Tour de France is back. It’s one of my favorite televised sporting events. Most of a day’s race (other than the frenetic sprint finishes) will have the soothing energy of watching the Masters (commentators sometimes have nothing to discuss during the long rides beyond the many castles and other historic locations serving as a backdrop). Importantly, for someone who is often dragged out of bed before 6:30AM, it also starts early (California time) for each of its 21 days. It’s better if you can get the international coverage—a proper EU commentator will focus much more on the heroics and suffering of the athletes (and the jockeying of the various teams for position). American coverage comes across as confused—like the announcers aren’t sure why it can’t be the Paris Olympics yet.
To honor the return of cycling’s (and possibly all of sportdom’s) greatest feat of endurance, here’s a nude bronze of a cyclist by Aristide Maillol (which I will show from the rear out of cowardice for reasons that will become clear). The description for the piece in the Musee d’Orsay’s online catalog is what initially caught my interest:
Its realism is disconcerting, and even the patron found it exaggerated! But the fact that the statue is smaller than life sized dispels some of the embarrassment.
Even allowing for some strange French to English translations, it seemed like the description was raising more questions than it answered. The piece was originally commissioned by Count Harry Graf Kessler, a German diplomat and patron of the arts, who has been described as “the original hipster.” Kessler is a deeply fascinating figure (and was an avid diarist), but I think this portrait of him by Edvard Munch is all you really need for the purposes of this piece.
The guy knows how to wear a woven hat (I originally ran across Kessler as ‘the man in the Panama hat’ when I was doing some reading on the history of the introduction of the Panama hat to Europeans).
So back to this bronze, and why everyone was being so weird about it after its unveiling. The statue is in the likeness of Kessler’s then-lover, Gaston Colin. It’s a beautiful summer Saturday, so I’ll just quote liberally from this excellent article from Cambridge University, The Cyclist as Hero: Harry Graf Kessler and Private Press Books (no point in trying to rewrite or summarize what they laid down so nicely):
Kessler’s ideal of beauty was male. It was men bathing naked in rivers. It was working-class boys fighting in a Whitechapel boxing ring (‘East End and Greece in one’, he noted in his diary on 25 April 1903). It was the attraction of two young Belgian sailors on leave, or Nijinsky performing on stage. By 1907 he was in an amorous relationship with a slender seventeen year old racing cyclist named Gaston Colin. The Kessler archive in Marbach holds a number of notes (so-called ‘petits bleus’) sent from Colin to his lover from various stages of the Tour de France. Having met Aristide Maillol for the first time on Sunday 21 August 1904, Kessler came to consider the sculptor’s work the embodiment of excellence. He was attracted to the sensuality of his art. On 10 November 1902 he had noted in his diary that the great loss for art since the Renaissance was the disappearance of warm-blooded lust. To Kessler, the naked body and the beautiful human face were the alpha and omega of great art. However, it took him a great deal of effort encouraging the firmly heterosexual sculptor to chisel a male nude. He finally persuaded him to have Gaston Colin stand as his first adult male model. Maillol executed the sculpture in 1908 in his studio in Marly. When the clay version was finished, Kessler ordered a bronze cast to be made. In his diary the latter documented the progress of the work and took a number of photographs of a nude Colin posing in Maillol’s studio. The statue of this adolescent male became known as ‘Le coureur cycliste’ (but without his bike). It is the sculptor’s only major free-standing male nude. With the acquisition of this sculpture in bronze Kessler came to possess a full-length nude portrait of his lover and companion, an image of physical perfection. However, critics considered its realism disconcerting. To many of them it seemed a shameless celebration of the penis. Even Kessler found its features somewhat exaggerated.
Young Colin was a keen cyclist. From the end of August and throughout most of September 1907, he and Kessler went on a bicycling tour of Normandy and the Channel Islands. Colin’s participation in the Tour de France however seems improbable. It is doubtful that this young adolescent would have had the brute strength to take part in a race that was then and remains now one of the most gruesome of enduring sports. The fifth annual Tour of 1907 (won by Lucien Petit-Breton) took place from July 8 to August 4 and attracted ninety-three starters of which thirty-three made it to the line as classified finishers in Paris. The name of Gaston Colin is not amongst them. For 1908 the same applies. From letters written to Kessler in 1908/09 there is evidence that Colin took part in bicycle races in France, Italy and Spain, not as a competitor however, but most likely as a mechanic (with the outbreak of World Word I he served as a mechanic in the 36th Artillery Regiment at Moulins). Whatever Colin’s involvement in the Tour may have been, Maillol produced the first known statue of a racing cyclist. In the end, he produced only three male nudes: apart from the cyclist, there are those of an ‘Athlete’ and a ‘Dying Warrior’. The link between sport and war is significant.
It’s great to have the tour back. As for the piece that convinced Kessler that Maillol was the right guy to sculpt his paramour, it was probably this one from 1905, La Méditerranée (he spent about 5 years making it).
Though Maillol is lesser known today than some of his contemporaries (i.e., Rodin), the Musée d'Orsay has this to say about the piece:
About The Mediterranean, André Gide was to write: "It is beautiful. It signifies nothing. It is a silent artwork".
All the great tendencies of modern sculpture, from cubism to abstraction, found their origin in this silent revolution, which the public discovered with The Mediterranean at the 1905 autumn salon.
As for Maillol, his own museum has a great line about him in his life timeline. They state, “Maillol retired to Banyuls in September 1939, fleeing the madness of men.”
Whether this characterization is driven by primary source material from the artist, or is merely an excellent guess on their part, is unknown to me.
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Internet Bycatch
Wherein we display those trophies pulled from the Ocean of Content.
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Style for all gender expressions is in a confused state. Some of this can be blamed on the return of many awful 90s staples (I’ve refrained from disparaging things like bucket hats and cargo pants in public, complaining only to close friends, but no longer). This Pitti slideshow from Vogue helped me identify two current trends. For menswear, everyone is either dressed as a bookie/dice roller or a vivified version of the odd-lot fabric bin at the craft store. The Robb Report has a slightly better version to reassure us that it’s not all crochet and chains out there. Pulled the image below from Pitti’s website. No one below looks bad per se, but these are trends that will be executed poorly in the real world/when they escape streetstyle photography confinement.
Simon Crompton’s men’s style resource, Permanent Style, has released their suggestions for a summer capsule wardrobe. Helpful for short-term packing or long-term planning.
Jake Mueser, head of the eponymous tailoring house that has made many wonderful things for me, has a much-deserved profile in Esquire. You root for a business like this to do well, but you also selfishly hope they don’t become so big that it changes too much.
Adret, a clothing company out of the UK, remains my favorite kind of out of reach designer. They are intentionally low/no e-commerce, and it’s unclear when, if ever, I would be returning to the UK to try anything on. It’s nice to leave some things unattained.
It’s not just the draping, elegant clothing. The advertising prose that goes with their images makes me feel like I’ve gone back in time sixty years. “Adret: King of Textiles,” or “Adret: Clothing with a Future.” Really great stuff.
I finally watched La Piscine (title was essentially unavailable to me in the US for a few years, so I was delighted to finally be able to buy a digital copy). It’s a stylish film and great for summer, but I ended up being disappointed and confused that a film that’s hailed as an all-time great psychological thriller devolves into a more pointless/generic police procedural by the end. The styles put together by André Courrèges for the film are incredible, even 55 years later, but I found a piece in The New Yorker that sums up my confusion about why this film has endured as such a classic for lovers of foreign films.