Women On Exhibit
Exposition, Suite for Barbara Loden & The White Dress by Nathalie Léger. St. Louis, Missouri: Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2016-2020.
Exposition. Nathalie Léger. St. Louis, Missouri: Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2020. 160 pages.
Suite for Barbara Loden. Nathalie Léger. St. Louis, Missouri: Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2016. 128 pages.
The White Dress. Nathalie Léger. St. Louis, Missouri: Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2020. 128 pages.
In her 2012 Prix Du Liver Inter winning book, Suite for Barbara Loden, Nathalie Léger explores the life and work of American film star Barbara Loden. Probably best known for her part in Splendor in the Grass, Loden appeared alongside Hollywood legends like Montgomery Cliff, Warren Beatty, and Natalie Wood. She was married to celebrated director Elia Kazan and won a Tony Award for her portrayal of Maggie in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall. In 1970 Loden wrote, directed, and starred in the film Wanda. It won Best Foreign Film at that year’s Venice Film Festival. Europeans adored it, but in America, prominent critics like Pauline Kael were underwhelmed. In the decades which followed Wanda was forgotten by all except hardcore cinephiles, and its creator and star overshadowed by her more famous husband.
Commissioned to write a short entry on Loden for an encyclopedia, Léger instead unpacks Wanda scene-by-scene, slowly unwinding the story of a Pennsylvania coal miner’s wife. We first meet Wanda at her divorce trial. Labeled an unfit mother and wife, she breaks with husband, children, and community. Discarding her old life, she wanders out into the world with only the clothes on her back. Like Meursault reincarnated as a poor, uneducated American housewife, Wanda is a passive victim, interacting with but indifferent to those around her. She embodies all the existentialist apathy and detachment of Camus’ antihero, without any of his Algerian glamour. Alternating descriptions of the film with biographical details from both Loden’s, and her own, life -- Léger maps out for her readers an entire constellation of connections.
Dorothy, the U.S. publisher, released two more books by Léger in 2020. Unaware in 2016 that they were reading the middle book of a trilogy, most critics reviewed Suite for Barbara Loden as a stand-alone title. It is actually the central panel of a literary triptych, the word the author prefers to use when describing her project. Suite for Barbara Loden is flanked by Exposition and The White Dress. Together they form a gentle meditation, a literary altarpiece that uses a combination of memoir and biography to explore the social structures women navigate: the patriarchy, objectification, internalized sexism, gender role conformity, and the consequences of the male gaze. Léger manages to address feminist issues without relying on the vocabulary of feminism and, as a result, the arc of her ideas resolve themselves in unexpected and interesting ways.
Exposition, book one, is a much-abbreviated biography of Virginia Elisabetta Luisa Carlotta Antonietta Teresa Maria Oldoïni, better and more conveniently known as the Countess of Castiglioni. The onetime mistress of Napoleon III and an acknowledged beauty, she posed and paid for hundreds of photographs. She oversaw every component of the meticulously composed black and white tableaus, from how she positioned herself to the lavishly designed costumes she commissioned and wore, exercising total control of her image as an artist, subject, and muse. Were she alive today, the Countess would dominate Instagram with the ruthlessness of a Kardashian.
Or so we would like to believe. Beauty is a young woman’s game and Oldoïni outlived hers, dying at 62 in a time when the average life expectancy for women was 48. In her later years, her boudoir became a pilgrimage site for young men who had heard the legend of her beauty. She entertained and, when the conversation faltered, disrobed for them.
‘ “Ugh, she smelled like sweat,” said General Gaston de Galliffet, the one who commanded the famous cavalry charge at the Battle of Sedan. No matter, she would make good on it at her next sitting with the photographer. Images don’t smell.’
Centuries later Léger, while attempting to put together an exhibit about the Countess, would pose the question to a male curator as to whether “she” could have existed without “he”, only to be willfully misunderstood and then dismissed.
Léger, who is also an art curator , treats each of her books -- Exposition, Suite for Barbara Loden, and The White Dress, -- as a gallery in the art exhibit she lacks the resources to stage. Her subjects are strategically chosen. Three women artists, all working in the format of film available during the era they were alive. Artists whose bodies and biographies are the central motifs in their work. Each obscure enough to accommodate Léger’s projections but relevant enough to merit rediscovery and reinterpretation.
The writer compresses and inserts an impressive amount of seemingly peripheral, but what is in fact intersectional, information into her texts – memories of her parents’ marriage, the life of Marilyn Monroe, Maria Abromovic’s 1974 performance piece Rhythm 0, the 1966 film Blow-Up, and seemingly endless cultural references to art, literature, and film. She not only acknowledges, but embraces Google, Wikipedia, and Social Media, implicitly encouraging her readers to pause and search the internet for the bits of film footage, photographs, and newspaper articles she references. For example, she goes into exhaustive detail describing an episode of The Mike Douglas Show featuring John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Barbara Loden as guests. You can watch it on YouTube, along with the archived Italian tv news footage on the murder of Pippa Becca, who Léger writes about in The White Dress. You can search The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online database for photos of the Countess of Castiglioni, which are in their permanent collection. Even Wanda is available to stream. As our experiences over the last year have taught us – everything is online. For those with internet access, the entire world is only a few clicks away.
What she cannot find, Léger invents, extrapolating from the existing information to bridge the gaps in the historical record. Her descriptions are so beautiful, it does not matter whether events unfold exactly as she describes.
She immerses herself, she immerses herself. And when the session is over, while Pierson gives instruction to the labs, she lingers a little, she is no longer thinking of anything, the curtain has finally fallen on her inner theater, its phantoms have been done away with. She watches the rain fall on the skylights, the starbursts opaque on the panes. She stands there, inert, as if entombed underwater, almost totally drained, standing still in the studio’s great luminous void, entrusting herself to a moment of silence and the absence of images, vanishing, carried away, swallowed up in the whiteness.
Pippa Bacca, the Italian performance artist, is by far the most problematic of Léger’s subjects and the one with which she is forced to take the most license, often veering away from the difficult details of the case to instead focus on her (Léger’s) own family history. In 2008, Bacca, whose real name was Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, began a performance art piece in which she and a friend hitchhike from Italy, through the Middle East, to Jerusalem, wearing white wedding dresses to symbolize “marriage between different nations and people”. The project was guided by a series of symbolic acts – they could not refuse a ride when offered and stopped along the way to wash the feet of midwives – and dedicated to the cause of world peace.
"The dress, the white, the foot washing, the ash, the accessories, images, arguments, everything had to be terribly significant.”
Twenty-three days into her journey, after she and her friend separated intending to meet up again in Beirut, Pippa Bacca was raped, murdered and her body abandoned on the side of a road in Turkey. “She was asking for it” is the verdict sent down by friends of Léger’s mother when she explains her project to them.
The atrocity is too recent, and too awful, to be examined with real detachment. Halfway through The White Dress, we find the writer lying on her mother’s sofa, “eyes closed, teetering at the edge of sleep but never falling into it”. She has returned home after traveling to Italy to speak to Pippa Bacca’s mother – a poorly conceived plan which she aborts on the same day she arrives in the town where the still grieving family lives. But without that interview, she can reach only a superficial understanding of her subject. At an impasse, suddenly her focus transfers back to her own mother. This woman hovering over her, demanding that her daughter abandon Bacca and tell her story instead.
And so Bacca shares her space in this literary exhibition with Nathalie Léger’s mother, for whom there is no archival material other than a daughter’s memories. The narrative fragments of which have been disbursed amongst the three books like Easter eggs. Léger tells herself “I have to stay focused” as she moves between her mother and Bacca at whiplash speed. The quiet, timid woman Léger views with a mix of pity and disdain (her father’s influence, no doubt) stands with the three artists as another woman who was positioned by the men in her life. Their stories, and the abstract ideas Léger has interwoven into their stories, are more personal than we realized.
Whereas a writer like Virginie Despentes crackles on the page, ferocious and pugnacious, subverting norms, embracing taboos, and seemingly enjoying herself all the while, -- Léger is more reserved as both a writer and narrator. Her three translators, Amanda DeMarco, Natasha Lehrer, and Cecile Menon, organize her words into a stream of flowing, hyper-intellectualized prose which even in English reads as quintessentially French. As Léger grudgingly acquiesces to her mother’s demands to transcribe her story, we come to see how the subjects of these books were chosen with this larger, feminist project lurking in the background. Léger dismantles the patriarchy, citing example after example from her subjects’ lives: the objectification and perceived narcissism of the Countess of Castiglioni; the victim-blaming of Pippa Becca; Wanda’s children being taken from her and the overshadowing of Barbara Loden’s achievements by those of her feted husband.
If there is a flaw in this project, it is one of timing. The mother’s story is trivialized, broken up, and lost in the flotsam and jetsam of societal misogyny, internet rabbit holes, and publication dates. But we understand that it is her mother’s history and by extension her own, which Léger is most invested in and has been struggling with throughout. That she ends her triptych with the image of a man, -- smiling, behind a camera, taking photos of family and friends at a wedding just days after he raped and murdered Pippa Bacca -- feels like a betrayal. It also feels most like the truth.
I read these books last fall and loved them, and your post makes me want to reread them.