Haute École: Reading Smith’s Horses

Abstract

Stevie Smith opens her second novel, Over the Frontier (1938), with her protagonist Pompey musing on an oil painting by George Grosz, Haute École. Depicting a horse and rider, simply and sparsely painted, the image joins a number of horses which recur in Smith’s narratives and offer tempting metaphorical significance. In this context, a critical debate exists over whether Smith invented the painting, or based her detailed description on a real artwork. This essay engages with contemporary gallery catalogues and Grosz’s executor to establish, firstly, that a painting existed with the name Haute École. Secondly, it identifies Haute École as a work still extant and displayed in the USA under the name Circus Rider. The identification of Haute École offers support to many of the excellent interpretations of the image by critics including Kristin Bluemel, Laura Severin and Romana Huk. It raises further questions, as this essay outlines, about the nature of archive research, the movement between simplicity and complexity in a writer like Stevie Smith, and the issue of how her critics might best read her work. In the process, the essay draws particular attention to the interplay, in Haute École, between concealment and openness, mapping them on to the interpretative difficulties which Smith’s work poses more broadly. Even though it eventually resolves into a cohesive trope, Haute École’s obtrusion into the text involves an element of superstitious recurrence: an appearance which is coincidental, irrelevant, in-passing, but which nevertheless seems charged with a significance which passes articulation.

Keywords:

• Stevie Smith
• Haute École
• painting
• Over the Frontier
• horse
• rider
• George Grosz
• hats
• exposure
• posture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.