Right-ho, we’re all relatively familiar with the story of the ant and the grasshopper, wherein the grasshopper plays the violin instead of farming, I guess, and then in the winter the ant reminds him that you have to farm if you want to live through the solstice, and everyone’s happy, or starves to death. The point is, it’s about a grasshopper and an ant; which apparently no one explained to Jean De La Fontaine or the entire nation of France, because here is a painting about The Grasshopper and The Ant. Can you spot what’s missing?
Because of the influence of La Fontaine’s Fables, in which La cigale et la fourmi stands at the beginning, the cicada then became the proverbial example of improvidence in France: so much so that Jules-Joseph Lefebvre (1836–1911) could paint a picture of a female nude biting one of her nails among the falling leaves and be sure viewers would understand the point by giving it the title La Cigale. The painting was exhibited at the 1872 Salon with a quotation from La Fontaine, Quand la bise fut venue (When the north wind blew), and was seen as a critique of the lately deposed Napoleon III, who had led the nation into a disastrous war with Prussia.
“So much so that Jules-Joseph Lefebvre (1836–1911) could paint a picture of a female nude biting one of her nails among the falling leaves and be sure viewers would understand the point by giving it the title La Cigale.”
A of all what, B of 2 QUELLE, C of thirds OKAY?? “You know how improvidence is a grasshopper or a nude woman biting her nails, right?” “Definitely, Jacques.” “Oh, but it’s also Napoleon.” “Assuredly so, Desmondes.”
[Image via]
.jpg){kind=link}
The last time a Napoleon screwed up this badly the winter was three years long and some Frenchmen had to interact with Lord Byron. That sort of trauma stays with people.
I guffawed just a little bit at my desk. What an exquisite description of events.
Goddammit I clicked on this at work not realizing that “art” is synonymous with “full frontal nudity.” Thank goodness there’s currently no one sitting at the desk behind me.
Although can we be sure this person even has genitals, based on this portrait?
I’m glad I’m not the only one who questioned the genitals in this piece of art…
History has proven that painting that little line needed to make a proper vulva is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT, practically an impossible task.
Whereas evidence would imply painting an elaborate dickribbon apparently comes more naturally than breathing. So odd. I require a post of Women in Western Art History Inexplicably Lacking a Vulva just to fully vet out this thesis. (I suspect it will be all of them)
“Labia? Never heard of it. Boobs…not quiiiite sure, but I have a pretty good guess I think, it’s like tennisballs just under the skin, right?”
“Do areolas exist? Can we be sure? Probably best to paint boobs without them for the next couple hundred years to be on the safe side”
“Pubic hair? NEVER HEARD OF IT. O_O ”
(this is the hill i will die on)
(i have died on this bushy hill)
Ahh, when Toast is gone *where* will we be able to discuss the ubiquity of dickribbons in Western Art History? Our culture shall be the poorer for it, I am certain.
There’s got to already be a slack channel for that
r/dickribbon
I shudder to think of the spam commenters.
Also nobody can paint curly hair. Too complex.
What shows greater improvidence than forgetting to even have any genitals? It’s the height of reckless poor planning.
All boobs no vulva, you know how those improvident cicadas/grasshoppers/whatever insect clearly it doesn’t matter/etc are.
brb, off devoting my life to making “all boobs, no vulva” a idiom for… anything. Honestly, anything. Just so long as my children’s children live in a future where people casually say, “Dude was all boobs, no vulva, ya know?”
I want to leave a better world behind.
*spits tea* YES. This is a world I too will dream of.
“All sack and no nut” is a personal aphorism I use based on…. a very… unique… experience I had one time. It’s just not catching on, though. Time to move on to boobs and vulvae, clearly.
Infinitely better than “all hat, no cattle.”
I’m a fan of “all talk and no trousers.”
I want patches and buttons, can we make these?
For some reason, this reminds me of the Scottish expression “A’ fur coat and nae knickers”.
I am wracking my brain trying to figure out what the apostrophe after the A is abbreviating.
All!
Obviously the artist has never seen female genitals… Won’t HE be surprised!
I just assumed the artist has never seen a naked woman before, so he used an anachronistic Barbie for the model.
See I was tempted to blame an anachronistic Barbie model too, but that does not account for the extremely pronounced lack of thigh gap. Whatever this model was going for, it is clearly the polar opposite of thigh gap. Thigh hug? We should have a name for that.
Are her breasts oddly, like, right under her neck, too, or is it the angle?
Yes, this is a good candidate for when I curate a museum exhibit with the secret theme of physiologically inaccurate breasts.
At first I read that as “psychologically inaccurate breasts,” and now I’m trying to figure out what that would mean.
DO IT
All those middle-aged art connoisseur dudes explaining secret theme-unrelated stuff to their dates, who for once (if in possession of boobs themselves) retain a little will to live
Only the left one. The right one seems to be at an appropriate location.
My best guess is that the artist was going for her left one being held up by her elbow and arm (which seems anatomically possible, if a bit awkward and uncomfy) but failed to portray what this would do to the shape and the skin above it.
Yeah, her missing thigh crease is weirding me out. It’s like someone attacked the model with an entire bucket of Nu-Skin, or the blend tool in photoshop.
I was just thinking it looks like she’s made of clay.
yeah I don’t know did you not get Napoleon III from this?
If you copy her hand-on-face pose, first of all, it’s not easy because wrists and forearms don’t bend that way, and second of all, you’ll immediately notice that the pinky is gnawed away in disdain for this whole situation, leaving THREE (III) (3) fingers as a clear signal to the world that this is about Nap3.
Literally read what you said and then tried the pose. There are fingernail marks in my face, the inside of my left elbow hurts, and my right shoulder feels like it’s on fire.
Y’see, she’s lowered her head down towards her left hand and breast and craned forward, cuz otherwise how could you put your whole left arm under and then around your breast and then somehow still reach your hand with your face, but then also her left shoulder is *raised*, making that whole situation worse, and then but also her right shoulder, and indeed her whole right *side* is lowered quite a lot, but not just lowered: held back so far that her right arm is actually behind her.
I feel like this is actually the position of 90% of mummified corpses, and that if you still have water in your body and all your bones in their right places, it’s excruciating and difficult in the extreme, such that you’ll wish that somebody’d just go ahead and mummify you and get it done with.
Did we all read today? http://publicdomainreview.org/2016/06/15/frankens…
Thanks for the heads up! I was oblivious. What a gap in my historical perspective. So relevant.
Looks like he got walked in on painting boobs and had to come up with a reason on the fly.
*Jean De La Fontaine, busily painting boobs*
*Enter his friend, Pierre*
“Christ, Jean. Are you just painting disembodied boobs again? What is up with you lately?”
“OH SHIT. I mean… surely not, my dear Pierre, I am clearly painting a simply blistering critique of our erstwhile emperor, Napoleon III. Behold!”
*Quickly paints sultry nude woman around formerly floating boobs*
“…I think it just got… smuttier?”
*Quickly paints… like, a handful of leaves*
“…”
“It’s called La Cigale, you see.”
“Ah. So. Yeah. Wait, is that your neighbor’s kid? Dude, how old is she even?”
“You are no true Frenchman, Pierre. And you never have been.”
“You a creep, Jean. You a creep.”
*stands up & applauds* nailed it
Can you spot what’s missing?
Pubic hair?
<3
Oh, but grasshoppers DON’T HAVE pubic hair, do they? So maybe that’s a clue?
And you call yourself clever…
And, you know, any suggestion of actual genitalia…
Maybe she’s wearing a very smooth, flesh-colored merkin? Which contributes to the allegory…somehow.
What I want to see is the corresponding allegorical ant. Does she get pubes?
Oh shit, I thought it was the grant goes to the asshopper, well here’s some tits anyway
Look, it is unreasonable to assume that all nations and eras should have the same approach to anthropomorphism. Obviously France was still struggling with the concept at that time, but the allegory seems plain enough. Here is a girl who is so improvident that she is gallivanting around with nothing but a scarf. But now it is autumn, as testified by the fading foliage, and how will she make it through the cruel French winter with only a gauzy wrap from Lavello? This image was probably one of a diptych, the other featuring a smug-looking young woman warmly ensconced in a vast puffy fur-lined Burberry winter coat.
Artistically, the image isn’t too different from the “furry” art of our own time. All she needs is a small set of antennae and a giant throbbing ovipositor.
Managed to hold it together until ovipositor, now I am choking back laughter
You are a treasure.
This comment is a work of art, itself.
Did you know that you’re my hero?
Nothing is “missing” but your imagination.
I guess to understand this it helps to understand French history and culture and the immense influence of Jean de la Fontaine’s Fables. I’m trying to come up with an American corollary but I just can’t. Maybe if there were Sesame Street songs that taught practical lessons for children but also had significant, sophisticated messages for adults as well? Or that were written for adults in the first place? Ugh, why is allegory so hard to explain?!
Sesame Street did have a song about how you can never go down the drain.
I thought that was Mr. Rogers.
Are a cicada and a grasshopper the same thing?
Or in France do they not have the green grasshoppers we have in the US of A?
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen either in Paris, so I don’t know, but there are definitely words for both. The story’s actually about a cicada and an ant. The French word for grasshopper is ‘sauterelle.’
Ah, so WE are the problem!
In Provence cicadas are a huge, loud, thing, so I know they’ve got ’em in France!
Oh, yes, cicadas are featured everywhere. I believe I was somewhere in the south when I ate at a café called La Cigale. The thing is, I grew up in the American South, and seeing as we have been known to have plagues of them, I don’t share the French fondness for cigale imagery. I remember the worst instance was in middle school. They were so bad that I got of the school bus, ran a few blocks home, and literally had to brush off my clothes and hair before going inside our house. Occasionally I’d still find one clinging to something later. The ground was more covered in shed cicada skins than leaves in autumn. Never again. I think I’ll stick to living in a country where it’s considered a charming subject for art. 🙂
There goes my imagining of this story as taking place with Mr. Jiminy Cricket suffering a long, cold, drawn-out death by starvation.
“The French word for grasshopper is ‘sauterelle.’ ” This is my new favourite French word. Roughly ‘jumping lady’.
Previous favourites include ‘patane’ (thingmabob – usually machinery) and ‘mazout’ (furnace oil).
While the grasshopper stand-in in this picture is definitely lacking what I would consider a normal vulva, I do appreciate how her breasts are pointing in different directions and getting squashed by her arms. As someone whose breasts are frequently doing inelegant things, it is comforting.
Both cicadas and grasshoppers are the same thing as dragonflies. Somehow.
(This annoying fable is known in Russia as “The Dragonfly and the Ant.” No, I don’t know why I. A. Krylov went with a dragonfly in his classic translation/retelling. For the sake of the rhyme, I suppose.)
I misread the headline as “.. Proof That Ant Doesn’t Work” and was expected some high-level truth-bombs.
I thought what was missing was her pubic hair and labia!
*entire gallery of nudes*
A Frenchman: Ah Aesops Fables, very nice, very nice.
"Pubic hair? NEVER HEARD OF IT. O_O "
(this is the hill i will die on)
(i have died on this bushy hill)
what museum is this at
i want to know so that i can take visitors there just to comment "and this one is about the ant and grasshopper parable, *obviously*" before standing back with a smug look on my face daring them to say something
i will also say "ahh yes a classic memento mori" in front of literally every artwork i see