May 21, 2014  

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Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe by Eugène Bataille from the corresponding page of Le Rire by Coquelin cadet  The accompanying text reads: "This is a masterpiece depicting a woman of striking beauty. Imagine for a moment that, by chance, the master has left in the mouth of this ideal beauty, a cheeky pipe  -.. You laugh. For the eyes. "
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Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe by Eugène Bataille from the corresponding page of Le Rire by Coquelin cadet
The accompanying text reads: "This is a masterpiece depicting a woman of striking beauty. Imagine for a moment that, by chance, the master has left in the mouth of this ideal beauty, a cheeky pipe -.. You laugh. For the eyes. "

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On the originary dates of three works canonical to the proto-avant-garde

I've been fascinated by the Incoherents since I first stumbled upon them in 2007[1][2].

Since becoming a member of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp library some weeks ago, I have been able to consult two seminal books on that movement's history: the Arts incoherents, academie du derisoire exhibition catalog (1992) by Luce Abélès/Catherine Charpin and The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905 (1996) by Phillip Dennis Cate.

Object of my research was to check the dates of works I consider canonical to the proto-avant-garde, which I previous held to be 1882, 1883 and 1884.

But I've had to adjust that series to 1882, 1883 and 1887: Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel at Night (1882), Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man (1884) and Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe (1887).

According to my research, Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe by Sapeck, which is still listed over at Wikipedia as originating in 1883 and erroneously titled as Le rire, in fact first saw the light of day in 1887, in the book Le Rire by Coquelin cadet.

Wikipedia is not the only reference work in error. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines erroneously states that this Mona Lisa was first shown in 1883 at the second "Incohérents" exhibition.

What is the importance of this augmented Mona Lisa?

Simple.

Perhaps the invention of high art with capital 'A' coincided with its first blows of ridicule. This augmented Mona Lisa was a desecration, a violation, a rape of its masterpiece: the Mona Lisa proper by da Vinci.

Think about it.


While[3] I'm on the subject of Metamorphic Genitalia and Fantastical Sexual Images, I recently found out that I'd previously misinterpreted the famous "How Panurge showed a very new way to build the walls of Paris" episode in Gargantua and Pantagruel.

I thought that Panurge wanted to build the walls with women's bodies while in fact he wanted to build them with women's vulvae, them being cheaper than stones. My mistake was due to the fact that the Urquhart and Motteux translation I based my research on mentions "kallibistris" ("callibistrys" in the French original), probably one of the neologisms of Rabelais (although Rabelais scholar Lazar Saineanu (1859-1934), remarks that the word callibistrys was used in the valley of the Yères).

In Rabelais and His World (which uses the 1936 Jacques LeClercq translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel), kallibistris has been replaced by the much more straightforward "pleasure-twats":

“I have observed that the pleasure-twats of women in this part of the world are much cheaper than stones, therefore the walls of the city should be built of twats.”

Everyone knows what a twat is.

I can't help but imagine what Yoshifumi Hayashi (the greatest living artist when it comes to grotesque genitalia, you should google him) would make of a wall of twats, a fortification of disembodied vulvae.


I'm happy to report that I have identified 'vulvic face, phallic head', the informal title to three (two unique ones)[4] [5][6] grotesque shunga of an amorous couple; her head is a vulva, his head is a phallus, her vulva is a face, his phallus is a face. These are featured in Shunshoku hatsune no ume (1842), written by Tamenaga Shunsui and illustrated by Utagawa Kunisada.

I've previously written about this print here.

They are part of the Metamorphic Genitalia and Fantastical Sexual Images project, in the category "Substitution, displacement or replacement".





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