Red: A History of the Redhead by Jacky Colliss Harvey

Red: A History of the Redhead by Jacky Colliss Harvey

Author:Jacky Colliss Harvey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Published: 2015-06-08T21:00:00+00:00


In fact the days of the smooth and perfect limbs of the Salon nudes were already numbered. Over the Channel the French Impressionists were also creating works in which redheads abound, in Renoir’s marshmallowy nudes and in the pastels of Edgar Degas of the late 1880s in particular. There hadn’t been so many redheads in art since the days of Elizabeth I. Degas’s pastels of women sponging or toweling off after the bath, or combing through their long hair, have been criticized for their objectifying of their subjects, their equation of these women with so many cats washing and tending to themselves. They also have what one might view as at least a semi-exploitative subtext, in that such ablutions traditionally preceded or followed intercourse, and that the women are often naked, or almost so, and their faces are again often obscured. But Degas did produce one of the best depictions, indeed glorifications, of red hair ever, in his La Coiffure of 1896 (Fig. 25). Here one woman (older, a redhead, in apron and pinkish blouse) is combing through the hair of another (younger, wearing a red robe) who sits before her. The younger woman’s long red hair is stretched between them, like washing going through a mangle. Everything in the image is red, from the curtain looped up in the top left-hand corner, to the color of the wall behind them. The beads of jewelry on the table are red. The young woman’s cheeks are flushed. The painting shows what we should presumably take for a domestic space as being as red as a womb. It is as if the electricity one can almost hear crackling off that hair as it is combed has suffused the entire canvas with its color.

But the artist of red hair par excellence in this period must be Toulouse-Lautrec. All three of his most famous sitters from among the singers and dancers of the Folies-Bergère—Yvette Guilbert, Jane Avril, and La Goulue—were redheads. In his Rue des Moulins of 1894 he depicts one of his favorite models, a snub-nosed prostitute who was apparently named Rolande waiting insouciantly in line, shift held up above her navel, to be inspected for signs of syphilis. Her bright red hair is the hotspot of the painting. And of course this is another reason why artists place redheads in their works—for that vibrant dash of color, that ability of red to draw the eye; which is exactly the same reason why for a woman of the streets, or a tart in a brothel of the Belle Epoque, red hair works. It gets you noticed.72

Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings record a love affair between a particular kind of throwaway French chic and the blazingly artificial dyed red hair that can still be seen on the streets of Paris today. How did a characteristic once so linked to the lower end of the social scale become desirable and fashionable? One answer is the link forged by these artists between the image of the intriguing, independent, unconventional,



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