Lathers probes romance, reality of artists' models
by Susan Griffith
The 19th century French reader loved romance stories about the Parisian artist and his female studio model. While an object of beauty on canvas, her portrayal in literature was frequently that of the artist's ruin, according to Marie Lathers, CWRU's new Elizabeth M. and William C. Treuhaft Professor of Humanities in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Lathers is the author of the newly published book, Bodies of Art: French Literary Realism and the Artist's Model (University of Nebraska Press).
She will talk about the history of the artist's model as a profession, in conjunction with the Cleveland Museum of Art's new exhibit, "Picasso: The Artist's Studio." Her lecture, "Posing in the Studio: Models in Paris, 1860-1920," begins at 2 p.m. Sunday, November 18 in the Recital Hall of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150 East Boulevard. The museum will host a book signing for Lathers following her talk.
Bodies of Art explores how authors portrayed the artist's model in French literature, a relatively unexplored research topic, according to Lathers.
Her museum lecture focuses on the opening chapter of her book. She gives a historical overview of modeling in 19th century France, and especially Paris, whose citizens revered their artists. She emphasizes that the book examines the working woman as a model and draws a clear distinction between the model and prostitute-a distinction that both 19th and 20th century writers and historians have often failed to make.
Although there have always been artist's models, Oscar Wilde described modeling as a modern invention, and Lathers agrees.
Modeling as a true profession rose at the 19th century's beginning, following the freedoms which the French revolution of 1789 ignited. Instead of the academy controlling who produced officially sanctioned art, the revolution enabled the rise of a new, plentiful group of unofficial academies and studios.
"The increase especially in the 1830s and '40s of the number of bohemian artists allowed working-class women to find higher-paid work as artists' models, rather than as seamstresses or factory laborers," says Lathers.
The profession ebbed by the early part of 20th century as the artist's model became increasingly important for the photographer, and the art world shifted away from realism to the avant garde, which required less and less the presence of a model in the studio.
Researching memoirs of artists, School of Fine Arts records, newspapers, and art journals of the time, Lathers found preferential changes in the types of models. In vogue in the 1820s was the Parisian type, followed by the Jewish or "exotic" model in the 1830-40s, the Italian model from the 1850-70s, and a return to the Parisian type of model in the last decades of the 19th century as anti-immigrant and nationalistic views prevailed.
Lathers describes her book "as the evolution of the model," not only from the perspective of changes in model types, but from an examination of the literature where the models aged from a younger woman in Honore de Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece, the middle-aged model in the Goncourt brothers' novel, Manette Salomon (also the name of the fictional Jewish model), and then to the aging woman in Octave Mirbeau's short story The Octogenarian.
Society did not always view these women kindly. The studio model was portrayed as a vixen by some and defended as a professional by others. "It became more and more difficult to distinguish between what was true about the occasional shift from changing the studio from the atelier to the boudoir, and what was invented for the sake of attracting readers to both fictional and non-fictional accounts of the artist's life," explains Lathers.
But when love, marriage, and family entered the studio, especially in the period's literature, the model's influence was often interpreted as extremely negative.
"When she turns the studio into a home where there are children and the woman is cooking dinner, she destroys his creativity," explains Lathers. She elaborates that a romantic myth surrounded the artist that he must live alone to create and should not come in contact with the realities of the world.
Lathers also found that, over time, the artists' perception of the model changed from the initial ideal beauty of the young model whose body is transformed by pregnancy and age, to where she starts to represent the material, practical world.
"The artist is supposed to be free of all the constraints of society, but the woman drags him back into this materiality through her body, which represents the very physical realities of childbirth, worries about money, and all these things that pull him back into the middle-class life that he has tried to escape," she adds.
Bodies of Art is among Lathers' research that focuses on art and literature. It had the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers.
Lathers came to CWRU in July as a visiting professor from Iowa State University, where she was an associate professor of French. Her appointment to the Treuhaft chair became official November 7 at CWRU's Board of Trustees meeting. The chair was established in 1968 with a gift from William C. Treuhaft, who also funded a chair at the Weatherhead School of Management.
She is a specialist in French literature and art. In addition to teaching French language and literature courses at CWRU, Lathers will be director of the graduate studies program in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and she will oversee the interdisciplinary program in French Studies.
Lathers earned her B.A. in French from the University of Maryland at College Park and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University.
With the publication of Bodies of Art, Lathers plans to embark on a project that looks at the significance of the statue Venus de Milo. The statue was discovered on the island of Melos in 1820 and brought to France in 1821. It now resides in the Louvre Museum in Paris.
