Parisian style
Sebastian Smee
ircuses everywhere do their best to resemble what the writer Jean Starobinski once described as 'an island shimmering with marvels, a place kept intact from the landscape of one's childhood'. But such sentimental descriptions can obscure the fact that the circus has always had a bawdier side, particularly in France, where `amener le petit au cirque' ('to take the little one to the circus') doubles as an underhand reference to sexual intercourse. 'Le petit' ('little one'), in this instance, is a reference to the male sexual organ while the circus tent alludes to a woman's skirts, an arena of vast excitement which , , you get the general idea.
Trust the French, you may say, to turn even the most innocent of childhood entertainments into a sexual allusion. But then it takes only a few minutes in front of a really great and mischievous clown to dispel the illusion that the circus is all about innocence. Indeed, in Rome, where the circus has its origins, Christians were fed to lions for the fleeting entertainment of the masses; 'innocent fun' is the least appropriate description.
Clowns, if they feel they can get away with it, have always enjoyed edging towards obscenity. At the Cirque d'Hiver Bouglione, the oldest circus in Paris, the fool August, played this year by the great Gianni Fumagalli (referred to by the ringmaster as 'le petit), is constantly peppering his act with expletives — although he is careful to utter them in another language.
Fumagalli grew up in Cineeitta, the film studios outside Rome, where his father worked for years with Federico Fellini on films such as I Clowns. A consummate professional, he abhors clowns who deliberately humiliate members of the audience, and although one of his acts at the Cirque d'Hiver involves liberally spraying the audience with water, he knows exactly how to avoid upsetting his victims, (Rule one: keep them laughing.) But clowns are anarchic; they need to have an edge, and Fumagalli is, in the end, unpredictable. He very generously sees it as part of his role to keep his fellow performers entertained, so he mixes things up as much as possible. A lot of his jokes — from sneaking up behind the Polish violinist and snapping back her exposed Gstring, to blurting out obscenities in Italian — are made on the sly, and are not intended for children. (Of course, it is the thrill of trying to get away with things — rather than the things themselves — that makes clowns so appealing to children; it is an impulse they can relate to.) The circus offers many kinds of fun, both innocent and not so innocent, which goes some of the way to explaining the attraction it has always held for artists. In one of the great 19th-century images of the circus, Seurat's much-loved 'Le Cirque' (1890-91), now in the Musee d'Orsay, some of the less innocent aspects of late 19th-century circus life are plainly on view — you just have to know where to look. 'Le Cirque' shows a female horserider and a clown in the ring, a section of the audience and the elevated loggia containing the orchestra at what was probably the Nouveau Cirque in Paris. The audience is clearly divided along class lines: the poorer spectators sitting high up in the cheap seats lean forward to get a better view, while the well-dressed bourgeois sit in the pricier seats close to the action.
Look again and you notice one or two women in this zone sitting alone. Such women, according to the art historian Paul Smith, would almost certainly have been prostitutes on the look-out for clients. 'Ladies and whores compete in elegance under the eye of a crowd of young and old men uniformly dressed in black and sporting white ties,' wrote C. Berthe Marriott in Les Grands Jours du cirque in 1883. It was a sign of class to flirt with the ecuyeres, the agile women who performed stunts on horseback, so they were always in demand among the wealthier men.
These days at the Cirque d'Hiver, in a neat reversal of roles, the person performing stunts on horseback is the circus's director, a short, 30-year-old, good-looking man who himself has an eye for pretty women. Meanwhile, his aging uncle, whose life revolves around the circus, makes a habit of discreetly propositioning the female dancers and musicians who work there.
In his early days in Paris, John Singer Sargent was a regular at the Cirque d'Hiver; he depicted it in several paintings in the 1880s. Seventy years later, Lucian Freud spent many spare hours there. On one occasion he remembers overhearing an exchange between a well-dressed Parisian woman and her child which seemed to define for him something quintessential about the French. The pair were walking past the animal cages, one of which contained a wolf that seemed to have eaten away half its own leg. 'Look,' said the glamorous mother to her child. 'What a beautiful wound!' For three weeks this February the Australian artist Joe Furlonger set himself up at the Cirque d'Hiver with a sketch pad, charcoal and pastels.
In particular, artists throughout modern history have identified with the figure of the clown, as a new exhibition at the Grand Palais, La Grande Parade: Portrait d'artiste en clown (until 31 May), makes clear. The tradition stretches back to Watteau and Goya, and runs through to artists such as Daumier, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Dix and Beckmann. To some of these artists, clowns dramatised the plight of the lonely outsider ignored or mocked by an uncomprehending public — a plight many artists can relate to (including Picasso in his more self-pitying moments).
But the appeal goes deeper. It has to do with a whole array of sentiments, from the futility and pathos great clowns can embody to their anarchic, irrepressible energy and their bursts of oblique insight. Depictions of clowns were also a 'roundabout and parodic way of posing questions about art itself,' according to Jean Starobinski. 'Since Romanticism, the buffoon, the saltimbanque and the clown have been exaggerated and intentionally distorted symbols that artists have applied to themselves and to the very nature of art.'
The tradition continues right through to recent times. When told that people visiting Picasso's studio used to liken it to a five-ringed circus with Picasso as the ringmaster, the American artist Philip Guston replied, 'Well, with me it's just strictly clowns.' And more recently, Cindy Sherman's latest series of photographic self-portraits show her made-up as a clown, making explicit an element of unhinged buffoonery her works have always alluded to.
Some of the most influential modern artists have been almost indistinguishable from clowns: Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol all played at being the fool August, parodying art and the art world even as they profited from it. Gianni Fumagalli prefers his own, more traditional forms of clowning. 'I'm not all that interested in fine art,' he said, running his hands through his hair and making a face. Didn't Duchamp say something similar?
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