Beasts get the babes
Artists have been coming up with scary monsters since well before Bosch, but somehow it fell to Emmanuel Frémiet to provide the image that scarred us most deeply, to such a depth in fact that we will happily go see as many “King King” remakes as Hollywood can produce, just to make sure to giant ape is still safely contained on celluloid.
This is “The Nightmare” by Johann Heinrich (Henry) Fuseli, which formed a blueprint for many a vampire tale to come. It was painted in 1781, many decades before Frémiet moulded his monkey. There are numerous, frightening beauty-and-the-beast images like this in the galleries of our collective imagination; Frémiet’s model doesn’t even look that scary. Why all the attention?
Frémiet (1824-1910), Paris-born to an artsy family, was one of those guys who filled museums and army barracks with statues of horses wearing armour. He was good at animals and they were good to him. It sure beat the drudgery of lithography, which is where he started out, and was definitely an improvement on being the city morgue’s official painter. He was used to bodies in bits and pieces at any rate: He and Rousseau fought elbow duels at the Jardin de Plantes — the zoological gardens — doing sketches of flora and fauna living and dead, and Emmanuel occasionally helped dissect the critters that died.
In 1843 he sent his portrait of a gazelle to the Paris Salon and became a star overnight. Within a few years his “Wounded Bear” and “Wounded Dog” were in the Luxembourg Museum, and Frémiet spent most of the ’50s churning out military statuettes for Napoleon III. At the Place des Pyramides, just around the corner from the Louvre, you can see his equestrian statue of Joan of Arc from 1889 (his own replacement for his 1874 original). His monuments are all over Paris, in fact.
But it was “Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman” of 1887 that brought the glory: a medal of honour from the Salon for Frémiet, who was by now artist-in-residence at the Museum of Natural History. This came close to being laughably ironic, since he’d sent them virtually the exact same sculpture 30 years earlier, and the judges’ ruling was somewhere between merde and “Yikes!”
Part of the problem in 1859 was artistic quality, but mostly it was because the Salon didn’t want to freak people out. First of all, Darwin had just issued his challenge to the world order, “The Origin of the Species”, and folks were skittish about meeting the new relatives. And new they were, because second of all, the gorilla had only been discovered 12 years earlier (by white people, that is), and it was assumed to be a ferocious carnivore, and quite capable of running off with your wife. See the rest.
