William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Au pied de la falaise (At the Foot of the Cliff), 1886, at 62 E.H. Crump.
Photographs by Anna Traverse.
You’ll think she’s an apparition at first, as you’re swooping eastward around the cloverleaf where I-55 reconfigures into E.H. Crump. A luminous-eyed, soft-limbed French girl, rendered monumental in six stories on the side of the vacant United Warehouse, gazes at some distant point beyond you.
She may be familiar: She lives most of the time in a frame, on a wall of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. William-Adolphe Bouguereau painted her, in the 1880s, calling the painting Au pied de la falaise (“At the foot of the cliff”). This fall, she’s been printed, to put it scientifically, on really, really big paper, on a really, really big printer, then scissored loose and wheat-pasted onto the old bricks and broken windows of the warehouse’s western-facing side, a fire escape notching up the gentle curve of her back, her little bare toes a foot wide, dangling a story above the earth: You find yourself au pied de <<Au pied de la falaise>>.
Katherine Augusta Carl, Portrait of Bessie Vance, ca. 1890, on the façade of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.
She’s one of several “monumentals” — super-large-scale works — included in the museum’s latest Brooks Outside series, this one part of the Outings Project launched by French artist and filmmaker Julien de Casabianca. De Casabianca has installed paper murals in cities around the world, Mumbai to Moscow, now Memphis.
In the Outings Project, de Casabianca — with input from curators and the local community — plucks figures from a museum’s collection, then prints and pastes them onto unexpected public places. Paintings are released from the walls of the museum and find new life, where they can be discovered and re-discovered, posed with, peeled at, interacted with in fresh ways.
Luca Giordano, The Slaying of the Medusa, ca. 1680, at 3177 Summer.
And so, here are instructions I would not ordinarily give when describing how to find a seventeenth-century painting. Head east on Summer and park in the AutoZone lot, and you’ll see it: Luca Giordano’s The Slaying of the Medusa, pasted onto the side of the lock shop next door. When I dropped by, no one else seemed to be paying any mind to the helmeted, sword-wielding man stuck onto moldering cinderblocks.
That’s part of the humdrum-wonder of this project: Instead of approaching paintings with reverence, standing before them, arms crossed, remarking on the chiaroscuro in hushed tones, folks just go about their ordinary business while Medusa gets slain.
Behind the National Civil Rights Museum, another stories-high, wheat-pasted painting seems to float just above a grassy lot. Several figures plucked from Carroll Cloar’s Wedding Party, pastel and statuesque, rise on the side of the Masonic building on G.E. Patterson, cattycorner to the Marmalade Lounge. When I visited, the green grass beneath the monumental members of the wedding party was almost blue with fresh rain; it seemed they might, at any moment, step off the side of the weathered bricks, dampen their shoes with cool dew.
Carroll Cloar, Wedding Party, 1971, at 154 G.E. Patterson.
You can make an excursion out of searching for the characters who have escaped from the Brooks as part of this project. Smaller, life-size figures can be found scattered throughout the city. There’s Old Man River, appropriately placed near the Mississippi, on Front, behind a bent-down chain-link fence. You’ll find a Winslow Homer on South Cooper, another Carroll Cloar on Lamar. Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Benardino of Siena — where else but on Frayser Boulevard.
It took a moment to find the piece near Crosstown Concourse — George Luks’ The Fortune Teller. In de Casabianca’s version, only the central fortune-teller figure is displayed, pasted onto the side of a building across from the Concourse, as if the fortune teller was holding court to an abandoned lot of curious seekers.
George Luks, The Fortune Teller, ca. 1920, at 472 North Watkins.
In the weeks since The Fortune Teller was installed, someone has ripped most of it down, leaving scraps of painting-printed paper curled on the ground beneath like dead leaves. The face of the fortune teller remains, sinister and shadowy as ever, as does a flash of the green birds that perch on his arm. Someone has scrawled across his pale, waxy face a message that contains two curse words, a combination of letters that does not signify anything (that I know of), and the number 87. Why 87? This I cannot tell you.
My first reaction, walking up to this apparent act of vandalism, was to sigh, “Oh, how sad. Gosh: people.” But is it sad? These paintings are all, in a way, acts of vandalism, just not the kind of vandalism we now think of as being a public nuisance. Art began this way, after all: not on canvas, not in designated marble buildings into which admission was charged, not to be hung on the walls of the wealthy, but added in flashes, splashed in shadows onto any available surface.
Richard Wilson, Tivoli: Temple of the Sibyl and the Campagna, ca. 1763-1767, at 381 North Main.
I find myself tumbling into strange imaginings, stumbling onto some of the Outings Project works, like a pastoral figure from Richard Wilson’s Tivoli: Temple of the Sibyl and the Campagna, who has found himself shaken awake and deposited into downtown Memphis. Fancy that the paintings and the buildings onto which they’ve been applied are pressing into each other with more than mere wheat-paste: that there is a reality in which a boy is sitting on a hillside, sometime in the late eighteenth century, and a reality in which a building with a for-lease sign stands near the carriage houses and the Pyramid, in present-day Memphis. And that somehow the two realities have gotten jumbled, leaving an imprint on the Memphis side in the form of a boy, back curled, legs outstretched, on a warm brick wall.
Carroll Cloar, Windy Corner in Vera Cruz, 1951, at 2571 Broad.
Over and over again, walking up to and around these figures, for a moment I would wonder, ludicrously, where their shadows were. By the end of a sunny afternoon, visiting another Cloar character (this one released from Windy Corner in Vera Cruz and affixed near the corner of Bingham and Broad), my shadow was long enough to stretch up the side of the wall and touch her feet. She herself was, of course, quite shadowless — a visitor from someone else’s imagination, projected onto our collective imagination, until weather or fingernails return her to canvas.
Jack Grue, Old Man River, ca. 1940, at 52 South Front.
