Dali House

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.

The first stuffed gorilla carcasses were shown at the Museum of Natural History in 1852, which is where Frémiet studied them, and from which he came up with an amazingly realistic sculpture he called “Gorilla Dragging Away a Dead Negress”.

When the Salon said no way Frémiet, the director of the Imperial Museums, Count de Nieuwerkerke, arranged for the beast to be put on view at the entrance to the Palais de l’Industrie. It did indeed freak people out, and more than a few people slept easier when the sculpture was destroyed in 1861.

Fast forward to 1887. The whole business of man evolving from monkeys has cooled considerably, thanks in large part to getting to know our genuine ancestors better. The first visual reconstruction of a Neanderthal had appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1873. He looked only marginally like us or a gorilla. If this was the missing link, it was a very broad link. There was roomy comfort zone between our branch and his.

Frémiet shows up in a truck at the Salon’s front door with another gigantic gorilla abductor, this one dubbed somewhat less sensationally “Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman”, and he’s got the backing of the artists’ jury. The Ministry of Fine Arts is less than pleased when he gets his medal, though, and has to be persuaded (possibly on threat of gorillas being brought to their homes to meet their daughters) to buy the sculpture for the national collection. The bureaucrats accede, but insist that it not be cast in bronze and not be shown at the Natural History Museum.

Smaller bronze copies are given the okay, however, and they sell like hotcakes, and engravings and photographs assure that Frémiet’s vision of jungle terrorism becomes an icon for the ages.

Frémiet, in a further irony, didn’t believe in evolution, and was probably joking when he wrote to an acquaintance that his depiction of the gorilla was “the exact portrait of Adam”. For his part, the sculptor carried on whipping out hundreds of small animal bronzes — often drearily cute, though the lizard seen here is brilliant — that remain highly prized today among collectors.

As a teacher he ended up having enormous influence on several generations of artists, and in 1892 he became a member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts, then, deliciously, professor of animal thawing at the Natural History Museum. Below is Frémiet’s sculpture of Pan.

Where does that leave us, though?

This is “Nessus und Deianeira”, painted by the Swiss symbolist Arnold Böcklin in 1898. Click on the image to see that this is no ape but a furry centaur on the make. Regardless of the species, clearly this Beauty and the Beast thing was catching on. By then Java Man — Pithecanthropus erectus — had been unearthed and put on display too, and Piltdown Man followed soon after, and their modern descendants started formulating notions of cavemen.

The “cave brute” variant came later. In 1896 Stanley Waterloo invented “Stone Age fiction” with “The Story of Ab”, about a nice little cave boy. Then cave art was discovered, and some interesting things about the ancient Egyptians. Jack London wrote “Before Adam”, about a man terrified by dreams of his evolutionary past. HG Wells obliged with “The Lost Island of Dr Moreau” and Arthur Conan Doyle with “Lost World”, but when Hollywood got going — well, you can’t have a good story without some violence — cavemen got nasty.

DW Griffith directed “Man’s Genesis” and “Brute Force”, Charlie Chaplin had a chuckle with “His Prehistoric Past” (that’s where the Flintstone garb and clubs originated), and then came Tarzan. Edgar Rice Burroughs had the vine-swinger rescue his mate from an ape: “Jane Porter — her lithe, young form flattened against the trunk of a great tree, her hands tight pressed against her rising and falling bosom, and her eyes wide with mingled horror, fascination, fear and admiration — watched the primordial ape battle with the primeval man for possession of a woman — for her.”

It was at this stage, Constance Areson Clark recounts in a remarkable essay about cavemen and the 1925 Scopes Trial, that American Museum president Henry Fairfield Osborn was swamped with letters from people asking whether apes really kidnapped women.

“He received so many queries of this kind that he saw fit to deny them even in scientific papers, mentioning in particular the notorious sculpture by Emmanuel Frémiet, ‘Gorilla Abducting a Negress’. The museum had been given this sculpture as a gift, he revealed, but would never put it on exhibit, ‘because in the museum exhibits we are trying to present only truth and to eliminate all misrepresentations of ape and human resemblance’.”

Hell with that, said Merian Cooper, who in 1933 found a giant gorilla threatening Fay Wray on remote Skull Island and made a movie about it called “King Kong”. Apes and anthropomorphism were good pals, simian depictions of one’s enemies having served as great war propaganda for decades. Kaiser Wilhelm got the full treatment during World War I, and Hitler was sure to follow. The social uncertainty stemming from the economic mess of the ’30s also made monsters more at home in the world.

They never seem to overstay their welcome anymore, probably because of that same sexual innuendo seeping from Frémiet’s troublesome statue. It’s been noted that one of Marlene Dietrich’s best remembered film scenes is her striptease in 1952’s “Blonde Venus”, in which she emerges from a gorilla suit.

Psyche out of control is a role best left to humans in monster disguise anyway. When I was a teenager I thought illustrations like the ones below by the great Frank Frazetta were sexually supercharged as well as fine art. Well, actually, I still do.

Of course Disney, by definition, tames the animal in us and for us, the ultimate example being “Beauty and the Beast”, which in its early forms — the stories of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont — was a pretty hair-raising yarn, as rife with sexuality as it was with character reform. (Walter Crane’s classic illustration below.)

And then there was Shrek!

Below, the last word goes to Alexandre Gabriel Decamps’ “The Monkey Painter”, from 1833. It made it to the Louvre, which is better than Frémiet did.