Portraits de l’artiste en singe, les singeries dans la peinture, Bertrand Marret (book)

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Portraits de l’artiste en singe, les singeries dans la peinture / Portraits of the artist as a monkey, the monkeying around in painting (book) by Bertrand Marret. Somogy Editions d’Art, 2001. Very good condition. Paperback, 128 pages. French text.

In the usual bestiary of Western painters, the monkey occupies a special place independently of animal art and naturalist study. As a pantomime of human behavior, the animal represents a long iconographic tradition loaded with metaphorical meanings. The monkey is the failed image of man, his caricature. By his indecent resemblance, by his attitudes, his gestures, his grimaces and especially his gift of imitation, the animal is naturally comical.

The monkeying around, easel paintings or decorative paintings, seek to accentuate this buffoonish character by giving the monkey the clothes of man, by making him use his familiar objects. At the same time, the theme of the monkey artist, which recurs constantly, always has the value of a pictorial fable illustrating the vain aspect of art. The monkey appears there as an avatar of the histrionic artist, he represents the cliché, the bad imitation, the “stupid” copy that is both servile and pretentious. He is the type of plagiarist who thumbs his nose at the practice of painting. It is in the tradition of genre painting, in Flanders in the 17th century, that monkey art will draw its inspiration and find its formula. David II Teniers, known as the Younger, will become its undisputed master and truly its inventor. But this genre continues to develop especially until the 19th century and is even brilliantly illustrated by artists such as Dürer, Bruegel, Mantegna, Goya, Delacroix, Picasso.

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