Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective

ONE Animal Subjects Between Nature and Invention in Buffon’s Natural History Illustrations

Chapte ONE Animal Subjects Between Nature and Invention in Buffon’s Natural History Illustrations joan b. landes At the invitation of the French art dealer Ambroise Vollard, Pablo Picasso undertook in 1936–37 the creation of a suite of thirty-two sugar-lift aquatint prints to illustrate a proposed modern edition of excerpts from the eighteenthcentury monumental work by the comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, originally a thirty-six-volume set of scientific writings and engravings on animal and human life in nature.1 Following Vollard’s death in 1939 in a car accident, Martin Fabiani, the dealer’s friend and protégé, acquired the rights to the project and published the book in the occupied Paris of 1942. In 1957 another edition appeared, based on a copy the artist originally gave to his lover, Dora Maar, which Picasso decorated with forty original drawings.2 On the frontispiece of this edition is Picasso’s playful inscription in words and pictures, where he draws Maar in the body of a bird—recalling the association of the Sirens of Greek myth (originally three dangerous bird women) with seduction and death (fig. 8).3 Underscoring the menacing aspects of Dora’s playful Sirenlike image, Picasso follows his dedicatory drawing with a page of Medusa heads, including a Medusan skull,4 as well as another series of frightening winged skeletons, which are nothing less than skeletons of sphinxes (mythical bodies in anatomical poses), accompanied by a cracked fossilized egg and a human skull—all drawn over the page assigned in Buffon’s original to the horse (le cheval). 22 GORGE OUS BE A S T S 8 Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar as Sphinx. Frontispiece of Pablo Picasso and Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, 40 dessins en marge du Buffon (Paris: Jonquières, 1957). © 2012 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 23 A N I M A L S U B J E C T S The Buffon prints are considered to be among Picasso’s most important graphic productions. These are prized examples of livre d’artiste or livre de peintre —typically, “luxuriously produced, limited-edition book(s) illustrated with original prints, which are conceived as integral creations rather than as literal illustrations or simply decorative embellishments subordinate to the text.” Picasso was especially enamored of the genre, creating artwork for 156 such publications.5 Even so, this particular example of Picasso’s oeuvre stands out for another reason: the manner in which it bridges invention and naturalism. As two critics remark, “Just as Picasso never made a bestiary [a medieval moralizing encyclopedia of animals], so he never really illustrated a natural history—at least not according to the rules of scientific interest or perfect naturalism which we might expect of a Stubbs or an Audubon.” Yet, referring to what they call Picasso’s “bastardised version” of a natural history, these same commentators underscore the naturalism of Picasso’s Buffon illustrations: “The relative naturalism of the Buffon prints is a rare exception in Picasso’s oeuvre. There are some early drawings showing a genuine interest in accuracy, but on the whole, unlike Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer or Stubbs, Picasso stuck to the aim of invention rather than documentation.”6 However, while the text in a typical artist book is generally believed to “trigger ” the creative collaboration between artist and publisher, it remains uncertain whether—or at least when—Picasso might have seen an example of the original work. Nor can we say whether he was acquainted with illustrations for earlier editions of Buffon’s masterly work. Moreover, it is reported that there are considerable discrepancies between the existing prints and the only abridged text of Buffon that could be found in occupied Paris by the wife of the lithographer Roger Lacourière, in whose studio Picasso produced these works.7 In short, Picasso’s deceptively simple work offers a fruitful starting point for this investigation into the work of illustration in eighteenth-century natural history texts. Whether “bestiary” or “bastard natural history,” his Buffon drawings straddle the opposing categories of naturalism and imagination, description and invention , all of which have challenged artists engaged in the activities of observing, anatomizing, or representing a natural object. At times, too, Picasso pushed the parameters of the object beyond scientific inquiry to decorative amusement.8 On a more somber note, however, Picasso’s Buffon project coincides with the political upheavals in...