Les Petites Mains
Hands make fascinating subjects for portraits. As expressive as faces, hands bear the work of time, the trace evidence of what they have carried in life,. And of what they have let go. I love to photograph them. Perhaps that’s why this phrase caught my attention: petite mans (little hands). My dear friend, Carol, and I had gone to see the exhibition “Heavenly Bodies: Clothing and the Catholic Imagination” at the Cloisters Museum, not far from where I live in northern Manhattan.
We were reading the wall text which described a dress designed by Maria Grazia Chiurri and Pierpaolo Piccioli for Valentino haute couture. I don’t know much about fashion, but the dress was spectacular. Gunmetal gray, made of a net fabric that was almost invisible it was so thin, it had a high collared neck and long sleeves. Were it not for the sensuousness of the sheer fabric, you’d describe the shape of the dress as quite prim, even severe. The full skirt, buoyed up by layers of tulle, was hand embroidered with a reproduction of a delightful painting of Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1526). From the garden blossoming over and around the skirt, the blooms and lush leaves of paradise trailed upward, trellising up the sleeves and across the back and neckline.
The unexpectedness of this choice - a 16th century vision of Edenic wonder paused in the moment before the fateful choice to pick an apple from a tree - made me laugh. I mean: What’s it doing on a dress? Like the best surprises, it claimed an inspired certainty of rightness, inevitability.
And it was hands, many hands - petite mans - little hands - which made the surprise real; hands which transformed an idea, through silk and metal thread, into something joyous. I picture them working, all those petite mans, hovering over their sewing like a flurry of butterflies or hummingbirds. I picture them working with a touch just as light and delicate, expertly pulling their needles through fabric which might as well have been a cloud or breath it’s so close to being air itself rather than material, making not a tear or pull, or dropping a stitch.
But, as the wall text said, these petite mans (these little hands - a phrase which, despite charming me no end, is also tinged with diminishment and sexism) were anonymous. So, virtuosos all, and unknown, except to their families, and workroom colleagues, and the accountant who issued their paychecks.
I wonder if any of the people inhabiting their petite mans imagined their work being on display in a museum, and receiving that imprimatur of worth and mastery.
We’re fortunate to know the know names of the many individual artists we love, to be able to reach back deep into the past and say, “You [insert name here] made this.” A name makes it harder to take the work for granted; this beauty came from a specific set of (mostly male) hands. Even so, how much other work remains unsigned? How much that gets us through our day comes from hands unknown?
From the cave painters, the stone and marble carvers, the manuscript illuminators, the workshop apprentices painting the large canvas waiting for the revered master to paint in the faces, the sculptors of ritual tribal objects and masks, the scroll calligraphers, the studio assistants placing the lights, well, the roll call of anonymity unspools into infinity . . . save for a lucky one or two dignified with an attempt at naming such as “The Master of the Ghent Altarpiece.”
This beloved artist,“Anonymous” creates counter to all current knowledge and art myths. “Anonymous” lives in the difference between giving attention - a hand held open to give and receive, a hand held open to make - or getting attention - a hand, most likely, closed which cannot hold a tool. Maybe it’s not quite that simple. Or maybe it’s a tension: wanting to make, wanting what was made to be seen. Or this truly difficult question: will I be seen myself?
I’m not immune.
Here I am sending out a newsletter, after all. There are days when I get so embarrassed by how worried I am about the slow creeping growth of my Instagram followers, especially on the days when I realize I can’t compete with the Professionally Hot Instagram Men or the cats and dogs who have triumphed over impossible odds. (Don’t worry: I still love you Lil’ Bub and Purrsistent Kitten!). Every metric of modern success insists that it is professional death - death! - to feel otherwise.
I want to resist this. Really, I do But when the stakes are that high . . .
That’s when it’s time to remember that somewhere in a room far from mine, a person unknown to me dons a white coat and enters the atelier workroom. She gather her tools about her and sets to work. She begins to unspool thread in her little hands. Wielding a lifetime’s worth of skill and intuition, as sharp and concentrated as the tip of a needle, her little hands give flight to an idea. A leaf begins to appear on a dress. A garden grows.
Creation itself becomes a garment, a seemingly weightless garment, a garment even you could wear so as to move about the world arrayed in splendor.
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