Sleep, death and dreams are intertwined themes, whose particular expressive power is taken from the formal closeness they have with each other. Bram Dijkstra (*), writing on this precise theme ( though applied to feminine representations ), sees in these arched isolated, vulnerable, offered bodies as a call to the senses of the spectator.

Le sommeil, la mort et la rêverie sont des thèmes imbriqués, dont la force expressive particulière est tirée de la proximité formelle avec chacun des deux autres. Bram Dijkstra (**), traitant de ce sujet précis ( mais appliqué à des représentations féminines ), voit en ces corps cambrés, isolés, vulnérables, offerts, comme un appel aux sens du spectateur. Cet auteur traite le sujet d'une façon d'autant plus libre que son propos est de dénoncer le machisme qui sous-tend la création à cette période.

De slaap, de dood en de droom zijn themas die hun bepaalde uitdrukkelijkke kracht ontlenen uit de formele dichtbijheid die ze met elkaar hebben . Bram Dijkstra (**), daarover sprekend ( alhoewel betreffende vrouwelijke afbeeldingen ), ziet in deze lichamen iets als een roep aan de zinnelijkheid van de toeschouwer.

(*) Bram Dijkstra, Idols of perversity. Fantasies of feminine evil in Fin-de-siècle culture, Oxford University Press, New York, 1986, chapters II and IV.
(**)Bram Dijkstra, Les idoles de la perversité. Figures de la femme fatale dans la culture fin de siècle, Seuil, 1992, chapitres II et IV. Traduit de l'américain par Josée Kamoun.

Commentaire en français ici plus bas

p. 101."Bernard S. Talmey, in describing the " uncontrollable sex passion " he observed in one of his patients, could, in fact, have been describing any one of a thousand salon nudes he might have seen not only in Paris but in any " expensive " society saloon in cities across the United States. When reaching ecstasy, Talmey reported, this woman - a french woman, he was careful to point out - " has spasms of the muscles of the neck and back, by which the entire body is stretched backwards, the spinal column forming a convex arc at the anterior aspect, the veritable opisthotonus of hysteria " ( Woman 135 ). The word opisthotonus, used in the nineteenth century by pathologists to designate, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionnary, " spasm of muscles of the neck, back and legs, in which the body is bent backward," might indeed serve as a generic designation for the many paintings of women shown in terminal backward spasms of uncontrollable sexual desire which began to litter the walls of the yearly exhibitions in the 1870s and continued to do so well into the twentieth century."

Having isolated, among other themes, the one of the " opisthotonic nymph ", which infects old litterary and pictural themes, and inspires new ones, Dijkstra links to it his notion of " therapeutic rape " induced in the spectator, and uses the form of a gender study to put to trial the intentions of the artists, the clients and the misogyne ideology of the periods he talks about.

Such a freedom of tone would hardly be transposable to the commentary of boy-themed works of art hadn't the author taken the risk in chapter VI, when he talks about an opisthotonic Little Bacchus, painted in 1897 by Léon Perrault. He prudently qualifies it as repulsive ( although he uses a less violent adjective for a painting on another just as denuded opisthotonic composition, but showing a little girl...)

This being said, if the exhibition is not limited to the period treated by Dijsktra, and if the opisthotonic motive wasn't invented at the said period, boy-themed works of art allow parallels to be made with his development. For instance, Alexandre Falguière's opisthotonic Tarcisius, created in 1868 at the beginning of the said period fits well into this ideal of personal sacrifice, of " sublime consomptif " characterized by a chlorotic tone of skin and sunken cheeks, as well as by an expression of languor, and the renewal of religious themes at that period. Those works are comparatevely rare, and one may find surprising that this boyhood iconography owes to the then trendy treatment of those feminine themes ( and to the underlying mysoginist ideology! ). The parallels with the evolution as developped by this author could be multiplied. The selection of works here " exhibited ", however indicates that, if this trendy topoi has allowed to renew happily some old themes, as Abel, Icare or Ismael, it has also given birth to new themes, which are particular to the male childhood, some examples of which are represented in the exhibition. In this way, some boy-themed works participate to the language and spirit of their time, rather than following it.

Pierre-Jean David d'Angers Le jeune Barra 1839 Angers, Musée des Beaux-Arts

Jacques-Louis David Mort du jeune Bara 1794 Avignon, musée Calvet

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