#lassiette au beurre

EXHIBITION PEEK: L'Assiette au beurre

Our Gorman rare art book collection is featured in annual or biannual exhibitions held T.R. Andersen Gallery outside of the the James Ford Bell Library.  Our winter exhibition will be about caricature.  We mostly feature materials from Gorman and we complement with additional rare materials.  L'Assiette au beurre is apart of our regular rare collection and will most likely be featured in our exhibit.

Find it in the catalog

Today’s piece of gender non-conforming art history comes to us from 1909 France and is by the Artist Miklós Vadász who immigrated from Hungary and became an illustrator for the weekly satirical magazine L'Assiette au Beurre (”The Butter Plate”, or idiomatically, “The Pork Barrel”).  The magazine was satirical and often focused on socialist and anarchist themes, and was notable for having a vivid and graphically illustrated covered each week. (1)

In this scene, a queer figure rocks the gender spectrum in very stylish men’s clothing of the time, striking a pose as they place one hand on their hips, which are tilted jauntily out to the side, while the other hand, laden with jewelry, brings two fingers to their lips in a voguish pose.  The caption for the cover is in French and translates into “The Little Young Gentlemen”.

At the turn of the 20th century, it was already considered to be roguishly chic for assigned female Bohemian artists to dress in men’s suits. (3)  In 1909 (the year this cover illustration was published), Bohemian women in Paris (where the magazine was located) had additionally begun cropping their hair short which rapidly spread to Bohemiam artists circles throughout the world. (2)

To give further context to this cover image, a cartoon by the same illustrator has been included below (along with a link to this project’s article on the piece).  The cartoon is likely from the same issue, given the publication’s frequency in dedicating entire issues to specific topics. (1)  At a minimum, it is a carton by the same artist, in the same publication, published within months of this cover, and it depicts a male presenting character identifying themself  as “Lucy” with the very strong implication that the character is an assigned female person (rather than an assigned male person adopting a feminine name).

Given that assigned female Bohemians dressing in men’s suits was already an established phenomenon and that assigned female people had just begun cropping their hair short in the city that the magazine was based in and that L’Assiette au Beurre was a topical magazine, it seems likely that both the cover and the cartoon were observations of the phenomenon.  This is bolstered by the caption referring to the gentlemen as being “small”, and is further bolstered by the related cartoon which more explicitly depicts an assigned female character in a suit figure.  In light of this, it seems fairly certain that this cover depicts transmasculine imagery, but either way, it definitely depicts a gender non-conforming queer fabulous person of the day.

LINK TO CARTOON’S QUEER ART HISTORY ARTICLE: https://erotic-art-history.tumblr.com/post/147102364387/todays-piece-of-historic-gender-non-conforming

REFERENCE / FURTHER READING

(1) WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE: L’Assiette au Beurre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Assiette_au_Beurre 

(2) WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE: “Bohemian Style” (Bobbed Hair and Cross Gender Styles subsection)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_style#Bobbed_hair_and_cross-gender_styles

 (3) Malycheva, Tanja and Isabel Wünsche.  Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in Her Circle.  Brill, Leiden: 2017.

Direct link to “CHAPTER 9 Transcending Gender: Cross-Dressing as a Performative Practice of Women Artists of the Avant-garde by Marina Dmitrieva, p. 123-136.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctt1w8h0q1.15?seq=13#metadata_info_tab_contents

WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE: “Miklós Vadász” (translated into English)

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fhu.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FVad%25C3%25A1sz_Mikl%25C3%25B3s&edit-text=&act=url

abject-reptile:

Cover of L'Assiette au beurre [1906/04/07 (N262)]