The Black & White Of Silhouettes

From this 1953 dry cleaning booklet, the origins of the word silhouette:

Time was that silhouette was a naughty word -- which only goes to prove that we live in a changing world. France, in 1759, had a comptroller general whose name was "Monsieur Silhouette." He introduced a number of taxes so odious that the mere mention of his name in polite society could mean pistols at dawn. Just how this epithet gradually shed its shady meaning and came to connote the outline of an object is lost in the pages of history. We chose the name SILHOUETTE for our magazine as a compliment to you... your clothes, your personality, and the home that is a gracious setting for the special beauty that is yours alone.

Curious myself, I did a little research.

From Silhouette-Man:

The art of silhouette cutting originated in Europe in the early 1700's. Prior to the French revolution, silhouettists were hired as an amusement for the royal class. The featured artist would attend the many extravagant balls and cut out the distinguished profiles of the Lords and Ladies capturing the latest fashions and elaborate wigs.

While the aristocrats were having their silhouettes cut out and eating like kings much of Europe was starving, especially in France. In the 1760's the Finance Minister of France, Etienne de Silhouette, had crippled the French people with his merciless tax polices. Oblivious to his people's plight, Etienne was much more interested in his hobby of cutting out paper profiles, the latest fad. Etienne de Silhouette was so despised by the people of France that in protest the peasant s wore only black mimicking his black paper cutouts. The saying went all over France,"We are dressing a la Silhouette. We are shadows, too poor to wear color. We are Silhouettes!" To this very day the black profile cutouts are called silhouettes. Thankfully, the negative connotation no longer remains.

However, artists like Kara Walker are resurrecting the art, using it to explore negative issues such as racism and feminism.

In this PBS interview, Walker said:

“I was looking at racist paraphernalia, iconography, and then at these accurate versions of middle-class Americans. I began to associate the silhouette itself, the cutting, with a form of blackface minstrelsy. Here we have these mainly white sitters or a few slaves who were documented in silhouette—but for the most part white sitters whom I identify as middle class because upper class would require a full-fledged oil portrait and that’s what I had already ruled out for myself…’No oil painting here, not going to ape the master that way.’”

“I always think about this work, this history, in terms of the body. And in terms of this act of excavating that’s been such a current and recurring theme, particularly in the histories of feminist artists, feminist writers, African-American people of color, investigating and eviscerating this body of collective experience…sometimes to the point of leaving nothing intact. I entered into this project, this idea of being a black woman artist, from the perspective of a person who has been presented with a pre-dissected body to work from. A pre-dissected body of information.”

Kara Walker's Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994) from The New York Times.

Other image credits: Kara Walker silhouette via The Whitney.

More on Etienne de Silhouette at Wikipedia.