Contagion, Hygiene, and the European Avant-Garde by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

As Dr Georges Decrop who treated prostitutes with la syphilis arabe at the Fez Clinic recalled, ‘their hideous masks eaten away by syphilis of the face’ attracted such attention, ‘it was a tableau worthy of Goya’.132 Yet in identifying its source as hereditary and innate to North African Arabs, particularly the Moroccan race, la syphilis arabe was a means, if not an insidious strategy, of disconnecting civilisation from syphilisation and exonerating French colonisers from all blame.

Due to la syphilis arabe, the overdevelopment of the male Arab abdomen supposedly directed energy only to the sex organs and explained their feeble intelligence.133 Polygamy and child marriage supposedly stimulated male organs to an enormous size; sexual libertinage and syphilis in women supposedly explained ‘the clitoris’ appearing ‘voluminous and very pre-eminent’ with ‘the vagina’ as ‘very ample’.134 This theory was confirmed by the very venereologist who had been chef-de-clinique at Saint-Lazare when Picasso was painting Les Deux Sœurs (Figure 4.4), Georges Lacapère.135 ‘Syphilis is one of the most widespread infections in Morocco’, Lacapère maintained.136 He estimated that there were 70–75% infected in Fez alone, plus 10,000 infected prostitutes.137 Even in Algeria and Tunisia, infection rates were estimated at 70–90%. Despite the impact of Pasteurian microbiology, plus Albert and Edouard Fournier's research and treatises on syphilis, particularly heredo-syphilis, Muslims were regarded as syphilitic because they were Muslim. Hence, Director of the first Institut Pasteur in Morocco, Pierre Remlinger, identified syphilis as integral to ‘Moroccan pathology’ and not the result of France's ‘mission civilisatrice’.138 ‘Arab syphilis created the Muslim as a cultural, social, and biological inferior’, concludes Ellen Amster, ‘a non-évolué who could only be a non-citizen’.139 In identifying them with hereditary syphilis and in turn, anarchy, libertinage, disease, and degeneracy, this seemingly justified the imposition of a sex industry consisting of maisons de tolérance, quartiers réservés, and bordels militaire de campagne, together with race hygiene, syphilitic medical science, and colonial governance.

Hence, just as the masks of the demoiselles in ‘The Best Guarantee’ (Figure 4.9) seem to have been erased to reveal what lay behind their full-haired wigs, glowing white face paint, rouged cheeks and kohl-blackened eyes, so they have been in Picasso's Brothel. While the prostitute wearing the mask in Picasso's painting is the curtain-raiser to the prostitutes on display for the client to make their choice, she is metaphorically the mask remover whose role Green compares to the revelatory ancestral spirit, Tupapaus, in Gauguin's The Spirit of the Dead Awakening.140 In so doing, she reveals the sequence of syphilitic decompositions from left to right that seems to devolve from the unsyphilised to the most syphilised, culminating in the final demoiselles in Picasso's brothel bearing la syphilis arabe.141 Yet as signified by the scarification directly below the left eyebrow of the third prostitute, the source of this syphilis seems not to be racially hereditary, in terms of la syphilis arabe, but integral to the French ‘mission civilisatrice’ that entailed sex available for French colonials plus medical and scientific experimentation by none other than the Pasteur Institute.

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