The naked snollygoster

Early this year I bought a book titled ‘Lost Words – Collywobbles, Snollygosters, and other surprisingly useful terms worth resurrecting’ by Joe Gillard. It was the word ‘snollygosters’ that made the purchase irresistible.

A snollygoster – from the 19^th century American slang – is a dishonest, corrupt and unprincipled person, especially a politician. If you have been watching the ABC television documentary series ‘The Road to Now’ (still available on ABC iView) then you will be familiar with the ‘rise of the snollygoster’ in the 21^st century.

The book is arranged alphabetically and one of the early ‘A’ words is ‘Adamitism’. This is another 19^th century word, but this time from England, deriving from the Biblical Adam. It means the advocacy or practice of public nudity, particularly for religious reasons. Apparently, there were a variety of Christian sects or cults that advocated nudity as an expression of human perfection.

This encouraged me to re-visit the images of ‘nudes’ in the NGV collection. I was aware that the nude figure is a tradition in Western art that has been used to express ideals of human beauty, as well as other themes – ranging from moral to transgressive. Commencing with fertility figures like the Venus of Willendorf to Ancient Greek art, (with a hiatus in the Middle Ages), then a re-invigoration in the Renaissance, the nude continues to this day to use the body to express ideas. An obvious early example of the depiction of ‘perfect nakedness’, with religious and political meanings, is the installation of Michelangelo’s ‘David’ in the cathedral in Florence which took place during this week in the year 1504.

Kenneth Clark’s book ‘The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form’ from 1956 makes the distinction between the naked body and nudity.  As Clark says: ‘To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word “nude”, on the other hand, carries … no uncomfortable overtone. [The nude is] a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed’. For Clark, the ‘naked body’ is transformed into ‘the nude’ – an aesthetic object – but his use of the word ‘re-formed’ is a lovely (perhaps unknowingly intended) pun.

The ‘reformed’ nude allowed 19^th century Victorians, who were struggling within a repressive sexual environment, to gaze upon erotic presentations of the body under the guise of historicism, academism and even morality. The plethora of images in the art of the Victorian era depicted the naked body in many ways – as nymphs, goddesses, athletes, martyrs and even allegorically.

Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1836-1911) was a French figure painter, educator and theorist. After studying at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in the 1850s, Lefebvre won prizes, exhibited 72 portraits in the Paris Salon, became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and a professor at the Académie Julian in Paris. Many of Lefebvre’s paintings are of single figures of beautiful naked women from myth, history and the Bible – including his portrait of ‘Chloe’ in Melbourne’s Young and Jackson Hotel and ‘La Cigale’ in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.

Lefebvre’s art owes much to the Mannerist painters, especially Andrea del Sarto, and to the time he spent in Rome after winning the Prix de Rome competition for young painters. It was during his time in Rome that his interest in the female nude began, culminating in his painting the ‘La Vèrité‘ (‘Allegory of Truth’) in 1870. In this picture, a beautiful young woman holds up a mirror (the conventional symbol of truth). As the mirror is at the very top of the painting, in order to see the mirror, one has to visually caress the sensuous feminine curves over the length of the outstretched figure. Lefebvre clearly liked this representation and he was to use this format in many of his works. Images of Lefebvre’s art can be seen at: https://www.artrenewal.org/Artist/Index/188

Happening upon Lefebvre’s painting in the NGV, at first glance one might assume it is a tantalising image of a coquettish young girl with a ‘Brazilian’ by one of ‘those’ risque French artists who satisfied the needs of repressed men in the Victorian era. While this is quite likely the case, the theme of the painting shifts us from erotica to moral education. The title, ‘La Cigale’ or The Grasshopper, is taken from Aesop’s fable ‘The Grasshopper and the Ant’. This moral tale describes the grasshopper who plays and sings all summer and is critical of the ant for spending its time labouring to put away supplies for winter. The grasshopper’s folly is exposed when the weather turns, leaving it cold, hungry and unprepared.

In Lebfebvre’s painting, the concerned, vulnerable, pensive grasshopper – with the falling leaves indicating the imminent approach of winter – is realizing the consequences of her careless frivolity. When the painting was shown in the 1872 Paris Salon, it was accompanied by a quotation from La Fontaine’s French adaptation of Aesop’s fable: ‘Quand la bise fut venue’ (when the cold wind blows) reinforcing the point. To look at this painting encouraged ruminating on ‘living the virtuous life’ – not dissimilar to the message in Hogarth’s works on ‘Industry and Idleness’ discussed in a previous post. Lefebvre was fond of the image of ‘La Cigale’, and perhaps also its moral message, as several versions exist including in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

The painting is an allegory of foolish unpreparedness. One way the image can be interpreted, given its date of execution, is as a critique of Napoleon III and his poor leadership which led to economic collapse and the Paris Commune uprising of 1871. However, ‘La Cigale’ as a naked female was a not uncommon image in French art of the 19^th century and referenced the frivolous, wanton behaviour of young women – the bohème or demimondaine – who enjoyed the present without regard to their future. This image is seen in the art of Corot, Edward Steichen, and René Mège du Malmont  among others.

After debuting in Paris, Lefebvre’s painting was bought by Daniel Catlin of St Louis , and shown publicly in the Chicago Exposition of 1893. In the early 1980s, ‘La Cigale’ was purchased by a private collector in Melbourne and displayed in the exhibition ‘Narratives, nudes and landscapes’ at the NGV in 1995. It was acquired by the Felton Bequest for the NGV in 2005 at a cost of more than $500,000.

Lefebvre was painting at a time when painting was going through a revolution with the emergence of impressionism. His stylised classical figures were seen as increasingly old-fashioned and this resulted in a small, sad notice of his death in the Sydney ‘Evening News’ from 3 August 1911 which described Lefebvre as a ‘one-picture painter’. The ‘death notice’ concludes with: ‘To many people the news of his death appeared a joke, as they believed Lefebvre had died years ago’.

However, ‘La Cigale’, in her dawning self-awareness, is an image of the nude ‘re-formed and reformed’, that is, of ‘the nude becoming naked’ – a reminder that reality teaches life lessons.

And this brings me back to snollygosters. As I continued to reflect on nakedness, I was reminded of another story of nakedness – ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ by Hans Christian Andersen. With the multiple challenges that have confronted us all locally and globally, people are increasingly unwilling to engage with unspoken contracts that willfully refute what they know to be true. The naked narcissism and power tactics of today’s snollygosters are clearly on display. I doubt that snollygosters have much capacity for reformation but there are many among us today who are clearly pointing out the nakedness of emperors who behave appallingly.