| The Artist's Model | ||||||
Bodies of Art explores how authors portrayed the artist’s model in French literature, a relatively unexplored research topic, according to Prof. Lathers. 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 nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and historians often have failed to make. Although there have always been artist’s models, Oscar Wilde described modeling as a modern invention, and Prof. Lathers agrees. Modeling as a true profession rose at the nineteenth century’s beginning, following the freedoms ignited by the French revolution of 1789, which 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 artist’s models rather than as seamstresses or factory laborers,” says Prof. Lathers, who received the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers for her book.
Researching memoirs of artists, School of Fine Arts records, newspapers, and art journals of the time, Prof. Lathers found that there were trends in the different types of models through the years. In vogue in the 1820s was the Parisian type, followed by the Jewish or “exotic” model in the 1830s and ’40s, the Italian model from the 1850s to ’70s, and a return to the Parisian variety of model in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as anti-immigrant and nationalistic views prevailed. The CWRU professor describes her book “as the evolution of the model” not only from the perspective of changes in model types, but from an examination of literature. Models aged from a younger woman in Honoré de Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, to the middle-aged model in the Goncourt brothers’ (Edmond and Jules) novel Manette Salomon (also the name of the fictional Jewish model), and finally to the aging woman in Octave Mirbeau’s short story “The Octogenarian.” Society did not always view these women kindly, notes Prof. Lathers. 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 nonfictional accounts of the artists’ life,” explains Prof. Lathers.
The author 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 the point at which she represents the material, practical world. “The artist is supposed to be free of all the constraints of society,” adds Prof. Lathers, “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.” With the publication of Bodies of Art, Prof. Lathers, who came to CWRU last July as a visiting professor from Iowa State University, plans to embark on a project that looks at the significance of the statue Venus de Milo. Discovered on the island of Melos in 1820 and brought to France in 1821, the statue now resides in the Louvre Museum in Paris.  Susan Griffith Photograph by Michael Sands, CWRU Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Raphael and the Baker’s Daughter [Raphael et la Fornarina], 1840, oil on canvas 1957.013, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Bequest of Frederick W. Schumacher |
