THE BACK JACKET copy calls Exposition the first in a triptych--a painting in three panels--would we call Exposition a portrait, then? It's not historical fiction, but not a biography either. It lies within hailing distance of art criticism or art history, but what kind of art history devotes any space to the author's father's marital infidelities? So let's just say portrait. A portrait with a lot of other things in the background.
Exposition is a portrait of Virginia Oldoini (1837-1899), the Countess of Castiglione, a celebrated beauty and Parisian social figure of the Second Empire (1850-1870), for a time the mistress of Napoleon III. The Countess is famous for being photographed--"the most photographed woman on the 19th century," reputedly. A lot of painstaking preparation went into the photographs, attention to clothes, hair, setting; some are in costume or are representations of a historical character. Robert de Montesquiou--the main model for Proust's Charlus--was among those fascinated by her and by the photographs. The most famous of them, "Scherzo di Follio," you have probably seen; it often figures in accounts of the early history of the medium.
The France of the 1850s and 1860s was politically gruesome (see Robert Browning's "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society") but it was a flourishing era for French art--there were the Impressionists, of course, not to mention Baudelaire and Flaubert. So, is the Countess an artist? Is she a precursor of Cindy Sherman? Is she the ancestress of all the artistically-inflected self-representation that now occurs globally on the internet?
Maybe. Léger raises such possibilities, but she does not spend a lot of time or energy on them. Rather than turn the Countess into that familiar figure, the woman ahead of her time, or attribute to her motivations we can readily recognize, Léger ponders her in all her bewildering idiosyncrasy. What did she think she was doing? Why is it still interesting?
It has something to do with the male gaze, Léger seems willing to venture. If to be a woman has a lot to do with being looked at, all the more so if one is beautiful, even famous for being beautiful. Is that something one can work with, do something with, heighten, appropriate, turn inside out? Or is it just a cage, however you decorate it?
I'm hoping to have time this January to look at the next two panels of the triptych.
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