Malgré Tout

Despite It All: Dis-ability in Art: Sculpture, Music, Painting, and Literature

The Case of Jesús Fructuoso Contreras’ Malgré Tout

by Ian Charles Lepine

MA in Art History

Alma Mater Sudiorum, Università di Bologna / École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris

 

 

Critical Introduction

Let us conceive of art—despite the objections any definition of art forcibly entails—as an application of skill towards an expressive purpose. What this paper seeks to problematise is this seemingly innocuous term, i.e. skill, and specifically skill as a consequence of bodily ability. From thence it follows that the more excellent the body, the better the art. Such an idea has a sort of Darwinism at its core, but culturally we take it, as indeed we do most things, from the Greeks; however, it was in 1894 that the Olympic motto was formalised in the Latin formulation ‘citius, altius, fortius’, faster, taller, stronger. Such an emphasis on the growing abilities of humankind has been a driving force of technological, social, and artistic change since; innovation has come be understood as the product of physical and intellectual excellence.

    This paper seeks to take a look at the other side of this coin, not at excellent bodies, but at the mangled and the damaged, representative as they are of the very real risk of loss and the frailty of flesh that is in many ways the very heart of artistic production. Specifically, we seek to bring to the fore one of the most distinguished Mexican artists of the 19th century, Jesús Fructuoso Contreras, a sculptor that suffered a singular fate that went on to inspire a whole generation of artists to reflect on the connection between art and the breakable human bodies that make that art. What indeed happened to him? Suffice it to say that this artist was known in the latter stages of his life, when he executed his most inspired work, and indeed the main piece for which he is remembered, as Jesús ‘the One-Armed’ Contreras.

 

Relevance

It has been pointed out that the world’s biggest minority is in fact the disabled. According to the 2011 World Health Organisation’s Report on Disability (2011, 262), the number of people with disabilities is increasing, and has recently reached one billion people; one billion out of the eight billion currently on our planet; this is a staggering minority. Moreover, though the disabled are certainly discriminated against, disability is the only non-discriminating minority, for in just one quick, tragic moment we might all find ourselves within its ranks. Disability, unlike belonging to any other minority, is not exclusively assigned at birth. We are not all potentially black, potentially Jewish, potentially Hispanic. But we are all potentially blind, deaf, dumb, and one-armed. It is exactly because of this fact that art dealing with the issue of disability, mental and physical, resounds within us to such a degree. It opens the blinds to our awareness of our own frailty: it demystifies the myth of the abled-bodied: that we are invincible.

       Such is the prevalence of this myth that, according to the non-for-profit association Humanity & Inclusion, ‘despite being “the world’s biggest minority”, people with disabilities are often forgotten’ (2000). This paper seeks to remind us of the fact that the disabled have been a driving force of art since its beginnings. The number of blind writers (Homer, Milton, Borges) added to the deafness of Beethoven, arguably the greatest composer, are clues to steer us in the right direction. Our study seeks to celebrate the works of disabled artists as achievements made possible not despite their disabilities but precisely through and due to them. We have chosen to focus exclusively on bodily disabilities, as in many ways there is already an overrepresentation of mental disabilities for artists. The trope of the tortured genius dominates artistic discourse even in our days; but what about the bodily-impaired genius? We have taken the case of Jesus F. Contreras as paradigmatic. It is doubly interesting furthermore due to the fact that a number of other artists took his story as the inspiration for works in other artistic disciplines, works with the same theme: the need of man to create art, despite it all.

 

 

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Fig. 1 Malgré Tout

Jesús Fructuoso Contreras (1866-1902)

1898

MUNAL, Mexico City

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The Sculpture

Malgré Tout (Fig. 1) is a sculpture in Carrara marble, depicting a nude woman lying down struggling against her chains to rise anew. The piece exists materially in several copies. There was a clay original (now lost), the Carrara marble currently at the National Museum of Art in Mexico City, a plastic fibre copy at the Museum of Aguascalientes, and a bronze copy located today in the Alameda Central in Mexico City, where the original marble was first located but whence it was removed to prevent vandalism.

      The piece has been celebrated as one of the finest expressions of Mexican art and the Ministry of Culture of Mexico speaks of the artist on its website as an exceptional figure who ‘brought together the traditional style of the academy with modern sculpture’ (2021, 1). Moreover, while Contreras sojourned in Paris, Jules Claretié (1840-1913), member of the French Academy and president of the Société des gens de lettres declared him ‘the most relevant sculptor of the Mexican school’ (2014, 26).

      But indeed, the fascination with his Malgré Tout comes from a certain element that exists in the thin line between its context and its content: the fact that the sculptor was on the verge of losing his right arm when executing the work. Many non-academic sources claim that he sculpted this piece after his arm was amputated. This is indeed a myth, as the surgery took place two years after Malgré Tout was complete; nevertheless, it is a myth that is proving impossible to eradicate. The reasons for this are indeed a matter of great interest, which we shall comment on later. First, however, we think it contingent to establish historical truth: what is it that actually happened?

      In 1898 the government of Porfirio Díaz named Contreras to the position of General Commissioner of the Fine Arts with the aim of creating a sculptural work worthy of being exhibited in the Mexican pavilion of the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Malgré Tout was initially created for this purpose in clay as a preliminary stage towards marble and, later on, bronze casting. It was completed in 1989 when the artist suffered debilitating pains caused by a form of cancer that was localised in his right arm.

     On May 15th, 1900, the year of the Exposition Universelle, Contreras left for France from the port of Veracruz presumably with his sculpture, and hoping to find a cure in the French capital for his already diagnosed cancer. Nevertheless, the disease had by then run its course and his arm was amputated on the 24th of the same month. In the last stage of his life, he was known as ‘El Manco’ (the One-Armed) Contreras. Perhaps some of his success is owed to the terrible irony of a one-armed manual artist, a fate paradoxically full of ‘advertising’ possibilities that would have distinguished him in a rapidly evolving artistic scene that was switching from an emphasis on individual works in terms of themselves to a fascination with the life of an artist, to an obsession with that poorly defined je ne sais quoi of artistic glory: genius.

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Critical Reception

As Galenson and Robert point out in relation to White & White’s book Canvases and Careers, the end of the 19th century was characterised by a change in what the authors refer to as ‘the institutional structure of the 19th-century French art world’, from what they call ‘the Academic system to the dealer-critic system’ (2002, 4). In the Academic system, so do the Whites argue, ‘it was the picture, not the artist, around which the official ideology centred’ (5); the new system focused itself more on the artist, on the idea of the artist as a brand, as a genius superior to his works, as a singular fate expressing itself in form and matter.

      It is undeniable that by the 1900s the French salon system was suffocating its artists, who indeed could go nowhere else. As Courbet observed as early as 1847, ‘to make a name for oneself one must exhibit, and, unfortunately, that is the only exhibition there is’ (In Galenson and Robert, 8). The emergence of the expositions universelles towards the end of the century provided some relief to the salon system but did not radically transform it. And as such, just like the salons of which it became a continuation, the exposition universelle was overcrowded and dizzying in its scope. Artists fought for the attention of the public and critics with more and more desperation as their livelihoods quite literally depended on it. The exposition universelle of 1900 in particular was staggering in its size, featuring as it did an extreme overabundance of works: ‘3,066 for the Centennale, 3,336 for the Décennale and 4,967 for all the foreign sections. The press encouraged visitors to return several times so as not to be overwhelmed’ (Google Culture). It would take a tour-de-force to be noticed there and that is exactly what Fortuna, in that ironic way of hers, provided for Contreras.

Indeed, Contreras managed to distinguish himself in this event to a degree that no Mexican, perhaps no Latin American artist ever had. The jury that year, composed by none other names than those of Bartholdi and Bouguereau conferred upon the young sculptor the highest distinction. As Oeconomo notes:

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     Ainsi Contreras conféra à l’exposition d’art sa perle, Malgré tout, qui fut prise pour une allégorie de l’épreuve que l’artiste avait enduré en perdant son bras droit et pour laquelle non seulement il reçut un grand prix mais fut aussi nommé chevalier de la légion d’honneur (2018, 150).

 

      In such an enormous exhibition, crowded as it was by academic works much resembling one another, the human interest story of a one-armed sculptor without a doubt stirred enough interest to put Contreras’ work at the very fore. An article of the journal Le Voltaire that appeared on the 16th of June 1900 establishes an interesting connection about the man and his work:

Après leur examen, les artistes maîtres français et étrangers composant le jury, ont exprimé le désir de voir personnellement M. Jesus F. Contreras, ainsi que la photographie de ses œuvres antérieures […] [Il] a été rappelé et a reçu les félicitations les plus flatteuses. C’est un jeune homme encore, qui a été cruellement éprouvé par la perte du bras droit, mais à qui, malgré tout, un magnifique avenir semble réservé, car, chez lui, la conception noble s’allie à l’exécution vivante (Oeconomo, 150).

       The last sentence of the quote is worth our notice. ‘He is still a young man who was cruelly tested by the loss of his right arm but to whom, despite it all, a magnificent future is reserved’. The very use of the phrase that titles the marble sculpture creates a blurring of the lines between artist and art, which echoes White & White’s idea that the end of the 19th century saw a change of emphasis from the work to the artist, from the canvas to the career.

       What we propose next is to discuss the two-thronged approach that Contreras has received by contemporary commentators. On the one hand there is the aforementioned non-academic literature, which focusses on the tragic history of a one-armed sculptor to be considered almost as an allegorical figure. The academic alternative is decidedly different. In a book published by the University of Chicago Press, the celebrated art historian Justino Fernández comments on the Mexican academy of the beginning of the 19th century in the following terms:

      The academy produced few works of quality in sculpture. [...] However, near the end of the century one of the followers of Norteña, Jesus F. Contreras (1866-1902) began to distinguish himself. In a way he was to be the last interesting figure of the school and as such his romanticism seems intensified. He is the author of two marble statues that are today exhibited in the Alameda Central of the capital: Désespoir and Malgré Tout. Both show his end-of-century romantic agony, and are handled with skill and sincere feeling. One can say that sculpture in the nineteenth century was maintained with dignity, on a high level, and within a classical taste, except at the end with Contreras, who strove for a kind of expressionism in his Malgré Tout (1961, 131-2).

     Most notable is the absence of what makes Contreras’ life of interest to the layman. It appears that in the interest of academic objectivity, Fernández seeks to shy away from any kind of sensationalism to the point where he neglects to comment on what was perhaps the single most life-altering experience of Contreras’ life, the loss of his dominant arm. Nevertheless, Fernández points out that while ‘the subjects for the classicists were historical, the more personal works of Contreras, on the other hand, expressed existential states of mind’ (132).

     This idea of art as a personal biography of one’s state of mind is indeed a modern invention, and when it comes to art historical research, is something that academics do not precisely know how to handle. Art history trivia is full of such ‘superficial’ analyses of Van Gogh’s depression, and Satie’s eccentricities. These matters are seldom considered of academic interest. Perhaps the apparent simplicity of: ‘sculptor losses arm, makes sculpture about it’ is repellent to the academic to such a degree he might leave it out of his scientific article; Fernández certainly followed this route. But indeed, perhaps there is something to learn from ‘pop’ art history and its obsession with the biographical. How can we talk about the works of artists without talking about the artists themselves, and the experiences that left their indible marks upon their breakable bodies? It is in the spirit of such a kind of research that we now turn not to the academic reception of Malgré Tout, but to something quite different: its artistic afterlife, literary, pictorial, and musical by the hands of Contreras’ intimate circle of friends and followers.

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Literary Afterlife

Contreras’ influence in the cultural imaginary of Latin America was cemented precisely because he lost his arm. If originally, he was a perhaps an above average sculptor of the Mexican Academy, after his terrible disease he became a vessel for Fate, a character reminiscent of a Greek tragedy under the harrow of an ironic turn of Fortune: a one-armed sculptor who lost his dominant hand, the tool of his trade. So prevalent is this mythicized version of him that as was mentioned before there is a lot of uncertainty about the conditions under which he sculpted Malgré Tout. Half of the non-academic internet sites that tell his story assert beyond the shadow of a doubt that he had lost his arm when working on the piece itself, even if we now know that he was ‘merely’ in debilitating pain at the time, and that the loss of the appendage would take place two years after the marble was finished, in the same year he won the prix de sculpture.

Why then the cultural insistence of his losing it before the fact? Why is it important to us? The love of a satisfying narrative, the appetite for poetry is enough to deform the truth. In fact, it was the men of letters who went on to foster the myth (perhaps owing to the love of a deeper, a more literary truth). Specifically, we owe the romanticism of it all to the great Mexican poet Amado Nervo, a close friend of Contreras, who moved by the triumph of the sculptor at the Exposition Universelle (it was, after all, the first time a Mexican artist received such a deep honour from the French academy), published a panegyric in the journal El Imparcial, where, as Sánchez notes, he ‘celebrates the victory but also perpetuates the image of the one-handed sculptor, an image later to be invested with a tragic aura and cast by his contemporaries as the archetype of the fin-de-siècle artist par excellence’ (2014, 26). Amado Nervo’s text is reproduced in the original Spanish to which we have annexed our translation:

       El artista venía a París con el brazo derecho atormentado por terrible dolencia [...] Contreras venía a operarse, a dejar un pedazo de sí mismo [...] y acaso morir. [...] La ciencia empero acertó esta vez. Salvó al escultor, ¡pero de qué ruda manera!, pidiéndole como tributo el brazo derecho. ¡Qué ironía tan inmensa! A un enamorado de su arte, arrebatarle el supremo instrumento de ese arte. Otro cualquiera habría buscado la resolución del problema en el suicidio. Contreras fue superior a su desgracia. Su primer figura esculpida con una mano, y que representaba una enorme suma de trabajo, fue el Malgré tout, símbolo conmovedor de su orgullosa manquera (In Sánchez 2014, 27).

      The artist had come to Paris with his right arm in the throes of a terrible pain [...] Contreras came to undergo a surgery, to lose a piece of himself [...] and maybe to die [...] Science however, was to triumph this time. It saved the sculptor—but in what a brutish manner!—by demanding of him as tribute his right arm. —O, irony of ironies! To rip the supreme instrument of art from a man in love with his art! Any lesser man would have searched for a solution to this problem in suicide. Contreras, however, was greater than his tragedy. His first work, sculpted with one hand, and which demanded an enormous amount of labour, was the Malgré Tout, the emotional symbol of proud one-armedness.

     It is hard to tell whether this text is a novelized version of the artist’s life or not. It certainly reads like a novel. The commentary of Nervo, empahsised in our English translation with em dashes. makes it feel like a narrator commenting on his own narrative. In different parts of the text and other writings, Nervo was to provide Contreras with a metaphorical, sometimes allegorical treatment:

Aquello era tanto como romper a un águila un ala, como destrozar a un león una garra [...] Contreras fue superior a su desgracia. ¿Le mutilaban un ala? Pues bien, ¡qué diablo!, volaría con la otra, aunque se desplomase como El Genio de Rodin [...] (In Sánchez 2014, 27).

      Such a fate was like breaking off the wing of an eagle, like destroying the claw of a lion. [...] Contreras triumphed over his tragedy. His wing was to be amputated? Well, to hell with it all, he would fly with the one that remained behind, even if that meant to plummet to the ground like Rodin’s genius.’

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Pictorial Afterlife

The extremely literary treatment of Nervo is perhaps even more evident in this last text, but it is in painting that we see an expression of allegorical excess. Inspired by Contreras’ story and Nervo’s imagery, the Mexican painter Julio Ruelas went on to create an oil composition that shows Contreras as an eagle with a broken wing. The painting titled Entrada de don Jesús Luján a la Revista Moderna is an allegorical piece representing the arrival of Jesús Luján to the Moderna magazine, which was the most important medium of expression for hispano-American modernism at the time. 

      In this painting, made in 1904, that is, two years after the death of Contreras, Ruelas represents the late sculptor as an eagle with a broken wing. The visual imaginary started by Nervo has taken a life of its own, even after the demise of the man that was to incarnate it. As Sánchez notes, ‘the imagery and metaphors used by many members of Contreras’ generation, do not refer to the man himself, but rather to the archetype of the modern artist.’ (2014, 26). As Patricia Pérez Walters states, ‘the end-of-the-century atmosphere hungered for a martyr’ (In Sánchez, 27) and Contreras provided it, giving an entire artistic generation the imagery for expression in literature, painting, and even music.

 

  

Musical Afterlife

As has been discussed, Amado Nervo was the first to state that Contreras sculpted Malgré Tout with one hand. He was a poet and what is true in poetry is seldom true in real life. Other texts on Contreras by other men of letters followed suit, among them works by Junco de la Vega, Rubén M. Campos, Jesús E. Valenzuela and José F. Elizondo. However, these poems and other writings are largely forgotten.

To find who cemented the myth of Jesús ‘the One-Armed’ Contreras in the cultural imaginary of Mexico in perpetuity we must turn to the timeless art of music, and specifically to perhaps the greatest classical music composer that Mexico has ever produced: Manuel María Ponce. In 1900, the musician composed an extraordinary piece that is quite unique in the classical piano repertoire. It bears the same title as Contreras’ sculpture: Malgré Tout and it has the eccentric character of being a composition exclusively for the left hand. The piece bears the dedication ‘To the memory of the sculptor Jesús F. Contreras’ and its elegiac and dramatic character can be thought of as a musical illustration of the contradiction of the artist’s fate.

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From a musicological perspective the composition is remarkable in that it does not in any way bespeak the absence of one hand. If one were to listen to it without any context, one would not suspect this peculiarity. The nature of the musical notation is also to be commented upon. Ponce’s piece is written in the same way that every normal piano composition is undertaken. In traditional piano notation, the F clef generally stands for the left hand while the treble clef represents the right hand. Overlap is of course only to be expected. For a visual statement of one-handedness, Ponce could have of course written the entire piece just on the F clef leaving the treble clef empty. He, however, did something profoundly different.

       The reasons for the standardized notation for such a non-standardized conceptual piece are of course hard to pinpoint. The first is naturally convenience. Writing the piece entirely on the F clef would have made it harder to read and would have supposed the use of many additional lines, as the highest notes run quite into the upper registers of the pentagram. However, a symbolic reason could be the fact that even though this is a piece just for the left hand, it is not by any means a piece characterized by lack. It is a complete, controlled musical composition and were it not for the legend ‘mano izquierda sola’ (just for the left hand), any pianist would go about it with both hands.

       Such a quality, the fact that the piece musically does not denote lack, is also true of Contreras’ sculpture. Materially it is the work of an able-bodied artist, and yet his debilitating condition makes its execution all the more astounding. Though undoubtedly his arm had not yet been amputated when he was working on it, the distinction is pedantic and perhaps only of morbid (academic) interest. More interesting is undoubtedly what the work says about the human spirit.

Subdued with her hands tied behind her back, the woman in Malgré Tout is forced into a downward position by invisible oppressive forces, by one would say, Fate. Nevertheless, she raises her gaze and seems to look towards the heavens. The name of the piece is scrawled out in enormous letters on the work itself as if to prove that the title is as big a part of the piece as the female nude itself. Thus, the sculpture, we propose, is composed of a female nude and an inscription. Malgré Tout means ‘Despite it all’, and as such the meaning of the piece is irrevocably connected to Contreras’ bodily fate and his indomitable spirit of creation.

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References:

 

Galenson, David. and Jensen, Robert. Careers and Canvases: The Rise of the Market for

       Modern Art in the Nineteenth Century. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2002.

       http://www.nber.org/papers/w9123

Fernández, Justino. A Guide to Mexican Art, from its Beginnings to the Present.

       Trans. Joshua C. Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961

Google Culture. The 1900 Universal Exhibition.

       https://artsandculture.google.com/story/YgVh2LcH9y-cKw

Humanity and Inclusion. ‘One billion people with disabilities: the world’s biggest minority’

       https://www.hi-canada.org/en/one-billion-people-with-disabilities-the-world-s-biggest- minority#:~:text=One%20billion%20people%20around%20the,15%25%20of%20the%20global%20population.

Ministry of Culture, Mexican Government. ‘Jesús F. Contreras, artista plástico que reunió la

       academia tradicional y la escultura moderna’

       https://www.gob.mx/cultura/prensa/jesus-f-contreras-artista-plastico-que-reunio-la-academia-tradicional-y-la-escultura-moderna

Oeconomo, Esteban Sánchez. L'image de prosperité nationale du Mexique à

       l'Exposition universelle de Paris 1900. École des hautes études en sciences sociales Centre Alexandre-Koyré, 2018

       https://www.mexicofrancia.org/trabuniv/p45.pdf

Sánchez, Shanik. ‘El brazo izquierdo del modernismo: la leyenda de Jesús F. Contreras’.

       Este Pais 2014 No. 25, Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas.

World Health Organization & World Bank. (‎2011)‎. World report on disability 2011.

       World Health Organization.

       https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/44575