Hair by Sam McKnight

There is another exhibition on hair coming. (I failed to write up the one in Utrecht earlier this year, but will one of these days....) This one, Hair by Sam McKnight, will feature fashion photographs!

The exhibition will be on view at the Somerset House in London from 2 November 2016 – 12 March  2017. Here's the press release. Of course, I question the claim I've formatted in boldface below. I predict a bunch of fashion photos on the wall with some brief didactic text introducing the exhibition. Call me cynical.

This autumn, Somerset House is proud to present Hair by Sam McKnight, a major exhibition celebrating the master hairstylist’s remarkable 40 year career, from the late 1970s to the current day. An integral part of the fashion industry, Sam has been instrumental in helping to develop the images of Kate Moss, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell and Princess Diana among many others. He is one of the first session stylists to have carved out a career solely within fashion, having worked on hundreds of fashion editorial shoots, advertising campaigns and catwalk shows. He has shot over 100 covers for British Vogue alone, as well as numerous other magazines and worked with most international fashion designers from Chanel to Vivienne Westwood.

The exhibition will unveil the little-known creative process behind the craft of hair styling within fashion and explore the relationships between McKnight and key, long-term collaborators; photographers such as Nick Knight and Patrick Demarchelier, models including Kate Moss, Stella Tennant and Christy Turlington, stylist Lucinda Chambers, and designer Karl Lagerfeld.

This will be the first exhibition of its kind, looking at hair from a new perspective and contextualising its wider cultural significance and the role of the session stylist within fashion. It will include some of the most iconic images in popular culture and some of fashion’s most memorable looks, from Princess Diana’s short, slicked back style to Madonna’s Bedtime Stories, and Tilda Swinton channelling David Bowie, tracing different movements and hairstyles, from nostalgic to androgynous, romantic to sexy, red to platinum, cataloguing the transformative nature of hair within the image.

Exhibiting pieces from Sam’s extensive archive, gathered over his 40 year career, the exhibition will feature photography, magazines, catwalk and behind-the-scenes footage, private photographs and full outfit looks as well as commissioned wigs and hairpieces. Grouped into thematic sections, the exhibition will explore process, relationships and collaboration, movement, transformation, the shoot and the catwalk. Throughout the exhibition a visual timeline will trace not only Sam’s career from the late 1970s to today, but also track changing styles through time; exploring the relationship between fashion shoots and the street in influencing contemporary hair styling.

To be published at the same time as the exhibition, there will be a book by the same name, Hair by Sam McKnight with texts by Tim Blanks, Alexander Fury, Amanda Harlech, Nick Knight, Camilla Morton, Anna-Marie Solowij, Jerry Stafford and commentary by Sam McKnight featuring images spanning his entire career. Richly illustrated, it features photographs by leading fashion photographers and styles commissioned by Vivienne Westwood, Balmain, Chanel, and many others.  A unique reference book that offers a glamorous tour through the past forty years and a style bible for glorious looks, the book is published by Rizzoli and priced at £35.00.

The exhibition is curated by Shonagh Marshall and exhibition design is by Michael Howells.

David Hammons

While some of the best known works by artist David Hammons are ephemeral performances (like Pissed Off 1981 or his Body Prints made by rolling his greased body on paper), Hammons spent a great deal of his career making art from found materials, including hair.

Hammons was one of a number of African-American artists creating assemblages in Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s. (Others of note included Betye Saar and John Outterbridge.) Primarily using found materials, such as discarded chicken bones or barber shop hair clippings, Hammons's work rejected the 'clean' aesthetic of American Minimalism and embraced an aesthetics of refuse.

Untitled - 1992 - human hair, wire, metallic mylar, sledge hammer,
plastic beads, string, metal food tin, panty hose, leather, tea bags, and feathers
- Whitney Museum of Art, 92.128a-u

"The artist has often been characterised as a sophisticated junk dealer who breathes new life into paper bags, bottle caps, frizzy hair, snowballs, rocks, broken appliances, old clothes, rugs, grease and half-eaten ribs." 1.

The detritus Hammons collects is specifically selected "to evoke aspects, attitudes and sensibilities of black American culture.” 2.  His spider-like sculpture, Untitled 1992, consists of African-American hair wrapped around wires, that emulate the look of dreadlocks. There is no actual body represented, only a reference to the body, created by amassing discarded, kinky hairs. Artists that utilize human hair in their work evoke, consciously or unconsciously, the uncanny by re-contextualizing something with which we are so intimately familiar.

Pieces of hair inevitably fall beneath and around the work, evoking natural processes of change and decay. Like much of Hammons’s art, Untitled summons an uncanny sensation of the strangeness that often lies just below the surface of the familiar. 3.

Hammons frequently uses the visual trope of hair as a marker of African American racial identity. This is evident in his rock heads, works that combine a head-sized stone with hair collected from the floors of black barbershops and affixed to the stone in a manner resembling a head of hair. Art historian Blake Gopnik notes that "in its obvious echoes of Brancusi’s smooth forms, it takes modernism’s Africa fetish and reclaims it for black America." 4.

 Untitled (Rock Head) - 1998 - stone, hair, and shoe polish container
- from the collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris

Much of Hammons's work circles around representation, addressing a "politics of visibility, of who and what can be seen and explained." According to artist Lorraine O’Grady, “Hammons tries to make art in which white people can’t see themselves.” 5.  

Old dirty bags, grease, bones, hair … it’s about us, it’s about me. It isn’t negative. We should look at these images and see how positive they are, how strong, how powerful. Our hair is positive, it’s powerful, look what it can do. There’s nothing negative about our images, it all depends on who is seeing it and we’ve been depending on someone else’s sight … We need to look again and decide. ~ David Hammons, 1977 6.

 Rock Head - 2000 - stone, hair, metal stand - RISD Museum, 2001.31.1

If the hair on his rock heads clearly addresses racial identity, using hair on these balanced monoliths also nods to something more universal — the delicate dance of that which decays (the ephemeral) with that which appears to live on forever (the eternal).

While Hammons predominately employs hair for its symbolic, rather than personal, value — using African American hair from anonymous sources — in one of his earlier artworks, Flight Fantasy 1978, he used his own hair to offer a "critique of the dislocation of the black body in American society." 7. 

Flight Fantasy - 1978 - phonograph record fragments, hair, clay, plaster, feathers, bamboo, colored string.  Walker Art Center, 1995.24

Hammons's work often offers sight-gags — visual one-liners that riff off dominant cultural signifiers. "He's distorting all of these stereotypes to produce something which is a critique of the way this community has been seen." 8.  One of his most powerful works in this vein is Hair Relaxer, a visual pun that plays with ideas of power, privilege, art history, sex, and ideals of beauty. 

In Hair Relaxer, African American hair rests-reclines-relaxes on a recamier — an item of furniture associated with western European luxury, and by extension privilege and power. 9.  It's an ironic statement since the black struggle against oppression and injustice can never rest. Hair Relaxer addresses many contested positions for African Americans in art history, culture, and society.

 Hair Relaxer, 1998 - chaise-longue and human hair.

This item of furniture also recalls a specific painting by Jacques-Louis David—a painting of Juliette Récamier who was considered one of the great beauties of her day. The painting, from 1800 depicts Juliette reclining on a divan and epitomized an ideal of feminine elegance. It inspired painters and poets, and came to be riffed-on by artists, such as Magritte and Manet, in particular. 10.  In ironic homage, Manet's Olympia 1863 was famously provocative for the sexually aggressive gaze of its reclining odalisque, despite how she hid her public hair with her hands (addressed in an earlier blog post). Hammons joins the art-historical-parody party, arranging curly hairs in the seam of the recamier — down its crack, so-to-speak—playing with the cultural inappropriateness of publicly visible pubic hair.

But Hair Relaxer is far more than part part of an art-historical running joke about beauty ideals. African Americans have long endured exorbitant pain trying to accommodate Caucasian standards of beauty. Hair straightening treatments (relaxers) use toxic lye and cause great pain and suffering.

I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined the multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are “inferior” — and white people “superior” — that they will violate and mutilate their God-given bodies to try and look “pretty” by white standards. ~ Malcolm X 11.

Like most of David Hammons's artworks, Hair Relaxer works on many parallel tracks to address a shared black experience and situate it against and within both black and white cultures. Hammons "works off familiar, highly charged iconography ... and his puns conjure up some of the more contradictory and even painful aspects of contemporary black life." 12.

In a 1986 interview, the art historian Kellie Jones asked David Hammons why he makes art. Because, Mr. Hammons offered, art is about symbols and “outrageously magical things happen when you mess around with a symbol.” 13.  Hair, which is imbued with magical properties from cultures throughout time and place, is a significant medium for Hammons and serves as a versatile fiber for art-making.

For further reading about David Hammons, I invite you to explore the Mnuchin Gallery website, where the recent exhibition, Five Decades (March 15 - May 27, 2016) generated many articles about the artist and his body of work.

---

1. Coco Fusco, “Wreaking Havoc on the Signified”, Frieze online, May 7, 1995.
2. ibid.
3. Collections record from the Whitney Museum of Art.
4. Blake Gopnik on Art, Tumbr, Jun 5, 2014.
5. From Andrew Russeth, “Looking at Seeing: David Hammons and the Politics of Visibility”, ARTnews, February 17, 2015.
6. From the label text from the exhibition Art in Our Time: 1950 to the Present, Walker Art Center, September 5, 1999 to September 2, 2001.
7. From the label text for David Hammons, Flight Fantasy (1978), from the exhibition Black History Month, Walker Art Center, February 1999.
8. Philippe Vergne, curatorial comment, Walker Art Center, September 1999. 
9. Other names for this item of furniture are a divan or a chaise lounge. 
10. Philippe Segalot, Carte Blanche, Phillips auction house, November 8, 2010. 
11. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, New York 1965, p. 64.
12. Coco Fusco, “Wreaking Havoc on the Signified”, Frieze online, May 7, 1995.
13. Holland Cotter, "David Hammons Is Still Messing With What Art Means", New York Times, March 24, 2016

Buddah Hairwork

This 17th-century textile depicts Buddha in a state of nirvana. It incorporates embroidered human hair - black to represent the hair on Buddha laying on his side and gray to render the withered sal tree. The work measures 170.6 centimeters high and 84.2 centimeters wide.

The textile panel was created in 1678 by a Buddhist priest and artist named Kunen, who collected hair from devotees who felt that their donation would help them in making merit and reaching paradise in death. "The phenomenon of embroidering devotional works using human hair seems to be a peculiarly Japanese response to image making, probably beginning in the thirteenth century and usually associated with the Pure Land tradition."1.

I could not find any additional information about the artist Kunen, but the press release states that he created 72 textile works, some using the hair of at least 10,000 people! Only eight of his works survive. This piece was found in 2007 at the Joganji temple in Kyoto's Kamigyo Ward. It has been on view since February 8 in the Kyoto district office of the Jodoshu, or “Pure Land” sect, located in Higashiyama Ward. Admission is free.

While not abundant, there certainly are many examples of Buddhist artwork which incorporate human hair. Most of these are in the Pure Land tradition. "Using the hair of devotees to represent sacred figures was a dramatic way to collapse the distinction between devotee and deity, to show the merging with the sacred for which devotees longed, in this life or after death."2.

LEFT: Mandala of the Two Worlds. Kamakura period, ca. 1300; silk floss and human hair embroidery on silk; hanging scroll. Taisanji, Kobe.
RIGHT: Raigo: Descent of the Amida Buddha. Muromachi period, 1400s; silk and human hair embroidery mounted as a hanging scroll. Cleveland Museum of Art.

The use of human hair in these Japanese Pure Land embroideries likely began around the 13th century and then became more commonplace in the Muromachi period (1333-1573). They generally fall into two categories - those of predominantly figurative images and those that emphasize the written word.3. Above left is an embroidered shoji Mandala of the Two Worlds, a devotional textile in which human hair was worked into all the black sacred syllables that signify deities. Above right is a scroll representing the welcoming descent (raigo), the most ubiquitous of Japanese Pure Land images, here showing the Amida triad "offering the lotus throne on which the believer will be transported to salvation."4.

"When devotees donated hair to be worked into these powerful images, another layer of meaning is added. Since hair often suggests wild, untamed, sexual energy, its use in embroideries can be seen as an attempt to control or transform that 'negative' power, to turn negative into positive, to make the imperfect into the perfect. Hair, signifying the human body, undergoes a purifying metamorphosis when used in these embroideries to depict the hair and garments, or the names, of sacred figures. The distinction between buddha and believer collapses and they become one."5.

1. Elizabeth Ten Grotenhuis, Japanese Mandalas: Representations of Sacred Geography, University of Hawaii Press, 1999, page 95.
2. Ibid.3. Elizabeth Ten Grotenhuis, Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia, in Handbook of Oriental Studies, BRILL, 2010, page 884.
4. Ibid, page 877.5. Ibid, page 891.

Denise Grünstein: Figure Out

Swedish photographer Denise Grünstein's 2009 series "Figure Out" places solitary, faceless women masked by hair in surreal, Dali-blue-skied environments or dark, simple rooms reminiscent of those found in 17th-century Flemish still lifes. The woman are positioned centrally, yet appear passive. The effect is dreamlike - women at odds with their environments, placed awkwardly, displaced and misplaced. Many images depict hair found on dining tables draped in white linen, suggesting that the hair is edible, can be consumed. But the women are also being consumed by hair their hair. If hair can be understood as something that directly shapes our looks, perhaps these images imply the contradiction of both consuming and being consumed by appearance/appearing.

Denise Grünstein's work is on view in Different Distances: Fashion Photography Goes Art, an exhibition at Aperture Gallery from February 6–February 14, 2014.

  Head over Heels, 2009

 Figure Out, 2009

Female Gaze, 2009

Figurine, 2009

Headhunter, 2009

 Inside looking out, Outside looking in, 2009

 Tied, 2009

Video still from All Flesh is Grass. The title refers to the perishing, temporary nature of everything.

Deluxe Play with Hair

An Ellen Gallagher (b.1965) show recently opened at Tate Modern. Running through September 1, 2013, Ellen Gallagher: AxME is the artist's first major solo exhibition in the UK. Of Irish and African American heritage, Gallagher appropriates source materials from science fiction, the vaudeville tradition of black minstrels, and advertising targeted to African Americans.

Of note is DeLuxe (2004-5), sixty individually-framed prints that hang in a rectangular grid arrangement. Each print is a re-working of a magazine advertisement from a publication such as Ebony, Our World or Sepia dating from the 1920s to the 1970s. The ads, aimed at African American consumers, "promote a range of beauty products for women and men, especially goods relating to hair including wigs and pomades."1   Gallagher has appropriated these images and modified them using a variety of techniques -- in particular, collage. To the prints she has added materials such as glitter, gold leaf, coconut oil, toy eyeballs, and molded plasticine in the shape of wigs.

Gallagher's interventions to these beauty ads parody the idea of "improvement" through a process of erasure and alteration and "underscore in particular the role of hair as a signifier of difference."2 While her work is often characterized as political art, as it investigates of social and racial identities, it also has a playful approach that “confronts issues of race...with clever, even antic, satire."3

This idea of playfulness resonates both in format (she "plays" with the traditional print) and in content (poking fun at hairstyles and appearance). In Gallagher's hands, looks that are intended to help us "conform" to an ideal become fantastical masks, jazzy helmets, or fanciful hats from outer space. "When viewed together, these prints offer a history lesson about modernism, fashion, mass media, and race in mid-century America."4

‘The wig ladies are fugitives, conscripts from another time and place, liberated from the “race” magazines of the past. But again, I have transformed them, here on the pages that once held them captive.’ 5

One of Gallagher's tropes is the grid. Not only is Deluxe installed in a grid formation, the wig ads themselves are laid out in rows and columns of wigged heads. "Gallagher was drawn to the wig advertisements because of their grid-like structure...[having been] influenced by the sublime aesthetics of Agnes Martin’s paintings, as well the subtle shifts and repetitions of Gertrude Stein’s writing."6

These grids reminded me of another work by another artist: Tom Sach's James Brown’s Hair Products (2009). I saw this work when it was on view at the Sperone-Westwater Gallery in 2011. While the Sachs work has little in common with Deluxe in regards to motivation and interpretation, the works do align themselves formally. Confronted by a grid of hair products, each a specimen of physical conceit and tool of identity construction, we might ask ourselves to look at how we fetishize our hair rituals.

1-2. Tate Museum object catalogue record
3. "In Black and White" by Mark Stevens. Feb 21, 2005 issue of New York magazine
4. Walker Art Museum object catalogue record.
5. Exhibition description
6. PBS series Art21 from the episode "play"

Chained Accumulus Necklace

Artist Sergey Jivetin works in multiple arenas, jewelry being one of them. Chained Accumulus Necklace, a delicately rendered cloud form, is a piece composed of hair and jewelry chain from his "Accumulus" series. Jivetin's diverse body of work is created from unconventional materials and explores themes of the body, science, and time.

  Chained Accumulus Necklace 2009 Hair, Jewelry Chain.

"I strive to create representations of paradoxical concepts like the sometimes sterile, cold interactions between humans in office environments," he explains to one blogger. "By choosing jewelry's small scale and proximity to the body, I want the wearer to experience a concept in tangible, three-dimensional forms"1
"I am interested in opening new ways of obtaining levels of interaction between beauty, physicality, and knowledge."2

Drawing from studies in engineering, fashion jewelry, illustration, and product design, this SUNY New Paltz and New Parsons School of Design graduate has created innovative items fashioned from watch hands, human hair, fishing hooks, egg shells, wish bones, jewelry saw blades, hypodermic tubing, and syringe needles.

Opti Accumulus Necklace 2009 Glasses frames, False eyelashes.

Sergey Jivetin is currently exhibiting in two NYC shows.

Hydrologic ~ April 20-May 20, 2013
    NYU Langone Medical Center.
    MSB Gallery 550 First Ave. New York City

Out of this world. Jewelry in the Space Age ~ March 17-September 7, 2013
    Forbes Magazine Galleries.
    60 Fifth Ave. New York City

1. Splendor: A Celebration of Jewelry Designers, February 12, 2010
2. Marthe Le Van, 1000 Rings: Inspiring Adornments for the Hand. Lark Books, New York/ London, 2004: 220

The Art of Hair

Oh my! There is a wonderful exhibition, The Art of Hair: Frivolities and Trophies on view in Paris at the Quai Branly Museum. It looks at the universal importance of hair in cultures throughout the world. A multitude of objects - 280 to be exact that include sculptures, paintings and photography - address how hair has been shaped, sheared, and sculpted to express loss, beauty, intimacy, sociability, ritual, religion, fashion, and style.

 J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, 1974.
Credit: Musée du Quai Branlyn.

The show combines western and non-western, ancient and contemporary pieces. Diverse items, such as a skull from Papua New Guinea, a photograph by Man Ray of Duchamp's star "haircut," and a limestone sculpture of Marie-Madeline from the earth 14th century, work together to reveal human history's overwhelming preoccupation with this organic material.

Preserved Skull. Iatmul, early 20th century / Musée du Quai Branly, photo Patick Gries.

(L) Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp tonsured by George de Zayas, 1919 / Credit: Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris, 2012

(R) Statue of Sainte Marie-Madeleine, by the Ecole Francaise. / Credit: RMN-GP/Jean-Gilles Berizzi

The objects in the exhibition show hair as a frivolous frippery for fashion but also its use as a political statement, a sexual symbol, a spoil of war, a fetish, a tool of sacrifice or punishment, an object of loss that symbolizes time passing, illness and death, or simply as vehicle for artistic expression.

Figurine from a Turkish shadow puppet theater show. The hair of the four men is being used as reins as they pull a figure in a carriage.
Claude Germain/Musée du Quai Branly

(L) Coiffe de chef Fang, Pahouin, avant 1899, Gabon, Afrique  / © musée du quai Branly, photo Claude Germain.

(R) Samuel Fosso, from his series “African Spirits,” 2008.

One of the themes of the exhibition is how hair -- blonde, brunette or red; straight or frizzy; long, short or shaved -- has been used to convey and establish standards of beauty.  Hair "is loaded with cultural meaning because it signifies an very human capacity for self-conscious manipulation, management and display."1  Examples in this section include wigs from Papua New Guinea,  photographs by JD Okhai Ojeikere (top photo) and Samuel Fosso (above), as well as paintings by Ingres, Jean-Louis Bezard, and an installation by Annette Messager (below). But is the quest for beauty a question of mere frivolity? Or is there something more serious below the surface? The rituals, the care, the modifications; do they not also betray a vital urge to create something out of the ordinary and cast off the ugliness of banality?2

The dance of the scalp
© Annette Messager - Adagp, Paris, 2012

With its metamorphic properties, hair can take on an infinite variety of physical and symbolic forms, varying between cultures and the social groups, trends and periods within each culture. Symbolically hair can represent normality and individuality, conformism and rebellion, seduction and repulsion. It classifies and differentiates people. But there are obvious paradoxes: shaved head or flowing long hair can be the hallmark of a rebel, a lout, an artist or a king, but also of a hermit, a mourner, a tramp... and colors come with their own stereotypes.

Bezard Jean-Louis (1799-1881) featuring Clotaire 1er, king of Francs.

Lighter colours are believed to have appealed to our prehistoric ancestors, with blond having reassuring qualities, evoking angels, saints and maternity. A common hair colour among northern Europeans, blond hair became a totem of the abhorrent theories regarding an Aryan race. Over-represented in the media, blond hair for women has sometimes come to be seen as a sign of superficiality. And many other clichés lie in the collective imagination -- brunettes are supposed to represent the opposite of blondes, being pragmatic or adventurous, while redheads are depicted as dramatic or even diabolical.

The Bouffant Belles, a running team from Texas, in the starting blocks, 1962.
Credit: Neil Barr

Obviously color, length and style of hair can also be a key component of seduction. From Antiquity to the present day, hairstyles have been in a constant state of flux, evolving hand-in-hand with fashion, convention, and discipline. Curls, fringes, long flowing locks...depending on the tastes of artists and their eras, hair has been used in different ways to represent seduction. The mythology and symbolism of hair help blur the boundaries between conformity and licentiousness, morality and sensuality, masculine and feminine.

(L) Brigitte Bardot and Alain Delon,  Sam Lévin, 1958. / Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine
(R) Evariste Vital Luminais. Norman pirates in the 9th century (1822) / Credit: Jérôme Mondière

(L) Marble bust of Catharina Frederika of Württemberg by François Joseph Bosio ©Château de Versailles et de Trianon.
(R) A 19th century bust of an African woman by Charles Cordier, who devoted his career as a sculptor to showcasing the diversity of human physiognomy.

Another theme of the exhibition deals with hair incorporated into relics, tokens, and talismen. In many cultures, hair retains the aura and energy of its owner and therefore some objects are considered "magical" or thought to be endowed with special powers. The practice of wearing belts made of hair is testament to this power. Acquiring hair which belonged to an important figure, and preserving this hair in a weapon or magic charm, is supposed to convey power and good fortune.

(L) An ornament for a man's belt, made of women's hair, from the Aguaruna tribe of the Rio Manarnon region in South America.
(R) A mask from the Makonde people of Tanzania

Both: Claude Germain/Musée du Quai Branly

Some societies place great value on physical trophies of victory, an extreme example being the practice of headhunting. Trophies, scalps and other totems are supposed to carry a certain energy, often associated with crop fertility, group prosperity and peaceful relations with deceased ancestors. 

takes on an infinite variety of physical and symbolic forms, varying between cultures and the social groups, trends and periods within each culture. This floating symbol can represent normality and individuality, conformism and rebellion, seduction and repulsion. It classifies and differentiates people. Faced with this enormous diversity of artworks and objects, we are struck by the obvious paradoxes: shaved head or flowing long hair can be the hallmark of a rebel, a lout, an artist or a king, but also of a hermit, a mourner, a tramp...

A shrunken head from Ecuador.
Credit: Claude Germain/Musée du Quai Branly

At times, hair is believed to be imbued with the power of its original owner, and worn as a symbolically-charged personal adornment. This was particularly popular in the nineteenth century, when hair jewelry, such as bracelets, lockets, and broaches, formed of type of dialogue between this life and the great beyond. These delicate creations were often souvenirs of long-lost childhood, or tokens dedicated to the memory of those who had passed.

S.E locket, circa 1900 ©Collection Jean-Jacques Lebel

The loss of hair is a powerful biological process, but hair when shorn for donation (as with reliquaries), punishment, or political resistance it is a powerful symbol of social codes and sexual politics. Deliberately renouncing one’s hair can involve a complex combination of commitments and conventions, as with hair lost by nuns entering certain religious orders, or in initiation rituals in Papua New Guinea. The phenomenon of shaving the heads of women accused of sleeping with the enemy was a notable feature of the conflicts which ravaged Europe in the period 1933-1945. These ‘carnivals of ugliness’, as Alain Brossat described them, took palce in Spain, Germany and of course in France, with the events in Chartres recorded for posterity by Robert Capa (below).

Hairpiece cut from a young woman named Emma when she entered the Carmelite order.  (Circa 1900)

André Malraux bought the object at a Paris flea market and gave it to a friend for his twentieth birthday.
Credit: Collection Jean-Jacques Lebel.

Robert Capa. Chartres, August 18, 1944.
Woman shamed for having a child with a German.

 Evariste-Vital Luminais (1822-1896).
Le dernier des Mérovingiens.
Musée des beaux-arts, Carcassonne.

Immune to decay, from birth to death and beyond, hair has the ability to straddle this life and the next, and acts as a quintessential symbol of both the superficial and the profound. 

 An ornament from the Marquesas islands.
Credit: Claude Germain/Musée du Quai Branly

The exhibition will be on display until July 14, 2013.

1. Geraldine Biddle-Perry and Sarah Cheang "thinking about hair," Hair, Berg, p10.
2. I've used substantial content from the English translation of the exhibition press release, available on Artdaily.org