Noble Cast

Before Cindy Sherman, there was Claude Cahun, and before Cahun, there was the countess. That's a neat summation of a certain lineage of photography by and about women, but it's not quite accurate. While Sherman and Cahun donned costumes and guises as a way to question gender stereotypes, their nineteenth-century precursor, the Countess de Castiglione, dressed up to enhance the role she assigned herself: international woman of mystery, influence, and seduction. Rather than Sherman, a more apt analogy might be Austin Powers - except the countess wasn't kidding.

The countess sat for some 400 to 500 photographic portraits during her life, most if not all taken by Pierre-Louis Pierson, a Parisian whose studios catered to the court of Napoleon III. Of particular interest is the active part she took in making the photographs, and the variety and oddity of her costumes and poses - like the ones in which she lifted her skirts to reveal her scandalously bare limbs, images brought to public attention by Abigail Solomon-Godeau in her essay "The Legs of the Countess."

Pierre Apraxine began acquiring photos of the countess in 1985 for the acclaimed Gilman Paper Company collection of photography. That quest will now form the bulk of a major exhibition of one hundred of her portraits and related images. "La Comtesse de Castiglione par ellememe" opens October 12 at Paris's Musee d'Orsay. Conceived and curated by Apraxine, who worked with Francoise Heilbrun, chief curator of the Orsay, and Xavier Demange, the show goes on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in September of next year. The countess will at last receive the homage that she herself had planned but was ultimately forced to abandon with her death one hundred years ago.

Apraxine is a central figure in the world of photography. A courtly, soft-spoken man, the former Fulbright scholar was curator of the Baron Lambert Collection for Banque Lambert in Brussels and assistant curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art before joining Gilman in 1976. He honed his eye in the late '70s and early '80s, a time when few were interested in photography - and when auction prices were still relatively low. The standards of aesthetics and connoisseurship he is credited with developing for the medium were on prominent display in "The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century," a show of selections from the Gilman collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1993. With an attendance of around 185,000 people, the survey was a veritable blockbuster for a photography exhibition, particularly one with such a rarefied focus.

Although the countess may not have quite as much draw, the exhibition should add to the growing evidence of the role of women in shaping the medium of photography. In anticipation of the opening, I sat down with Pierre Apraxine in Gilman's midtown Manhattan offices to discuss the "noble operator" and the images she left behind.

- CS

CAROL SQUIERS: When did you first see the portraits of the Countess de Castiglione?

PIERRE APRAXINE: It was at Galerie Texbraun on Rue Mazarine in Paris in the early 1980s. They were miseen-scenes of the countess in one of her most famous costumes, as the Queen of Etruria. The images were steeped in the nineteenth century, with stilted, staged movement and theatrical costumes - it was everything I didn't want to see in nineteenth-century photography.

CS: What did you want to see?

PA: Like everyone else, my interest was in artists like Gustave Le Gray or Henri Le Secq; they were appealing to a contemporary sensibility. The spare, austere composition, atypical for the taste of the period in which they were shot, was the thing that I liked. Like other American collectors, I was coming from contemporary art; we passed from that to photography.

CS: What happened to change your mind?

PA: Texbraun secured some photographs from the Braun family - the Mayer & Pierson studio responsible for her photographs had merged with the Braun studio in the 1870s. They were photographs from the end of her life - 1893, '94, '95 - when she went back into the studio and resumed posing. They were very disturbing, because you felt the narcissistic neurosis taking over, the lack of contact with reality. You wondered whether she knew what she was doing. That made them fascinating. I purchased several booklets of photographs at that point - 1985.

CS: What happened next?

PA: I had the end of the story and I started looking for the beginning. I was already working on "The Waking Dream" exhibition. A dealer in Paris showed me one of the most beautiful portraits of her, called Le Regard [The gaze], done in 1857 during her first stay in Paris. It's a masterpiece of that period. She is giving of herself, but at the same time she remains aloof. So now I had the beginning and the end. Later, in 1995, a group of works came on the market which I bought at auction in Paris. So every period of the countess's involvement is represented in the collection.