text:
Colonizing the Cosmos
Astor’s Electrical Future
By Iwan Rhys Morus
September 14, 2022

During America’s Gilded Age, the future seemed to pulse with electrical possibility. Iwan Rhys Morus follows the interplanetary safari that is John Jacob Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds, a high-voltage scientific romance in which visions of imperialism haunt a supposedly “perfect” future.

If we time travelled back to America’s Gilded Age, the closing decades of the nineteenth century, what would the future look like? The economy was booming as cities expanded and industrialization gathered pace. Railways spread across the country, fuelling westward expansion with the opening of the First Transcontinental Railway in 1869. European investors flooded this growing market as they jostled to cash in on American prosperity, and American speculators made their own fortunes, too. Day by day, the United States seemed to be accelerating into the future promised by industry. Nikola Tesla, reminiscing in later years about his 1884 arrival in New York, remembered thinking that America was “more than one hundred years AHEAD of Europe and nothing has happened to this day to change my opinion.”1
This new tomorrow was to arise through the power of innovation. In 1876, Americans celebrated a century of independence with the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The huge Corliss steam engine that dominated the main exhibition building was forty-five feet tall and, through a series of shafts more than a mile in length, powered almost every other machine present. At this same event, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was exhibited for the first time. And American ingenuity showed no signs of abating. Almost twenty years later, viewing Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, commentators believed they were seeing the stuff of which the future would be made — it was “a shining vision, serenely awaiting the admiration of the world”.2 What did the privileged elite of the Gilded Age, those who often funded and stood to profit most from this vision, make of all this? How would they think about their own place in the future that technological ambition and innovation seemed to offer?
Luckily, one of them told us exactly how he imagined the century to come. In 1894, New York publishers D. Appleton and Company released A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future, written by John Jacob Astor IV, one of America’s wealthiest men. The Astor clan had originally made their fortune in the fur trade, and had added to their millions through investment in land and property. In 1897, John Jacob would build the Astoria Hotel in New York, next door to the Waldorf, owned by his cousin William. The hotel was both a symbol of the Astor family’s wealth and a honeypot for New York’s fashionables (Tesla himself lived there until he was turfed out for failing to pay his bills). It’s Astor’s authorship that makes the book such a fascinating insight into the Gilded Age’s fantasies about its prosperous tomorrows.
A Journey in Other Worlds is an example of what was once called “scientific romance”. The thriving genre was not only published in book form, but also in popular magazines aimed at a middle-class readership. Publications such as Cassell’s Magazine, Pearson’s Magazine, or the Strand (where Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared) allowed readers to discover scientific romances about strange new inventions, machines that could think, and travels in space. Some of Astor’s readers might, for example, have been familiar with Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, written a couple of decades earlier and featuring a superhuman race of subterranean, electricity-harnessing beings. They would have read Jules Verne’s fantastic tales of adventurers journeying to the centre of the earth, or descending two thousand leagues under the sea. They might have read Edward Page Mitchell’s short story, “The Ablest Man in the World”, in the New York Sun, about a man with an artificial brain. And in the same year as Astor’s book was published, readers could have encountered Gustavus W. Pope’s Journey to Mars the Wonderful World.
That is to say, Astor’s tale would have been familiar territory for his readers, though presumably their knowledge that its author was one of the world’s richest men gave it an added edge of interest. Written at the end of a century, the story was set in the year 2000: the beginning of a new millennium. It describes a world transformed by technology, awash with free energy. The novel’s protagonists are already on their way to Jupiter in its opening chapter, relaxing in the aftermath of the triumphant campaign to straighten the Earth’s axis, doing away with the inconvenience of seasons. Readers are treated to a potted history of the past century, including how the world’s politics had been transformed, before following their heroes on a jaunt through space.
Astor’s future ran on electricity. There was nothing novel about this. His readers would have found any other choice peculiar, to say the least, for everyone knew that the future would be electrical. As early as the 1830s, pundits were enthusiastically predicting the day when “half a barrel of blue vitriol, and a hogshead or two of water” (the constituents of an electric battery) would be enough to fuel a ship crossing the Atlantic.3 By the time Astor was writing in 1894, electric power cables were already festooning the streets of many American and European cities, and a scheme to generate electricity from the Niagara falls was under way, with Astor as one of the directors. George Forbes, the project’s consultant engineer, boasted that visitors would “see a whole new world created”.4 And Nikola Tesla was busily trying to persuade investors — including Astor himself — to back his grandiose plans to distribute electrical energy without wires across the globe. Electricity was the fuel of choice for scientific romancers.
What’s particularly remarkable about Astor’s vision is the sheer detail. It was all very carefully imagined. This is a future in which “[e]lectricity in its varied forms does all work, having superseded animal and manual labour in everything, and man has only to direct.”5 Everywhere, electricity is generated by the power of wind and water; the “electrical energy of every thunderstorm is also captured and condensed in our capacious storage batteries”; the “windmill and dynamo thus utilize bleak mountain-tops that, till their discovery, seemed to be but indifferent successes in Dame Nature’s domain.”6 Renewable electricity is used to “run our electric ships and water-spiders, railways, and stationary and portable motors, for heating the cables laid along the bottom of our canals to prevent their freezing in winter, and for almost every conceivable purpose.”7 Everyone has a windmill on their roof.
Astor offered his readers a blueprint for the coming century that laid out how they would get from their present to the electrical future. “This period — A. D. 2000”, one of his characters says, “is by far the most wonderful the world has as yet seen.”8 The wonder was the result of science and technology, of course, and all that plentiful electrical energy. It’s no surprise that Tesla thought (wrongly, as it turned out) that Astor would be an easy touch for cash to fund his dreams of wireless power. The spread of republican ideals in the aftermath of the French Revolution more than two centuries earlier, and the great advances in science that accompanied it, meant that “education has become universal, for women as well as for men, and this is more than ever a mechanical age.”9 Astor’s future was the end-point of the inexorable march of progress. Science had generated “this perfection of civilization”.10
It was only a perfect civilization for some, however. In the same year that Astor published A Journey in Other Worlds, women suffragists presented an unsuccessful petition with almost 600,000 signatures at the New York State Constitutional Convention, while the United States Supreme Court passed the Civil Rights Repeal Act, overturning congressional protections for the voting rights of Black Americans. The inequalities of Astor’s present remain largely unaddressed in his vision of the future, and in some respects are hideously amplified. While women benefit from universal education, there is no mention of suffrage, and the physicians of the future are solely “serious and thoughtful men”, whose research finds “the physique, especially of women, . . . wonderfully improved”.11 Meanwhile, Astor’s twentieth century is primarily shaped by white Anglophones conquering every region of the planet. A Journey in Other Worlds cannot imagine a future that is not built from colonial violence.
Astor’s novel describes how, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, continental Europe descended into a perpetual state of warlike antagonism between the great powers of France, Germany, and Russia, whilst England “preserved a wise and profitable neutrality”.12 One result was a technological arms race as the competing nations developed larger and deadlier armaments. Metallurgy flourished in the search for advanced weaponry; chemists developed better explosives; and the invention of flying machines made them all too dangerous to use. “These tremendous sacrifices for armaments, both on land and water, had far reaching results, and, as we see it now, were clouds with silver linings”, says Astor’s future historian.13 The great war never came, and the continental rivals stagnated in perpetual stalemate: “the rival nations had their pains for nothing, or, rather, for others than themselves.”14
The other result was mass-migration, as weary Europeans left the continent and its antagonisms for better lives elsewhere. At the same time, the “jealousy of the Continental powers for one another” put a stop to these nations’ dreams of empire, leaving the world free for exploitation by Britain and the United States.15 English was on its way to becoming a universal language, through eradication rather than acquisition. “Spanish and Portuguese elements in Mexico and Central and South America show a constant tendency to die out”, reports Dr. Cortlandt with sinister ambiguity.16 And the perished residents of these regions are gradually replaced by the supposedly “more progressive Anglo-Saxons”, making “the study of ethnology in the future. . . very simple”.17 By the end of the twentieth century, Canada had joined a United States that now spread over both North and South America. Britain in the meantime had free rein to assimilate much of Africa and Asia into the British Empire (Astor was writing during the Scramble for Africa). Due to improvements in condenser technologies, allowing water to be made from air, “mile after mile of Africa has been won for the uses of civilization”, and “the erstwhile ‘Dark Continent’ has a larger white population now than North America had a hundred years ago”.18
That was the “perfect” world from which Astor’s protagonists set out on their jaunt to the planets — a future that reflected the Gilded Age elite’s fantasies of empire and colonial settlement. Their planetary encounters would be similarly revealing. As far as his characters were concerned, their own world had reached perfection and it was time to embark for the stars: the next stage in humanity’s manifest destiny. The spaceship built by Colonel Bearwarden — president of the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company — and his companions is called the Callisto (the name of Jupiter’s second largest moon). Constructed entirely from beryllium, an electrically-conductive element, the ship is powered by apergy: a term that had been invented by the author of scientific romances Percy Greg, in his 1880 story Across the Zodiac, to describe a kind of anti-gravitational force. Astor is vague about how exactly his version of apergy works, but the implication is that it operated through some kind of modification of electricity.
Bearwarden chooses Jupiter and Saturn as the expedition’s ultimate destination, planets that seem to offer the best prospects for human habitation and colonization. “I am convinced”, he says, “that we shall find Jupiter habitable for intelligent beings who have been developed on a more advanced sphere than itself, though I do not believe it has progressed far enough in its evolution to produce them.”19 The belief that life existed on other planets was widespread throughout the nineteenth century. And the notion that the various planets of the solar system might be at different stages of evolution was also a common one in scientific romances (H. G. Wells would use it in his War of the Worlds just a few years later, for example). As far as the adventurers on the Callisto are concerned, the planet’s primitiveness made it an ideal space for human conquest — almost as if it had been made for them.
In due course, they are off, with great pomp and circumstance — flags waving and a twenty-one-gun salute ringing in their ears. The space through which Astor propelled them was increasingly familiar territory by the 1890s. They whiz past the Moon: “[t]here was something awe-inspiring in the vast antiquity of that furrowed lunar surface, by far the oldest thing that mortal eye can see”.20 That lunar surface had been photographed as early as the 1840s and was exhaustively mapped by the 1890s. They pass by Mars and its two satellites. As with the Moon, Astor’s readers would probably have been quite familiar with the Martian surface. Given Giovanni Schiaparelli’s and Percival Lowell’s observations of canals on Mars, it is perhaps surprising that his travellers do not spot any. They do, however, see a comet, and even take a ride inside its tail. And they pass through the asteroid belt, finding an atmosphere: “oceans and continents, with mountains, forests, rivers, and green fields”.21 ※※Indexed under…MarsTravel to
Flying at last over the surface of Jupiter, the crew of the Callisto marvel at the “towering and massive mountains” and “smoking volcanoes”.22 Heading west, they see “gently rolling plains, and table-lands that would have satisfied a poet or set an agriculturalist’s heart at rest”.23 Their response to these sights is revealing of what Astor thought the planets were really for: “‘How I should like to mine those hills for copper, or drain the swamps to the south!’ exclaimed Col. Bearwarden.”24 Jupiter was a future Africa or American west — a space deemed ripe for  exploitation. “Not even did Columbus, standing at the prow of the Santa Maria, the New World before him, feel the exultation and delight of these latter-day explorers of the twenty-first century.”25
Saturn, on the other hand, is an abode of the dead. Spiritualism and theosophy were all the rage in fashionable American society during the 1890s, and Astor was not the only one to play with the idea that the planets might represent higher spiritual planes. A few years later, Louis Pope Gratacap would devote an entire novel to the proposition that Mars was inhabited by the dead, who could be communicated with using wireless telegraphy. In this case, the presence of spirits does not prevent the Callisto’s crew from continuing their interplanetary safari. When they eventually return to Earth, they might be spiritually elevated, but they are also well aware of new worlds still to conquer: “Remember, we have been to neither Uranus, nor Neptune, nor Cassandra, which may be as interesting as anything we have seen”, Bearwarden says, taking leave of his fellow-travellers, “should you want to take another trip, count me as your humble servant.”26
A Journey in Other Worlds is a fascinating and revealing novel, which tells us a good deal about the way in which Astor and his readers viewed their future. This is important, because even though the future did not entirely match their fantasies, those fantasies were still key to making the modern world. It’s a future saturated with technology, and electrical technology in particular. Electricity is what makes Astor’s future world go round — literally, in fact, since it was electricity that Astor imagined pumping water back and forth between the poles to fulfil the peculiar ambition of righting the Earth’s axis and eliminating the seasons. This was the future projected by inventor-entrepreneurs like Tesla, too, and embodied in World’s Fairs. Astor’s story offers insight into just how seductive this vision of the future was to the Gilded Age’s privileged elites. It's striking that the novel’s protagonists are men clearly modelled on Astor himself. They are powerful and wealthy, the heads of corporations and committed to technological futurism. ※※Indexed under…PoleRighting the Earth's axial
More striking still, though, is the theme of empire. Bearwarden and his crew were heading to Jupiter for a specific kind of adventure. Jupiter’s exotic “Jurassic or Mesozoic” creatures, or Saturn’s “dragons” were just big game, as far as they were concerned. This was space travel as safari. But like Victorian big game hunters and explorers in Africa — both real and fictional — even as they bagged their trophies, they were casting covetous eyes over the landscape, too. Jupiter and Saturn (and presumably the other planets in due course) are places to be colonized. They were places where farms might be established, mines sunk, and resources extracted. They are different in scale, but not in kind, from how Astor’s novel envisions continents such as South America and Africa in the twentieth century: blank canvases, shorn of subjects, on which to paint dreams of supremacy. As things turned out, of course, Astor never came anywhere near the future he imagined. He died on April 15, 1912, the richest victim on the Titanic. But it’s clear that the future he imagined and wrote about was a future tailored for men like him.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 14, 2022

author: Iwan Rhys Morus


text:
Displaying the Dead
The Musée Dupuytren Catalogue
By Daisy Sainsbury
November 22, 2022

When Paris’ infamous museum of anatomical pathology closed its doors in 2016, a controversial collection disappeared from view. Daisy Sainsbury explores the history of the Musée Dupuytren, and asks what an ethical future might look like for the human specimens it held.

For years, the Musée Dupuytren in Paris was the site of an unusual pilgrimage. Students, medics, linguists, and neuroscientists would travel to the city of lights in search of Louis Victor Leborgne. Not the actual Leborgne – he had died in 1861 – but his brain, which had been sealed in a glass jar, preserved in a fixative solution, and displayed on a shelf at eye level in this museum of anatomical pathology. A brain in a jar, you might think, looks like any other brain in a jar. Yet Leborgne’s brain was of particular historical importance. Raised in Moret-sur-Loing, a commune known for its tanneries, the former craftsman had suffered from aphasia for most of his adult life: he could understand everything he heard, but, whenever he tried to speak, the only thing Leborgne could say was a single, non-sensical syllable: “tan”. Leborgne became a patient of the French physician Paul Broca, and when he died aged fifty-one, Broca conducted an autopsy. The doctor found a lesion on the left frontal lobe, which supported his theory that speech production was localized (in what is now known as Broca’s Area). This revolutionised our understanding of language and its disorder, and, by cementing the idea that cognitive functions could be mapped to specific parts of the brain, laid the foundations of modern neuroscience.
A visitor to the Musée Dupuytren did not have to be a neuroscientist to appreciate the museum’s collections. Since its inauguration in 1835, members of the public came to gaze at skeletons and pickled body parts, skulls impaled by metal rods, anatomical wax models depicting rare defects and diseases — and, in the process, discover something of the history contained in this morbid cabinet of curiosities. During the nineteenth century, when a trip to the Paris Morgue represented a fun day out for the family, the museum pulled in large crowds with an appetite for the gruesome and the grotesque. Visitor numbers, while not publicly available, are thought to have dwindled over time. During the 1990s, concerns began to grow about the future of the museum. This intensified in the decades that followed as museums in France and abroad came under increased scrutiny for some of the objects in their collections. The debate originally centred around artworks and artefacts obtained during colonial rule, but soon extended to a broader discussion about the ethics of exhibiting human remains.
It was not a complete surprise, then, when the Musée Dupuytren announced it would be closing its doors for good in 2016 — officially, because the premises had fallen into a state of disrepair and did not meet accessibility requirements. Its collections were transferred to the basement of the Sorbonne University’s Pierre and Marie Curie campus where they can now be visited by students and researchers exclusively on request. There are currently no plans for the museum to reopen. Anyone wanting to discover more about the Musée Dupuytren and its contribution to the history of medical science must make do with Charles-Nicolas Houel’s Catalogue des pièces du musée Dupuytren (Catalogue of artefacts in the Dupuytren Museum).1 This five-volume inventory, published between 1877 and 1880, detailed the six thousand or so specimens in the museum’s collection at the time, accompanied by some eighty-five black-and-white photographs.2
The museum was founded from a bequest by Guillaume Dupuytren (1777–1835). Dupuytren was a celebrated surgeon, anatomist, trepanning enthusiast, and doctor to Napoleon Bonaparte, whose haemorrhoids he allegedly treated. Although little-known today, his name crops up time and time again in nineteenth-century literature. He appears in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) and Dictionnaire des idées réçues (1911–1913), and counted Flaubert’s father as one of his medical students. Among his patients was Marie-Henri Beyle, otherwise known as Stendhal. The two men belonged to the same masonic lodge and the novelist would send him copies of his books, before their friendship swiftly cooled — the fate of many, if not most, of Dupuytren’s relationships.
But it was Balzac who made real space in his literary oeuvre for this figurehead of scientific progress. In La Comédie humaine, the writer’s interlinked collection of more than one hundred novels, short stories, and essays, Dupuytren appears under the guise of the fictional surgeon Desplein, trepanning the eponymous hero in the novel Pierrette (1840) and operating on Madame Mignon’s cataracts in Modeste Mignon (1844). In 1836’s La Messe de l’athée (The Atheist’s Mass), Balzac dedicates an entire short story to unpicking the contradictions of this “transient genius” who “flashed across science like a meteor”.3 He is depicted as coming from humble beginnings, hauling himself up the social ladder thanks to his unbridled ambition and a propensity for hard work. “His enemies”, Balzac wrote, “attacked his odd moods and his temper whereas, in fact, he was simply characterized by what the English call eccentricity”.4 Balzac’s is a somewhat generous take. The real-life Dupuytren’s “moods” were well-documented, and while jealousy may have played a role, he was on most accounts power-hungry, tyrannical with his students, and scornful of mediocrity. He suffered from a persecution complex and was so eager for control that he dictated the findings of his own autopsy in advance.5
After Dupuytren’s death, the museum’s collection grew from 1,000 artefacts (mostly bone specimens) to the 6,000 inventoried in Houel’s 1877–1880 Catalogue, and now amounts to over 15,000 items in the Sorbonne’s basement archives. Donations came from medical societies such as the Anatomical Society of Paris, famous physicians like Broca and Dominique-Jean Larrey, but also many lesser-known surgeons hoping to secure their place in history through their inclusion in the museum. With specimens dating from 1752 to the 1920s, the collection charts a key period in the history of medicine, where the pace of development was unprecedented. They attest to the explosion in research on patients and their cadavers in the wake of the French Revolution, when hospital regulation was minimal. Animals, too, were subjected to this appetite for experimentation. The Catalogue describes transplants and amputations performed on rabbits, dogs, and guinea pigs, all of which either died shortly after or were “sacrifié” (“sacrificed”) to expedite the subsequent autopsy.
The Catalogue reflects the range of treatments available to patients over time – some surprisingly advanced, others markedly less so. One entry refers to the skull of a young woman who, after suffering concussive episodes brought on by a fall, was trepanned no less than nine times — and this, before the widespread use of anaesthesia.6 Other entries describe successful operations that nonetheless resulted in death from ensuing infections, as antiseptics were not used in surgery until 1865. More recent additions to the collection demonstrate the tentative beginnings of medical technologies. A hand, preserved in fixative in the early 1910s, exhibits gangrene resulting from exposure to radiation without proper protection. After Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895, X-ray machines were quickly rolled out, not only in the medical domain but in shops and fairgrounds too, where paying customers could have a go on this new-fangled apparatus, returning home with scans of their skulls and the contents of their handbags. In the time it took to discover the harmful effects of radiation, many pioneering radiologists and shop-floor operators alike presented with similar injuries. In parallel, the Dupuytren collection demonstrates what uses medical imaging was put to: X-rays taken during World War I show how neurologists Jules Dejerine and Augusta Dejerine-Klumpke were able to locate and extract bullets and shrapnel from wounded soldiers.
Many of the pathologies described in Houel’s Catalogue are now increasingly rare. Rates of syphilis, typhoid, tuberculosis, and rickets have dropped substantially in most parts of the world thanks to new treatments or improved diet, sanitation, and living conditions. Smallpox — a deadly epidemic in eighteenth-century France — was last detected in 1977. Likewise, many of the gravest birth defects listed in the Catalogue are now picked up early during prenatal screening. But perhaps more interesting is the glimpse the Catalogue offers of society at the time. Poor labour conditions are reflected in the significant number of workplace injuries: the fractured skulls of construction workers who’d fallen from scaffolding or quarrymen felled by landslides and loose rocks. One particularly gruesome specimen is the hand of a factory worker ripped off in an accident involving heavy machinery, heralded in the Catalogue as a valuable demonstration of the tendons system. In a period dominated by bloodshed (not least the Seven Years’ War, the French Revolutionary, and Napoleonic Wars), there are body parts of young soldiers as well as bystanders caught up in social unrest: a man shot in the head in the 1848 June Days uprising and a fifteen-year-old girl hit by a grenade in Orsini’s 1858 failed assassination of Napoleon (where around 156 onlookers were injured and 10 killed).
Beyond this, the catalogue contains the expected array of ordinary human misfortune that might not look so different to a Saturday night in any modern-day emergency room: patients who fell downstairs, off ladders, walls, and chairs; others caught up in scrapes and brawls; one man hit over the head with a plank. An entry dating from 1849 echoes the incredulity of twenty-first century doctors, forever bewildered by the foreign objects that find their way into their patients’ bodies. In his report, the surgeon Stanislas Laugier describes a fifty-three-year-old man suffering from unexplained leg pain and shifty in his responses: “We were unable to ascertain if he was a regular brandy drinker nor what his lifestyle was like. From his embarrassed explanations, we can assume that he was not telling the truth”.7 Despite treatment — eighty leeches applied to the leg and foot — the patient died shortly after his admission to hospital. In the autopsy, a five-centimetre-long woman’s hairpin was found in the left ventricle of his heart.
The Musée Dupuytren was founded with a clear, pedagogical purpose, yet many visitors were drawn less by the opportunity to learn as by the chance to ogle real human remains for their shock or entertainment value. As a museum of anatomical pathology, the collection reflected a panoply of illness and diseases, as well as physical and intellectual disabilities. It housed the skeleton of Marco Cazotte or “Pipine” (1741–1803) — a man born with Phocomelia Syndrome, a rare birth defect leaving him with no arms and legs, his hands and feet being attached directly to the torso. In his lifetime, Cazotte earned an income as a fairground attraction, one of the few ways that someone with this disability could make a living at the time. The question of whether the museum’s displays represented a continuation of the same fairground dynamic is a reasonable one to ask. In recent decades, the Musée Dupuytren was keen to distance itself from its reputation as an anatomical “horror show”, with guided tours stressing the scientific, educational value of its collections. But at other points in its history, it seems to have leant into its voyeuristic appeal. In the 1920s and 30s, waxwork exhibits depicted gory crime scenes pulled from the headlines.8 Other items previously on display — a six-footed pig, a two-headed cat — were of equally tenuous educational value, bringing little to the study of human anatomical pathology.
In accounting for the Musée Dupuytren’s falling visitor numbers, it would be too simplistic to suggest that our appetites have changed since 1835. In the era of true-crime documentaries, which often include real footage of murder scenes and dismembered bodies, morbid curiosity seems as “alive and well” as ever. Nonetheless, societal attitudes have shifted over the years, with the boundaries of acceptability redrawn. Today, visitors would feel less comfortable confronted with some of the specimens in the Dupuytren collection: foetuses and premature babies with birth defects; body parts of indigenous patients brought back from French colonies; the throat of a man with an intellectual impairment who choked on a plate of potatoes. They might wonder about the historical power dynamics between doctors and their patients that led to the latter’s inclusion in the collection, as well as what forms of consent — if any — were given. In the twenty-first century, these are exactly the kinds of questions that should have been addressed in the museum’s curation. But, as both scholars and members of the public have pointed out, the signage in the museum provided limited information.9
During the final decades of the Musée Dupuytren’s existence, museums in France and abroad found themselves in a climate of increased scrutiny, particularly with regard to exhibits removed from their homelands in a colonial context. In 2002, the remains of Sara Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman known by the pejorative term “the Hottentot Venus”, were returned to South Africa for proper burial. During her lifetime (1789–1815), Baartman was put on display at freakshows in England and France for her steatopygic body type (characterised by large fat deposits on the buttocks). After death, her body was dissected, her genitalia and brain were preserved in jars, and her skeleton was displayed at the Musée de l’homme, an anthropology museum in Paris. Her skeleton was removed from public view in 1974 and kept in storage until the French Senate voted to repatriate it twenty-eight years later. The Senate’s decision, while clearly correct, destabilised the regulatory framework that had previously protected the contents of public museums as an intrinsic part of France’s heritage and therefore “inalienable public property”.10 It also ushered in a wave of further restitutions. In 2010, the heads of nineteen Māori warriors were returned from French public collections to New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa; four years later, the skull of the indigenous Kanak chief, Ataï, who led an 1878 rebellion against colonial French rule in New Caledonia, was also repatriated.11
In parallel, a high-profile scandal surrounding the 2009 “Our Body” exhibition raised questions about the ethical and legal status of exhibiting human remains more broadly. Ran by a private events company, the exhibition staged real human bodies in various poses — playing chess, riding an exercise bike — and had travelled from several cities in the United States to Lyon and Marseille in France, before being banned by a court in Paris. The ruling alluded to a recently introduced law specifying that the “respect, dignity and decency” owed to a human body while alive should also apply after death.12 The judge deemed the exhibition to be in contradiction of this law by commodifying human bodies exclusively for profit. In 2009, a court of appeal upheld this decision, but for different reasons. It ruled that the exhibition’s organisers were not able to provide sufficient proof that the people whose bodies appeared in the show had given their consent.13
To this day, French law permits national museums and hospital- and university-based institutions like the Musée Dupuytren to exhibit human remains for artistic, cultural, scientific, or pedagogical purposes, as long as their dignity is preserved. But following the spate of restitutions and the “Our Body” ruling, by the 2010s, the fate of other morally questionable exhibits had never been more uncertain. Consequently, when the Musée Dupuytren closed in 2016, speculation abounded about the reasons behind this decision. If, as the Sorbonne University’s press release would suggest, the state of the premises were to blame, then why was there no plan to renovate or relocate the museum to a more suitable site? Did concerns about the appropriateness of its exhibits play a role, as the inevitable trickle of “political correctness gone mad” opinion pieces proposed? The university has kept quiet on the matter, and when I put these questions to a representative of the Dupuytren collection, they declined to comment. However, in a research paper published in 2020, Eloïse Quétel, who has been in charge of the Dupuytren collection since 2017, shed some light. She described the university’s decision as being motivated by three factors: “to assess the state of the collections related to its conservation”, “to bring the building up to health and safety standards”, and finally, “to reflect specifically on the ethical and deontological issues related to the exposure of human remains”.14
Those reflections will presumably include a discussion of what conditions must be met to justify exhibiting a human body after death. Informed consent? Demonstrable scientific, historical, or cultural value? Time elapsed since death? (Mummies in the Louvre seem to have been spared the concern surrounding more recent human remains.) A further question to consider is what we mean when we talk about dignity. Is dignity better served in a basement archive rather than a public museum because the motivations of visitors can be filtered by profession or institutional affiliation? By rethinking the collection’s curation, situating it in its historical context and addressing the more uncomfortable aspects of its past, could the Musée Dupuytren reopen to the public again? There are presently no firm plans, but for those who believe the collection should have a place in the public domain, there is some good news on the horizon. Quétel is currently working on a database that will catalogue each item in the collection along with any available information about the patient, their pathology, and the doctor who treated them. She hopes to make it freely-accessible online in the future.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 22, 2022

author: Daisy Sainsbur

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Marvellous Moderns
The Brothers Perrault
By Hugh Aldersey-Williams
May 17, 2023

Charles Perrault is celebrated as the collector of some of the world’s best-known fairy tales. But his brothers were just as remarkable: Claude, an architect of the Louvre, and Pierre, who discovered the hydrological cycle. As Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores, all three were able to use positions within the orbit of the Sun King to advance their modern ideas about the world.

Louis XIV of France — the longest reigning monarch the world has ever known (born in 1638, he reigned from 1643 until his death in 1715) — was a man of great passions. Aside from his Catholic faith, and his two wives and his mistresses, he adored music, dancing, theatrical ceremonies, his gardens, fountains, and palaces. His last words, noted down and later framed as a warning to his successor, were: “I loved wars and buildings too much.”1
Fortunately, there were great talents equal to the King’s passions, among them the composers Jean-Baptiste Lully and François Couperin and the playwrights Molière and Jean-Baptiste Racine. When domestic artists could not be found, the best were brought in from abroad, such as the sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who came from Rome.
Never, though, did a single family encompass the range of skills that the French court required as comprehensively as that of the Parisian lawyer Pierre Perrault and his wife Paquette Leclerc. Of their six sons and a daughter, three in particular would distinguish themselves in very different fields, their careers all woven together by dependence on Louis’ extravagant but visionary royal patronage. In an age when the fine arts, the “useful arts”, and the sciences still overlapped to a great extent, these three brothers crisscrossed almost effortlessly between a host of disciplines.
Best remembered today is the youngest of the brothers, Charles (1628–1703), who is famous now as the collector and author of fairy stories — including “Sleeping Beauty”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Cinderella”, “Puss in Boots”, and “Bluebeard” — known as the Mother Goose Tales. Before turning to writing, however, he served at the French court as a cultural advisor to Louis’ all-powerful minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
Like Charles, Pierre Perrault, the oldest of the brothers (1611–1680), trained as a lawyer. He rose to a senior position as a receiver of taxes, where he was well placed to bankroll his family’s ambitions, until he fell from grace in an embezzlement scandal. Thereafter, he pursued literary and scientific studies, and wrote an influential treatise on the origin of springs, which is considered to mark the discovery of the hydrological cycle in nature.
Claude (1613–1688) began his career as a physician, and made investigations in the fields of physics and natural history, becoming one of the founding members of the French Academy of Sciences, before dying from an infection contracted during the dissection of a camel. But it was in the theory and practice of architecture that he was really to make his mark.
In addition, there was Nicolas, who studied to be a theologian, and became well known in his day as the author of a vehemently anti-Jesuit tract, and Jean, who also followed in his father’s legal footsteps, but caught a fever following injuries sustained in a carriage accident while in Bordeaux with his brother Claude, whose attempt to cure him through bloodletting precipitated his sudden death. Charles’ twin, François, died in infancy and a sister, Marie, died before reaching adulthood.
The quality of the brothers’ education is neatly encapsulated by a eulogy for their father, who “made a particular effort to fortify, at the opportune moment, his children against popular errors, to inspire them with the purest maxims taken from Holy Scripture, and to open their minds to the most beautiful forms of knowledge.”2 Though they were all intellectually accomplished and highly ambitious, the brothers were nevertheless different in character. Charles had a sharp, ironic wit. Nicolas was pious, but humorous, too. Claude was the most scholarly among them, while Pierre had the social skills that helped to launch them all on their astonishing careers.
In 1654, Pierre followed his father into government finance when he bought the position of receiver-general for Paris. As such, he was responsible for collecting the iniquitous land tax known as the taille (it affected all common people’s property, but the nobility, with far greater land holdings, was exempt). His handsome earnings taken directly as a percentage of these receipts enabled him to support his younger brothers as they too began to explore the corridors of power. Charles was the first to take advantage, and moved in with Pierre, acting as a runner for his older brother, ferrying taxpayers’ monies to the bank. (Though he too had studied law, he never practised, dissuaded perhaps by the shady business of collecting his degree, when, along with two friends, they found “the sound of our money, which someone was counting behind us during our examination, played some part in making them believe our answers to be better than they actually were.”3)
The Perrault brothers’ collective prospects were boosted by political changes, which gradually introduced a more meritocratic approach in state administration.  Following the death of his boyhood mentor and chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, in 1661, Louis XIV — still only twenty-three years old — began to take more direct control of the government. He appointed Jean-Baptiste Colbert as his finance minister. The immensely able and cultured Colbert set about centralizing power through a sweeping programme of domestic economic development, trade reforms, and colonial expansion, introducing greater efficiency in tax collection in order to pay for it all. The increased receipts were used to fund a series of public works such as long-distance canals, as well as to glorify Paris with the erection of grand buildings, foremost among them Louis XIV’s palaces of the Louvre and Versailles. Colbert also instigated a string of new royal academies of the arts and sciences in addition to the existing Académie Française.
Charles’ less than onerous duties for Pierre left him with plenty of time to browse in his brother’s excellent library, and to work his way into Colbert’s favour with his literary and cultural expertise. By 1664, Charles had so impressed Colbert that he was made superintendent general of buildings, advising on royal palaces and gardens, as well as the secretary of one of Colbert’s new academies, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, devoted to historical writings. In reality, the brief was even wider: as Colbert’s confidant, Charles was “to examine in good faith anything that contributed to the arts and sciences”.4 Sometimes, the literary and horticultural came to a happy convergence, as when he suggested that Louis XIV theme thirty-nine sculpted fountains at Versailles according to fables of Aesop.
However, as Charles rose, so Pierre was to fall. Streamlining the collection of taxes proved so successful that it was soon possible to bring in general tax cuts. The only ones to suffer were the official receivers of taxes, such as Pierre, who had bought their positions dearly when taxes were high, only to see an easy incom gradually eaten away. Caught out by the abrupt change, Pierre felt he had no option but to dip into the current tax takings in order to pay his debts. When Colbert heard of this misdemeanour, he personally made up the missing revenue, but demanded an explanation from Charles Perrault, who went to see his brother to hear his excuses. These were unsatisfactory to Colbert, who immediately forced Pierre to sell off his office at a loss. “It was all done with extraordinary harshness, and shocked all the financiers”, Charles wrote afterwards.5 Charles, too, severely tried Colbert’s patience when he interceded once too often on behalf of his hapless brother. The Perrault brothers had learned the hard way that the family name they had sought to use for their advancement could also easily count against them.
Once he had regained Colbert's trust, it was now Charles who was able to help another brother, Claude. He recommended Claude as one of the founding members of the Academy of Sciences, where he embarked on a project to assemble a natural history of animals and their anatomy. Endless dissections of diverse animal species soon extended into an exploration of the motion of bodies and the action of mechanical springs.
But it was not long before Colbert found Claude a new project. Aware that the physician was adept in Latin, the minister commissioned Claude to produce a French translation of the ten books of Roman engineer Vitruvius’ De Architectura, the only work of architectural theory surviving from the classical period. His medical expertise allowed him to express his astonishment when he came across the highly idealized proportions of man laid down by Vitruvius in Book Three of his work.6
This theoretical project led to two important building commissions. The first was for the design of the east colonnade of the Louvre, which still stands as an exemplar of French classical architecture. The extent of Claude Perrault’s involvement is not entirely clear — several other architects contributed as well. However, he was the principal architect of the Paris Observatory, which, along with being an astronomical facility, was to serve as a meeting place for his Academy of Sciences. Work on the building began on the summer solstice of 1667 when the academicians gathered on site to agree its precise orientation to the cardinal points of the compass, with the Paris meridian defined by its axis of symmetry.
A major challenge of the design was to meet the modern requirements of a scientific institution within the conventions of the classical architectural style. The final plan comprised a complex grouping of three octagonal towers around a rectangular central block. Exceptionally for the period, the resulting edifice was almost without ornament, dedicated entirely to its scientific function. Unlike the Louvre colonnade, the classical orders of architecture were all but absent from the facades, whose tall, arched windows gave an austere overall appearance.
While Claude was busy with these projects, and Charles continued to serve Colbert, their brother Pierre, following his financial disgrace, tried his hand without success at translation and literary commentary. Quite how he came next to consider the problem of hydrology is a mystery. Perhaps a clue lies in the dedication of the treatise he produced on the subject to his friend (and friend of all the Perraults) Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch scientist and a leading light at the Academy of Sciences, who was much concerned with the hydraulics of Louis XIV’s fountains, among more serious pursuits in astronomy and mechanics. Or perhaps it was his brother Claude, who may have pointed out as he was translating Vitruvius that the Roman engineer speculates in the eighth book on the origin of springs and their exploitation for urban water supply.
De l’origine des fontaines (translated as On the Origin of Springs, rather than “fountains”) was published in 1674, setting out for the first time with quantitative evidence the workings of the natural water cycle (a summary of the work had appeared a couple of years earlier in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society). He published it only reluctantly, fearful of the kind of satirical criticism to which his brother Charles was routinely treated for his literary efforts.
Water has long been something of a French obsession. The country’s natural thermal, spring, and mineral waters were acknowledged as an important national asset, with a history of scientific attention and statistical data-gathering behind them. A century after Pierre Perrault, the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier was one of the contributors to a mineralogical atlas of the country’s waters, for example. But the groundwork for Perrault was laid by the Huguenot ceramic artist and hydraulic engineer Bernard Palissy, who published a discourse on the sources and composition of underground waters in 1580.
It had been widely believed since antiquity that much of the Earth’s water must come from sources underground. Aristotle, for example, reasoned that the volume of all the rivers was far greater than could be explained by rainfall alone. Palissy was the first to suggest that the Earth’s precipitation was in fact sufficient to account for the flow of all its springs, streams, and rivers, although he did not offer evidence for his claim. Pierre agreed with his countryman that springs could arise from rainwater alone, although he disputed certain details, such as how the soil and rocks underground contributed to the cycle.
Pierre’s innovation was to employ quantitative analysis. He conducted experiments to gauge the ability of sand and soil to absorb and release water, and devised means to measure the flow and volume of streams and rivers such as the Seine. In this way, and taking into account the absorption of water by plants and losses due to evaporation, he was able to show convincingly for the first time that the total of the rain (and snow) that falls on the Earth is indeed sufficient to account for the water that emerges from springs and flows in all the rivers. In reviewing previous thinking about water sources from Plato onwards, Pierre surmised that Aristotle, perhaps overly awed by watching rivers in spate, had neglected the balancing factor of the sheer area of the Earth’s surface available to collect rainwater.
According to Pierre, the conventional wisdom that “the rains that fall on the slopes of hills are lost and of no use for springs, because thence they fall into rivers” — in other words, that rainwater was carried straight to the sea via rivers, and that springs were therefore caused by some other divine or undiscovered underground agency — was completely wrong. For Pierre, it was very nearly the opposite: it was the rains and rains alone “that serve to produce and maintain springs”.7
For an amateur’s first foray into science, Pierre’s treatise was remarkably well received. His calculations were checked later and confirmed by leading members of the Academy of Sciences, such as the physicist Edmé Mariotte, and by the astronomer Edmond Halley in England. Pierre himself remained modest about his achievement. “There is nothing hard to understand, nothing new to be imagined, nothing to be assumed gratuitously or by miracle”, he wrote of his findings.8
Though working in very different milieus, each of the brothers was now known in effect as a writer at a time when writers were much in demand at court in order to communicate the glory and progress of the French state. Claude was the translator of Vitruvius. Nicolas had written against the Jesuits. Pierre had his treatise on springs. And Charles, the future author of the Mother Goose Tales, was kept busy by Colbert penning celebrations of royal occasions and profiles of beneficiaries of patronage. In the eighteenth century, the mathematician and encyclopedist Jean le Rond d'Alembert, writing a series of eulogies to early members of the Académie Française, praised Charles Perrault as one who wrote for a nation that “wanted and deserved to be enlightened”.9
The Perraults’ centrality to the literary world of Louis XIV’s France was underscored when Charles became embroiled in the “culture wars” of the day. Known as the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns”, a satirical pun on the title of an essay by Charles titled “Parallel of the Ancients and the Moderns”, this long-running dispute revolved around whether the works of classical antiquity could or should be surpassed by contemporary creativity. It began in 1674 with an operatic production of Alceste by the court composer Lully, which was criticised for departing from the classical story by Euripides. In a polemical essay, Charles defended the work, arguing that artistic progress was possible. However, leading playwrights such as Pierre Corneille and Molière sided with the Ancients, while Racine mocked Perrault in verse.
Charles Perrault was a modern in more than just a literary sense. For example, he produced an early “Defence of Women” when a colleague published a satire against the female sex in the style of the Roman writers Horace and Juvenal. In fact, the “Quarrel” reveals something fundamental about all the Perrault brothers, which is that they were all Moderns in their way, for Pierre’s and Claude’s works take sides no less than Charles’. Claude’s translation of De Architectura was no slavish copy, but also a modern commentary in which he was critical not only of Vitruvius’ idea of human proportion, based on his own modern medical knowledge, and referenced reinterpretations of the Roman master by modern architects such as Palladio. The translation served as the platform for Claude’s later work, “Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns”, which aimed to synthesize the best features of Vitruvian idealism, actual classical antiquities and the ideas of Renaissance theoreticians.
The architect-brother's immersion in the dispute was practical as well as theoretical. A design that he produced for a triumphal arch near the Bastille came unstuck when opposing sides could not agree whether its inscriptions should be in Latin or modern French. In the end, construction was abandoned and the foundations were demolished after Louis’ death. And at the Observatory, an argument erupted concerning Claude’s proposal to set the signs of the zodiac in marble into the paving. Though not strictly an ornament in the classical style, and so a “modern” conception, the idea was judged vulgar and unscientific by the incoming director of the observatory, the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini.
Pierre Perrault’s hydrological studies were also framed in terms of the “Quarrel”. In his introduction to the work, he challenged his contemporaries for their refusal to consider that rainfall might account for all the Earth’s waters. “How is it then”, he demanded, “since the first and most usual maxim of our Moderns is to doubt everything, that they do not doubt also an opinion so contested and so obscure?”10 In the end, though, he builds on modern studies such as those of Palissy, and demolishes the old thinking of Plato and Aristotle.
In 1697, his seventieth year, Charles Perrault saw prose versions of his fairy tales into publication. Surprising as it seems, even these were a late counterblast in the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns”, intended as modern alternatives to the classical fables of Aesop. They were also a riposte to the contemporary French fabulist Jean de la Fontaine, one of the Ancients faction, whose famous verse tales, such as “The Grasshopper and the Ant” and “The Lion and the Mouse”, began to appear from 1668, and were derived mainly from classical sources.
Assembled from folklore, but greatly embellished, and in some cases completely invented by Charles, the Mother Goose Tales are modernized versions of traditional stories, relocated into a bourgeois society that seventeenth century readers — and especially his friends at court and in the Académie Française — would recognize. Sleeping Beauty’s wedding even takes place in a mirrored apartment reminiscent of Versailles. And each tale has a moral purpose. “They all lead us to see the advantage of being honest, patient, clever, industrious, and obedient, and the evil that befalls those who are not”, Charles wrote.11 For him, it was this that made them modern. “I believe that my Fables are more worthy of being recounted than most of the ancients’ Tales . . . which were created only to please, without regard for sound morals, which they greatly neglected.”12
Just as Claude’s magnificent additions to the architecture of Paris still stand today, so do Charles’ timeless stories and Pierre’s ideas about the hydrological cycle. In these three brothers’ work, we find enduring achievements made possible by the overlapping visions of science and art under the reign of Louis XIV.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Hugh Aldersey-Williams


text:
In Search of True Color
Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky’s Flawed Images
By Erica X Eisen
December 7, 2022

Archived amid Prokudin-Gorsky’s vast photographic survey of the Russian Empire, we find images shot through with starshatter cracks, blebbed with mildew, and blurred by motion. Within such moments of unmaking, Erica X Eisen uncovers the overlapping forces at play behind these pioneering efforts in colour photography.

“At 9 [PM]”, Tsar Nicholas II recorded in his diary on January 22, 1911, “Prokudin-Gorsky showed us his beautiful color photos of the Volga and the Urals in the Semi-circular Hall. Dmitri and I played billiards.”1 As well as telegraphing a certain princely boredom, the entry is testament to a striking early achievement in the history of photography: the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky, an academic and scientist from Murom whose research interests had come to focus on photochemistry. At a time when black-and-white was still the dominant photographic mode, Prokudin-Gorsky had perfected a technique of capturing scenes in full color, so that he could dazzle audiences in St. Petersburg with magic lantern shows that looked to be brimming with life: plates of ruby-red berries, lush greenhouses, scale-like church roofs radiant in the sun.
As the editor and publisher of the prominent photography magazine Fotograf-Lyubitel, Prokudin-Gorsky had used his position not only to report on advances in color photography but also to illustrate these discussions with select reproductions of his own images, establishing him as a leader in the field and garnering widespread public notice for his portraits of Tolstoy.2 The wave of fame these photos brought him culminated in a 1909 invitation to the Romanovs’ summer residence at Tsarskoe Selo, where he gave the imperial family a private demonstration of his work. On the strength of that original presentation, Nicholas granted the photographer virtual carte blanche to pursue his dream of documenting the empire via 10,000 images in full color, allowing him access to areas that would otherwise have been off-limits and even outfitting the expedition with a special train-car-turned-dark-room.
Drawing upon the work of James Clerk Maxwell, Adolf Miethe, and others, Prokudin-Gorsky honed a technique that mimicked how the human eye processes light by dividing it into three discrete channels. With the aid of special triple-wide glass plates, the photographer would capture each scene three times over — first through a blue filter, then a green one, and lastly a red one. The positive images, when projected using these same filters, could then be recombined and overlayed to produce a gem-bright composite.3 In its elaborate three-shot, three-filter requirements, the technique differed from other early color photographic technologies, notably the Lumière Brothers’ potato-starch-based Autochrome, which the professor considered “complex and capricious” and discarded in favor of his own methods.4
The most well-known of Prokudin-Gorsky’s works possess both a vitality and the peculiar bittersweetness that comes from seeing a world lost to the past: boys studying at a school in Bukhara’s Jewish community, now largely dispersed through emigration; nomadic pastoralists in Central Asia whose traditional way of life would soon be radically altered by forced settlement and collectivization. But there is something equally arresting about those lesser-seen works among Prokudin-Gorsky’s œuvre, photographs that their maker might well have understood in some sense as “failures”: warped images, off images, images shot through with starshatter cracks where the plate was smashed, blebbed with mold and mildew, scratched with a fingernail, or caked in dust. Here our focus strays away from elegant landscapes and fantastical Orthodox church domes and toward the great effort involved in staging and producing the photographs themselves.
The phrase “true color” occurs a number of times across Prokudin-Gorsky’s surviving writings. To him, this was his œuvre’s chief virtue, the quality that set it apart from both black-and-white photography and other forms of art. “These images are everlasting—they do not change”, he wrote in a letter attempting to convince Tolstoy to sit for him. “No painted reproduction can achieve such results.”5 Projected for audiences across Europe — the most common way Prokudin-Gorsky’s works were seen by the public during his lifetime — his photographs were met with wonder and rapturous praise: a record of one such display for a group of specialists reports “lengthy unceasing applause and shouts of approbation among those present”.6
Yet the photographer’s claims of “true color” elide the degree to which, by virtue of his particular technique, many aspects of the final images are ultimately open to choice, in the way that an adagio may sound crisp or contemplative depending on the orchestra interpreting it. The photographs printed during Prokudin-Gorsky’s lifetime, for instance, were rendered in considerably more muted tones than the bright hues in which they are typically shown today.7 The prints and digital images familiar to modern viewers are themselves the product of painstaking efforts by various parties in recent years to overlay the photographer’s triplicate filtered negatives to create a single unified scene. Done manually, proper matching of a single image can take hours, a process that has been sped up somewhat by the advent of new digital tools. But no matter the technology at one’s disposal, harmonizing the three color-filtered exposures is tricky, not least because both the subject and the camera may have shifted between the first and third shutter release. For those attempting to align the resultant staggered negatives, these disjunctures present a quandary: which is the “true” photo, the composition with which the other two negatives must be made to conform?
Of the several efforts that have been made to tackle this challenge, two prominent ones have come out of the Library of Congress. The institution has housed all known surviving negatives of Prokudin-Gorsky’s work since 1948, when the library purchased and removed the collection from the cramped Paris basement where it had been kept following the family’s departure from Russia.8 The hand of Blaise Agüera y Arcas, who produced a set of color composites for the LOC in 2004, is instantly recognizable by the thick bands of color that form a kind of ersatz frame around each image: smooth gradations fraying into discrete strands of red, blue, and green. Walt Frankhauser, who began work on the collection in the 1990s, chose to draw out more brightness and contrast in his renditions. When surveying several versions of the same shot, the certainty of Prokudin-Gorsky’s “true colors” soon becomes nebulous and difficult to pin down.
The photographer must have been acutely aware of the difficulties his technique posed when it came to overlaying three negatives to create a crisp scene. He generally avoided photographing anything that might move when working indoors, where low light levels required a single exposure to drag out for ten minutes or more.9 Instead, viewers are treated to a series of still and dead subjects: wooden saints, elaborately costumed mannequins, and taxidermied animals whose rictus snarls were guaranteed to hold from shot to shot.
The bright light of the outdoor sun shaved down exposure times considerably, and it was here that Prokudin-Gorsky attempted to capture scenes of life. But even if he worked at top speed, there was always the risk that a sudden stray movement would create what Agüera calls “ghosting”— a candy-colored blur where a solid form should be. A Turkmen camel shakes its head pinkly; the breeze splays a carpet across the visible light spectrum; a baby pops in and out of existence between takes. Certain subject matter presented further challenges to the professor’s method. Rivers proved difficult: at Five Brothers Rock, the swift-flowing Chusovaya runs red, while in a shot of Girvas Waterfall, the rapids are alive with flashes of strange rainbow light. Clouds and smoke are similarly transformed into sweet blurs as they move across the sky. While Prokudin-Gorsky may well have understood these difficulties as faults of his technique, they constitute a fundamental part of its charm: documentary fidelity tips into something imperfect, enchanted, and alive.
Then there are those photographs in Prokudin-Gorsky’s collection that were affected not by a chance occurrence while they were taken but by an accident in the century since. Over the intervening decades, negatives have shattered or become breeding grounds for fungi; scenes once clear have grown faded and patchy as their emulsion has broken down. The names bestowed upon these imperfections by conservators sometimes possess a startling poetic quality: “butterfly wing”, “fern life”, “frost on a windowpane”.10 Frankhauser, who produced digital renderings for roughly 1,400 of the LOC’s 1,902 negatives and generally favored greater intervention to sharpen his pictures, reached the conclusion that “unfortunately, some images simply could not be processed”.11 But Agüera’s digitization effort, which tackled the Prokudin-Gorsky collection in its entirety, gives us a sense of how even these extremely damaged pieces could look. In one photo, color defects turn a Danube landscape into Rothko-esque planes of pure color; in another, a wedge of unalloyed pink slices through an otherwise bucolic scene of peasants lunching in a hayfield. River views break out in pox, ferns emerge through the snow of mountains in Uzbekistan, and a blue fingerprint smudges the foreground of a shot across the Kem. It is precisely where the image is unmade — colors bleeding together, coming apart — that we get a sense of how it was created in the first place.
If Prokudin-Gorsky felt that the great strength of his photographs was their fidelity to nature, he was also quite clear about the effect he hoped they would work upon the viewer. Seeing the breadth and beauty of the country, he wrote in notes to a lecture for his fellow Russian émigrés in Paris in the 1930s, was “the only way to show and to prove to Russian youth, who have already forgotten or who have generally never seen their motherland, the full power, full significance, full greatness of Russia and in this way awaken that national awareness that is so necessary”.12 Even before the Russian Revolution, which precipitated the photographer’s departure for the West, a nationalistic and imperialistic bent is clear in his work. Prokudin-Gorsky’s surviving writings are dotted with assessments of Russian advancement in photographic technology that explicitly measure his home country against Europe, comparisons that evoke a long history of anxieties about Russia’s status vis-à-vis the West.13 In this context, significantly, imperial possessions were often used as barometers of Europeanness, a sentiment perhaps most infamously contested in a quotation from a newspaper column by none other than Fyodor Dostoevsky celebrating tsarist conquests in Turkestan: “This shame that Europe will consider us Asians has been hanging over us for almost two centuries now…. With our push toward Asia we will have a renewed upsurge of spirit and strength.”14
In this respect, it’s significant that Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographic survey completely eschewed Russia’s principal cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg in favor of forays into the imperial periphery.15 The 1905 public demonstration mentioned above, which won the photographer “lengthy unceasing applause and shouts of approbation”, focused on views of Finland, Dagestan, and the Caucasus — conquered territories populated by peoples whose ethnic backgrounds, languages, and religions differed from those of many metropolitan viewers. Likewise, his celebration of railroad technology — a prominent staple of his albums and the mode of transit that made possible their very creation — obscures the fact that these and other imperial infrastructure projects were often built by forced laborers.16 Some of Prokudin-Gorsky’s most frequently reproduced photographs come from colonial Turkestan, where visions of broad, unpeopled landscapes and deteriorating Timurid mosques with no one there to maintain them — images whose lack of living subjects was likely at least in part dictated by the limitations of his three-color technique — suggest empty terrain ripe for the taking by Russian settlers.17 Among his less picturesque views of the region, we find a series of photographs of factories and machines used to process cotton — a boon for the imperial economy whose cultivation was a major driver of Russian settlement in colonial Central Asia.
If photographic archives like Prokudin-Gorsky’s are indices and tools of empire, what happens when the images they contain are broken? It’s tempting to read into the collection’s imperfections, as if a negative’s flaws might reveal the instability of the powers that created it, the lie beneath all claims of “true color”. Like the Central Asian nomads and migrants whose movements constantly frustrated Russian colonial authorities’ attempts to pin them down under the border regime, Prokudin-Gorsky’s framing of the world required a deathly stillness that never comported with reality.18 Should something move, should the wind blow too forcefully, or should anything happen to the delicate glass slide once the photograph was taken — then only ghosts would remain.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: December 7, 2022

author: Erica X Eisen


text:
Images from the Collective Unconscious
Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn and the Eranos Archive
By Frederika Tevebring
February 22, 2023

In the 1930s, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, mystic and founder of the multidisciplinary Eranos forum, began compiling a diverse visual archive that would allow dreamers to cross-reference their visions with the entirety of cultural history. Frederika Tevebring explores this grandiose undertaking and its effect on the archivist, as images from the collection began to blur with her psyche.

In the 1930s, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881–1962), artist, mystic, and founder of the multidisciplinary forum Eranos, began assembling an extensive archive of images.1 Its purpose was to offer a “respite from logical thinking in words and concepts”, relying instead on the “magic wand of analogy”.2 The archival project was grounded in Carl Gustav Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, which he considered to be a universal part of the human mind, holding memories inherited from our ancestors. Accordingly, Fröbe saw her collection’s images as archetypes — memories from the deep religious and symbolic past as they manifested across different cultures and epochs. Its eclectic categories included: the Trinity, Masks (with subcategories: double-faces, miscellaneous, and Swiss), Navajo Sand Painting, Fish, and Three-Headed Gods. These headings reflected Jung’s theories, Fröbe’s conversations with some of the most radical academics of the time, and her personal journey towards psychological introspection.
The archive grew in parallel to Fröbe’s wider Eranos project. Starting in 1933, she organized the annual Eranos conferences at her home in Ascona, Switzerland, handpicking speakers — from across fields such as psychoanalysis, art history, comparative religion, oriental studies, archaeology, and biology — and overseeing the publication of accompanying yearbooks. The speakers looked to symbols and mythology to track the changing forms of religious experience: “backwards into cultural history and forwards to the mental problems of today’s humanity”.3 Fröbe’s ambition was that the image archive would grow into an institution and become a tool for research and instruction in the spirit of Eranos. Her project inspired thinkers such as the myth theorist Joseph Campbell and the psychoanalyst Erich Neumann, who based his book The Great Mother (1955) on the image collection.
One prominent intention of Fröbe’s archive was to decipher the archetypes that appear in dreams. In its complete form, this archive would expand beyond images and supposedly allow the dreamer to cross-reference their visions with the entirety of past and present human culture. To interpret dreams, visitors would be able to draw upon different “departments” sorted by: pictures (mostly archaeological and ethnographic); texts (e.g. from Christian mystics, alchemic treatises, and Eastern and Western systems of yoga and meditation); other people’s dreams (historical and contemporary, collected and organized according to their archetypal content); excerpts from the works of Jung; and a reference library consisting of the “[w]orks on the primitives. Their culture, religion and art” as well as:
a. The scriptures of the world. (in english, french and germanb. The myths of all time and peoplec. Folklore, fiarytales of all ages and races. [sic]4
In a letter to Ximena de Angulo, a close friend interested in disseminating the ideas of Eranos in the US, Fröbe imagined how such an archive might function for the dreamer:
Lets say I dream of a ship, whose mast is a Christmastree, and a lion and a snake are sitting at its foot. (this is an imaginary dream). I would first look up either the pictorial folder of ship pictures, or of the Tree of Life. There I should find picture material, with reference Nos to the Text department, and also to the Dream department, in which other dreams of ships and trees etc occur. With this picture, text and dream material I could work out my own dream very thoroughly.5
If realized, this interpretative dream machine would have been the culmination of Fröbe’s lifework. When it had reached its full potential, the archive would serve as the basis for a “new history of art written from the standpoint of the archetypal representation”.6 It was, she wrote, “an Eranos baby, born in the darkest hour of European chaos”.7
When World War II began, Fröbe felt that her database was more necessary than ever. In her correspondence, she insisted that cultural pursuit and intellectual introspection was what the war-torn continent needed most: Eranos was a haven for these pursuits and, as an institute, would set the tone for a new age of humanity once the unrest had settled. In one of her frequent moments of grandiose ambition, Fröbe described her project as the basis for a “comprehensive science of the soul”.8 Eranos would be able to address the “problems of today’s humanity” from the perspective of the psyche rather than material concerns. The world needed to know about Jung’s theory of archetypes, and her envisioned archive would serve as the inductor. The Eranos image archive was supposed to illustrate the constants of the human psyche across time and place. Yet the archive’s history — its emergence during war, the intimate link between the collection and Fröbe herself — raises still-relevant questions about the relationship between the psychological and the material world, between the individual and the collective, and the place of introspection in a time of violence.
The Mountain of Truth
Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn was born into an artistic and politically active Dutch family living in London. She studied at Zürich University of Arts and although she did not make a living as an artist, she would produce hundreds of vivid abstract paintings inspired by Eastern mandalas and her esoteric visions. After a period in Berlin, she returned to Switzerland following her husband’s premature death and settled outside of Ascona, a municipality bordering Italy on the shore of Lake Maggiore.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Ascona had begun to attract those seeking an alternative to modern life. On Monte Verità, the “mountain of truth”, anarchists, nudists, and vegetarians experimented with communal living, free love, and plotted a utopian society. Over the decades, it played host to sharp critics of technology and capitalism, as well as to many who shaped the aesthetics and philosophies of modernism. Visitors included: the artists Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Jean Arp, and Paul Klee; anarchists and socialists such as August Bebel, Peter Kropotkin (an old friend of Fröbe’s mother), Otto Braun, as well as Lenin, Trotsky, and Bakunin; the dancers Isadora Duncan and Rudolf von Laban; and poets, authors, and philosophers like Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Stefan George, and Rudolf Steiner.
In 1905, the German anarchist Erich Mühsam dreamt of Ascona serving as a refuge for “freed or escaped prisoners, for the pursued homeless”, and for everyone else unfit or unwilling to become productive members of capitalist society.9 As the area became increasingly fashionable and a magnet for minor European nobilities with esoteric interests, a German journal identified Ascona as “Berlin’s outermost suburb”. “Anyone from the German literati in search of a vacation spot that comes with the possibility of a think piece guaranteed to be accepted by any paper should make their way to Ascona”, the journalist stated, promising that here you can discover “a lizard . . ., a movie star, or a new religion”.10 Bolstered by Swiss neutrality, Ascona evolved into a place where disenfranchised aristocrats rubbed shoulders with revolutionaries, while keeping close connections to the avant-garde art scene of Zürich.
Fröbe settled in Ascona during the 1920s, at some polite distance from the radicals on the mountains (during a lecture on Taoism by Martin Buber she demanded a chair while the rest of the audience sat on the grass).11 Here, she painted, practised yoga, and studied Eastern religions. In 1928, impelled by one of her frequent visions, she commissioned a conference room to be built on the slopes of an erstwhile vineyard next to her house, even though she was not yet certain what kind of meetings it would host. Casa Eranos, as the building came to be known, found its first purpose in 1930, when Fröbe and the theosophist Alice Bailey (who had coined the term “New Age”) began to use it for spiritual summer schools.12 Bailey left Ascona in 1932 after relations between her and Fröbe soured. The meetings had become too academic for Bailey’s taste (“too many German professors”) and, adding insult to injury, her own mystical visions had revealed that the area was a cursed centre of Black Mass.13 Her departure did not particularly bother Fröbe, who was becoming increasingly interested in said German professors, and disapproved of Bailey’s husband swimming nude on the premises.
Casa Eranos was given a new purpose in 1933 when Fröbe hosted the first Eranos conference on “Yoga and Meditation in East and West” (the conferences have, with few interruptions, continued to this day). Eranos became her lifework, covering themes such as “The Symbolism of Rebirth in Religious Images through Time and Space” (1939), “The Mysteries” (1944), and “Man and Time” (1951). The themes attracted a wide audience, including “quiet minds, real scholars, mystics, snobs, enthusiasts, improvers of humanity, prophets, socialites, and many contemplative nobodies and knowledge seekers”, as Jolande Jacobi notes.14 Fröbe sought out scholars who shared her scepticism towards rational thinking as a privileged form of knowledge, instead embracing what she and her cohort considered archaic, intuitive, and symbolic ways of expression.
The name Eranos was suggested by the religious historian Rudolf Otto, the Greek word denoting an eating-together and thinking-together. Fröbe herself compared Eranos to a dance, in which the performers changed but the movement continued. Many “dancers” would devotedly return year after year, such as Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, classical philologist Karl Kerènyi, Gershom Scholem, founder of the modern academic study of Jewish mysticism, historian of religion Mircea Eliade, and, most importantly, the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung.
In 1950, when Joseph Campbell was scrutinizing the Eranos lectures with the purpose of assembling a selection for the US market, he remarked that the commitment to facilitating understanding between “East and West” had gradually been abandoned. After 1939, only two papers treated people outside Europe and the Mediterranean sphere (one of them disparagingly) and there had been only one paper by a non-European scholar, Swami Yatishwarananda.15 Fröbe scoffed at such remarks, countering that the “reason for concentrating on the [Mediterranean] cultures was that there is the source of all Western culture, and as such already too great a task for us. So we had to leave the East. The title ‘Meeting place of East & West’ simply means, psychologically, ‘Meeting place of the opposites’”16 Fröbe had invited some of the foremost European experts on Asian art and religion, like Campbell’s mentor Heinrich Zimmer, but there is no doubt that the Eastern topics most dear to her, such as yoga, mandalas, and the I Ching, were understood through a distinctly European (that is, Jungian) lens. In other words, the Eranos audience was attracted to the spiritual phenomena of the “East” as tools for their personal journeys of individuation: the mental maturation that, according to Jung, resulted from an individual’s thorough confrontation with their unconscious. Eranos anticipated comparative religious and cultural studies in a way that was ahead of its time, but the comparison was to an extent predetermined by the conviction that all cultural expressions reflected something constant and omnipresent in the human psyche.
Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious provided a framework that linked the sprawling themes of the conferences and the wide-ranging expertise of the speakers. The 1938 conference on “The Great Mother”, for example, tied together Celtic goddess worship (V. C. C. Collum), the Anatolian Artemis of Ephesus (Charles Picard), and the Indian world mother (Heinrich Zimmer) into a search for the “unity of mankind”.17 This kind of comparative humanism held great appeal, as it offered a unique bridge between disciplines and historical epochs. The comparison of such seemingly unrelated cultural manifestations also, unavoidably, created reductive equivalences. Eranos’ comparative framework was geared from the outset towards similarities rather than difference. Regarding the image exhibition that accompanied the conference on the Great Mother, Fröbe wrote that it showed how “the conception of the feminine deity went back to prehistoric man . . . giving an historic series of the transformations of her image and of its many aspects”.18  Whether they treated their presentations as such, each lecturer could be understood as contributing specific examples of an eternal idea of femininity as described by Jung. To Fröbe, this was not about exploring the different associations that motherhood might have carried throughout cultural history, but showing how they all “stand for primeval ideas eternally existent in the psychic world, that have sought expression in every age and in every culture, and are today alive and active as in the beginnings of time”.19
Collecting the Collective Unconscious
Fröbe developed her image archive in tandem with these conferences, and, in the early 1930s, she began collecting alchemical images for Jung. She travelled to libraries across Europe and eventually the US, photographing manuscripts, arguing with librarians, and updating her correspondents about the rudeness she encountered in Paris — where the library administrators sit “like demons on the books and manuscripts and becomes hostile when you force them to hand them over”20 — and the chaos in Athens: “Nothing is organised, nothing is permitted”.21 The photographs in the archive were mainly sourced from books; Fröbe rarely photographed objects. The publications she sought out, and arguably her own project, reflected the dream of “the universal archive”, an aspiration that had been reflected in Enlightenment encyclopaedic projects and ethnographic museums since the nineteenth century.22
Perennially troubled by finances, Fröbe wanted to turn image collecting into a profession and contacted the Warburg Institute in 1936, suggesting that they hire her to expand their own impressive collection on topics adjacent to alchemy. The cash-strapped Institute could not take up her offer, but Fröbe, with typical brazenness (“perhaps he thought I was some rich lady with my own personal research funds who could work for him for free”) was not discouraged.23 Help came from overseas. Encouraged by his wife Mary, Paul Mellon, co-heir to the Mellon family banking fortune, had developed an interest in Jungian psychology, and the couple were introduced to Fröbe and Eranos during a trip to Switzerland in 1938. With their funding, Fröbe could continue expanding the archive, although the support mostly fell short of her expectations. Under Mary’s leadership, the Mellons started the Bollingen Foundation — named after Jung’s ascetic tower retreat — which would support many scholars from the Eranos orbit (Mary sometimes called it “her Eranos”). William McGuire, in his extensive biography of the Foundation, likened Jung’s tower to a navel at the centre of the Mellon’s intellectual world: “if a being could have more than one, [Eranos] was Bollingen’s other omphalos”.24
Encouraged by this double-naveled philanthropy, Fröbe considered moving the archive to the US, safeguarding it from a possible German invasion of Switzerland during World War II. She was annoyed but undeterred after she attracted the attention of the FBI upon leaving the United States with a suitcase full of strange images.25 In 1941, Bollingen began planning an English-language volume based on the Eranos yearbooks. The project was soon shelved, partly because Fröbe would not accept cutting an essay by the Indologist Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who had infamously tried to create a Nazi religion combining Protestantism and Hinduism. “It seems to me that the spirit of Eranos would be terribly boxed up, if considerations such as you mention are going to be taken into account”, she wrote in response to the Americans’ reservations, “after all philosophy, or comparative religion are realms quite outside politics of war”.26 Shortly after this, Bollingen was pressured to cease collaborations with Switzerland in order to placate American authorities.
During the war, the annual Eranos conferences were limited to Swiss participants. It was at this time that Fröbe imagined the archive blossoming into its final form. “It is a huge piece of work, [far] bigger than the above suggests and is a typical synthetic creation of the new age”.27 The archive was not an easy companion, however, especially not for Fröbe. Exceptionally attuned to metaphysical transference, she often found her own psychological journey reflected in the symbols at hand. Travelling to Crete in search of images of the Great Mother, the island and its mythology began to merge with her sense of self. Overwhelmed by visions, she identified first with the island and later reached the insight that she carried a reflection of the minotaur inside her: “Oh dear, those archetypes! what a plague they are”, she wrote to her friend in frustration.28 She kept the images in her bedroom, and she could sometimes feel them interfering with her health. “I sleep in the coll. Unc[onscious]”, she complained, and since archetypes do not require food or sleep, she too could not get proper rest and nourishment.29 Cohabiting with the images allowed them to creep back into Fröbe’s dreams, blurring the line between personal psyche and deep human history. After the war, when Fröbe could once more host international gatherings, she arranged for the images’ move to the Warburg Institute in London, where they remain today — an institution that, like her archive, was built on a grandiose vision for a new organisation of knowledge.30 After this move, Erich Neumann wrote to congratulate Fröbe that her room was once more fit for habitation.31
The Eranos archive was supposed to draw out “the supra-personal in the personal and unique”.32 And yet, it became almost identical with Fröbe’s personal journey. Jung repeatedly cautioned her about identifying too fully with Eranos.33 She recognized that the process of collecting images was part of her individuation, a process that brought her ever closer to the archetypes, as when she readily identified as the mother of Eranos and her speakers, who were generally all too happy to play along. “I’m returning the images of the Great Mother to the Great Mother of Ascona”, Neumann wrote her.34
Critical evaluations of Fröbe’s legacy have pointed to her association with future Nazi sympathisers such as Hauer, while supporters emphasize her many collaborations with Jewish scholars. The relationship between Fröbe’s Eranos project and Fascism is both more entangled and more nebulous than her endorsement of individuals. Eranos was unique, yet also a project of its time. World War I, and the political instability preceding and following it in Europe, birthed a disillusionment with modern society and the dream of progress. The first decades of the twentieth century saw an increased fascination with mythology, the occult, and the archaic. For the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs, these “irrational” cultural tendencies, down to the experiments in back-to-nature lifestyles promoted on Monte Verità, all fit neatly in a trajectory leading directly towards fascism.35 The truth is likely better understood as a conceptual fork. Some thinkers interested in the occult’s fascination with the eternal and immutable folded these conversations into their ideologies of pacifism or feminism; others into fascism. As Hans Thomas Hakl writes, the National Socialists and Jung both “longed to experience a ‘sacred time’”: the former “were searching for a mythical primal era of the Aryan peoples, whereas Jung saw this [sacred time] as having been realized in the collective unconscious.”36
Fröbe was no Nazi sympathizer, and, more than anything, she insisted that Eranos was apolitical. Yet, in the middle of war, that amounted to a political position in its own right. “It is the only platform where representatives of the European intelligentsia can meet independently from political misunderstandings and tensions”, she wrote to Jung in 1942.37 Today the choice of the euphemisms “misunderstandings and tensions” reads as an absurd, even myopic, understatement. For Fröbe, however, the path inwards was not only more important than the outer world, it was the only path to healing a world in chaos.38 Fröbe’s prioritization of personal spirituality above social action poses the most difficult and perhaps most pressing dilemma for our own time: can turning inwards indeed bring about change in the world? Do we recognize a collective unconscious reflected in our individual lives, or do we rather project our personal concerns into the art of distant cultures? Where does contemplation retreat into complicity?
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 22, 2023

author: Frederika Tevebring