange illness. As a result of watching the films jiggle and tremble, I can't stop myself from fidgeting; something in me continually dances. I have ci-ci-ci cinematomagitate. From head to rump I feel the vibrations. . . . it's the nerves at work." 36 The effects of this pathology are sexual: "when I see a [woman's] calf, I can't stay still; my cane stands up from bottom to top." As is most often the case, the uncontrollable movements inspired by popular spectacle are tied to libidinous sexual behavior.
A year after Dr. Simon published the above observation, Parisians were exposed to several strange new dance exhibitions. As indicated earlier, 1878 was a capital year for dance and, as a result, for concerns about contagion: it was the year of the first Exposition Universelle to exhibit an officially sanctioned African village and to showcase African dancing. 37 It was the year that Zulus first danced on Music Hall stages at the Folies-Bergère. 38 It also saw the first crest of popularity of the Epileptic Singer, and it was the first time that case observations of chorea appeared in the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière , then in its second year of publication.
Concurrently with the appearance of minstrels in France, beginning in 1877, large numbers of Parisians came to the Jardin d'acclimatation to see the "African Villages," a scientifically endorsed ethnological exhibit. 39 The first of these exhibits presented fourteen "Nubians" who had been transported from Africa along with a number of exotic animals. "Paris always needs a special attraction. Right now, its curiosity is vividly transported to the Jardin d'acclimatation." 40 This "special attraction," as the journalist writing in L'Illustration called it, fed Parisians' curiosity with the spectacle of a group of people going about their daily activities. Their physical characteristics, their dress and their habits seemed extraordinarily uncivilized to the casual observer, whose impressions were soon confirmed by anthropologists. Soon, to add to the thrill of the attraction, mating rituals and cannibalism were mimed as part of the ethnological exhibits. Initially sanctioned as scientific, they became more and more theatrical and commercialized. The "Amazons" of Dahomey were first brought to Paris in 1891; 800,000 visitors came to see the tableaux vivants at the Jardin reenacting the fierce battle that French forces waged against the warriors defending Abomey. A small number of women fought alongside the men: they were soon to achieve mythic status as Amazons. West Africans were in fact only presented to the French "after the exhibits . . . were turned into circus spectacles. The consequence was that, following the lead of illustrated magazines, the ethnographic exhibits made certain to show West Africans in a spectacular and sensational decor. The accent was put on their bizarre costumes, their ferocity and their savagery in order to attract and entertain the crowds." 41 The exotic animals in captivity displayed alongside the villagers were not the only unflattering juxtaposition. "Monsters"—dwarfs and giants—were also exhibited at the Jardin d'acclimatation. As mentioned before, they had already been popular acts in the café-concert for some time. In fact, among the scientific studies published in the first issue (in 1873) of the Bulletin of the Anthropological Society of Paris was Clémence Royer's study of the so-called Russian Dog-Man and his son (father and son were exhibited in Barnum's touring circus). The convergence of science and popular spectacle of course continued into the twentieth century, with scientists in the fledgling fields of anthropology and criminology capitalizing on the presence in France of Africans and of physically different individuals. 42 The 1909 exhibit and performance of dwarfs in the Jardin d'acclimatation furnishes a good example: not only did popular weekly magazines devote articles and photographs to the exhibit, but the Anthropological Society of Paris also published an article comparing the dwarfs to Pygmies who were previously on exhibit. Simultaneously, an article in Comoedia jokes about the famous criminal anthropologist Alphonse Bertillon rushing to the Jardin to make anthropometric measurements of the dwarfs' members. 43 The attraction of bodily otherness was paramount in nineteenth-century entertainment, and in the latter part of the century the attractions based on this appeal were tied to the fears surrounding the physical malformations and mental deficits of Degeneration. 44 With the advance of Darwinism (The Descent of Man was translated into French in 1872), Haeckel's idea quickly gained ground: for centuries, in the development of species only the lower forms of mental activity had existed, and the higher forms were had recently evolved. 45 As cases of hysteria and degeneration multiplied, prehistoric craniums were compared to the craniums of microcephalics and imbeciles. Evolutionary regression and nervous pathology were not only considered to be related, but one was sometimes even mistaken for the other. If, to the average French spectator, the agitation of "primitive" peoples resembled that of epileptics and hysterics, the fact that "savages" were major attractions in the same period as the Epileptic Singers and minstrels no doubt contributed to the assimilation of hysteria and black performers in the popular imagination. Finally, a confusion existed in physical anthropology between the craniums of prehistoric humans and contemporary peoples such as Africans and Australians. As early as 1888, the secretary-general of the Anthropological Society of Paris, Paul Topinard, had written in La Nature that races such as Australian aborigines and Hottentots were soon to become extinct because of their inability to adapt. Soon after this article appeared, his reconstitution of primitive life at the 1889 Universal Exposition attempted to demonstrate that contemporary "savage and barbarous races are the same humans as our European ancestors." 46 This confusion also found a home in the theater, as the skull of a present-day Australian was given a hierarchical place in a row of skulls presented at the Théâtre Antoine in 1908 (the year that the so-called Missing Link was discovered in central France). 47 A 1909 article in Comoedia by the creator of the exhibit at the theater is worth citing.
Every newspaper announced in 1908 that a Monkey-Man (unhomme-singe) had just been discovered. . . . The Pithecanthropus . . . The missing link. [The cranium] is perfectly equivocal: tiny indications of the simian race are undisputable and, nonetheless, to cite M. Manouvrier (of the Musée Dupuytren) . . . "it's a trueParisian brain!" . . . This poor cousin who returns from his provincial backwaters after an exile of 50 thousandyears feels quite at home amidst our electric luxury. . . . Does this discovery corroborate the theory of evolution (transformisme) concerning the origins of man? . . . Mr. Boule aligned . . . six craniums in the very same order that I exhibited them attheThéâtreAntoine, that of a chimpanzee . . . then, in order of merit, Java, Neanderthal, Chapelle-aux-Saints, present- day Australian, and Homo Sapiens. The orthodox refuse to believe that there is a missing link. When shown a cranium, they cry: "A degenerate!" 48
Note that the scientific search for the missing link was of such keen interest to the general public that even the craniums became a theatrical attraction. Judging from the brain, Parisians weren't that far removed from monkeys after all, particularly Parisians who were afflicted with Degeneration. Perhaps this explains the extraordinary success of so many performing chimpanzees in Parisian music-halls. The year that the missing link was discovered in France, the Grand-Guignol "Theater of Fear" staged the comedy "The Little Baboon" and Mistinguett brought her pet monkey on stage, eliciting the kind of hilarious laughter that she herself had garnered when she was a chanteuse épileptique. The chimpanzees "Monsieur et Madame X" were "frenetically applauded" at the Olympia in 1909. Darwin's theory of evolution, more and more discussed in France and manipulated to fit notions of social hierarchies, offered a scientific explanation for white superiority. Physical anthropologists were eager to uncover simian characteristics in Africans, beginning with Georges Cuvier's 1817 report published in the Mémoires du Muséum, a year after the dissection of the body of Sartjie Baartmann, whose movements the naturalist described as "brusque and capricious, recalling those of a monkey. . . . She danced in the style of her country." 49 In addition to the extraordinary popularity of the "ethnological exhibits" described above, enormous crowds came to the 1878, 1889 and 1900 Expositions Universelles to see the natives of the Congo, Dahomey, and Sénégal perform songs and dances. In 1910, the movements of African dance continue to thrill spectators and to elicit the same comparisons: "The tom-tom is father of formidable leaps, of stupefying contortions, hilarious grimaces, frenetic entrechats. . . . The tom-tom is the synthesis of Negro life. . . . The lanky dancer crouches until he resembles a dwarf, then he leaps, contorts himself, dislocates his body, grimaces . . . with the gestures and grimaces of a monkey." 50
A journalist in the magazine Fantasio writes that "In Africa, lascivious dances to barbaric rhythms accompany the meeting of the sexes. . . . Certain black women here and there are cannibals. But their charm is only heightened by it, from what one says. . . ." 51 Posters foregrounding the bare-breasted Amazon warriors of Dahomey served to advertize the hugely successful play "Au Dahomey" at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in 1892. In 1893, a spectacular show featuring 100 Dahomeyans and 25 Amazons was presented at the Casino de Paris and attended by 2.7 million spectators, not counting those who went to see other Dahomey extravaganzas at the wax museum and at the circus. ( 5) A book review of The Man with the Glass Eye, Adventures in Dahomey states that "regrettable incidents have attracted the attention of all French people to this part of the big, mysterious continent." 52 So it was that highly sexualized savages and cannibals populated the imaginations of the French in the 1880s through the first decade of the twentieth century. What spectators savored, according to many accounts, was the amount of flesh bared and the frenzied movements, and this was in strict parallel to the attraction of the chanteuse épileptique. It should be noted that the spectacle of African Amazons (as well as the 1893 exhibition of Achantis in the Jardin d'acclimatation) coincided in time with Polaire's rise to fame between 1890 and 1895.
It is 1908: the combination of undress, "excessive movement," agitation, and obscene gyrations—previously associated with Epileptic Singers and now firmly meshed with African dancers and the fantasies surrounding African women—is still very much in demand on Paris stages. "A fashion has taken over, the fashion of the nude. Little by little, our artists appeared barely belted from the navel to the hips, in the fashion of Negresses. . . . painfully contorting themselves. And then another variety of nude was dreamed up . . . she . . . who presents herself like meat on the rack. Even the loincloth of the Negro is discarded. 53
It is the African woman who springs to mind whenever contorted and sexual movement is combined with the naked female body. In addition to characterizations as obscene or animalistic, descriptions of the acts of Epileptic Singers in the 1890s when the style was at its peak contain striking analogies to portraits of Africans or black Americans in the same period. Journalists focus on the singers' "big nostrils" and big mouth as well as on their décolletageand the fact that they are " dé-cul-otée on the bottom ." 54 Naya is "a little animal with a chignon"; Vanoni possesses "the furious grace of the American, the gymnastic pantomime of this unleashed Furyowes something to the Hanlon-Lees." 55 She is "The Agitated One." 56 Can-can dancers, too, carried associations with black women: André Chadourne wanted to "stop those horrifying exhibitions of women found in the worst gutters . . . these Goulues, these Grilles-d'égout who dance on the French stage the kind of dance steps that are unknown even to the lowest form of savages" (LCC, 311). 57
The commercial attraction of obscenity—or at the very least, of sexual provocation—was central to the Epileptic Singers' rise to fame as it was to the popularity of the can-can, and it is no less central to the draw of African women in the eyes of the media. The chanteuse épileptique successfully embodies and capitalizes on Otherness: loss of control in epilepsy and hysteria, the behavior and language of a prostitute. Like Africans, they were labeled "animalistically aggressive." Even in the 1930s, Mistinguett was singing, "I'm looking for a millionaire, and that's why I walk the boulevards." When she finds him, she sings, "now kiss me. Harder, still harder, a kiss à la cannibale!" 58 Yet, singers perform in a way that is grotesque and comical enough to make the frightening aspects palatable. Later, Josephine Baker would temper the "man-eating" threat of the highly sexualized "black savage" by crossing her eyes.
Scientific theories about sexual deviance were rife in the nineteenth century, and often preposterous. Sartje Bartman's genitalia, covered by a loincloth, were the focus of countless fantasies and rumored to be strangely extended like an apron. Scientific studies of the genitalia supposedly established links between the sexuality of the black woman, the lesbian and the prostitute, as well as implying freakishness and bestiality.
A large painting of a Hottentot woman occupies a very prominent place at the entrance to Topinard's exhibit in the 1889 Exposition Universelle; it attests the persistence of the image of the Hottentot Venus 75 years after her death in France. At the end of the nineteenth century, Cesare Lombroso again pointed out the analogy between the physical characteristics of Hottentots and prostitutes. 59 Zola's heroine, the courtisan Nana, became an overnight star in her role as the Blond Venus, a name that would automatically evoke her predecessor, the Black Venus. Indeed, the play "La Vénus noire" was having a successful run at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1878; Nana was published in installments in 1879-80. Even if this role was clearly modeled on Offenbach's "La Belle Hélène," there exists, nonetheless, the echo I am suggesting. 60 One indication that the Blond and Black Venus remained tied as complementary opposites in French minds is offered in the person of one of the only music-hall performers to rival Polaire in popularity. La Belle Otero, known primarily for her Spanish dances, but who did not hesitate to dance the Cake-Walk, opened the 1903 season in a play called "Dream of Opium." In it, she is a "wild Venus (Vénus fauve) with a black mane and powerful arms, savage, but Goddess nevertheless." The reviewer salutes her "terrible voluptuousness" that does not possess the beauty of the blond Venus, but rather "the robust, crude, and powerful beauty . . . that destroys and creates." 61 The unbridled sexuality of the prostitute,"an atavistic form of humanity" according to writers like Lombroso, is a regression to a primitive stage of evolutionary development, just like the hysteric's. 62 "The links between prostitution, madness, and hysteria were fundamental in contemporary writing on prostitution," according to Alain Corbin. 63 One of these links was the loss of control represented by unleashed sexuality; another was the "love of dancing" characteristic of degenerates and of savages. 64 Charles Bernheimer has written that "hysterics on display at the Salpêtrière were the prime stimulus for many of the male fantasies about female sexuality previously projected onto prostitutes." 65 We need to add that that stimulus was matched by the gaze that was focused on African women.
In a 1909 Revue at the Olympia, Foottit played an American impresario who comes to Paris to "steal" the stars of the music-hall away from Paris. The American is accompanied by "his wife, a Négresse, agile as a monkey (played by Chocolat) and his son, a fantastical dwarf." 66 Black Americans are in fact stealing the show from Parisian stars, and their popularity in music-halls is mirrored by other bizarre or unusual performers such as dwarfs and monkeys. Minstrels were so popular that the word was included among the 45 English words every French person absolutely needed to know in case of an British invasion, along with water-closet, music-hall, and Darwin's baby. 67
The most famous black performer of the period was the clown Chocolat. Willy's friend Curnonsky called Foottit's side-kick (emphasis on kick) "Foottit's shadow, the inseparable Chocolat."  68 Most often seen in the company of his white partner, Foottit, Chocolat's celebrity nevertheless exceeded the bounds of the comic numbers the pair performed at the Nouveau Cirque. His elegance and grace outside of the circus act can be seen in Toulouse-Lautrec's 1896 lithograph, "Chocolat Dancing in a Bar." In 1894, Chocolat was already "legendary [and] the favorite amuser of the crowds" for the theater critic of the Courrier Français, Jean D'Arc. 69
Could Chocolat make women's hearts beat faster? A little tale by Jules Renard entitled "Pierre et Berthe" answers in the affirmative. Ten-year-old Berthe announces to nine-year-old Pierre that she wants to marry Chocolat. Pierre: "He wouldn't want you." Berthe: "But I want him." P: "It's forbidden for a white woman to marry a black man. People on the street would say: You see that little girl, she's the wife of a Negro!" B: "I don't care, because I love him." P: "Why do you love him instead of Footitt?" (sic) B: "Because he doesn't wear a wig or make-up. I love him, I love him." P: "He doesn't love you." . . . B: "He already loves me because he gave me some chocolates." P: "Chocolat gave you chocolates because you were at the circus. He gives them to everyone. . . . At the circus, yes, he's very nice, but not in town. In town, a Negro is always mean."  70 Little Berthe is naive, but she correctly interprets Pierre's insult. The correlation between Chocolat, chocolates, and—as we will have occasion to verify—Africans selling chocolates clearly has to do with fantasies about cannibalism. Better to eat than be eaten by a black man, as the chocolates in the form of black babies sold in America not so many decades ago remind us. If we look at the advertisements that Willette drew for the candy manufacturer Pihan, we can see Chocolat himself presenting them, a Pierrot licking the hand and arm of a lovely and scantily-attired African woman and saying: "It's Pihan chocolate," and a drawing that is very much along the same lines as the story of little Berthe.  One little girl has fallen over, landing in a position that very much resembles a sexual posture often found in Willette's drawings of cocottes; the bug-eyed stare of the black clown would seem to confirm this interpretation. 71 The chocolate hearts, like romantic black men, are bait for innocent young French girls. A monkey descending from the palm tree is juxtaposed to the black man.
 But what about black laughter?  Perhaps black laughter was angry; a French review of black dancers in America emphasizes the "Negro's ability to find every opportunity to grimace with his comical face," at the same time describing this face as "mark[ing] the transition from man to gorilla." The 1910 article begins with a condemnation of lynching in America, 500 or 600 in any given year:
it's a solution to the Black menace. . . . Lynching and beating has even lost its savor for their demanding taste; the Negro is now burned at the stake. The Negro continues nevertheless to thumb his nose at hisexecutioner with a childlike insouciance and the swagger of a schoolboy's tricks which is not without its grandeur [in this] country where the struggle for life takes on the somber aspect of murderous grappling, the Negro, with his face of soot broken by the white flash of his teeth and his mocking eyes, would seem to represent the only real gaiety of the United States. The Negro is smiling. 73
Selling chocolates is an acceptable way for black men to make a living in Paris—as long as they are not too successful.  In Raoul Ponchon's poem, "Boumboum," the "Negro of the Esplanade" sells candies he imports from Africa.  Boumboum! That is to say, bon-bon, I think. Boumboum, shouts Bamboula, opening a savage oven, so wide that you say to yourself: he's going to fall into his own mouth." 74 The merchant's gaping maw threatens to devour the Parisians around him. This is the same gaping maw that we saw in the depiction of Mlle Abdala. The unconscious connection between black men, chocolates, and cannibalism could hardly be clearer. But the fear is economic and social as well, for he is swallowing up profits that used to be made by Parisians. And, even worse, his success opens the flood gates of African immigration. The only hope is to make Africans themselves into products for Parisian consumers. Thus, at the end of the poem, all these Africans invading Paris are called "exotic products."
The black mouth also amazed spectators when Hicks' Georgia Minstrels toured Australia and New Zealand in 1877. A reviewer wrote that they were "genuine delineators of the Ethiopian character as it is seen in the United States of America, and as such they are simply inimitable. . . . two of the gentlemen have mouths which, when expanded, present an exhibition well worth the entrance money alone, for every time they open them, they seem as if they were trying to swallow their own heads. Nor is the company altogether weak in the vocal line." 75
Jean Lorrain's portrait of Polaire cited above draws attention to her "big, voracious mouth." Polaire changed her name from Emilie-Marie Bouchaud because she thought the name sounded too much like the name of a Zolian character. One can regret the change, because it would be easy to read "bouche chaude" (hot mouth) in her last name. During the second Empire, the mouth of the greatest female star of the café-concert, Thérésa, was also the focus of attention. She was the only nineteenth-century female singer to have achieved the same degree of popularity and notoriety as Polaire would. "Her mouth stretches all the way around her head; for lips, the cushions of the Negro, and they spew out the truffles found in the gutter." And the audience becomes her mirror: "The animal maw [of the public] has to be fed on rotten meat from now on." 76 She was also linked to the theme of freakishness: her biggest hit was "The Bearded Lady."
In 1886, Maurice Vaucaire described the café-concert genre, "Les Exotiques:"
English or Americans in black-face, in black tights, both agile and heavy. Heavy in order to impress the public who is thrilled when it hears the stage boards resonate under their feet (and) their insane pratfalls. Fists in the face, kicks in the pants, blows to the gut and on the head! It makes them sweat, the poor devils, and the sweat runs freely, taking off the sooty brown varnish that they've applied to their face.  In this way they're as likeable as they are terrifying. 77
In 1895, "the Parisian minstrels in strange costumes . . . sing, play the guitar, and give the impression of some tormented dream. We will no doubt have the opportunity to come back to this bizarre, this disturbing and amusing trio." 78 Black minstrels are "bizarre and disturbing, the "tormented dream" of a white public, as well as amusing. But when the blows fly, the audience exults. ( 7) They are "burlesque . . . as Negroes know how to be." 79
When, in 1893, Georges Montorgueil reflected on the longevity of the minstrel genre, he recognized the family resemblances with other acts that had won favor with the public precisely because they echoed the bizarre appearance (or so-called ugliness) and the burlesque violence of minstrel acts, violence "which always makes us rejoice." He surmised that it would be the wave of the future.
 We must recognize, in the ability of these minstrels to keep themselves on the programs of the summer café-concerts, an indication of the programs of the future where this exhibition will occupy a place rivaling songs. And maybe an hour will strike when the café-concert will be a place without any concert at all. . . . The singer will come there to exploit a special, distinctive ugliness like the musical Negroes, and Mlle Abdala will be a star of the first magnitude. 80
If one of the threats that black performers posed was to become so popular as to threaten the disappearance of other café-concert genres, then it was necessary to copy them. I want to show here that not only did the movements of black entertainers influence white singers and dancers, but their grimaces and perceived "ugliness" constituted an attraction that also inspired white Epileptic Singers.
On 1 November 1902, an American troupe presented a new dance, one which was to become what the French call "un phénomène de société." That dance was the Cake-Walk. 81 Introduced in the review Les Joyeux Nègres at the Nouveau-Cirque by Mr. and Mrs. Elks and their troupe, the jerky, syncopated rhythms of the Cake-Walk were described by Jean Cocteau: "They danced: skinny, crooked, their . . . knees higher than their thrust-out chins. . . . wrenching their gestures from themselves. . . . They reared, they kicked, they broke themselves in two, three, four. . . . The delirious public was on its feet stamping. Never has a trendy spectacle composed of saltpeter, not even the first jazz music accompanying the dances of Gaby Deslys at the Casino de Paris, never has a spectacle been comparable to this apparition." 82 Note that Cocteau published this account a full decade after Josephine Baker's Paris debut in 1925. 83 The next years witnessed a veritable explosion of cake-walk-o-mania. ( 8) At the Ambassadeurs, Strit performed "La cakewalkomanie," Odette Auber sang "Professeur de cakewalk," Anna Dancrey sang, "with his cakewalk he charms me, my little Negro." "Uncle Tom" and "Black American" were sung by Epileptic Singers and Foottit and Chocolat parodied the dance. The mania was not limited to the stage. In 1903, several Cake-Walk films were released. In a very brief period of time, however, the "elegance" perceived by the Courrier Français journalist disappears (it was, moreover, entirely overlooked by Cocteau in his 1935 memoir), giving way to a vision of a backward slide to a prior stage of evolution. Of the six American films of the dance held at the Library of Congress, only one resembles the descriptions that can be read and seen on film in France, the "Comedy Cake-Walk"; all the others are far more elegant and restrained in movement. 84 It would seem that Cake-Walk dancers in France quickly adapted their performances to French expectations, expectations that one can only surmise were the fruit of the African spectacles which had preceded their arrival on French shores. The 1899 program for M. B. Curtis' Afro-American Minstrels and Variety Company thus becomes more comprehensible to us. After a "Lilliputian Creole Contortion Danseuse," "The Grand Cake Walk" is presented. "Participated in by 16 Devotees of Delsarte, who stand ready to defend their claim as Champions on the merits of Style, Grace and Execution." 85 (François Delsarte [1811-1871] was a theorist and teacher of drama and mimicry who put forth gestural language as the most direct expression of the Soul.) Accordingly, the reviewer writes, "the Cake Walk was a decided novelty, and the house was charmed by this unique spectacle of Negro grace." 86 In his report from New Orleans, Harry Trémont underlined the difference I am pointing out: "the serious (solemn) cake-walk [is] not one of these grotesque, meaningless contortions which were recently an epidemic in our salons, but a real competition of elegance where a cake is the prize." Yet, only a page later, the reporter reverts to the commonplace perception, the one that governs French spectators. "The eyes roll comically. . . . the couples begin to move. What an exhibition of expertly clown-like graces! You're supposed to walk with elegance [but] you would think they were cocks in heat. Moreover, they have an irresistibly libidinous temperament. . . . then the rhythm accelerates . . . frenetically [which] forces them to make incredible contortions." 87 The implications of frenetic rhythm and the raw energy exhibited in black bodies dancing the Cake-Walk, as we see, include not only physical prowess but a "libidinous temperament." The latter is underlined in the contemporary press on a remarkably frequent basis.
An elegant young Parisian couple, seated at a café, the man haggard and fatigued, watch as a tall, proud Sudanese man walks by. This is an advertizement for a pick-me-up that claims to be an antidote to neurasthenia.  It seems that it's thanks to Kola Marque that the Sudanese and other exotics are so solid and vigorous." 88 In the 25 August 1900 issue of Le Rire, a middle-aged Bourgeois returns home to find his wife in bed with a black man. Both are startled and afraid, but the husband exclaims: "Ah, so you're the Negro: please continue." In another drawing, an elegant threesome is composed of a Parisienne with a black man on each arm. 89 Dangerous attraction, to say the least, judging from other drawings. An African tribal chief tells a tall, young member of the tribe who is handcuffed to a Parisian cocotte in lingerie and black stockings: "We have all we need for now; we'll eat her when we're in the Sahara." An African is dancing wildly in the background. 90 A poem by Raoul Mayence entitled "The Black Peril" sums up the fear of black men: "Negroes prowl around your women in the Luxembourg Gardens. . . . Perhaps their ambition is to subjugate and captivate all of Paris." 91
"The Trial of the week" by Lucien Perrin, featured in the first issue of the 1892 Courrier Françaisoffers one example of the "Black Peril."
The Negro, Jo Adeko, had at his side a charming little woman, as blond and white as he was black. Ah! The rascally Negro! Or, rather, the rascally white woman! . . . for this Negro had irresistible attributes, if Ibelieve the scandalous chronicles and the number of his conquests [which] attest brilliantly to his worth; decidedly, nobody can surpass Negroes in this domain: such was, at least, the conclusion drawn by the women present at the trial. . . . Poor Parisian males, what Pygmies we are next to this Hercules of love. . . . This Negro . . . is of royal heritage. . . .  The Negro and his mistress were sentenced to a week's imprisonment. 92
But the sexual energy in the Cake-Walk could also be seen as a form of Devolution: "The lower we descend in the scale of animal life, the more prominent do the motor reactions become. This life is primarily of the instinctive type," wrote the American psychologist Boris Sidis in 1908. 93 The raw energy and abandon of the body in the Cake-Walk with all its implications of regression, sexual violence, and the domination of the "lower orders" is imported into France from an "uncivilized" place: black America. The spectacle is, at the same time, exotic. "The operetta 'Floradora' is so exotic that it cannot fail to excite and retain Parisian curiosity. . . . An extraordinary Cake-Walk sends the audience into delirium with its simian gestures." 94 In Raoul Ponchon's poem, "Le Cake-Walk," we learn that the energy and agitation of the dance comes down to us from our (fore)fathers, the apes! "This dance of our fathers, the monkeys [is composed of] agitation and twisting in the attempt to bite oneself. The disorder has an order to it; it is all done according to a far-distant ritual." 95 Ponchon's poem is written in response to a news item, inserted as epigraph to the poem, that society women are forming an anti-Cake-Walk league. The magazine Le Rire warns: "While there is still time, before the Cake-Walk obsession has taken over all classes of society, let it be known that this Negro dance is all the rage; its vogue reached its apex with the Bals de l'Opéra and l'Opéra comique. . . . It's everywhere: at the Bouffes-Parisiennes: 'Floradora'; le cake-walk; Nouveau Cirque: Joyeux nègres, le cake-walk; Opéra: 'Siegfried—5th act,' le cake-walk. . . . [Attend] the big protest meeting against [the new negro dance], la Mana Negra." 96 A month later, it is clearly too late: the Cake-Walk has taken over in elegant Parisian salons, as the following poem laments.
In 22 stanzas of "Pavane et Cake-Walk," Jacques Redelsperger contrasts "the dances of France" with the Cake-Walk. In the former, the cadence of French dances carried their partners toward the joyful land of love, and aristocratic ladies reserved their gestes canailles (naughty gestures) for the bedroom. "Alas, today French brains are topsy-turvy and the prancing of monkeys has turned the universe upside down. Hip! Hip! Hourrah! Let's shake our bodies, chimpanzees and female monkeys, everyone goes at it with his convulsive jolt. . . . The epileptic Cake-Walk makes us look like broken toys who spin like madmen.  Any minute, you expect them to climb up into their coconut palm trees. . . . Oh little society women, keep the waltz and the Boston, and let this dance be sweated out by the inmates of Charenton." 97
Dancing the Cake-Walk effects an instantaneous evolutionary regression, and what is most disturbing is the willingness of the symbol of elegance—la Parisienne—to lead the dance. ( 9) What's more, it makes the French look like madmen, and it should be left to the insane who are interned in Charenton hospital. In addition to the agitated kicking, the arched back must have reminded spectators of the hysterical arc de cercle. And indeed, among the adjectives that spring to Redelsperger's pen are "epileptic" and "convulsive." What is new is the emphatic reference to monkeys. And the Cake-Walk spreads to all levels of Parisian society like a contagious malady. 98 Naturally, the concern is that this dance that blurs class and race boundaries will eventually destroy those distinctions. Result: everyone will be savages. In an 1899 drawing by Willette, "How the French are Seen Abroad," a French couple dressed as African natives are observed with fear and mistrust by other Europeans. ( 10) The French are already exotic and sexually provocative in the eyes of their British, German, and Slavic neighbors! The situation is more dire in this 1901 Willette drawing: ( 11) the French couple has truly regressed to a prehistoric stage of humanity: They have become savages. And the reason is given in the caption: "Parisians, deprived of the Comédie Française, return to the life of savages." It doesn't take much; just take away the clothing of civilization or the civilizing effects of high culture, and Parisians will revert to a prehistoric moment in time. Nonetheless, and this has been pointed out again and again in commentary on the French reception of Josephine Baker in 1925, regression is also experienced as a sense of liberation. The exhilaration of seeing and imitating the black body in movement was already crucial between 1889 and 1904. And the fantasy of regression was not foreign to the thrill: nostalgia for a more instinctual life is apparent in the following poem. "By the folds of the brain . . . science proves to everyone that Man had the Monkey for a father. Madame, at your service!  Let's return under the coconut trees, where, all day long, the drunkenness of gorillas is allowed—Happiness unknown to man." 99 Thus, in a 1904 drawing for Le Rire, the French President Loubet awards the Legion of Honor to a Cake-Walk-dancing chimpanzee, "creator of our national dance of France," pronouncing these words: "Who said that the cake-walk was American in origin?" ( 12)
The fascination for the rhythms of the black body in dance was very much akin to the fascination for the crazily frenetic rhythms of the Epileptic Singer. The Epileptic Singer deliberately foregrounded her strangeness, and the sexual fantasies that surrounded her were further primitivized by lending her the traits of an African woman, [Begin Page 644] and by linking her to animals and atavism. 100 A famous Epileptic Singer, Emilienne d'Alençon, also performed with a trained donkey act, and, after years of stardom in the café-concert, ended life as a concierge. The journalist interviewing her in 1902 remarked that "You often finish like you began! . . . Atavism is not a meaningless word." 101
These images constructed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, built upon in the first decade of the twentieth, are essential to understanding the public for Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre in 1925. I now want to show how the combination of clownish postures, of hyper-sexuality, and of "bizarre and charming" black dance movements were co-opted by white stars.
When Polaire danced the Cake-Walk, Willy wrote that it had "remained a dance of epileptic savages—and like a representation of colic and the illustration of Vomito Négro, until the day that Polaire was kind enough to dance it on the stage of Les Mathurins." 102 This assimilation of epilepsy, blackness, savages and disease jumps off the page like the leaps of an epileptic dancer off the stage. Willy may have wanted to distinguish Polaire's performance of the Cake-Walk from what was repulsive to him in the "[nauseating] epileptic savagery" of the dance, but in fact Polaire was already associated with the dark continent. 103 One might begin with Raoul Ponchon's 1902 poem entitled "Polaire" which remonstrates against negative characterizations of the singer. "Despite the enormous caricature of her by Sem and Cappiello, Polaire is an exquisite woman. . . . Unfortunately, I don't know if, in addition, she is Callipyge. . . . she has dark and golden skin. . . . I love the metallic sound of her laughter and her chaotic gestures." 104 The Callipyge Venus in the museum of Naples had exaggeratedly developed buttocks and, indeed, the caricaturist Sem had made her resemble the Hottentot Venus. Ponchon's poem was the second in a series of four. One of Polaire's critics, Hugues Delorme, responded in the following issue of the Courrier Français. Not only does he reiterate the qualification of callipyge, but in the last quatrain, we find our old friend, the paragon of ugliness, Mademoiselle Abdala. "You, Ponchon, adore Polaire?! . . . What a cynical lie! The only heart that your heart tolerates, is it not that of Abdala? . . . " 105 (As we will soon see, Polaire and Abdala not only shared the black, voracious mouth, but like Abdala, she was viewed as a Phenomenon.) Polaire herself wrote a response to Ponchon in the following issue acknowledging his compliments and elaborating on her female critics as "envious creatures": whatever their name, "they are always la môme caca!. . . . [and] it is thanks to their grumbling that I realized how charming my [physique] was." 106
Born in Algeria of an Algerian-born Frenchman, she had "dark skin, a physique one wasn't accustomed to meet in Paris." 107 In her memoirs, Polaire par elle-même, Polaire writes "My instincthad me make crazily excited gestures. . . .  I let my wild mane go free. . . . I sang bent over backward . . . with nervous, exasperated movements" (PPEM, 83; emphasis mine). Every part of Polaire's body, from the contractions of her hands to the tensed-up members, twitching feet and the arc de cercle , conforms to the picture of nineteenth-century hysteria. At the same time, much of the italicized vocabulary also evokes the savage with equal insistance. The media seized upon the image of Polaire as the incarnation of sexual vice, and that contributed to her meteoric rise to stardom. 108 Yet Polaire's image did not only draw on the comparison of the Epileptic Singer with the prostitute. It reached farther down into the French psyche. Léon Nemo and Jules Gondoin wrote that "her capricious and pretty face of a delicate and perverse little animal is profiled on the most modern of Parisian horizons." 109 Her friend Colette noted that when Polaire was sad, she "leaned her cheek on her shoulder like those ravishing little monkeys [sold by] dealers in exotic animals." 110 Again we see the attraction of epilepsy and animality. What I want to try to untangle in these descriptions of gesture in Polaire's performances is the question of instinct and influence. The source named by Polaire in her own account of them is "my instinct." From her instinctual drives came the "nervous movements" and the "crazily excited gestures." But is this the same instinct that is called to mind for the readers of Le Courrier Français in 1894?  With her strident voice, she excels in the fashionable, nervous, neurotic morbidity. . . . All of this instinctive noise, incessant stamping and trembling. . . . This, henceforth, is the genre Polaire." 111 One can safely assume that, when nearly three million spectators watched dancers from Dahomey in that year alone, the words "instinctive" and "incessant stamping"—an image underlined by the references to North Africa in the same article—brought forth images of African dancers, while the constellation of "instinctive noise, trembling, nervous and neurotic" also brought forth the image of hysterics. Nonetheless, Polaire was (it seems to me) imitatingneither African dancers nor hysterics. On the contrary, she tries to make a case in her memoirs for the origination of these gestures in her own nervous system. In the interviews that I cite below, we will see that she also accounts for a personal, childhood source for the dance movements that resemble those of Africans. Only 18 years old in 1894, Polaire from that time on takes credit for "inventing" the genre épileptique. In the article cited above, Jean d'Arc writes that she is "a wildcat whose eyes glimmer in the Algerian nights with bizarre and wild reflections: she was born in Algiers—on the border of dull civilizations [and] the deserts of liberty." In addition, she has "the breasts of an Almée," that is to say, a belly-dancer ("MPAA," 9). Polaire may be "the most Parisienne among Parisians," but she is nevertheless more the "daughter of Africa with her languorous eyes brilliant with sunshine, and the slow lascivious walk of women from down there." 112 The oscillation between "the most Parisienne" and the "daughter of Africa" could not be more important; it is precisely this undecidability that made Polaire the biggest music-hall star of her generation. And, along with her "neurotic" traits, it is also key to her title to modernity, as the earlier reference to the "most modern of Parisian horizons" attests. In an interview for the magazine ComoediaIllustrated, Polaire confessed: "I knew I was more strange than pretty, I felt myself more capable of emotion and passion than of comedy, what was I doing—despite the success and money—on a music-hall stage?" 113 And in a Fantasio interview, after describing her childhood in Algeria, she claims that she learned the belly dance from Ouled-Nail nomads while still a child and danced it to enthusiastic "little Negroes" in the neighborhood. Criticized for her lack of decorum and unconventional behavior, she explains: "I am a sauvagesse." She then asks a leading question, but one that we should have no trouble answering: "the little Savage has not only become a Parisienne, but one of the most representative silhouettes of Paris, this Paris where all fashion of paradox becomes reality. How did that happen?" 114 The answer will become so obvious that in 1925, no one will have to ask the question. Her dark skin and her excessively narrow waist (which accentuated her hips) were the reason that "people insisted on only seeing me as a Phenomenon (une phénomène)" (PPEM, 10-1). In the context of the music-hall, as I have noted, the term Phénomène has a very precise meaning, akin to "freak." What made Polaire a phenomenon was also her physique, but—as we see from her own description—not only the famous wasp-waist. She mentions her wild mane twice in her memoirs. She cropped her hair short—just above the shoulder—in 1900: twenty years before other "liberated" women all rushed out to "bob" their hair in order to conform to fashion. This and her narrow waist explain her being billed in America as "The Ugliest Woman in the World," a billing that confirms the above equation between Phenomenon and freak. ( 13) For there was a precedent in America for the billing: it was Julia Pastrana, a bearded Mexican-Indian woman with simian features and "yellow-brown skin" who sang and danced between 1854 and 1860; Pastrana was also sometimes billed as a freak, "The Apewoman." Her "hideous" face, as an 1888 commentator described it, was in stark contrast to the grace she exhibited in dancing Pepitas and flings in short dresses very much like those worn by singers in France. 115 Polaire's involvement in the fascination that Blackness held for Parisians was not unidirectional: Polaire bought and brought back a young black man from her American tour, as we learn to our shock in an article in the magazine Femina. The illustration shows the smiling sixteen-year-old Jimmy alongside the medallion inscribed "I belong to Melle Polaire. Please return me to her" that he supposedly wears around his neck. 116
If, as I suggested earlier, Polaire was intent on underlining the origins in her own body and in her own childhood for nervous, epileptic movements, as well as for African dance movements, she nonetheless would not have been able to stake a personal claim for the black American Cake-Walk. In the mind of the average French spectator though, there was a considerable amount of conflation between Africans and black Americans. Did Polaire's Cake-Walk express her own identity, or did it mime the fantasized identification of her public? A review of a musical at the Moulin-Rouge, "The Belle of New York," notes the irresistible desire on the part of spectators: "You will split your sides laughing. The night of the premiere, the spectators were so delighted by the play, so worked up and carried along by the extraordinary movement which is the characteristic of this genre of spectacle that some of them left dancing the jig involuntarily, while others were carried away and executed steps of the cakewalk." 117 The reviewer also remarks that the "perpetual jigs make one think that all of the characters are afflicted with the St. Vitus Dance." The space of performance is an exchange between performer and audience—particularly in the café-concerts and music-halls where audience participation was firmly implanted from the beginning in these sites. Moreover, the intensity and specificity of this exchange in late nineteenth-century Paris was colored by the dynamics of unconscious imitation that I have discussed elsewhere. When racial identifications are inserted into this exchange, the dynamics are complicated further. To cite W. T. Lhamon, "when a gesture comes to stand for someone other than its apparent originator, what is the meaning? How does it happen? . . . Maybe marketing of gestures exhibited this complexity of cultural property: that it was saleable but never exclusive property. You could buy it and you could sell it, but you could not own it. Maybe the step took over the stepper, an inversion analogous to the tail wagging the dog."  118 He is attempting to trace the evolution of gesture from these street performances of the 1820s to the mid-century blackface minstrel shows, and he is using the wheeling gesture as a gestural touchstone. I find his remarks very pertinent to performances of the Cake-Walk at the turn-of-the-century, whose gestural touchstones are the arched back and the high kicking strut. What has been exchanged between Polaire and her public? The fascination that the energy of black bodies in movement holds for the French has been incorporated into Polaire's person, thanks to her physique, her movements, and to the media. 119 The attraction that the image of blackness holds, as it is seen and fantasized, is now packaged in a product with white skin that can be openly enjoyed by the masses. 120 Polaire has managed the aesthetic creation of a type removed from the real thing. Thus, Willy was able to write that until she danced the Cake-Walk, it had "remained a dance of epileptic savagery and Vomito Negro." Still, the residual feelings of fear and repulsion are present and Polaire was the first to feel their sting. Polaire's short hair was a striking and brazen example of her Amazon-like nature; she wrote that people found her short hair disgusting, and petulant, she insistently repeated that her "wild mane" was not in fact naturally curly. When she appeared at Les Ambassadeurs in the early 1890s, already a star, she became fodder for humorists and caricaturists.  Always the same error about my hair: it was neither black nor curly. . . . Sem ornamented my body with enough rotundities to put the Hottentot Venus to shame!" (PPEM, 93). 121 ( 14) Photographs of Polaire show her to have dark, wavy hair, but the caricaturist's transformation is easily understood: he is simply completing a picture of sexuality and Phenomenon that includes Blackness. Polaire may not have known why people always made the mistake, but we do: epileptic contortions and fever-pitched sexuality immediately brought associations with blackness. In the text that accompanies this image, Sem accuses contemporary couturiers of pathologizing fashion: "the processions of disarticulated manikins (resemble) a music-hall extravaganza" producing "scenes of modern hysteria" and "moral perversion" where the only thing missing is "the Négresse." 122 However, she is not missing for long: women dressed in these fashions look like "female savages decorated with talismans. . . . Papous from New Caledonia with dyed manes, (and) troglodytes."  This weave of images—the music-hall, dance as hysteria, pathology as fashion, vice, the savage Négresse, evolutionary regression past (Troglodytes) and present (Africa, New Caledonia)—is the one I have been elaborating upon in this study. What we must note, though, is its tenacity, for Sem is writing in 1914. By then, this cluster of associations has become a cliché, a cliché, moreover, that Josephine Baker's 1925 debut will exploit to its fullest. Polaire's extraordinary appeal as the incarnation of Vice must also include the "Négresse's sexual savagery," and I venture to say that she knew that very well. Now that we have seen the image of the Hottentot Venus spring to Polaire's mind, we can be certain that the term "Phénomène" did not occur innocently in her memoirs. For in fact, the first female Phenomenon to be exhibited in Paris in the nineteenth century was none other than Sartjie Baartman. It was not for nothing that Polaire and another dark-haired Epileptic Singer, Eugénie Fougère, a Spanish Jew, were the first white stars to dance the Cake-Walk in Paris. Fougère was described as "naïve et sauvage," and when she returned to the stage in 1920 after a long hiatus (in a musical revue with none other than Polaire), she appeared "in the costume of an American Negro." At least in this original fantasy, she told an interviewer, "I felt my old self again." The incorporation of blackness by this white singer suggests that the motivations for adopting a black persona and the effects of such a mascarade might have gone beyond the purposes of simple exploitation. 124 Essentially making the Cake-Walk a variant of her own style, the bawdy female café-concert performer encouraged the oblique aura of racial attributes that already hovered around her to become a more explicit part of her persona.
Contained in this aura was an extraordinary sense of liberation from the layers of inhibition imposed by societal conventions and taboos against bodily abandon; freedom, too, from rejections of images of illness, deformity, and ugliness. This "return of the repressed"—marked as inherent to "primitive" peoples and, at the same time, as symptom of epilepsy and hysteria—was facilitated by the form of popular spectacle invented by the "animalistically aggressive" singers I have described here. Discussing the mirror held up by the media, Mary Russo has written that grotesque representations of women, the disabled, and sexual and racial minorities offer one the chance to "parade in these fun house mirrors [and to] surrender one's identity as no longer possibly correct, recognizable, . . . but inevitably bound to other bodies and strange selves." 125 This dynamic is akin to Freud's Uncanny and is precisely the one at work in the Parisian spectators' experience of the Epileptic Singer, the minstrel, and the African dancer. Freud writes, "we see in epilepsy and madness the workings of forces hitherto unexpected" and dimly perceived "in a remote category of [one's] own being." 126 This is clearly a dynamic that thrilled spectators in the electrified, nervous ambience of the Music Hall. 127 For the more sophisticated members of the public, this liberation was not only that of the body, but that of the mind and senses: those spectators sensed that they were experiencing a new art form.
Picasso's 1907 "Demoiselles d'Avignon" explicitly joined African masks to
prostitution (and syphilis) and moved these fantasies about the primitive
onto the stage of High Art at the same time that the musical purveyors
of the primitive were leaving the stages of popular entertainment. Two
decades later, black primitivism would be incarnated by Josephine Baker,
and the aggressive, animalistic dislocations of the Epileptic Singers'
bodies would be definitively forgotten.
Rae Beth Gordon is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut. In addition to numerous essays on correlations between medical science, literature, art history, and aesthetics, she has written Ornament, Fantasy and Desire in 19th-Century French Literature (Princeton University Press, 1992) and Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford University Press, 2001). She is currently a Fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.
All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
1. Marcel Lami, "Revues: Moulin-Rouge 'T'en as un oeil' de MM. De Fursy et Ch. Mougel, Olympia 'Paris qui chante' de MM. Montréal et Blondeau," Courrier Français (8 November 1903), 3-4.
2. In Edmund de Goncourt & Jules de Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire, 1864-1867, vol. 7 (Monaco: Editions de l'Imprimerie nationale de Monaco, 1957), entry for 3 December 1866, 222, emphasis mine.
3. Mark Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and its Interpretations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 198.
4. An analogy between the hysteric, the savage, the prostitute and the criminal was drawn by the Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso in the 1880s.
5. The same focus prevailed when a belly dancer was described by Gabriel Mourey in 1890: "she shakes her generous hips . . . and her monstrous behind" (Mourey, "Théâtres," Courrier Français [31 August 1890], 2.) It makes one wonder about the underlying fantasies that the bustle may have inspired in the fin de siècle.
6. Louis de Gramont, "Darwin," La Lune rousse (8 August 1878), 1. Gramont explains Darwin's theory as well as Lamarck's and Saint-Hilaire's previous theories e.g. transformism, and observes that certain people now want to claim that murder is a form of the struggle for survival, but "a scientific theory isn't a catechism destined to deal with the behaviour of the Bohemians in the Latin Quarter," 3.
7. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 8.
8. Rae Beth Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 80. Henceforth abbreviated as WFLJL.
9. Maurice Vaucaire, "Le Café Concert," Paris Illustré 50 , 130.
10. André Chadourne, Le Café Concert (Paris: Dentu, 1889), henceforth abbreviated as LCC. Chadourne is obviously evoking the specter of syphilis, an image that attached itself to the image of the café-concert singer.
11. Georges Montorgueil (et.al), Les Demi-Cabots: Le Café-concert, le cirque, les forains (Paris: Fasquelle & Charpentier, 1896), 14; also in "Le Café-Concert," L'Echo de Paris (9 December 1893), 2.
12. E. Lepelletier, "Les nouveaux dieux," Gil Blas (31 October 1887), cited in Nicole Edelman, Les Métamorphoses de l'hystérique (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 2003), 192.
13. Joris-Karl Huysmans, "L'Exposition des Indépendants en 1881," in L'Art moderne / Certains (Paris: U.G.E., 1975), 227.
14. Jean Lorrain, "La Ville empoisonnée," in Pall-Mall Paris (Paris: Jean Crès, 1936), 279.
15. See WFLJL. See also Rae Beth Gordon, "From Charcot to Charlot," Critical Inquiry 27 (spring 2001), and Rae Beth Gordon, "Epileptic Singers on the Parisian Stage," in Rosemary Lloyd and Brian Nelson (eds.), Women Seeking Expression (Monash, Australia: Monash Romance Studies, 2000). Portions of the material in the present essay are drawn from these texts.
16. Mary J. Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1995). We might think of Bakhtin's medieval virago of Carnival, an aspect of the world "accessible only to laughter"; see Linda Frost's "Circassian Beauty and Slave," in Rosemary Garland Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 298.
17. Montorgueil, "Le Café-Concert," 3-4 and Georges Renault & Gustave Le Rouge, Le Quartier Latin (Paris: Flammarion, 1899), 116.
18. Max Viterbo, Foscolo Dossier, BnF, Département des Arts du spectacle, Collection Rondel.
19. Jules Roues, "Concerts: Casino de Paris," Courrier Français (10 January 1892), 10.
20. "Yvette Guilbert," Courrier Français (14 December 1890), 6.
21. Romi (Robert Miguel), La petite histoire des café-concerts parisiens (Paris: Jean Chitry, 1950), 21.
22. Montorgueil, "Le Café Concert," 17.
23. Raoul Ponchon, "Abdala (du Petit-Casino)," Courrier Français (16 April 1893), 2; my emphasis to indicate parallels with the contemporary descriptions of the minstrels and Africans we will soon have the opportunity to study.
24. Vaucaire, "Le Café Concert," 132. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the film critic Ricciotto Canudo also drew an analogy between "the educational exhibition of unknown peoples, moving, shaking, throbbing" and "the display of 'freaks' acts in the old fairgrounds" (in Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism: a History / Anthology, 1907-1939, vol. 1 [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988], 59-60).
25. Bilboquet fils, "Women Phenomena," La Lune (10 February 1867), cited in Kari Weil, "Purebreds and Amazons: Saying Things with Horses in Late 19th-Century France," in Differences: a Feminist Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 , 1-37.
26. André Savignon, "Ideal Ugliness," Courrier Français (15 August 1897), 4.
27. Alphonse Lemonnier, "The Lover Who Makes You Laugh," Courrier Français (6 January 1901), 3.
28. François Caradec & Alain Weill, Le Café Concert (Paris: Atelier Hachette / Massin, 1980), 138, 140, my emphasis.
29. Désirée-Magloire Bourneville & Pierre Réynard, "Observation III: 'La Chorée rythmique hystérique,'" Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, vol. 2 (Paris: Progrès médicale-Delahaye, 1878), 184.
30. Dimitri Michailowski, "Etude Clinique sur l'Athétose double," in Nouvelle iconographique de la Salpêtrière, vol. 5 (Paris: Bataille & Co., 1892), 253.
31. Pierre Janet, L'Automatisme psychologique: Essai de psychologie expérimentale sur les formes inférieures de l'activité humaine (Paris: Alcan, 1889), 66.
32. Jules Claretie, La Vie à Paris (Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1885), 521-2.
33. Georges Montorgueil, "Paris Dansant," Courrier Français (11 April 1886), 3.
34. See Felicia McCarren, Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
35. Paul-Max Simon, Hygiène de l'esprit au point de vue pratique de la préservation des maladies mentales et nerveuses (Paris: Baillière, 1877), 98.
36. The song (music by Scotto, lyrics by Briollet and Lelièvre), discovered too late to include in the book, confirms notions put forth about unconscious imitation and cinema spectatorship in WFLJL.
37. The Musée de l'Armée also inaugurated an ethnographic exhibit of wax dummies in 1878. An article by Col. Duhausset in the 23 March 1878 issue of L'Illustration entitled "The Ethnographic Gallery of the Museum of Artillery" informs the reader that "It is all the more precious to conserve the exact representation of certain degenerate races because some of the numerous types of human savages will soon only be a memory," 187.
38. In America, too, African song and dance became part of popular spectacle: in 1879, the Hyers sisters opened in San Francisco in a "new burlesque" entitled "Urlina, African Princess."
39. H. T. Sampson dates the first black minstrels in London in February 1870; they were followed by Hick's Original Georgia Minstrels in July 1870. The earliest examples of minstrelsy in Paris that I have been able to date are: the Mannon Sontargs who presented musical numbers, burlesque sketches, dances and acrobatics, ending with a comic monologue by one of the endmen, "considered to be a marvel of grotesque humor" (1875-1880; in Alan Weill, Exposition Chaumont 1993: Jazz, pop, rock [Paris: Somogy, 1993], 29). In 1877 at the Alcazar d'Hiver, Armand Ben introduced the character of the black Dandy, a parody of white nouveaux riches. The following year, Jilson and Reed, billed as Burlesque Negroes—a name that will stick to the end of the century, performed at the same venue. By the 1880s, a new café-concert genre had emerged called "Les Exotiques," American and Englishmen in blackface.
The director of the zoological Gardens was the celebrated evolutionist, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. The spectacle of fourteen Nubians going about the activities of daily life in the Paris Jardin d'acclimatation was a huge commercial success. Around thirty such exhibits followed up until 1912, and enjoyed the same success. These are the years of French colonial expansion (1870-1910) during the Third Republic. The 1881 Terra del Fuego exhibit in Paris drew over 50,000 visitors on a single Sunday (the natives of Terra del Fuego had the distinction of being designated by Darwin as the lowest form of the human race). Only the very briefest sketch of these exhibits is given here; the reader is referred to the work of Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, Laurent Gervereau, Images et colonies (Paris: Achac/BDICE, 1993) and Nicolas Bancel & Sandrine Lemaire (et al), Zoos humains: de la Vénus hottentote aux reality shows (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 2002), henceforth abbreviated as ZH.
40. G. B., "Nubians at the Jardin d'Acclimatation," L'Illustration (4 August 1877), 71. Although the article states that there were thirteen Africans, scholars cite the number as fourteen (see Bancel and Lemaire, ZH).
41. William H. Schneider, "Les expositions ethnologiques du Jardin Zoologique d'acclimatation," in Bancel & Lemaire, ZH, 76.
42. There were over 80 articles based on observations of natives in ethographic exhibits.
43. One amusing proof of anthropological knowledge filtering down to the Music Hall is Willette's 1899 cover of the Courrier Français: a sexy dancer backstage, with index finger and thumb indicating a distance of one inch, reports to two elegant and amused suitors that "Bertillon's member is this big."
44. A reading of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in this context clearly illustrates the conflation between degeneration theory and evolution in 1886. Hyde is "like a madman," "ape-like" and "troglodytic," "deformed somewhere," and "stump[s] along" with a pathological gait (1886; New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 4, 8, 18, 27.
45. Jules Chéret, whose posters were instrumental in visually defining the modern Pierrot, wrote that "this modern type [was] thrown into a life too great for his atavistically contracted brain." Cited in Paul Hugounet, Mimes and Pierrots, (Paris: Fischbacher, 1889), 223.
46. Gilles Boetsch & Yann Ardagna, "Zoos humains: le 'sauvage' et l'anthropologue," in Bancel & Lemaire, ZH, 60.
47. The Neanderthal man was discovered in Germany in 1856, just three years before Darwin's Origin of Species. In 1867, prehistoric life was depicted for the first time in Paris at an Exposition universelle; the following year a Cro-Magnon skeleton was discovered in the Dordogne (France). Pithecanthropus erectus was discovered in Java, and was reconstituted at the 1900 Paris Exposition universelle. Finally, the Pithecanthropus man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints was discovered in the Corrèze (France).
48. Paul Hyacinthe-Loyson, "Mon Singe," Comoedia (1 January 1909), 1-2. Fantasies about the short distance between human and simian abound at the turn of the century. See, for example, Armand Charpentier's novel Le Roman d'un Singe (Ollendorf, 1895).
49. He also compared her habit of protruding the lips to that of orangutans. Georges Cuvier, Mémoires du Muséum d'Histoire naturelle, vol. 3 (Paris: Belin, 1817), 263.
50. Paul Bourgette, "The Perfume of the Black Woman: Fêtes galantes," Fantasio (15 March 1910), 563-4.
51. Henri de Weindel, "Black Charm" Fantasio (1 September 1906), 100. The allure continues to hold fast in reviews of Josephine Baker's performances. Nancy Cunard described the "cannibal beauty." Parallels with Epileptic Singers are rife: "the little savage of the early days with her delirious, grotesque dances" (Cunard, Negro [1934; New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969], 329). In those early days, Pierre de Régnier asked: "Is it a man? . . . Is it a woman? . . . the voice is high-pitched, she is in a perpetual tremble. . . . this dance of rare indecency is the triumph of lubricity" (cited in Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], 99). These examples are far from being the only ones that demonstrate an extraordinary similarity between perceptions of the Epileptic Singers and perceptions of Josephine Baker (whose dancing was labeled epileptic by two journalists reviewing the premiere of La Revue nègre), explored in greater detail in my book in progress, Backstage at the Moulin-Rouge: Dancing with Darwin.
52. "Livres," Courrier Français (3 January 1892), 6.
53. Puck, "The Audaciousness of the Nude," Fantasio (15 March 1908), 809; my emphasis.
54. "Profils d'Artistes et de Mondaines: Valentine Valti," Courrier Français (5 April 1891), 8.
55. The Hanlons, like the Clodoches, were forerunners to the epileptic, eccentric, and agitated genres of singers and comics in the café-concert. See Baudelaire's essay on the comic, "De l'essence du rire," in Curiosités esthétiques: L'Art romantique (Paris: Garnier, 1962), and Chapter 3 in WFLJL for descriptions of the pantomimes of the Hanlons.
56. Jean D'Arc, "Aux Ambassadeurs: Vanoni," Courrier Français (7 June 1891), 8.
57. Charles Zidler, the owner of the Moulin Rouge, should be cited in this context. His intention was to create a space where "the venal woman would be queen, a form of luxurious slave market with this difference that the unpaid slave would be the most stylish prostitute of the moment" (see Howard J. Lay, "Pictorial Acrobatics," in Gabriel Weisberg (ed.), Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 164.
58. "Je cherche un millionaire" by Léo Lelièvre and Henri Varna.
59. See Sander Gilman's Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
60. Scholars have analysed the focus on Nana's protruding buttocks in the painting by Manet. Note that in Jean Renoir's 1926 film adaptation of Zola's novel, Catherine Hessling continually takes a pose that consists of an even more pronounced jutting out of the derrière.
61. Le Rideau de fer, "Otero aux Mathurins," Courrier Français (20 December 1903), 3. The Théâtre des Mathurins was the site where Polaire first danced the Cake-Walk.
62. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 98. Gilman notes that Lombroso's analogy between the Hottentot and the prostitute "simply articulates. . . a view which had been present throughout the late nineteenth century" .
63. Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, transl. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 298.
64. Corbin, Women for Hire, 303 and 305.
65. See Charles Bernheimer, res of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in 19th-Century France (London: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 252. Robert Nye writes that "unregulated sexual behavior was not simply perceived as a threat to moral order but as a biological menace to the social organization itself" (Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984], 158.