Listen to my reading of this essay:
The bare-breasted warrior woman, none other than Liberty herself, in Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, after which my pastel is fashioned, has always struck me as a powerful, subversive rendering of the female form. Here is a woman who has roused the men around her, not to sexual excitement, but to battle, for Her. She strides over corpses, flag uplifted, and men armed to the teeth follow her without reserve. Perhaps most impressive to my younger self, she is entirely unconcerned that her clothes are falling off.
French government officials bought the painting from Delacroix for 3000 francs. They thought it would be hung in the throne room of the Palais du Luxembourg, as a reminder to “Citizen King” Louis-Philippe of how, exactly, he had come to power. Instead it hung in the palace’s gallery for only a few months, after which it was removed. Too inflammatory, the king said, no doubt reminding government officials that a king is still a king.
Two years later the government returned the piece to the care of its maker, after which it generally remained hidden away, in the attic of Delacroix’s aunt, until it was acquired by the Louvre in 1874.
For our bicentennial celebrations, France gifted the United States with the rare opportunity to display the painting, along with 148 other works, underscoring the unique relationship between France and the United States. We are nations who share the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and France has been generous with repeated gifts of Marianne, as a symbol of Liberty, to the United States.
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In my rendering of Liberty Leading Her People, there is no bare-breasted warrior woman, no flag, no human beings at all. But a sacrifice is made. A bald eagle is splayed out upon the ground, his feathers disrupted, his lifeless eye gazing upward. No longer does he scan the broad horizon from the clouds.
There is something hard about killing a national symbol in a work of art. As I worked I wondered, Is this too inflammatory?
Symbols are powerful things; they reach deep into our psyches. They are more than just an equation of meaning–more than just Marianne equals liberty, equality, and fraternity, or bald eagle equals the freedom and vision of the United States. A symbol is a reservoir for potent, activating energy, something akin to livingness, and when it is resides in the human imagination on a collective scale, well, that is no small thing.
But artists are in conversation with the Otherworld, and I felt the symbol was asking for its sacrifice. The energy it holds has, in very real ways, died in this world. The eagle stands for a nation that is now careening away from its foundational principles with unmitigated speed. That death needs to be accounted for, so that the symbol can be restored to proper livingness.
For Delacroix, the Notre Dame stands in the background as the spiritual heart of France. My rendering is decidedly American, and I place the spiritual heart firmly in the green and living world. Still, that green world is obscured by clouds of polluted smoke. Foxes and crows rush forward through a dry, fruitless plain and an empty forest, to the fallen eagle, and to the eagles’ nest that crowns the forested hill. There is an inequality that must be balanced.
Just as the air is polluted, the soil is barren. Corn rots in the foreground and little grows there but wisps of grass. But the blood of the fallen eagle has nourished the soil––enriching clover grows where blood has been spilled.
My Liberty (I call her the Fox Queen) is nursing three kits, and one of them is injured. His blood, too, falls to the ground. And why foxes? Why crows? These are tricksters of great renown. They move between worlds and bring us what we need most, but that is invisible to us. Like dreams, they serve the greater whole, and not the surface ego.
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Indigenous American writers and historians have long held that it was their cultures, with their emphasis on freedom, equality, and the balance of power, that provided the revolutionary ideas of the Constitution. In The Dawn of Everything, David Graebor and David Wengrow argue that, beyond the Constitution, it was exposure to Indigenous American’s critique of European cultures that challenged European thinking about how a society could be organized. The idea that of equality was fixed within natural law became the hot topic of books and discourse throughout the continent during the Enlightenment.
I first read about this Indigenous American perspective decades ago in Marilou Awiakta’s book Selu, Seeking the Corn Mother’s Wisdom. Awiakta shows us how the principles for democracy and reciprocity are encoded in the Cherokee’s relationship with corn, and in corn itself.
The idea that a relationship with a plant could be the foundation for a culture blew my mind open. Did the long and interwoven relationship, both material and spiritual, between humans and a plant create, at least in part, the organization of cultures that would later inspire the peoples of another lineage?
It could be argued, then, that Marianne is a European symbol whose roots are actually in America, and even more specifically, in the roots of a plant that has been in relationship with human beings for 8000 years. More than just a plant, she is known as Selu, Grandmother of many peoples.
In the making of this piece I prayed, may the true light of Marianne shine in the harbor of New York harbor again, as a beacon for freedom and justice for all who come to our shores.May the wisdom of the Corn Mother bring us back to the living world, to an ethos of wisdom and reciprocity.
It is our only way forward.