Cirque the plastic arts

From 1900 to 1920, Pablo Picasso, assiduously frequented the famous Parisian Medrano circus, set up on the boulevard de Rochechouart, and represented harlequins [Harlequin, 1917, Picasso Museum, Barcelona; Portrait of an adolescent as Pierrot, 1922, Picasso Museum, Paris; Paul as a Harlequin, 1924, Picasso Museum, Paris], acrobats [Acrobat family with monkey, 1905, Göteborg Konstmuseum; The Acrobat, 1930, Picasso Museum, Paris], jugglers and circus riders (note the important stage curtain that he created in 1917 for the Parade ballet by Erik Satie, performed by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes at the Théâtre du Châtelet [Stage curtain for the ballet Parade, 1917, national museum of modern art, Pompidou centre, Paris]. However, Picasso is not to be our main thread. Instead, we will look at the American painter Edward hopper (1882-1967), with this painting, Soir Bleu (1914) [Whitney Museum of American Art, New York], a nostalgic memory of his time spent in Paris, and whose central, front-facing figure is that of the white clown. This figure seems to us to be a bridge between modern paintings from the early 20^th century and the corrosive, playful, ironic, disillusioned representations. It even seems to take a grotesque opposing view to some contemporary artists such as: Cindy Sherman¹, Bruce Nauman², Ugo Rondinone³ and perhaps, the closest to Hopper's white figure-landscape, the American artist Roni Horn with her series of drawings and photographs Cabinet of (2001) [Hauser & Wirth Gallery, New York-London-Zürich].

In a sort of shared ancestry, we could, in fact, begin this visual journey by recalling the full length portrait, in the foreground, of Gilles, in the Jean-Antoine Watteau painting, Pierrot, dit autrefois Gilles (circa 1718-1719) [The Louvre museum, Paris]. This character from the commedia dell’arte became a set, melancholic figure, set apart from life and society. Gilles by Watteau was one of the sources of Hopper's sad, immobile clown. The American painter, who made several visits to Paris between 1906 and 1907, lived the Parisian lifestyle of the era. He went to the theatre and other popular places, where he drew portraits of society. He assimilated Courbet's lesson on pictorial realism and that of Degas in the choice of motif, which was to be this Parisian life that fascinated him with its parties, Bohemians, novelties, distractions and characters of modern life. In this panorama of pleasures, there was the circus, which artists, writers and poets loved. In Soir bleu, which he painted in 1914 back in the United States, Hopper unfolded Parisian society in a line oscillating between realism and symbolism. The artist was present, as was the military man, the prostitute, the pimp and a bourgeois couple, slightly alarmed by all these people from different world gathered together in the café.

From the beginnings of the circus, in particular in France where the first temporary establishments opened dedicated to equestrian games and juggling, flying and acrobatic skills  (the Manège Anglais at 16 rue du Faubourg-du-Temple on July 5th 1782, replaced on October 16^th 1783 by the Amphithéâtre Anglois des Sieurs Astley père et fils), then in April 1807 (the Théâtre Cirque Olympique de Franconi on the rue du Mont-Thabor), a concomitance can be seen between the appearance and the rapid development of these new places and show forms, along with a romantic sensibility that was then blooming. This concomitance grew stronger under the Second Empire. The second half of the 19^th century saw the construction of a certain number of permanent buildings: the cirque d’Été (known as the Cirque de l’Impératrice until the fall of the Empire), on the Champs-Élysées in 1841; the cirque d’Hiver (originally named Cirque Napoléon) in December 1852, on the boulevard des Filles-du-Calvaire and the cirque Molier (amateur circus), in 1880 on the rue de Benouville. Later came the Nouveau Cirque, on the rue Saint-Honoré, in February 1886. In the first decades of the 19^th century, the circus became established, and distinguished itself. 

Thus in 1868 with his Clown at the circus (Kröller-Müller museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands), Pierre-Auguste Renoir took hold of this character that we have taken as a leitmotif. He is in the centre of the circus ring, at eye level with the spectators, this new type of audience, that the painter also portrays. We could say that the painting and the motif are "planted." In 1901-1902, Renoir portrayed a White Pierrot [Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit], full length in his white costume, taking up the entire canvas. One can recognise how the motif, and the impressionist representation of this now familiar character, are constituted. Meanwhile, the circus had truly become a favourite theme for artists. In 1879, Renoir represented Acrobats at the cirque Fernando (Francisca and Angelina Wartenberg) [Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago]. The cirque Fernando, built in 1975 on the boulevard de Rochechouart, welcomed this new audience of bourgeois, of artists and the working class. Toulouse-Lautrec was a regular, fascinated by the clown, acrobat and circus rider acts. He found new inspiration for characters, attitudes, line and colour work here: Equestrienne (at the cirque Fernando) (1887-1888) [Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago]. But Toulouse-Lautrec was also haunted by the clown and the clowness: The Clowness Cha-U-Kao (1895) [Orsay museum, Paris]. This remarkable character, who was magnificently raw, lonely, and despairing, was close to the figures from the Moulin-Rouge.

Modernity, or modernities in the plural, summarize the multiple art forms that the circus motif knew and enabled during this period. Edward Hopper's white clown, which the artist identified with, dissolved in the tragedies of the century. The circus left the artistic scene in the 1960s and 70s. A contemporary moment… It was once again through the figure of the clown, that certain artists today, have rediscovered this circus figure. They have done so via a different filiation to Didier Ottinger, in his article Le Cirque de la cruauté. A portrait of the contemporary clown in Sisyphus (in the catalogue La Grande Parade, idem, p. 35) recalls not those of Gilles and the sad pierrots, but those of the "Hanlon-Lee, six brothers of Irish origin, who with resounding slaps and erratic somersaults, revolutionized the clown art, rendering pantomime and its art of silence obsolete, almost instantly."
And because, once again, this polysemic figure enables identity and stereotype to be questioned, this "contemporary clown" directed by American artists such as Bruce Nauman (Torture of clowns (dark and windy night with laughter) 1987 [Barbara Balkin Cottle and Robert Cottle collection]) and Paul McCarthy (Painter, 1995 [Fine Arts museum, Ottawa Canada,]) in their photographs, videos, installations and performances from the late 1960s and the 1970s and 1980s, served as a vector to contest the modernist model in its conceptual and minimalist format, as established on the arts scene.
This vector was once again an "overturning of values." It was a type of expressive realism that used the grotesque, exhibitionist sexuality, the show society and mass consumerism.
This questioning of identity can bee seen in the work of Cindy Sherman in, among others, a photographic series in the early 2000s (Untitled n°411, 2003 [Metro Picture, New York]) where continuing to work on the image of self and travesty, she creates a self-portrait as a clown. A clown which, beneath a heavy mask loaded with colour and grimacing, carries the sadness and melancholy ofthe clown in Blue evening. This landscape of moving and androgynous identities unrolls with the Cabinet of and Clowndoubt (2001) series by artist Roni Horn. Photographic portraits are cut up and then recomposed, making the image blurred of course, and apparently illegible as well, but perfectly sensitive to a variation of expressions. Doubt and worry are contemporary. From Watteau's Gilles to Hopper's sad clown and to Nauman's grotesque one, Horn removes and undoes elements in order to recompose an ambivalent landscape.

The relations of circus forms with art forms are probably always positioned in this style of inversion and experiences that are both formal and sensitive. Today, contemporary art is more and more committed to forms of performance, and to new performance protocols following the historic era of the 1960s and 1970s. Future writing will probably stem from other forms of concomitance.

The Xian pits form a strange domain preserved at the heart of China where, since the 3^rd century B.C., an immense army lies, crafted by hundreds of scrupulous sculptors, who succeeded in giving these soldiers imperceptible details that enabled them to be differentiated, and gave them an extraordinary lifelike touch. Recent new digs there revealed – alongside the infantry and the cavalrymen – the presence of a small population of acrobats, dancers and musicians. These sculpted bodies, caught in an acrobatic movement or posture, possess the same significance as the fragile terracotta statuettes buried in the Han tombs. Destined to be substitutes for the corpses of the deceased's entourage, traditionally immolated as a tribute, these delicately crafted shapes embody the pleasures of existence and symbolically accompany the deceased in the afterlife to continue to serve and entertain him. This substitution effect, a phenomenal progress in the history of cults and rites, generated a related and extraordinary blossoming of works of arts. These objects, which are funerary pieces, would gradually acquire art status and were established as an artistic reflection of successive eras. Etruscan and Egyptian contortionists, and Roman and Chinese acrobats were among the finely carved, or barely sketched figures, which were the first landmarks in the history of acrobatic representation. This intense artistic adventure was tinged with a hint of magic and a lot of power.

Like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault (1871-1958), Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) and his  brother Jean (1888-1964), Fernand Léger (1881-1955), Marc Chagall (1887-1985), Otto Dix (1891-1969), André Derain (1880-1954), Marcel Vertès (1895-1961), Kees Van Dongen (1877-1968), and Oskar Kokoshka (1886-1980), many others have loved the circus, its trapeze artists, circus riders and clowns. They have woven their pictorial vocabulary of powerful bodies, inscribed on paper or canvas like landmarks in memory to convey a flamboyant repertoire of pure, stylised or abstract forms. Before them, Victor Adam and Carle Vernet appreciated the grace and elegance of male and female circus riders, producing canvasses and illustrations in multiple reflections of the spectacular horse riding of the era.
Gustave Doré (1832-1883), the painter, illustrator and sculptor, also explored the theme of acrobats, in particular in his brilliant composition L’enfant blessé , sketched in 1853 and taken up again in 1873 and 1874 with subtle variations as seen in the versions kept at the Roger-Quilliot art museum in Clermont-Ferrand and at the Denver Art Museum. He portrays the distress of a marginal world when faced with a dark destiny, adding strong symbols to his canvas, such as cards and owls, but he also made it a work with a sacred character by suggesting a pious gypsy, using a diagonal structure to create both depth and dynamism. In 1870, he painted a striking self portrait in which he appears as a pierrot, an ambivalent character announcing, in a troubling synthesis, the victimised clown figure with the pallid, disconcerting mask.

Invented in the first decades of the 19^th century, photography, literally a "drawing with light" accompanied the transformations of time and helped set a good number of the most notable inventions. Without becoming a substitute for painting entirely, photography nevertheless accounted for a powerful evocation of men, landscapes and places: the circus very soon became an interesting pictorial and commercial theme. The Bibliothèque nationale de France has kept, in particular, a series of portraits of Jules Léotard, who created the Trapeze Races in 1859, as both artistic and historical evidence that is as much advertising document as artistic gesture. Technical developments enable photographers to seize movement and to still action with precision, providing a field of endless exploration. From the first years of the 20^th century, clowns acrobats and circus riders as well as big tops, life scenes, parades and camps would all be embodied in the lenses of numerous photographers, fascinated by the mix of strangeness and brilliance that distinguished this universe.
August Sander (1876-1964) included circus men and women, and artists and technicians in his famous People of the 20th Century created in 1924. Otto Umbehr (1902-1980), a photojournalist and artist captured the clown Grock in a series of striking portraits, while Izis (1911-1980), Pierre Jahan (1909-2003) and Brassaï (1899-1984) were attached to the behind the scenes poetry, tracing in black and white, moving lines of strength in a world already weakened by the developments made in modern society following the Second World War. Paul de Cordon, François Tuefferd (1912-1996), Robert Doisneau (1912-1994), Philippe Cibille, Gilles Henri Polge and Christophe Raynaud de Lage, contemporaries, were the heirs to and the continuation of the French School, supporters of humanist photography, careful to account for the realities of a world in progress, and to poetise its most astonishing moments.