{"id":150929,"date":"2021-02-12T09:00:42","date_gmt":"2021-02-12T14:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=150929"},"modified":"2021-02-11T17:34:07","modified_gmt":"2021-02-11T22:34:07","slug":"people-shaped-white-rocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/02\/12\/people-shaped-white-rocks\/","title":{"rendered":"People-Shaped White Rocks"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Jean-Antoine Houdon, Madame His<\/em>, 1775, marble, 31 1\/2″ tall. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Victor Thaw, 2007.<\/p><\/div>\n

There are few uncooler-sounding words than \u201ceighteenth-century marble portraiture.\u201d Even typing these words makes me feel like I\u2019m prepping for the PSAT. But eighteenth-century marble portraiture\u2014specifically that of Jean-Antoine Houdon, known for his uncool likenesses of Voltaire and George Washington\u2014can be extraordinarily strange. Furthermore, the examples here are nearly nowhere to be found on your phone except in lo-res preview form. In other words, you have to actually go to the Frick to see them.<\/p>\n

Two busts, sculpted within two years of each other, are paired in an out-of-the way hall of the museum: a woman, Madame His<\/em>, and a man, Armand-Thomas Hue<\/em>. Translucent, actual-sized, people-shaped white rocks carved in Enlightenment dress and balanced atop quadrangular pedestals at eyeball height, both are lopped off somewhere above the waist and function as the sort of thing that museum-going twenty-first-century humans are likely to walk right past and think, \u201cOh, art.\u201d Which is just what I did, on my way to the Bellini painting I\u2019d planned to write about. But something stopped me. Madame His<\/em> doesn\u2019t look like the majority of eighteenth-century painted portraits I\u2019d seen, which largely crash-land somewhere in flyover caricature country: big watery eyes, boiled-egg chins, tiny red lips. As I circled the bust, I increasingly admired how it substantiated my mental template of \u201cactual human being,\u201d how Houdon had worked outside his epoch\u2019s stylizations. I was surprised by how the marble skin seemed to suggest hidden muscles and tendons, by how the slightly rougher fabric of the bodice lightly met her soft shoulders. Then I looked up, and something even more surprising happened: Madame His met my gaze. <\/p>\n

As any kid with a crayon knows, the human eye is attuned to finding faces. Two dots will fix the seen for the seer, and vice versa; we are constantly seeking to pin other consciousnesses down, catching in our headlights the thoughts of others at our shared twin fulcrums of empathy. That ubiquitous 1975 smiling yellow disc proves it. But in art, it\u2019s up to the artist\u2019s skill and sensitivity whether the sensation of life or the sentiment of \u201chave a nice day\u201d is the result. So it\u2019s to Houdon\u2019s credit that at that moment in front of Madame His<\/em>, the chasm of the centuries sprang together, and I felt, if just for a moment, like I was uncannily and most genuinely in the presence of someone two hundred years dead. Even more painfully, if I moved ever so slightly one way or the other, she turned once again to stone\u2014not unlike the passengers on the plane with whom I\u2019d traveled to New York, nearly all of whom had closed the shades of their windows to more effectively bury themselves in the light of their screens.<\/p>\n

On that flight, I\u2019d sat next to a sixtyish woman in an alarmingly bright red dress. (Her dress was the detail I remembered most as I\u2019d only gotten in a couple of sidelong glances at her, but I also noted her frizzy chestnut hair, square silver earrings, and slightly downturned nose.) Despite more than two hours spent sipping complimentary soft drinks and crinkling pretzel bags within five uncomfortable inches of each other, we\u2014agreeably\u2014didn\u2019t exchange a word and parted at the LaGuardia jet bridge forever. I had completely forgotten about her until the following morning at the Frick, when I looked over from a painted slice of the Renaissance and there she was, right next to me, again: the same alarming red dress, the same frizzy hair, same square silver earrings, same nose. I began to seek the right words to try to express how fabulously weird it was, here in a city of millions, that we\u2019d cross paths twice. But she clearly hadn\u2019t noticed me either on the plane or at that moment, and she turned and walked away.<\/p>\n

Madame His\u2019s hallway companion in eternity, Armand-Thomas Hue, won\u2019t look at you either. Try as you might, you absolutely will not be able to meet his eyes. I wonder if this was Jean-Antoine Houdon\u2019s subtle aim, as it ultimately says more about his subject and is almost more of an artistic accomplishment than what he managed with Madame His\u2014and also because it\u2019s what most of us spend our lives actually doing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jean-Antoine Houdon, Armand-Thomas Hue, Marquis de Miromesnil<\/em>, 1777, marble, 25 1\/2″ tall. Purchased by The Frick Collection, 1935.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chris Ware is an American writer and artist who has contributed graphic fiction and covers to <\/em>The New Yorker. Among his numerous books are <\/em>Rusty Brown (2019) and <\/em>Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), which won the Guardian Prize. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Jewish Museum in New York, among other institutions.<\/em><\/p>\n

From <\/em>The Sleeve Should Be Illegal & Other Reflections on Art at the Frick<\/a>, published by The Frick Collection in association with DelMonico Books \u2027 D.A.P.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are few uncooler-sounding words than \u201ceighteenth-century marble portraiture.\u201d But the work of Jean-Antoine Houdon can be extraordinarily strange.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1462,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2384],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-150929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-look","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPeople-Shaped White Rocks by Chris Ware<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"There are few uncooler-sounding words than \u201ceighteenth-century marble portraiture.\u201d But the work of Jean-Antoine Houdon can be extraordinarily strange.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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