Deauville (Calvados). In painting, what is a character seen from behind? In ancient Rome, it was a technical choice to create perspective, as in the fresco of the Mysteries (around 60 BCE) from the eponymous villa in Herculaneum (Italy) which shows a woman’s back seated at a table. It was also “a figure without a portrait”, like this young goddess whose face we cannot see, the Flora (before 79) almost dancing from the Villa Arianna in Pompeii. “When the face hides, it is the whole body – and more precisely here the back – which comes to embody the presence or carry a story”,writes the curator, Annie Madet-Vache, in the foreword to the Franciscaines catalog about the characters seen from behind, a subject which has never been treated in an exhibition.
Some signs allowing identification
The nearly one hundred works on the chrono-thematic tour date back to the beginning of the 16th century, with Mass of Saint Gregory (around 1500-1510), work by an anonymous person kept at the Musée du Hiéron in Paray-le-Monial [Saône-et-Loire]), to the present day. The photographs from the series “Hundred Hidden Faces” (2022) by Émeric Lhuisset show members of the Ukrainian civil resistance seen from behind, presented under their first name only and accompanied by a document bearing their answers to the questions: “What would you like to happen now?” » And “What do you think will happen?” ». It is then no longer a question of figures without portraits (according to the subtitle of the exhibition), but of portraits without faces. Artists have dabbled with it since the Middle Ages: in the illuminated manuscript The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry (which cannot be loaned by the Château de Chantilly), riders are represented from behind, which was not uncommon. But one of them, painted in the illumination of the Month of May (before 1416), figure Jean de Bourbon slightly turned towards his fiancée, Marie de Berry, daughter of Duke Jean de Berry, brother of the King of France. We cannot distinguish the features of Jean de Bourbon which we recognize from a jewel, his golden “chest” with two chains. One of the Limbourg brothers therefore dared to represent from behind a character as important to his sponsor, creating the faceless portrait of a model that he carefully made identifiable and whose status, elegance and courteous attention he paid to his future wife he characterized.
Henri-Félix-Emmanuel Philippoteaux, The Gentlemen of the Duke of Orléans in the garb of Saint-Cloud1839, oil on canvas, Paris, Musée Nissim de Camondo.
© Decorative Arts / Jean Tholance
The Louvre and Orsay museums lent works. Around forty French and foreign museums and institutions, as well as collectors, also responded favorably to loan requests. The result is a very diverse set of academic studies, genre scenes, portraits of important people or those close to the artists, crowds or solitary figures contemplating the landscape. The painters are often little known, or sometimes they are minor works by renowned artists. Only one sculpture is on display, Earth (1896) by Auguste Rodin.
Visitors can enter the tour with paintings in mind that they will not find here. The iconic backs painted by Johannes Vermeer, Gerard ter Borch, Caspar David Friedrich, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Gustave Caillebotte and Vilhelm Hammershoi have given way to Woman with a letter (1650) by Pieter Codde, Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon (around 1680) by Pierre Mignard, View of Dresden at sunset (around 1822) by Carl Gustav Carus, Study of the back of an old man (undated) by Henri Gervex, Back miner (around 1903) by Paul Antin or Dora seen from behind (around 1910) by Georges Victor-Hugo. An extraordinary Ecce Homo from the 17th century, painted double-sided on canvas by an anonymous artist, shows a Christ with his back and arms streaked with blows, his chest dotted with drops of blood flowing from his forehead.
If the room texts and the labels developed inform the public about the artist and the iconography, everyone retains the possibility of reflecting on their relationship to the subjects presented: why did the artist choose to show his character from behind? What do his body, his posture, his clothes tell us? What emotions does he express? Beyond the pleasure of often discovering remarkable works, this exhibition is an opportunity to have a visual experience.
