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La exposición
Célebre tanto por su ambición como por su belleza, la condesa de Castiglione, florentina afincada en la París de Napoleón III, se convirtió en una heroína de Italia. Amante del emperador, desempeñó un papel decisivo en la unificación italiana de 1861, aunque quizá su mayor legado fueron los más de setecientos retratos para los que posó en el estudio de Pierre-Louis Pierson a lo largo de su vida. La narradora de este singular y hechizante relato topa por casualidad con una de las fotografías de «la Castiglione» e inicia una indagación sobre el destino de una mujer que se convirtió en un absoluto enigma a fuerza de mostrarse hasta la extenuación. Y al examinar las fotografías para revelar su secreto, va descubriendo todo lo que se ha ocultado a sí misma y exponiendo su historia personal. Nathalie Léger nos ofrece así una autoficción que es también una reflexión sobre el espacio de lo femenino.
144 pages, Paperback
First published November 6, 2008
22 people are currently reading
956 people want to read
About the author
Nathalie Léger
17 books89 followersNathalie Léger is an award-winning French author living in Paris, as well as an editor, an archivist and a curator. Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden won the prestigious Prix du livre Inter 2012, voted for by readers across France. Other works include L’Exposition (2008), a semi-fictionalised essay about the enigmatic Countess of Castiglione, the most photographed woman in late 19th century Paris; and Les Vies Silencieuses de Samuel Beckett (2006). She curated the 2002 exhibition on Roland Barthes and the 2007 exhibition on Samuel Beckett, both at the Pompidou Centre. Since 2013 she has been the Director of the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC), a unique cultural institute dedicated to the archives of 20th and 21st century French writers.
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January 25, 2022
GR ate up this review.
I just wish young women addicted to the Selfie culture read this.
The fascinating Virginia Oldoïni (1837-1899) who became Contessa de Castiglione when she was just sixteen, was an Italian (Tuscan) beauty that fascinated many people. First of all, she was fascinated with herself (elle avait pour elle-même un culte qui frisait l’idolâtrie). A figure no less than Emperor Napoleon III was also fascinated and, expectedly, converted her in his lover. The Emperor’s photographer, Pierre-Louis Pierson (1822-1913) inevitably fell under her spell and became fascinated too. He photographed her around 700 times along four decades. As an Emperor was not enough, she became the lover of King Vittorio Emanuele II, who undoubtedly found her fascinating. And last but not least, she exerted fascination on one of the most fascinating gentlemen of the French Belle Époque, Robert de Montesquiou, a very familiar figure for Proustians. Montesquiou wrote her biography (published in 1913), and collected, obsessively more than half of those 700 photographs. He kept them in this Pavillon des Muses in the Palais Rose in Le Vesinet.
This is a fascinating story.
Nathalie Léger writes beautifully of all these facts, but not necessarily in that order, since this is not at all a biography. What Léger does is inquire deeper into the identity of the self, representation, self-disclosure, self-representation, inner knowledge, projection, image versus substance, possession and seduction, appropriation. An illustration is her quote of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sentence – one that, she tells us, Edgar Auber wrote on the back of his portrait when Marcel Proust had asked him for it: Look at my face, my name is Might Have Been, I’m also called No More, Too Late, Farewell.
Virginia’s and Pierson’s project, of longue durée, Léger compares with the series of photographs of Isabelle Huppert by Roni Horn in 2005. Or to those of Marilyn Monroe by Bert Stern. Or the Lisa Lyon by Mapplethorpe. All these series are very revealing in not revealing much, for as the self is objectified it loses individuality.
This book that defies genres is the first of a triptych that I hope to read too. These are: Supplement à la vie de Barbara Loden and La robe blanche.
I just wish young women addicted to the Selfie culture read this.
The fascinating Virginia Oldoïni (1837-1899) who became Contessa de Castiglione when she was just sixteen, was an Italian (Tuscan) beauty that fascinated many people. First of all, she was fascinated with herself (elle avait pour elle-même un culte qui frisait l’idolâtrie). A figure no less than Emperor Napoleon III was also fascinated and, expectedly, converted her in his lover. The Emperor’s photographer, Pierre-Louis Pierson (1822-1913) inevitably fell under her spell and became fascinated too. He photographed her around 700 times along four decades. As an Emperor was not enough, she became the lover of King Vittorio Emanuele II, who undoubtedly found her fascinating. And last but not least, she exerted fascination on one of the most fascinating gentlemen of the French Belle Époque, Robert de Montesquiou, a very familiar figure for Proustians. Montesquiou wrote her biography (published in 1913), and collected, obsessively more than half of those 700 photographs. He kept them in this Pavillon des Muses in the Palais Rose in Le Vesinet.
This is a fascinating story.
Nathalie Léger writes beautifully of all these facts, but not necessarily in that order, since this is not at all a biography. What Léger does is inquire deeper into the identity of the self, representation, self-disclosure, self-representation, inner knowledge, projection, image versus substance, possession and seduction, appropriation. An illustration is her quote of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sentence – one that, she tells us, Edgar Auber wrote on the back of his portrait when Marcel Proust had asked him for it: Look at my face, my name is Might Have Been, I’m also called No More, Too Late, Farewell.
Virginia’s and Pierson’s project, of longue durée, Léger compares with the series of photographs of Isabelle Huppert by Roni Horn in 2005. Or to those of Marilyn Monroe by Bert Stern. Or the Lisa Lyon by Mapplethorpe. All these series are very revealing in not revealing much, for as the self is objectified it loses individuality.
This book that defies genres is the first of a triptych that I hope to read too. These are: Supplement à la vie de Barbara Loden and La robe blanche.
March 27, 2020
I'm looking up 'exposition' in Trésor de la langue francaise: 'That which is shown in an exhibition. The act of exposing a sensitive surface to rays of light. The act of arranging something in such a way as to place it in view. It is a group of objects presented for viewing. The place where objects are presented for viewing. It is the act of revealing something in speech. It is secretly abandoning a newborn in a place where it is likely to be taken. It is the exhibition of a body on a bier. To run a risk, with a common noun as a subject. To place something on view. The state of that which is on view.'
The wonderful small independent publisher Les Fugitives was formed to publish Suite for Barbara Loden (my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) translated by co-founder Cécile Menon and Natasha Lehrer from the original by Nathalie Léger. See https://www.lesfugitives.com/about/ and
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/arti...
That book formed the second of what can now be considered as a form of trilogy, this latest translation from Les Fugitives being the first:
'L'exposition' (2008), translated by Amanda DeMarco as 'Exposition' (Les Fugitives 2019)
'Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden' (2012), translated by Natasha Lehrer & Cécile Menon as Suite for Barbara Loden (Les Fugitives 2015)
'La Robe Blanche' (Gallimard 2018), translated by Natasha Lehrer as 'The White Dress', (Les Fugitives 2020)
Exposition is based around the remarkable 19th figure of the Countess di Castiglione (1837-1899) a legendery beauty and one of the most photographed women of her time, but of her own volition. For 40 years from 1856-1895 she returned to the same Parisian photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson, to have photographs taken often in elaborately staged tableaux of her own design. See https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-o...
The most iconic is perhaps this:
But Léger's book starts with her discovery, in a museum, of this photograph:
She enters. She is roused by anger and reproach. She bursts onto the right of the image as if it were a backdrop masked with curtains. One hand clutches a knife against her waist, which gleams obliquely across her belly. Her face is cold, her mouth thin, lips tight, eyebrows knit, her gaze is clear and hard, her hair is slicked into two little severely parted plaits. The knife, whose handle disappears into her balled fist, vibrates at its very center, nearly absent from it, so white is its blade that it disappears in the luminous satins of her dress. But its tip agitates the exact center of the image, piercing its focal point. As if the fullness of her garments weren’t enough, she grasps the faille silk curtain, pulling it toward her in a strangely chaste gesture. It is not her body she wants to conceal, certainly not, but rather the faux backdrop, overfilled with a tin-plate pedestal table whose foot might invade the image. This woman entering, she wants to kill. Theatrical killing? Yes, no one would doubt it, she is definitely on a stage, pretending to ensure that everything has the semblance of truth. But like any great actress, she is pretending to be pretending. This woman entering, she wants to kill.
In this wonderful extended meditation she muses on The Countess not so much by her life, as by her imagery, a discussion that takes in other icons, including Bert Stern's photoshoot of Marilyn Monroe (https://vocal.media/filthy/marilyn-mo...) and links to the author's own family history and photographs:
After the intoxication of her beauty, after the ecstasy, she swilled abjection. I look at the image, 22 x 16.8cm. I don’t know what of it is her and what is me. That is where all of my fear of these photographs comes from, all of my fear of this woman, the horror of being hidden under so many masks and rises, then greedily fused with death.
Recommended.
The wonderful small independent publisher Les Fugitives was formed to publish Suite for Barbara Loden (my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) translated by co-founder Cécile Menon and Natasha Lehrer from the original by Nathalie Léger. See https://www.lesfugitives.com/about/ and
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/arti...
That book formed the second of what can now be considered as a form of trilogy, this latest translation from Les Fugitives being the first:
'L'exposition' (2008), translated by Amanda DeMarco as 'Exposition' (Les Fugitives 2019)
'Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden' (2012), translated by Natasha Lehrer & Cécile Menon as Suite for Barbara Loden (Les Fugitives 2015)
'La Robe Blanche' (Gallimard 2018), translated by Natasha Lehrer as 'The White Dress', (Les Fugitives 2020)
Exposition is based around the remarkable 19th figure of the Countess di Castiglione (1837-1899) a legendery beauty and one of the most photographed women of her time, but of her own volition. For 40 years from 1856-1895 she returned to the same Parisian photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson, to have photographs taken often in elaborately staged tableaux of her own design. See https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-o...
The most iconic is perhaps this:
But Léger's book starts with her discovery, in a museum, of this photograph:
She enters. She is roused by anger and reproach. She bursts onto the right of the image as if it were a backdrop masked with curtains. One hand clutches a knife against her waist, which gleams obliquely across her belly. Her face is cold, her mouth thin, lips tight, eyebrows knit, her gaze is clear and hard, her hair is slicked into two little severely parted plaits. The knife, whose handle disappears into her balled fist, vibrates at its very center, nearly absent from it, so white is its blade that it disappears in the luminous satins of her dress. But its tip agitates the exact center of the image, piercing its focal point. As if the fullness of her garments weren’t enough, she grasps the faille silk curtain, pulling it toward her in a strangely chaste gesture. It is not her body she wants to conceal, certainly not, but rather the faux backdrop, overfilled with a tin-plate pedestal table whose foot might invade the image. This woman entering, she wants to kill. Theatrical killing? Yes, no one would doubt it, she is definitely on a stage, pretending to ensure that everything has the semblance of truth. But like any great actress, she is pretending to be pretending. This woman entering, she wants to kill.
In this wonderful extended meditation she muses on The Countess not so much by her life, as by her imagery, a discussion that takes in other icons, including Bert Stern's photoshoot of Marilyn Monroe (https://vocal.media/filthy/marilyn-mo...) and links to the author's own family history and photographs:
After the intoxication of her beauty, after the ecstasy, she swilled abjection. I look at the image, 22 x 16.8cm. I don’t know what of it is her and what is me. That is where all of my fear of these photographs comes from, all of my fear of this woman, the horror of being hidden under so many masks and rises, then greedily fused with death.
Recommended.
August 2, 2023
30 books in 3o days / Book #1
WiT 2023 #1
WiT 2023 #1
June 21, 2024
The blurb from Elle reads:
'Highbrow but highly readable.'
That might be the dumbest blurb ever written.
'Highbrow but highly readable.'
That might be the dumbest blurb ever written.
April 8, 2021
« La photographie peut en donner une image, mais pour en faire un motif, il faut autre chose, il faut, par les mots, rapprocher lentement, conjoindre, faire pénétrer. »
Virginia Oldoïni di Castiglione (1837-1899)
L'Exposition est une réflexion profonde sur la photographie et son langage interne. Dans quelle mesure une image révèle-t-elle l'objet photographié ? La question contient tout un éventail de réponses que Nathalie Léger tente de examiner avec intelligence et honnêteté, deux traits communs que j'ai découverts dans La robe blanche et qui, par la magie de la lecture, se sont imprégnées dans ma mémoire. Le livre semble se nourrir de fragmentation, dans laquelle l'histoire va et vient, fluctuant entre deux temps narratifs.
Le personnage central est la comtesse de Castiglione, dont la beauté a été exaltée par la société de son temps et reproduite dans diverses clichés pris par Pierre-Louis Pierson (il y a environ 500 photographies d'elle) qui ont été autrefois présentées dans une exposition (il s'agit de l'Exposition universelle inaugurée le 1er mai 1867). L'intrigue nous conduit par la main à suivre l'auteure, qui plonge dans le monde de son personnage et s'approprie en quelque sorte son histoire. Et c'est grâce à la clarté avec laquelle elle enlève les voiles qui recouvrent les images qui défilent devant ses yeux, que nous pénétrons dans la beauté saisissante de la comtesse.
« Rien de cette héroïne provisoire du second Empire, rien du destin de cette femme qui a passé tant d’heures à se faire photographier ne m’était familier, et pourtant, ouvrant ce livre d’images, j’ai eu l’impression étrange de rentrer à la maison et, bien que cette maison fût détruite, d’y rentrer avec crainte, avec reconnaissance. »
Cependant, les réflexions ne s’arrêtent pas à l’image et se penchent également sur le sujet d’une œuvre, qu’elle soit littéraire, picturale ou cinématographique. Par conséquent, Truman Capote, Roland Barthes, Jean Renoir, Murakami Saburo, Marguerite Duras, Kafka, entre autres, sont cités. En outre, elle relate le cas particulier d’une série de photographies d’Isabelle Huppert réalisées par Roni Horn qui révèlent les petits détails qui deviennent d’énormes traces des personnages qu’elle a joués.
Isabelle Huppert par Roni Horn, 2005
« Que Mme. Bovary, ce n’était pas une capeline et une robe à panier mais un détail, ce détail-là, imperceptible, ce coin tombant de la bouche, cet écart maitrisé entre le sourcil et la paupière, on ne voit rien, mais c’est là, cette intensité, ce travail sur l’infime nuance, vrai travail de l’actrice. »
Bref, c'est un petit livre dont la portée va loin.
Virginia Oldoïni di Castiglione (1837-1899)
L'Exposition est une réflexion profonde sur la photographie et son langage interne. Dans quelle mesure une image révèle-t-elle l'objet photographié ? La question contient tout un éventail de réponses que Nathalie Léger tente de examiner avec intelligence et honnêteté, deux traits communs que j'ai découverts dans La robe blanche et qui, par la magie de la lecture, se sont imprégnées dans ma mémoire. Le livre semble se nourrir de fragmentation, dans laquelle l'histoire va et vient, fluctuant entre deux temps narratifs.
Le personnage central est la comtesse de Castiglione, dont la beauté a été exaltée par la société de son temps et reproduite dans diverses clichés pris par Pierre-Louis Pierson (il y a environ 500 photographies d'elle) qui ont été autrefois présentées dans une exposition (il s'agit de l'Exposition universelle inaugurée le 1er mai 1867). L'intrigue nous conduit par la main à suivre l'auteure, qui plonge dans le monde de son personnage et s'approprie en quelque sorte son histoire. Et c'est grâce à la clarté avec laquelle elle enlève les voiles qui recouvrent les images qui défilent devant ses yeux, que nous pénétrons dans la beauté saisissante de la comtesse.
« Rien de cette héroïne provisoire du second Empire, rien du destin de cette femme qui a passé tant d’heures à se faire photographier ne m’était familier, et pourtant, ouvrant ce livre d’images, j’ai eu l’impression étrange de rentrer à la maison et, bien que cette maison fût détruite, d’y rentrer avec crainte, avec reconnaissance. »
Cependant, les réflexions ne s’arrêtent pas à l’image et se penchent également sur le sujet d’une œuvre, qu’elle soit littéraire, picturale ou cinématographique. Par conséquent, Truman Capote, Roland Barthes, Jean Renoir, Murakami Saburo, Marguerite Duras, Kafka, entre autres, sont cités. En outre, elle relate le cas particulier d’une série de photographies d’Isabelle Huppert réalisées par Roni Horn qui révèlent les petits détails qui deviennent d’énormes traces des personnages qu’elle a joués.
Isabelle Huppert par Roni Horn, 2005
« Que Mme. Bovary, ce n’était pas une capeline et une robe à panier mais un détail, ce détail-là, imperceptible, ce coin tombant de la bouche, cet écart maitrisé entre le sourcil et la paupière, on ne voit rien, mais c’est là, cette intensité, ce travail sur l’infime nuance, vrai travail de l’actrice. »
Bref, c'est un petit livre dont la portée va loin.
November 4, 2025
The rating here would indicate a seeming neutrality for Léger’s work—the constellational 3-star ‘meh’—but that would be inaccurate. She is exceptionally erudite, can write like a bastard, and manages to transcend enough times that I am compelled to revisit her. The issue I have with this is simple: I don’t give a fuck. Call me exhausted; the Literature of Europeanity’s Clenched and Retentive Analism via Hyperfocused Self-Analysis is just NOT where my head is at right now. Fuck me, how long a shadow did that mountebank Sigmund Freud cast over the habitually pasty?
I am increasingly of the opinion that the Literature of the Self, generally trading as ‘autofiction’ now, however temporary the fad may last, is exceptionally enlightening—to the person that wrote the thing. I just cannot find it in myself to gather enough energy to care about every inkpot’s fucking childhood. ‘I can learn something about myself through seeing a parallel in another person’s…’ can just fuck right off. I am good with my experiencing life firsthand and drawing what conclusions I make. These are informed by so many thousands of records and texts and mass forms of stimuli that I, clawing to sanity’s buoy, have chosen to not investigate each and every emotional impulse, inclination, peccadillo, idiosyncrasy, quirk, flaw, strength, weakness, and fucking COLOR that constitutes the human smoking processor known to others as ‘Cody’ and myself as—what? my entire ontological view of the smallest-to-largest particle of summative Life. The ‘I.’ The ego. Meh: boring/fuck all that. Listen: I am not that interested in me, so the chances that I am going to find your or Léger’s or anyone’s episodic ruminations upon—I dunno—familial psychodramatic episodes from 1971 involving Grandma and an egg beater worth much time are very slim. Depends on the size of the egg beater.
While none of this sounds like an endorsement, there is enough quality writing (when she can get out of her own way) by Léger that I am committed to finishing the loose trilogy this begins. I believe her talent and perspicacity will bear better fruit. What that will depend on is if she can get me to care IN ANY WAY about whatever’s under her psychological-cum-naturalist’s microscope. If this (non-)review shows my ass as entirely off the mark and her next book send me running to the nearest tattoo parlor for posterity’s sake, I will be gladdened, not embarrassed. Just don’t train my eye on Freud’s needle-clenching asshole; I am the Van Helsing to analysis’ vampiric suckage if left too long at draining all life’s blood.
I am increasingly of the opinion that the Literature of the Self, generally trading as ‘autofiction’ now, however temporary the fad may last, is exceptionally enlightening—to the person that wrote the thing. I just cannot find it in myself to gather enough energy to care about every inkpot’s fucking childhood. ‘I can learn something about myself through seeing a parallel in another person’s…’ can just fuck right off. I am good with my experiencing life firsthand and drawing what conclusions I make. These are informed by so many thousands of records and texts and mass forms of stimuli that I, clawing to sanity’s buoy, have chosen to not investigate each and every emotional impulse, inclination, peccadillo, idiosyncrasy, quirk, flaw, strength, weakness, and fucking COLOR that constitutes the human smoking processor known to others as ‘Cody’ and myself as—what? my entire ontological view of the smallest-to-largest particle of summative Life. The ‘I.’ The ego. Meh: boring/fuck all that. Listen: I am not that interested in me, so the chances that I am going to find your or Léger’s or anyone’s episodic ruminations upon—I dunno—familial psychodramatic episodes from 1971 involving Grandma and an egg beater worth much time are very slim. Depends on the size of the egg beater.
While none of this sounds like an endorsement, there is enough quality writing (when she can get out of her own way) by Léger that I am committed to finishing the loose trilogy this begins. I believe her talent and perspicacity will bear better fruit. What that will depend on is if she can get me to care IN ANY WAY about whatever’s under her psychological-cum-naturalist’s microscope. If this (non-)review shows my ass as entirely off the mark and her next book send me running to the nearest tattoo parlor for posterity’s sake, I will be gladdened, not embarrassed. Just don’t train my eye on Freud’s needle-clenching asshole; I am the Van Helsing to analysis’ vampiric suckage if left too long at draining all life’s blood.
September 11, 2020
Writer and former art curator Nathalie Leger’s Exposition blurs genre boundaries moving seamlessly between biography, autofiction and elements of art theory. Leger’s starting point’s a near-fixation with Virginia Oldoini, the Countess of Castiglione, perhaps the most-photographed woman of her era. In 1856, a chance encounter with jobbing photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson sparked a forty-year obsession, during which the Countess staged a series of striking self-portraits, Pierson merely providing a means for their production,
”She has thought at length about the subject of the sitting – which scene, which outfit, which character? And the light, the orientation of her profile, and the story, the tale of herself, the legend retold each time, reinterpreted with countless interjections and variables…She is an eighteenth-century marchioness, a severe Carmelite…she is a man-eater as Donna Elvira, she is dressed as a Chinese woman, a Finnish woman and here are funerals, a banquet, a ball.”
The Countess is sometimes dismissed as the original ‘selfie-queen,' at others compared to artists from Cindy Sherman to Claude Cahun, her iconic photographs circulate on Instagram, art sites, book covers, yet the tortuous studio sessions and the woman behind them remain obscured. And Leger recounts how the Countess, after repeated exposure to the camera lens, retreated into a self-imposed obscurity, spending her last years behind shuttered windows, in black-walled rooms, all mirrors banished; dreaming of a final, glorious funeral tableau, meticulously imagined, right down to the positioning of her taxidermied pet dogs.
Leger’s attempts to tell the Countess’s story set off a chain of associations which disrupt or divert attempts at conventional narrative: celebrity; nineteenth-century femininity; how women represent themselves or are represented from Marilyn Monroe to Isabelle Huppert; Barthes’s thoughts on the nature of photography; family snapshots recall her father’s affair, what might lie behind the face her mother presents to the world. Ultimately Leger’s trading in interrogations and reflections here, occasionally the questions she raised seemed a little predictable and her delivery ranged from incisive to lyrical to irritatingly overblown; there were times too when I found her digressions more frustrating than illuminating but there was still a lot of stimulating, often fascinating material. Exposition’s the first in a loose trilogy, the second examines the work of feminist film-maker Barbara Loden, and the final part focuses on performance artist Pippa Bacca brutally murdered during a tour to promote peace.
”She has thought at length about the subject of the sitting – which scene, which outfit, which character? And the light, the orientation of her profile, and the story, the tale of herself, the legend retold each time, reinterpreted with countless interjections and variables…She is an eighteenth-century marchioness, a severe Carmelite…she is a man-eater as Donna Elvira, she is dressed as a Chinese woman, a Finnish woman and here are funerals, a banquet, a ball.”
The Countess is sometimes dismissed as the original ‘selfie-queen,' at others compared to artists from Cindy Sherman to Claude Cahun, her iconic photographs circulate on Instagram, art sites, book covers, yet the tortuous studio sessions and the woman behind them remain obscured. And Leger recounts how the Countess, after repeated exposure to the camera lens, retreated into a self-imposed obscurity, spending her last years behind shuttered windows, in black-walled rooms, all mirrors banished; dreaming of a final, glorious funeral tableau, meticulously imagined, right down to the positioning of her taxidermied pet dogs.
Leger’s attempts to tell the Countess’s story set off a chain of associations which disrupt or divert attempts at conventional narrative: celebrity; nineteenth-century femininity; how women represent themselves or are represented from Marilyn Monroe to Isabelle Huppert; Barthes’s thoughts on the nature of photography; family snapshots recall her father’s affair, what might lie behind the face her mother presents to the world. Ultimately Leger’s trading in interrogations and reflections here, occasionally the questions she raised seemed a little predictable and her delivery ranged from incisive to lyrical to irritatingly overblown; there were times too when I found her digressions more frustrating than illuminating but there was still a lot of stimulating, often fascinating material. Exposition’s the first in a loose trilogy, the second examines the work of feminist film-maker Barbara Loden, and the final part focuses on performance artist Pippa Bacca brutally murdered during a tour to promote peace.
December 3, 2020
2.5 rounded up. I love when genres are blended, but this book just didn't speak to me. Perhaps reading the other 2 novellas in Léger's so-called triptych might give me a better sense of her writing. Not sure if I'll get to them any time soon though.
February 3, 2023
The female gaze is terrible and necessary.
April 13, 2021
The first in a loose essayistic trilogy by Leger, focusing on the experiences of historical women. This is the first, the second is Suite for Barbara Loden, the third is titled The White Dress. The books are short, biographical about each women, autobiographical about the unnamed narrator, who must in part be the author. For me, Exposition read more academically than I expected, despite the stream of consciousness, and I hoped for more of the relationship between the narrator and her mother, as I was intrigued by it in Suite for Barbara Loden. In 2005, the narrator is preparing a museum exhibition in France about ruins, and in her research comes across the Countess of Castiglione, deemed the most beautiful woman in the world, perpetually photographed on her own terms, in various tableaux, and for forty years by Parisian photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson. Who was she? What is her biography beyond the gossip that swirled around her in her day as a lover of Napoleon III, who ends her days as a recluse? What do the photographs expose about the woman she was? Suite for Barbara Loden was a more accessible read than Exposition, but both are intellectual and emotional examinations of identity, feminine beauty, and representation, and here, there's also an exploration into the nascent practice of photography in the 19th century. I was compelled by this book to look up images of Castiglione and it heightened my interest in learning more about Leger too.
February 18, 2021
to be honest the prose/translation of this particular book in nathalie's leger's series was a little hard to follow - lots of long sentences fragmented by commas, discussing people and books and places I couldn't understand clearly. maybe this gauziness and blurriness was intentional. i'm so drawn to nathalie leger's works on the surprising journey of searching through archives and trying to "find" a woman of the past, and find herself, her mother, too. although the images of castiglione are forever imprinted, so much else is forever lost. what were her motives for being photographed again and again, other than wishing to live? the countess created myths of herself, "most beautiful woman in the world" - myths that are of course destined to be shattered with age. photography is like that. there's this hyper-strange, manic desire to be famous , hence to be seen. however, while reading, i never really did get a good "look" at any of these images or stories behind her - i could never really see castiglione at all. "I recognized her without knowing her. i only remember having forgotten." - "You can't photograph a memory, but you can photograph a ruin."
July 1, 2022
"...she has this bearing, this allure, this guile, this self-assurance, deliberately prepared for confrontation, people thought she was burdened by her beauty, but she wasn't at all, because for her, her body was a matter of course... Just beyond this audacious body, this impetuous presence, whose timid body is it advancing unwillingly into the light, what dust, what fear, what regret?"
5 stars
A tiny novel with a big punch. If you enjoy Olivia Laing's writing or the concept of the author writing non fiction sprinkled with a bit of their own imagination, this book is for you.
5 stars
A tiny novel with a big punch. If you enjoy Olivia Laing's writing or the concept of the author writing non fiction sprinkled with a bit of their own imagination, this book is for you.
November 28, 2021
The first in Léger's triptych of books (put out here in the U.S. by the wonderful Dorothy Publishing), Exposition takes up the Countess of Castiglione in that obsessive fashion that is almost the research equivalent of an exorcism for the author. As photography comes into being in the late 1800s, Castiglione dedicates herself to becoming "the most photographed woman in the world." And Léger sets out to inhabit the subject in an exploration that delves into vanity, photography, fame, and power of one's image.
The writing is a delight and Léger skillfully weaves in tangents, anecdotes, and history and yet this book felt lesser than the other two in the triptych (Suite for Barbara Loden and The White Dress). Something about this felt short on cohesion, but I'm also not sure if this has something to do with Castiglione herself---clearly, Léger, is drawn to these enigmatic personalities who are at once incredibly public in their personas but mysteries under the written microscope, and this subject gives us little to work with beyond her image.
One wonders, with Castiglione, after a lifetime of being photographed, if there's not something to the fears many cultures express with regards to photography stealing one's soul.
Scherzo di Follia (1863–66, printed 1940s), by Pierre-Louis Pierson
The writing is a delight and Léger skillfully weaves in tangents, anecdotes, and history and yet this book felt lesser than the other two in the triptych (Suite for Barbara Loden and The White Dress). Something about this felt short on cohesion, but I'm also not sure if this has something to do with Castiglione herself---clearly, Léger, is drawn to these enigmatic personalities who are at once incredibly public in their personas but mysteries under the written microscope, and this subject gives us little to work with beyond her image.
One wonders, with Castiglione, after a lifetime of being photographed, if there's not something to the fears many cultures express with regards to photography stealing one's soul.
Scherzo di Follia (1863–66, printed 1940s), by Pierre-Louis Pierson
April 11, 2025
A neat book about photography, selfhood, and the gaze. Leger writes about the Countess of Castigilione the most photographed woman of her time period (19th century) with many detours to writing about (Leger) herself, her childhood, and her research process. A very cool concept and the first in a triptych of books in each of which Leger writes about a different female artist.
October 3, 2021
Este libro se mueve entre la biografía, la etnografía, la autoficción, la historia y la teoría del arte. Y en casa una de estas formas, Lèger encuentra la manera de mostrarnos tanto las costuras como los muy invisibles hilos que unen al arte a la escritura y a la vida.
January 12, 2022
I’m not exactly sure how to describe this - not a traditional narrative, not essays, not a biography . . . It centers on the Countess of Castiglione (who I wasn’t familiar with) and includes snippets of the author’s life. Primarily, it feels like a meditation of sorts, thoughts on being photographed, the subject of a gaze, images, aging. Especially interesting to consider alongside modern selfies.
April 27, 2023
A fragmentary journey into an experimental biography, an essay about photography and the self, and flashes of memoir. It’s hard to pinpoint the genre, because no two pages are the same, and that is precisely what makes it so powerful.
March 16, 2022
LOVELY TRILOGY
The truth of the matter is that if it was not for the French writer Nathalie Leger, I would not care about Barbara Loden, Countess de Castiglione, Pippa Bianca, and her mother. In life, Leger is an archivist, most notably of philosopher Roland Barthes, and over the course of these three texts, recently published by Dorothy Press, we see a glimpse of what goes on behind closed doors. The language is sublime. When you read her you are reading her poetic, astute perceptions, dispatched with the stylish, moody rhythm of each sentence, every fragment. I feel as though I am not as smart as her, but that don’t matter when you are of the kind who likes to try to keep up with superior intelligences. I’m always game. A good text is one that makes you feel like being a curious and avid student all over again, who, at every turn, now says to themselves, “I didn’t know we could think like that; say those things.” Her primary technique is to go back and forth between two seemingly disparate plots and in always disrupting our attention create resonances and echoes. Her uncanny quality is her ability to look at the one thing in a variety of absorbing ways. Her paragraphs, which function as chapters, never get tedious, never feel postured, and are always sweeping you away with them, like a dragnet, an image that Duras, one of Leger’s frequent literary interlocutors, uses in “The Lover.” The references are vast and interesting in themselves (the non-fiction work of Durga Chew-Bose and Rachel Kushner operate on the same frequency). There are parts of these works that are obviously fictions—in fact, the local library curiously labelled the texts as such—but they are more so elaborations on reality that retain an authentic texture. Exaggerations are playful if they're successful. Sometimes I am left not know what I’ve just read but I know that I’m mentally aroused. Ms. Leger is a neurotic, just like you and I. She doesn’t belong in her world, and that constantly bewildered, dramatic personae lends the work the feeling of being alive, of being recorded on the fly; thought through but never overwrought. She is like a witness to her life who at the end of every night comes to report of what she’s experienced during a certain period of time, with a lifetime of reading behind her from which she can endlessly pull associations to create a captivating, timeless collage. The question at the centre of these works is this: what can a meditation about a particularly mysterious artist tell me about my life, which includes my mother’s life and the history of art and epistemology. There is no climax to these texts: don’t expect it to perform your assumptions of what a text is. These are small books that do more than the big ones ever have, for me anyway. If the assignment is always to create a work of art, then Leger has understood and aced it. We must respect when we read a text that does not make us feel we have wasted our time, but that in closing the book, we have, in actuality, gained time, experience, knowledge, language. These are exemplars that show us what the mind looks like when it is obsessed with an entity it shouldn’t be obsessed it. These pages are dripping with desire and distilled consciousness. They awkwardly fade out and I like that, if only because I’m left with the feeling that I hadn’t read it properly, or at all really, and must return to it soon (the work of Renata Adler, Saidiya Hartman, Annie Ernaux, and Anne Carson have the same effect; historians of feeling attuned to the heart of darkness). But it was nice to be inside of each of them, for the time being, “in its order and even in its disorder.”
The truth of the matter is that if it was not for the French writer Nathalie Leger, I would not care about Barbara Loden, Countess de Castiglione, Pippa Bianca, and her mother. In life, Leger is an archivist, most notably of philosopher Roland Barthes, and over the course of these three texts, recently published by Dorothy Press, we see a glimpse of what goes on behind closed doors. The language is sublime. When you read her you are reading her poetic, astute perceptions, dispatched with the stylish, moody rhythm of each sentence, every fragment. I feel as though I am not as smart as her, but that don’t matter when you are of the kind who likes to try to keep up with superior intelligences. I’m always game. A good text is one that makes you feel like being a curious and avid student all over again, who, at every turn, now says to themselves, “I didn’t know we could think like that; say those things.” Her primary technique is to go back and forth between two seemingly disparate plots and in always disrupting our attention create resonances and echoes. Her uncanny quality is her ability to look at the one thing in a variety of absorbing ways. Her paragraphs, which function as chapters, never get tedious, never feel postured, and are always sweeping you away with them, like a dragnet, an image that Duras, one of Leger’s frequent literary interlocutors, uses in “The Lover.” The references are vast and interesting in themselves (the non-fiction work of Durga Chew-Bose and Rachel Kushner operate on the same frequency). There are parts of these works that are obviously fictions—in fact, the local library curiously labelled the texts as such—but they are more so elaborations on reality that retain an authentic texture. Exaggerations are playful if they're successful. Sometimes I am left not know what I’ve just read but I know that I’m mentally aroused. Ms. Leger is a neurotic, just like you and I. She doesn’t belong in her world, and that constantly bewildered, dramatic personae lends the work the feeling of being alive, of being recorded on the fly; thought through but never overwrought. She is like a witness to her life who at the end of every night comes to report of what she’s experienced during a certain period of time, with a lifetime of reading behind her from which she can endlessly pull associations to create a captivating, timeless collage. The question at the centre of these works is this: what can a meditation about a particularly mysterious artist tell me about my life, which includes my mother’s life and the history of art and epistemology. There is no climax to these texts: don’t expect it to perform your assumptions of what a text is. These are small books that do more than the big ones ever have, for me anyway. If the assignment is always to create a work of art, then Leger has understood and aced it. We must respect when we read a text that does not make us feel we have wasted our time, but that in closing the book, we have, in actuality, gained time, experience, knowledge, language. These are exemplars that show us what the mind looks like when it is obsessed with an entity it shouldn’t be obsessed it. These pages are dripping with desire and distilled consciousness. They awkwardly fade out and I like that, if only because I’m left with the feeling that I hadn’t read it properly, or at all really, and must return to it soon (the work of Renata Adler, Saidiya Hartman, Annie Ernaux, and Anne Carson have the same effect; historians of feeling attuned to the heart of darkness). But it was nice to be inside of each of them, for the time being, “in its order and even in its disorder.”
January 5, 2021
This is a weird one, formally, but I read it as a book-length essay composed of fragments, mostly about the life of the Countess of Castiglione, a sort of biography alongside some cultural analysis of her subject's time. There are fragments as well about why Leger is writing this book and also parts about her relationship with her mother, alongside some other tangents about "the female," photography, etc. But mostly the book is interested in understanding and situating the Countess as perhaps an artist who made her body her work of art, and the consequences of that in terms of her happiness and her ability to be seen as active and not just a receiver of the gaze.
The book lacked, for me, the striking anecdote of a traditional history, and it doesn't quite achieve lyric lift-off either. Leger's style is a little more frenzied than that, as she digs and digs for meaning. She's dogged, she builds lists, but her goal seems to be to bury and overload us, instead of making us marvel or giving us an aesctheticized response to the worlds she describes. I liked this without ever quite feeling blown away by it.
The book lacked, for me, the striking anecdote of a traditional history, and it doesn't quite achieve lyric lift-off either. Leger's style is a little more frenzied than that, as she digs and digs for meaning. She's dogged, she builds lists, but her goal seems to be to bury and overload us, instead of making us marvel or giving us an aesctheticized response to the worlds she describes. I liked this without ever quite feeling blown away by it.
January 25, 2022
A really great essay I wish I had read a long time ago… lots to unpack on portraiture, publicity, the archive and memory... hard to explain this but the book has made me hate technology less and ‘influencers’ (plus their army of likers) more. Photography in the 1800’s is what social media is right now… a vehicle to play out performances of self/identity for an arena/archive; performances so artificial in their construction/execution that it’s hard not to mistake them for the plasticity of the technology itself… but they’re not… they’re just playing out the fort&da, post&like, endlessly repeating line dance that makes some of us drunkenly think we’re the only person in the bar and helps some of us feel included even if we can’t dance.
September 27, 2020
Full review on Full Stop: https://www.full-stop.net/2020/09/14/...
June 25, 2021
God forbid I just finish a book, eh?
In looking for a few books I was meaning to work on (and the one I am in the middle of) I decided to give the whole Covid Era Reading thing a whirl again. I picked up this little number, figuring a short read was what I needed. It was done in two sittings.
Much as I can find it tiring when a book relies too much on large quotes instead of their own magic, this one comes together in a quote, at just about the start of the back third of it, regarding the meaning of "exposition," and it helps center the story a bit. The book is about photos (exposures), about a woman who, in the early days of photography, became obsessed with being the most photographed woman (a sort of overexposure), whose beauty was captured in these photos (being exposed). It touches on an art exposition the author is part of, it offers up an exposé of this woman who has haunted the author upon first seeing her. As any text that centers itself around rumination and obsession can get unraveled easily, this quote helps pull in all the threads... the suitors and historians, the photographs themselves, the autobiography comingling with the supposed history.
Overall an extended treatment on obsession and mortality, on what we show and what we hide, and on a life defined by the male gaze.
In looking for a few books I was meaning to work on (and the one I am in the middle of) I decided to give the whole Covid Era Reading thing a whirl again. I picked up this little number, figuring a short read was what I needed. It was done in two sittings.
Much as I can find it tiring when a book relies too much on large quotes instead of their own magic, this one comes together in a quote, at just about the start of the back third of it, regarding the meaning of "exposition," and it helps center the story a bit. The book is about photos (exposures), about a woman who, in the early days of photography, became obsessed with being the most photographed woman (a sort of overexposure), whose beauty was captured in these photos (being exposed). It touches on an art exposition the author is part of, it offers up an exposé of this woman who has haunted the author upon first seeing her. As any text that centers itself around rumination and obsession can get unraveled easily, this quote helps pull in all the threads... the suitors and historians, the photographs themselves, the autobiography comingling with the supposed history.
Overall an extended treatment on obsession and mortality, on what we show and what we hide, and on a life defined by the male gaze.
June 9, 2020
"Virginia Oldoini, más conocida como la condesa de Castiglione, fue celébre en su época por haber sido amante de Napoleón III de Francia y por su influencia en la unificación italiana, gracias al poder que ejercía sobre el emperador. Pero sobre todo, fue popular por su belleza, que dejaba a todos boquiabiertos según cuentan sus contemporáneos.
Vivió obsesionada con su imagen y encontró en la fotografía el medio para satisfacer su narcisimo. Así lo demuestran los más de 450 retratos que durante 40 años realizara en colaboración con el fotógrafo Pierre-Louis Pierson . Ella misma era quién elegía el vestuario, las joyas y la ambientación, la que estudiaba la pose y el punto de vista. Creaba una auténtica puesta en escena y en cada una de ellas representaba un personaje. El resultado son unas instantáneas de carácter dramático, misterioso y, hasta provocador, que rompen con todos los convencionalismos de los retratos de la época.
La narradora va recorriendo estas imágenes y, a través de ellas, rescata de su memoria otras fotografías, las suyas, las de su infancia, recuperando fragmentos de su propia vida que intercala con interpretaciones sobre la enigmática y fascinante vida de esta cautivadora dama." Raquel Ungo
Vivió obsesionada con su imagen y encontró en la fotografía el medio para satisfacer su narcisimo. Así lo demuestran los más de 450 retratos que durante 40 años realizara en colaboración con el fotógrafo Pierre-Louis Pierson . Ella misma era quién elegía el vestuario, las joyas y la ambientación, la que estudiaba la pose y el punto de vista. Creaba una auténtica puesta en escena y en cada una de ellas representaba un personaje. El resultado son unas instantáneas de carácter dramático, misterioso y, hasta provocador, que rompen con todos los convencionalismos de los retratos de la época.
La narradora va recorriendo estas imágenes y, a través de ellas, rescata de su memoria otras fotografías, las suyas, las de su infancia, recuperando fragmentos de su propia vida que intercala con interpretaciones sobre la enigmática y fascinante vida de esta cautivadora dama." Raquel Ungo
June 22, 2023
I was obsessed with this series of small volumes by Leger when I came across them in the bookstore. I was constantly looking up artwork and references as I read. She has an encyclopedic knowledge. And I later learned she was a curator at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It was an intense read--meaning it took a lot to digest. The Countess of Castiglione was consumed by being dramatically photographed. She was the most photographed woman in the world in her lifetime. Looking upon one of her dramatic photos she says, "Upon seeing such beautiful sadness, who could desire happiness." And then this line from one of magician Houdin's "manuals of conjuring" was this gem applicable to all things of modern social media culture: Although everything during a session may be, in a word, nothing but a web of lies, one must immerse oneself deeply enough into the spirit of one's role in order to believe oneself in the reality of the fables being uttered.
October 3, 2021
4.5 I am loving this triptych. I started with the last one, The White Dress, and bought the other two with no reservations whatsoever. The way she weaves history (of the Countess and her own personal history), art (in this case photography), and the examination of why and how people express themselves (in this case nearly obsessive self-portraiture) is just fascinating. As with The White Dress the text is undoubtedly also about the experience of being a woman in a public space, and the performance of it and how that influences how you are perceived. A really great triptych, and I can’t wait to read the second book!
February 11, 2023
Before the lens, one might expect the exaltation of celebration, gratitude at these reunions with herself, lone site of glorification, but it is the opposite, you see in the photos that you don’t see it. Before the lens, she was just a mass of absence.
Less of a biography and more using the Countess for various reflections on looking, seeing, the ethics of being represented, the consequences of being a subject. Not a topic that made me feel much, hence the four stars instead of five, but I found it very good -- although I get why some people think some digressions are overblown.
January 24, 2021
If you are also a fan of auto-fiction but not interested so much in flowery descriptive passages, you may also find this unsatisfying. It took a long time for me to become invested in the book, some of which I found slightly wayward and dull. The most intriguing parts were those about the author’s own story but there weren’t many of those. It is, however, a quick read and contains some interesting notes on photography and France in the time of the countess.
March 6, 2025
Beleza como fato, sem motivo nem propósito, pode se estar com ou contra, mas não se pode estar sem. A Castiglione é excepcional porque ela era completamente sua beleza (se a Nathalie Léger está correta). Beleza como algo incontornável, inegável, em face do que ninguém pode se defender, "a ela, nada será perdoado, pois ela tem tudo". "I was sure you could not be so beautiful for nothing!", diz a Sra. Bennet, pra que então?
March 7, 2023
The first in a loose trilogy that I read all out of order (but it doesn't matter!) about real women - filmmaker Barbara Loden, performance artist Pippa Bacca, and this one about the Countess of Castiglione, interspersed with some light memoir by Leger. The Countess was essentially the OG Queen of the Selfie - so of course, then as now, some people had a problem with her.
January 26, 2020
Al final ha logrado aburrirme 😔
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