Cro‐Magnon and Khoi‐San: Constant Roux's Racialized Relief Sculptures of Prehistoric Artists

Abstract

Constant Roux's (1865–1942) relief sculptures depicting Stone Age humans, contemporary “primitives” and chimpanzees form a frieze around the Institute of Human Paleontology, which was founded in Paris by Prince Albert I of Monaco (1848–1922) in 1910. In addition to making a distinct statement about the scientific work done inside the institution they decorate, these sculptures highlight conceptions of race that were prevalent at the time. Of the two images of prehistoric artists that frame the building's entrance, the one on the left represents a Magdalenian “Caucasoid” creating a bison from the Font‐de‐Gaume cave, while the one on the right depicts an Aurignacian “Negroid” sculpting the so‐called “Venus of Laussel.” These pendant bas‐reliefs demonstrate the ways in which race informed the interpretation of fossil human remains and Paleolithic art in fin‐de‐siècle France, with a scientifically sanctioned racial hierarchy subtly, yet clearly, at work.

Keywords:

• Prehistoric Art
• Hottentot Venus
• Roux, Constant‐Ambroise (1865–1942)
• Breuil, Abbé Henri (1877–1961)
• Mascré, Louis (1871–1929)
• Rutot, Aimé (1847–1933)

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Catherine Anderson, Andy Dickerson, Patricia Gindhart, Peter Miller and Christine Sundt for reading and commenting on this text. I am also grateful to Henry de Lumley and Arnaud Hurel at the Institute of Human Paleontology, Paris, and Françoise Antonutti at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Brussels, for their help with illustrations. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the French are my own.

Notes

1. The Aurignacian, from about 40,000 to 28,000 years ago, and the Magdalenian, from about 18,000 to 11,000 years ago, are divisions or cultures of the Paleolithic in Europe characterized by antler, bone and flaked stone tools and representational objects. While cave art began in the Aurignacian, it flourished in the Magdalenian. “Negroid” and “Caucasoid,” meanwhile, were terms used by scientists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to refer, respectively, to the black and white races. Due to their racist connotations and the fact that the typological method of racial classification has now been largely abandoned, these terms are no longer used scientifically.

2. On the formation of the Institute, see Arnaud Hurel, “La création de l'Institut de paléontologie humaine par le Prince Albert I^er de Monaco: Une étape vers l'institutionnalisation de la préhistoire,” Bulletin du Musée d'anthropologie préhistorique de Monaco 41 (2000–2001): 49–62; Arnaud Hurel, La France préhistorienne de 1789 à 1941 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2007), 205–208; Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman, The Neandertals: Of Skeletons, Scientists, and Scandal (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 194–195.

3. Marcellin Boule, “The Anthropological Work of Prince Albert I of Monaco and the Recent Progress of Human Paleontology in France (The Huxley Memorial Lecture for 1922),” in Smithsonian Report for 1923 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1925), 504.

4. H[enri] Breuil, “Souvenirs sur le Prince Albert de Monaco et son oeuvre préhistorique,” Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française 48, no. 6 (June 1951): 288.

5. However, as noted by Alan Houghton Brodrick, “When in 1920, the building was complete, Boule moved in as director and Breuil as professor of prehistoric ethnology. Obermaier, a former enemy alien, had by this time been dropped” (Father of Prehistory; The Abbé Henri Breuil: His Life and Times [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973], 152).

6. Marcellin Boule, quoted in R[ené] V[erneau], “A l'Institut de paléontologie humaine,” L'Anthropologie 32 (1922): 184: “le progrès de la Science sur toutes les questions relatives à l'origine et à l'histoire de l'Homme fossile.”

7. Hurel, “La création de l'Institut,” 49, 60; Arnaud Hurel and Alain Dubourg, “Un programme novateur: L'Institut de paléontologie humaine d'Emmanuel Pontremoli,” Livraisons d'histoire de l'architecture 13 (2006): 51.

8. Breuil, “Souvenirs sur le Prince,” 288: “sans aucun esprit de luxe; mais, sur ce point, le Prince voulut faire honneur à sa haute situation.”

9. Boule, “Anthropological Work of Prince Albert I,” 505.

10. M. Brincourt, “L'Institut de paléontologie humaine,” L'Architecture 35, no. 11 (10 June 1922): 157: “le caractère scientifique de la destination de l'édifice”; “une savante et artistique exactitude.” Laurent Noet has argued that Roux became, to a certain degree, the prince's official court sculptor in the early twentieth century (“Constant Roux (1865–1942), un sculpteur à la cour du Prince Albert I^er de Monaco,” Annales monégasques: Revue d'histoire de Monaco 27 [2003]: 161, 185–187).

11. Roux also depicted the “Old Man of La Chapelle‐aux‐Saints” Neandertal, but this relief is located over the Institute's dedicatory inscription and is not part of the frieze.

12. M[arcellin] Boule, “Les gravures et peintures sur les parois des cavernes,” L'Anthropologie 12 (1901): 671–677.

13. See the section “Contemporary Primitives and Ancestral Cultures,” in Robert L. Carneiro, Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A Critical History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), 19–22. It should be pointed out that while the word “Eskimo” continues to be commonly used to refer to the indigenous peoples of Alaska, it is largely considered pejorative in Canada and Greenland, where the term “Inuit” is now preferred.

14. Arnaud Hurel, “L'Institutionnalisation de l'archéologie préhistorique en France métropolitaine (1852–1941) et l'Institut de paléontologie humaine Fondation Albert I^er de Monaco” (PhD diss., Université Paris IV Sorbonne, 2004), 2:480, citing “Éphémérides Breuil: Henri Breuil—Voyages & travaux scientifiques—Dates et itinéraires I (1897–1933)” (Saint‐Germaine‐en‐Laye: Archives du Musée d'archéologie nationale [formerly Musée des antiquités nationales], fonds H. Breuil).

15. On ethnographic parallels, see Anne Roquebert, “La sculpture ethnographique au XIXe siècle, objet de mission ou oeuvre de musée,” in La sculpture ethnographique: De la Vénus hottentote à la Tehura de Gauguin, exh. cat., Les Dossiers du Musée d'Orsay 53 (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1994), 23; Pascal Riviale, “L'Ethnographie, de l'indigène au musée,” in Le XIXe siècle: Science, politique et tradition, ed. Isabelle Poutrin (Paris: Berger‐Levrault, 1995), 150; Trinkaus and Shipman, Neandertals, 108; A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 197–202.

16. Van Riper, Men among the Mammoths, 197.

17. É[mile] Cartailhac and H[enri] Breuil, La caverne d'Altamira à Santillane, près Santander (Espagne) (Monaco: Imprimerie de Monaco, 1906). On Breuil's use of ethnography in interpreting Paleolithic art, see Nathalie Richard, “En quête des mentalités préhistoriques: Henri Breuil, l'ethnographie et l'art des cavernes,” in Sur les chemins de la préhistoire: L'Abbé Breuil du Périgord à l'Afrique du Sud (Paris: Somogy, 2006), 85–96.

18. “Séance d'ouverture,” in Congrès international d'anthropologie et d'archéologie préhistoriques; Compte rendu de la XIVe session, Genève, 1912 (1912; Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1969), 70: “chapitres où l'interprétation de nos recherches pourra être avantageusement éclairée par l'ethnographie comparative.”

19. Claudine Cohen, L'Homme des origines: Savoirs et fictions en préhistoire (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 169; Marc Groenen, Pour une histoire de la préhistoire: Le Paléolithique (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 1994), 264–276.

20. On Sollas, see Raf De Bont, “The Creation of Prehistoric Man: Aimé Rutot and the Eolith Controversy, 1900–1920,” Isis 94, no. 4 (December 2003): 626; Marianne Sommer, “Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives: William Sollas's (1849–1936) Anthropology from Disappointed Bridge to Trunkless Tree and the Instrumentalisation of Racial Conflict,” Journal of the History of Biology 38, no. 2 (June 2005): 327–365.

21. Marcellin Boule, Les hommes fossiles: Éléments de paléontologie humaine, 2nd ed. (Paris: Masson, 1923), 317: “présentent des affinités avec chacune des trois grandes divisions des Hommes actuels: Nègres, Blancs et Jaunes.”

22. L[ouis] Capitan, Henri Breuil and D[enis] Peyrony, La caverne de Font‐de‐Gaume aux Eyzies (Dordogne) (Monaco: Imprimerie Vve A. Chêne, 1910), 195: “mériterait le nom de Caverne des Bisons, tant par le nombre que par la grandeur des images de ces animaux qu'elle contient.”

23. On Breuil's relevés, see Gilles Tosello and Carole Fritz, “L'Abbé Breuil et les relevés d'art paléolithique,” in Sur les chemins de la préhistoire, 103–112.

24. The information in this paragraph is from Paul G. Bahn and Jean Vertut, Journey through the Ice Age (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), 16–22; Gregory Curtis, The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists (New York: Knopf, 2006), 48–57; Randall White, Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey of Humankind (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 45–46.

25. Émile Cartailhac, “Les cavernes ornées de dessins. La grotte d'Altamira, Espagne. ‘Mea culpa' d'un sceptique,” L'Anthropologie 13 (1902): 348–354.

26. However, as Margaret W. Conkey has noted: “We still use the label Cro‐Magnons, although it has long been recognized that the people to whom the label refers are 100 per cent Homo sapiens sapiens and that the label is a ‘survival' from the 1860s' discoveries at the site of Cro‐Magnon when the biocultural status of the remains was not assured. While some might argue that we use the term now to mark them, chronologically, as the earliest of the fully modern humans in southwest Europe, a certain distancing from us is, nonetheless, in effect, retained by the continued use of the term” (“Mobilizing Ideologies: Paleolithic ‘Art,' Gender Trouble and Thinking about Alternatives,” in Women in Human Evolution, ed. Lori D. Hager [London: Routledge, 1997], 183).

27. Paul Broca, “On the Human Skulls and Bones Found in the Cave of Cro‐Magnon, near Les Eyzies,” in Reliquiae Aquitanicae; Being Contributions to the Archaeology and Palaeontology of Périgord and the Adjoining Provinces of Southern France, by Édouard Lartet and Henry Christy, ed. Thomas Rupert Jones (London: Williams & Norgate, 1875), 120–121.

28. A[rmand] de Quatrefages, The Human Species (New York: D. Appleton, 1879), 312, 321.

29. Groenen, Pour une histoire de la préhistoire, 275.

30. See Sigolène Loizeau, “Laussel: Un visage pour une Vénus,” in Vénus et Caïn: Figures de la préhistoire, 1830–1930 (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux; Bordeaux: Musée d'Aquitaine, 2003), 106; Trinkaus and Shipman, Neandertals, 183–184. Trinkaus and Shipman further write: “Because L. Testut, an anthropologist at the University of Lyons, had recently declared the Chancelade skeleton found near Périgueux in 1888 to be that of an Eskimo, the notion of racial migrations suddenly assumed almost ludicrous proportions, with extremes of modern racial groups wandering helter‐skelter across the French countryside and then dying out. With the acuity of hindsight, it is easy so see that both Testut and Verneau were confusing anatomical variations—some of which are a function of habits and behaviors during life—with clusters of anatomical features that are genetically associated with racial groups” (Neandertals, 184). However, Legrand Clegg II has revived the “Negroid” theory, writing: “We assert at the outset that these [the Grimaldis] were black people who probably invaded Europe as early as 40,000 BC and thereby became the first human beings to occupy this continent. They introduced human culture to the northern latitudes of the Old World and bequeathed to their ‘white’ descendants, the Cro‐Magnons, the most advanced ‘civilization’ of the Paleolithic Age” (“The First Invaders,” in African Presence in Early Europe, ed. Ivan Van Sertima [New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1985], 23).

31. René Verneau, Les origines de l'humanité (Paris: F. Rieder, 1926), 35: “ressemble d'une manière frappante à certaines populations nigritiques qui vivent de nos jours.” Also see René Verneau, Les grottes de Grimaldi, vol. 2, fasc. 1 “Anthropologie” (Monaco: Imprimerie de Monaco, 1906).

32. White, Prehistoric Art, 54–55; Randall White, “The Women of Brassempouy: A Century of Research and Interpretation,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 13, no. 4 (December 2006): 283.

33. Félix Regnault, “Les artistes préhistoriques d'après les dernières découvertes,” La nature 23, no. 1167 (12 October 1895): 306. Verneau, it should be pointed out, denied any relationship between the Grimaldi “Negroids” and Bushmen, writing, “on s'est basé sur un caractère que présentent certaines statuettes préhistoriques, découvertes en Europe, et qu'on regarde comme contemporaines des Négroïdes; je veux parler de la stéatopygie. … Mais cette particularité se rencontre dans d'autres races nègres et même chez des femmes blanches. … Il n'y a donc aucune raison pour rapprocher les Négroïdes de Grimaldi—dont il est d'ailleurs impossible de savoir s'ils étaient stéatopyges ou non—des Boschimans plutôt que de toute autre race présentant la même particularité” (Les origines de l'humanité, 36).

34. White notes that the term “Venus” was initially used only in reference to Paleolithic representations of ample women resembling the “Hottentot Venus” and concludes that “the application of the term ‘Venus’ resulted not from some extension to the Paleolithic of the reverence for classical art, nor does it involve a preoccupation with fertility. Rather it stems directly from Western European racial/racist attitudes of the early twentieth century.” He then continues: “In light of this history, I would recommend abandoning ‘Venus’ terminology as inherently tainted and interpretively vacuous” (White, Prehistoric Art, 54–55).

35. Among the many sources on Baartman, see Stephen Jay Gould, “The Hottentot Venus,” in The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985), 291–305; Rosemary Wiss, “Lipreading: Remembering Saartjie Baartman,” Australian Journal of Anthropology 5, nos. 1–2 (1994): 11–40.

36. G[aston] Lalanne, “Bas‐reliefs à figuration humaine de l'abri sous roche de Laussel,” in Congrès international d'anthropologie et d'archéologie préhistoriques, 551: “Il y a eu, à l'époque aurignacienne, autour de la Méditerrannée, une race négroïde, dont les femmes présentaient des caractères stéatopyges… . Cette race a fui de proche en proche dans l'Afrique du Nord, passant de là dans l'Afrique du Sud.”

37. Henri Breuil, handwritten description of Roux's decorative program dated 1921, Institute of Human Paleontology, Paris: “la Vénus Hottentote découverte à Laussel (Dordogne).”

38. Anne Hauzeur and François Mairesse, “Une collaboration exemplaire: Louis Mascré et Aimé Rutot,” in Vénus et Caïn, 110–130.

39. A[imé] Rutot, Un essai de reconstitution plastique des races humaines primitives (Brussels: Hayez, 1919).

40. Rutot, Un essai de reconstitution plastique, 83: “un homme vigoureux, de haute stature, de belle prestance”; “couvert de fourrures, car nous approchons de la deuxième et dernière poussée de grand froid arctique”; “est d'un type très élevé, pouvant atteindre aux plus hautes civilizations”; “encore vivante parmi la population de nos pays.”

41. E[rnest] A. Parkyn, “Theories of M. Rutot,” Man 21 (March 1921): 46.

42. Rutot, Un essai de reconstitution plastique, 144: “race blanche.” On this bust, also see De Bont, “Creation of Prehistoric Man,” 624–626.

43. Rutot, Un essai de reconstitution plastique, 65–66, 69–70. On this bust, also see De Bont, “Creation of Prehistoric Man,” 626–628.

44. See Charmaine A. Nelson, The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth‐Century America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), esp. 57–72. The quote is from p. 62.

45. Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth‐Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 12.

46. Wiss, “Lipreading,” 12.

47. William J. Lewis Abbott to Rutot, 7 January 1914, Rutot Papers, Royal Belgian Institute for National Sciences, Brussels, quoted in De Bont, “Creation of Prehistoric Man,” 625.

48. Martha Lucy, “Cormon's Cain and the Problem of the Prehistoric Body,” Oxford Art Journal 25, no. 2 (2002): 121.

49. On nudity as a “double sign,” see Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 57.

50. Stephanie Moser, Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 173.

51. Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin‐de‐Siècle France (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998), 36.

52. Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 71–74. However, Camper “denied that the range of facial angles corresponds to a scale of superiority‐inferiority” (73).

53. É[douard] Piette and J[oseph] de Laporterie, “Études d'ethnographie préhistorique. V, Fouilles à Brassempouy en 1897,” L'Anthropologie 9 (1898): 531–555, discussed in Henri Delporte, “Piette: Pionnier de la préhistoire,” in Histoire de l'art primitif, by Édouard Piette, Les classiques français de l'histoire de l'art (Paris: Picard, 1987), 155–156.

54. Frances S. Connelly, The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725–1907 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 28–29, 119, n. 33. The quote is from p. 119, n. 33.

55. Édouard Piette, “Sur de nouvelles fouilles dans la grotte de Gourdan,” Bulletin de la Société d'anthropologie de Paris, 2nd ser., 10 (1875): 279–296, quoted in Delporte, “Piette,” 141: “Il fallut que l'homme fît un effort de génie assez considérable pour créer l'art du dessin. Représenter par des lignes, sur une surface plane, des objets en relief n'est pas une chose qui aît pu se présenter tout d'abord à son esprit.” Others, however, believed that engraving had preceded sculpture. Henri du Cleuziou wrote that despite their prowess at engraving, prehistoric artists were less adept at creating more salient images, noting: “Mais la sculpture demande des aptitudes particulières; ils réussirent moins bien dans cet art complexe qui exige presque de la science” (La création de l'homme et les premiers âges de l'humanité [Paris: C. Marpon et E. Flammarion, 1887], 264).

56. See, e.g., Ernest A. Parkyn, An Introduction to the Study of Prehistoric Art (London: Longmans, Green, 1915), 39–40; W[illiam] J. Sollas, Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives (London: Macmillan, 1911), 222–223.

57. Only recently has “the idea that Upper Paleolithic representation underwent a 25,000‐year evolution from simple and childlike to complex” been debunked. After the discovery in 1994 “of the 32,000‐year‐old paintings and engravings at the Grotte Chauvet, we see that virtually every trick of the trade known to the Magdalenians was already mastered by the Aurignacians” (White, Prehistoric Art, 117).

58. Parkyn, “Theories of M. Rutot,” 46.

59. Roger Fry, “Bushman Paintings,” Burlington Magazine 16, no. 84 (March 1910): 337.

60. Nathalie Richard, “De l'art ludique à l'art magique: Interprétations de l'art pariétal au XIXe siècle,” Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française 90, no. 1 (January–February 1993): 61: “les traductions esthétiques des limites mêmes de l'intelligence de ses concepteurs.”

61. On the interpretation of prehistoric art, see R. Dale Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 7–11; Richard, “De l'art ludique à l'art magique,” 60–68.

62. Salomon Reinach, “L'Art et la magie: A propos des peintures et des gravures de l'âge du renne,” L'Anthropologie 14 (1903): 257–266.

63. Louis Capitan, La préhistoire (Paris: Payot, 1922), 46: “Il paraît en effet très vraisemblable que l'art primitif n'a cherché à être réaliste dès le début que parce que dans l'opération magique il était nécessaire qu'intervînt la figuration exacte de l'animal dont la capture ou la multiplication était désirée par le primitif.”

64. White, “Women of Brassempouy,” 276.

65. Lalanne, “Bas‐reliefs à figuration humaine,” 548: “Cette sorte de lipomatose semblait être un caractère ethnique, constituait un idéal de beauté que les artistes aurignaciens aimaient à reproduire avec leurs burins.” In response, however, W. Deonna replied that “on a souvent tort de rechercher dans les monuments des arts primitifs la représentation fidèle des traits ethniques, alors que les détails qui paraissent caractéristiques ne sont que des conventions communes à tous ces arts, indépendamment du temps et de l'espace” (551–552).

66. Quoted in Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978), 269.

67. Wiss, “Lipreading,” 15. However, as the artist William Hogarth noted in the mid‐eighteenth century, “the Negro who finds great beauty in the black Females of his country, may find as much deformity in the European beauty as we see in theirs” (The Analysis of Beauty [1753; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997], 114, quoted in Charmaine Nelson, “Vénus Africaine: Race, Beauty and African‐ness,” in Black Victorians: Black People in British Art, 1800–1900, ed. Jan Marsh [Manchester: Manchester Art Gallery, 2005], 47).

68. According to Conkey, the appearance of the “Venus” figurines was used “to distance the figurine‐makers and those they represented from the modern (civilized) humans of the early twentieth century” (“Mobilizing Ideologies,” 190).

69. Brincourt, “L'Institut de paléontologie humaine,” 157; Noet, “Constant Roux,” 189.

70. Martha Lucy, “Reading the Animal in Degas's Young Spartans,” Nineteenth‐Century Art Worldwide 2, no. 2 (Spring 2003). Available online at: http://www.19thc‐artworldwide.org/spring_03/articles/lucy.shtml; Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 55.

71. Vivien Green Fryd, Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 116.

72. Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 18.

73. Quoted in “Inauguration de l'Institut de paléontologie humaine,” L'Anthropologie 30 (1920): 568: “Quand vous viendrez entendre la parole des Maîtres auxquels je livre ce temple de l'Humanité, … levez les yeux vers la frise qui enveloppe le monument dans une ceinture animée: elle évoque la marche de la pensée humaine d'une période à une autre, et vous sentirez l'émotion qui vient aux âmes devant le spectacle de la vérité qui, seule dans le domaine de cette pensée, demeure éternelle.”