Author: chiron99 | Total views: 65 Comments: 0
Word Count: 649 Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 10:15 AM

The Cigar In The Visual Arts

Cigar smoking has left its imprint on the world of the visual arts. Pablo Picasso, to name just one, was known to love a good cigar.

In fact, given its history as a sort of affordable luxury item--the kind of thing that people take to in moments of relaxation--and the way that peoples' defenses drop slightly when smoking, which would seem to make the moment of puffing on a cigar a perfect one to have immortalized in a portrait, what's surprising is that the cigar doesn't turn up in visual art more often. This partial dearth can be explained, in part, by the history of smoking technology.

When Westerners first discovered smoking--during one of Columbus's missions--the indigenous Americans whom they learned the custom from tended to use tobacco wrapped in an outer leaf, a forerunner of today's cigar. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European smokers tended to use pipes or snuff. It was only in the eighteenth and, especially, the nineteenth centuries that cigars became a preferred tobacco-inhalation method.

So for a long time, when European artists depict smoking, it's with a pipe, as in the Dutch artist Adriaen van Ostade's An Apothecary Smoking in an Interior (1646) and many British paintings with pipes. A fashion of nineteenth-century art, blending the longing for the exotic with the racism of European colonialism, depicts "harem" scenes, in which pipes and hookahs, alongside stereotypically depicted Middle Eastern women, frequently appear: Jean-Leon Gerome's Odalisque, with its nude reclining slave, and the same artist's 1898 The Hookah Lighter, with its smoking bathing beauties, are among the most provocative of these.

Cigar smoking shows up in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engravings: an instance of a popular art catching a popular pastime. Cigar-smoking clubs, or cigar smokers in bars or other sociable places, often turn up in such images. Other popular forms of art--especially magazine illustrations of the period--frequently depict cigar smoking, and of course the nineteenth century is the period when the cigar box itself frequently becomes an art form. (For example, some of the first campaign memorabilia in America includes cigar boxes decorated with the visages, authorized or not, of famous cigar-smoking political figures.) In other arts, the hero of Bizet's great nineteenth-century opera Carmen is, of course, a cigar-roller.

In a moment of cross-art recognition, the great French painter Eduard Manet in 1876 catches the great French poet Stephane Mallarme in a relaxed, somewhat lost-looking moment with a cigar. Two arch-French Romantics meet in this single classic work. (But Mallarme really needed to get rid of the mustache!)

In the late nineteenth century, the trend changes again, and cigarettes (which were beginning to displace cigars as the smoker's bread-and-butter product) get their day in the sun. Vincent van Gogh's Skull with a Burning Cigarette (1885), which depicts just what the title says, is a hard-to-forget example of this. Cigarettes in the lips of women become particularly potent symbols for late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century painters seeking to epater les bourgeoisie; for example, Toulose-Lautrec and van Gogh both show cafe-going women lighting up.

Cigar and cigarette smoke alike became, as time went on, visual cues that the populations depicted in a painting are members of the intellectual or bohemian classes. Pablo Picasso made the equation in his 1911 Cubist work The Poet, in which smoking, being a poet, and being the subject of a cutting-edge painting technique (Picasso's own, then still new) are linked together. Smoking often turns up in twentieth-century pop art. Visual artists who call themselves film directors--think of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause-- also picked up on the visual cues of smoking. Or, for a more recent example, consider the works of Jim Jarmusch: his Coffee and Cigarettes, for example, celebrates the traditions of bohemian, artist-to-artist conversations in which smokes and cups of coffee help to keep time.

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