Harlequin (1888–90; detail), Paul Cézanne. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
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Each week we bring you four of the most interesting objects from the world’s museums, galleries and art institutions, hand-picked to mark significant moments in the calendar.
189 years ago this week, on 31 May 1837, Joseph Grimaldi – the most celebrated clown in English theatrical history – died in London. Grimaldi invented virtually everything we now associate with the clown: the chalk-white face, the painted grin, the outrageous costume, the slapstick physicality. His performances at Covent Garden and Sadler’s Wells drew enormous crowds.
The clown as Grimaldi conceived it is just one of many staple comic figures throughout history and around the world. Jesters entertained royal courts from medieval Western Europe to the Ottoman Empire and often made veiled criticisms of powerful figures while wearing a cap and bells or other accoutrements. The harlequin emerged later, from the Italian commedia dell’arte – a nimble trickster in a diamond-patterned costume, perpetually lovesick and broke, a character so malleable that artists from Watteau to Picasso adopted him as an alter ego. This week we examine four works from across five centuries that depict clowns, harlequins and jesters.
L’Arc-en-Ciel (1893), Jules Chéret
Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, Nice
A whirling woman dominates this vivid watercolour. Chéret made this as a preparatory drawing for a lithographic poster advertising a pantomime ballet at the Folies-Bergère – and in the finished poster the figure shares the stage with a harlequin and a Pierrot, figures borrowed from the commedia dell’arte tradition that had long been a staple of Parisian popular entertainment. The woman herself belongs to a different lineage: she is one of Chéret’s ‘Chérettes’, the vivacious, free-spirited characters he deployed across hundreds of posters for theatres, festivals and dance halls. Click here to read more.
Carved staff (1450–75), possibly Italian
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Intricately carved from a single branch of boxwood, this small staff teems with scenes of the Annunciation and the Adoration of the Magi alongside a bagpipe-player, a defecating figure, comic gurning faces, a bird, a castle and a seated lion bearing a coat of arms. Objects like this served the jester as both prop and proxy: the fool’s-head-on-a-stick functioned like a ventriloquist’s dummy, allowing its holder to voice criticisms they might otherwise have silenced. The blending of toilet humour with sacred imagery was nothing new by this point, but it seems especially appropriate for a tradition premised on licensed transgression. Click here to learn more.
Harlequin (1888–90), Paul Cézanne
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
A figure in a black and red diamond-patterned costume stands with his body angled slightly away from us, his eyes cast downward. A wooden sword is tucked under his arm, yet despite this prop of buffoonery his presence is more introspective than comic. One of a small group of commedia dell’arte works Cézanne painted in the late 1880s, the picture was modelled on the artist’s son, also called Paul, though the face has been reduced to a remote, abstract mask – the performer stripped of performance. Click here to find out more.
Clown Torture (1987), Bruce Nauman
Art Institute of Chicago
Four video monitors and two large wall projections fill the room with the image of a clown, caught in four separate loops of failure and humiliation. In one, he screams ‘No’ incessantly while jumping and kicking; in another, he struggles to balance a fishbowl on a broom handle pressed against the ceiling; in a third, he opens a door only to have a bucket of water fall repeatedly on his head; in the last, he is trapped inside a nursery rhyme he cannot escape. Clown Torture transforms the clown’s traditional relationship with failure from entertaining spectacle into something genuinely uncomfortable, even horrific. Click here to find out more.
‘Four things to see’ is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, a free arts and culture platform that provides access to museums, galleries and cultural spaces around the world on demand. Explore now.
