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| Joseph Albrier Studio Interior 1822 oil on canvas private collection |
"In the early part of the century, paintings in which the living model is juxtaposed and contrasted with the artist's mannequin are for the most part mild-mannered reflections on the theme of the artful and the artificial that maintain, and in some cases reinforce, the distinction between animate and inanimate 'sitters'. In Joseph Albrier's decorous and remarkably well-ordered studio interior, for example, the seated female figure – very possibly the artist's wife – looks away momentarily from her book into the shadowy depths of the studio, while a small, apparently female mannequin on the opposite side of the canvas stares blankly through a studio window onto a world of reality to which it/she can never aspire. Both figures are clothed or draped, and act as repoussoirs that frame the display of paintings and sketches on the wall behind, some of which can be identified as by Albrier himself. Amidst these are antique busts and plaster casts that may have inspired some of the artist's paintings: on the left, completing the trilogy of female heads, a plaster cast of Aphrodite acts as a pivotal exemplar of female beauty; on the right, a statuette of Mercury and – placed prominently between them – a bust of Homer. The theme of sightlessness is developed in the death mask hanging high on the cupboard door and in the hollow eye sockets of the skull, both forms of vanitas and memento mori that promote a reflection not only on death, but on the life that separates the living model from the mannequin."
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| Marie-Amélie Cogniet Studio Interior 1831 oil on canvas Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille |
"The young model [in Marie-Amélie Cogniet's studio interior] appears to take a rest from posing, amusing herself by playing with the absent painter's articulated wooden maquette, for her a substitute doll; the chalk circles on the tiled floor indicate where she should reposition herself when work resumes. Around her, the painter's materials – painting box, palette, brushes, portfolio of drawings and solitary pieces of chalk balanced on the stool – are spread out, suggesting the he, or she, has broken off in mid-composition."
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| Heinrich von Rustige The Farmer in the Artist's Studio ca. 1839 oil on canvas Stiftung Sammlung Volmer, Wuppertal |
"In Germany, representations of artists' studios became more numerous during the first part of the nineteenth century, a phenomenon that some authors have attributed to the increasing tendency for artists to work independently of church and aristocratic commissions and explore new self-referential and domestic subject matter. Outwardly, many seem little more than rumbustious pictorial farces, or excuses to target the growing market for such scenes, yet many thinly disguise more programmatic aesthetic intentions. Heinrich von Rustige's comic caper showing a farmer in the artist's studio, painted around 1839, is a case in point. In it, the faggot-bearing peasant – who could have walked out of one of the landscapes of Düsseldorf school in which Rustige trained – confronts the 'reality' of the artist's studio, perhaps mirroring the painter's own disorientation when first experiencing the unadulterated natural world. The painter himself is again absent, but leaves markers of his work in the palette and brush on the floor, the sketches hanging on the screen, the canvas on the easel and the empty bottle beneath it. Overawed by the resplendent uniform and decorated trappings of a military presence, the peasant doffs his hat while the child – presumably his son – tries to hide behind him, horrified by the headless apparition, and the dog sniffs the detached painted head on the floor. . . . On a simple reading, Rustige's painting reasserts that seeing is not always believing, but it also signals his renunciation of both history painting and the mechanics traditionally used in its making: for all his uneducated naїveté, the peasant is a much nobler, because a much more natural, figure, Rustige appears to suggest. The mannequin thus became a convenient scapegoat, a simulated personification of all that a new generation of painters came to feel was wrong with academic painting and the aesthetic beliefs it stood for."
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| Ferdinand Tellgmann In the Studio ca. 1834 oil on canvas Museumslandschaft Hessen, Kassel |
"Like Rustige, the deaf-mute painter from Kassel, Ferdinand Tellgmann, places nature at the centre of his artistic endeavours, albeit in less overtly comical guise. The compositional middle ground of his studio interior is dominated by a large landscape painting on an easel; behind, two other painters work assiduously by the daylight falling through the open window; contributing to a sense of overriding seriousness of purpose among the three artist-comrades. Plaster casts after antique sculpture – symbols of conventional artistic training – are again relegated to the top of a cupboard in the rear of the painting. At the same time as other painters in Kassel were ordering expensively crafted mannequins from Paris in precisely these years, Tellgmann covers his with a white sheet, perhaps simply to protect it from dust and damage, but in doing so also transforming it into the ghostly, awkwardly-posed relic of an academic art that has implicitly had its day."
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| Wilhelm von Kaulbach The Struggle against Pedantry ca. 1850 oil on canvas Neue Pinakothek, Munich |
"By far the most notable polemical intervention involving a mannequin in these years, Wilhelm von Kaulbach's Die Bekämpfung des Zopfes ('The Struggle against Pedantry'), was also its most public and parodic. Originally a member of the Düsseldorf school and a pupil of Nazarene painter, Peter von Cornelius, Kaulbach followed his master to Munich when the latter became Director of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, a post he himself came to occupy in 1849. As Court Painter to Ludwig I from 1837, Kaulbach was commissioned between 1847 and 1854 to paint twelve frescoes for the exterior of the Neue Pinakothek, the first public museum in Europe to be exclusively devoted to modern art, erected at the king's personal expense between 1846 and 1853. The frescoes (all now destroyed by damp) were intended to represent the achievements of contemporary German art and, by extension, to celebrate the king as the greatest patron of the visual arts of the day. One of the first in the series, Kaulbach's pedantic allegory was something of a heavy-handed – not to mention ungenerous – satire. On the left, clearly in a defensive position, are the representatives of the intellectual academic tradition, the Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the Danish painter Asmus Carstens and sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, and the theoretician J.J. Winckelmann, all of whom are protected by Minerva, the goddess of wisdom. On the right, mounted on the winged Pegasus, an emblem of inspiration, Kaulbach portrays his portly one-time teacher Cornelius alongside his Nazarene brothers, Johann Friedrich Overbeck and Philipp Veit, who tugs at a reluctant bearded figure precariously perched on a tortoise, Kaulbach himself. Between the two opposing camps the Three Graces cower imprisoned behind Pegasus' forelegs, while the bewigged figure of Gérard de Lairesse apparently lies in 'an eternal sleep' clutching in one hand some of his influential publications . . . and in the other, the mannequin which he considered the 'artful implement' so necessary to artistic practice."
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| Giorgio de Chirico Hector and Andromache 1917 oil on canvas private collection |
"De Chirico's wooden figures and their androgynous forms reflect the artist's state of mind during the war years as he considered innocence and despair: 'to live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness, full of curious many-coloured toys which change their appearance, which, like little children we sometimes break to see how they are made on the inside, and disappointed, realize they are empty'. . . . With their featureless tailor's dummy forms and classical settings whose arches and shadows are more psychological than architectural, de Chirico explored the often inhuman face of modernity. As he wrote in Zeuxis the Explorer (1918), he was haunted by severed heads in shop windows: 'The papier mâché head in a hairdresser's window, severed in the dubious heroism of dark, prehistoric days, seared my heart and mind like a recurrent song. The demons of the city were preparing a way for me . . .'"
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| Oskar Kokoschka Woman in blue 1919 oil on canvas Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart |
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| Oskar Kokoschka Self-portrait at the easel 1922 oil on canvas Leopold Collection, Vienna |
"Oskar Kokoschka also paved the way for Surrealism and its obsession with both the hand-crafted doll and the shop mannequin . . . the doll became an intriguing theatrical prop in his art. Kokoschka's doll was, famously, also linked to his great muse Alma Mahler, with whom he fell passionately in love in 1912. Their affair ended two years later, and after the war he commissioned a life-size doll, modelled on Alma, from the avant-garde dollmaker Hermine Moos."
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| Sándor Bortnyik The New Adam 1924 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest |
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| Sándor Bortnyik The New Eve 1924 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest |
"Hungarian artist Sándor Bortnyik turned to the mannequin as a sign of disillusion. . . . With their black-and-white costumes, urban settings and biblical names, these figures seem to signal the dawn of a new age. However, Adam is a wound up puppet and Eve a faceless automaton whose rigidity is underlined by the tailor's dummy behind her. . . . Painted while Bortnyik was living in Weimar and exposed to Walter Gropius' Bauhaus aesthetic and Theo van Doesberg's De Stijl seminars, both works reflect the 'total work of art' to which those movements aspired. Further, their abstracted forms are influenced by the contemporary ideas, drawings and ballet costumes of Oskar Schlemmer, who changed the nature of dance with his Triadic ballet (1922) and was the head of the Bauhaus Stage Workshop from 1923 to 1929. In an essay of 1924 Schlemmer described mechanization as an 'emblem of our time' and accused utilitarians of having 'gone a long way to killing utopia'. Correspondingly, Bortnyik's 'new' Adam and Eve are emblems of Weimar's 'new objectivity': devoid of individuality and emotion, the pair are intended as a warning for the spectator."
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| Alan Beeton Posing 1929 oil on canvas Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
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| Alan Beeton Reposing 1929 oil on canvas Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
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| Alan Beeton Decomposing 1929 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Alan Beeton began in academia, as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, before training as a painter, first at the Colarossi Academy in Paris, and later for a short time with Walter Sickert. After serving in the infantry during the First World War, during which he was attached to the French Camouflage Section, he exhibited his first painting at the Royal Academy only in 1923, when he was in his forties. At the end of the decade he produced a group of thoughtful, curious and often witty paintings, featuring his own lay figure as the central protagonist, which, for all the latter's lifelessness, have a remarkable sense of vitality and conviction. None of the series has more than a single word, descriptive title, so restricting interpretative or narrative readings, although the mannequin's painted persona often exudes a powerful sense of character, expressed mainly through a quirky arrangement of pose, gesture and the occasional prop."
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| Paul Delvaux Nude with Mannequin 1947 oil on canvas private collection |
"Paul Delvaux's Nude with Mannequin (1947) uses a buxom dressmaker's dummy to intimate sexual violence. In this painting the Belgian artist juxtaposes a nubile, elongated nude with an upright dressmaker's dummy, its neck swathed in some crocheted cloth which tumbles down behind it like a net. The nude is classically posed and, as with so many of Delvaux's females, recalls the languid odalisques of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). In contrast, the dummy takes on a phallic role, as it is strategically positioned opposite the nude's exposed sex and casts a dark, unnatural shadow. Details in the painting – notably the evening sky, train, steam, and pillars – exemplify Delvaux's use of dream symbolism to evoke the Oedipal scenario."
– quoted texts are from Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish by Jane Munro, published by Yale University Press in 2014 to accompany an exhibition organized by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
