Research Notes: July 2019

A year after meeting Dr. Barnes, Demuth enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied under William Merritt Chase and Thomas Anshutz.² By 1914 Demuth had formed a friendly relationship with photographer and art patron Alfred Stieglitz—though he would always remain at the periphery of Stieglitz’s inner circle—and socialized frequently with New York’s elite artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Florine Stettheimer, and Marcel Duchamp. In his work, Demuth started to rebel against the standards of American realism, creating more fanciful images of figures and landscapes, often in watercolor. In 1915 Demuth began illustrations based on literary sources.

Demuth’s Nana series (1916), illustrations based on the novel by French author Émile Zola, was exhibited at Manhattan’s Daniel Galleries in December 1920. A newspaper critic noted that “whoever enjoys a whimsical imagination will revel in Mr. Demuth’s illustrations of Zola’s Nana... The man who obtains this group of illustrations will be a lucky man.”³ In March 1922, Dr. Barnes was that lucky man; he acquired eight of the 12 illustrations for his collection.

Written in 1880, Nana tells the story of a young prostitute in Paris who rises to the level of high-class courtesan.⁴ In the novel, Nana meets with countless men, using them for both sexual fulfillment and monetary gain. She often leaves them worse than when she met them—typically in financial ruin. A classic femme fatale, Zola’s character was an emblem of 19th-century anxieties about sexual degeneracy; many blamed the demise of France’s Second Empire on the pleasure-seeking culture cultivated under Napoléon III.⁵ Adding to Nana’s perceived perversion was her same-sex relationship with fellow prostitute Satin.

To further understand Zola’s story—and Demuth’s interpretation of it—we will explore a watercolor depicting a scene from chapter five of the novel. Count Muffat’s First View of Nana at the Theatre is the first illustration in the series, painted in 1916 when Demuth was living in New York’s Greenwich Village.⁶ Though residing in this part of the city provided Demuth with a degree of safety, homosexuality was criminalized at the time.

In Count Muffat’s First View of Nana at the Theatre, we see Nana from behind, posed with her hands flanking her face. She stands nude, surrounded by other cast members of The Blonde Venus, a fictional operetta modeled after Offenbach’s La belle Hélène. The audience in the dark theater is barely visible. Demuth’s depiction of the scene differs somewhat from Zola’s description, particularly with regard to Nana. In the novel, she has long, flowing blonde hair and wears a gauzelike fabric around her body for the performance, but Demuth has decided to portray her as nude and with her hair up.

Moreover, rather than representing Nana’s body as the epitome of femininity—with the goddess-like swells and curves that Zola describes—Demuth presents us with an androgynous figure. Art historian Jonathan Weinberg writes that “despite her seductive beauty, she is almost masculine.”⁷ In fact, Demuth’s Nana closely resembles the sculpted male masseur in his painting Turkish Bath Massage, made around the same time. Demuth’s rendering of Nana actively distorts the female body, omitting signs of her sex and feminine attributes and instead emphasizing a chiseled musculature, a more traditionally masculine trait. Demuth likely does this to negotiate and perhaps even evade his discomfort with the sexualized female form.

By showing Nana from behind, Demuth provides an unmistakably voyeuristic point of view. Voyeurism, at its core, is based on pleasure in looking—and this watercolor is entirely about looking and being looked at. While the audience observes Nana from the front, two men gaze at her from backstage. And, on top of this, Demuth gives us the most voyeuristic view of all: the scene, as a whole, is from the point of view of Count Muffat, who stands backstage and watches Nana through a peephole in the wall.⁸ Demuth indicates the edges of the peephole in the image’s top corners, making it apparent that we, the viewer of the painting, are embodying the role of Count Muffat and therefore the role of the voyeur.

Nana, a novel with an underlying theme of the dangers of sexually powerful women, seems to perfectly coincide with Demuth’s own discomfort with the sexualized female form. Yet as opposed to the countless men in Zola’s novel who fall prey to her erotic prowess, Demuth keeps a safe distance from Nana by viewing her sexuality through a voyeuristic frame.