Jean-Claude Lebensztejn's history of the urinating figure in art,
Pissing Figures 1280-2014, is at once a scholarly inquiry into an
important visual motif, and a ribald statement on transgression and
limits in works of art in general. Lebensztejn is one of France's
best-kept secrets. A world-class art historian who has lectured and
taught at major universities in the United States, his work has remained
almost entirely in French, his American audience limited to a small but
dedicated group of cognoscenti.
First introducing the Manneken Pis--the iconic little boy whose stream
of urine supplies water to this famous fountain and is also the logo for
a Belgian beer company--the author takes the reader through a
semi-scatological maze of cultural history. The earliest example is a
fresco scene located directly above Cimabue's Crucifixion from around
1280 at the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, in which Lebensztejn's
careful eye locates an angel behind a pillar who looks like he is about
to urinate through a hole in his garment. He continues to navigate
expertly through cultural twists and turns, stopping to discuss Pier
Paolo Pasolini's 1968 film Teorema, for example, and Marlene Dumas's
1996-1997 homage to Rembrandt's pissing woman. At every moment,
Lebensztejn's prose is lively, his thinking dynamic, and his subject
matter entertaining.
In this short and poignant cultural history, readers not only find the
care for detail that has made Lebensztejn into one of the greatest
European art historians, but also the rebelliousness that makes him one
of the most interesting intellectuals of our time. The first widely
distributed book of Lebensztejn's in English, Pissing Figures
1280-2014 is simultaneously published in France by Éditions Macula.
