In Paris, an Exhibition Dedicated to Hair

September 25, 2012, 3:04 pm

By ELAINE SCIOLINO

PARIS - Hair, as the song from the musical goes, can be long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty, oily, greasy, fleecy.

It also can be shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen, knotted, polka-dotted, twisted, beaded, braided, powdered, flowered, confettied, bangled, tangled, spangled and spaghettied.

At the Musée du Quai Branly here, hair is just about all of these things, and even more. A new exhibition, “The Art of Hair: Frivolities and Trophies,” which opened last week, celebrates the universal importance of hair in art, fashion, style, ritual, sexuality, religion and culture, from antiquity to today.

Among the 280 objects on display are many of the kind you'd expect at an art museum: paintings, photographs and sculptures. And the Quai Branly is the Paris repository for the indigenous art of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania, so the exhibition also includes native American scalps, Ecuadoran shrunken heads, Peruvian mummified trophy heads and about 100 objects from the museum's permanent collection, including masks, jewelry, talismans, clothing and weapons made or decorated with human hair.

The opening rooms focus mainly on Western art and artifacts, juxtaposing blonds, brunettes and redheads to show the evolution of stereotypes attaching to each: blonds as angels, saints and mothers; brunettes, as their opposites-adventurers and sex symbols; redheads as drama queens.

Enormous color photographs of dark-haired actresses Ava Gardner and Gina Lollobrigida, their lips slightly parted, their makeup heavy, their cleavages showing, hang in the same area as white marble busts of French roya lty and Charles Cordier's bronzes of African and Chinese figures with coiffures that qualify as works of art themselves. Nearby is a series of paintings and photographs of redheads and blonds, the latter including a very young Jane Fonda with her hair in a half-pageboy, half-flip, looking like a sorority sister.

The stereotypes don't always hold: in one blown-up photograph, a very young and blonde Brigitte Bardot looks neither saintly nor angelic nor maternal as she is about to kiss a very young Alain Delon.

And hair, this show demonstrates, can be simultaneously virginal and sensuous. A 14th century French stone sculpture of Mary Magdalene, her eyes closed, her hands folded in prayer, is caressed and enveloped in hair that flows down to her feet.

“Hair has no fixed meaning,” said Yves Le Fur, the exhibition's curator. “It can show the norm and the anti-establishment, conformity and anti-conformity, seduction and repulsion, freedom and repression. It' s the only human material that can be shaped and distorted as you wish.”

Multimedia slide shows and short films illustrate the paradoxes and cultural divides. One slide show presents long-haired men-a street person, Albert Einstein, a young man in dreadlocks, a 1960s hippie-and men and women with shaved heads: a monk, a breast cancer survivor, a prisoner, a body builder, a skinhead, an American soldier, a Japanese warrior.

Other images and short films capture connections between hair and loss. A photo dating from the late 19th century or early 20th century of a Malagasy widow shows her long hair unkempt and flying in the wind; a widow in Madagascar did not wash for a year after the death of her husband, to avoid attracting potential suitors.

One of the most poignant objects is a hairpiece of three beautiful blonde curls held together by a white satin bow and set in a simple frame. It was cut from a young woman named Emma when she entered the Carmelite or der. André Malraux bought the object at a Paris flea market and gave it to a friend for his twentieth birthday.

Hair is associated with punishment in a short, silent black and white film clip made during the liberation of France, in which French women, their heads shaved for allegedly having had sexual relations with Germans, are paraded in public.

The mood of the exhibition shifts in the exclusively non-Western rooms, where hair is used in clothing, body decoration and religious and cultural rituals. The integration of women's long hair in Chinese tribal capes made of sheep's and yak's wool helped guarantee a dense natural weave that made the cape nearly impermeable. Wigs in Papau New Guinea were made of human hair with feathers, in sub-Saharan Africa with mud, vegetal fibers, pigments and bark as well as human hair.

A 20th century Madagasgar necklace of fabric, horn, wood, pearls, shells and hair offers a touch of whimsy: The pendant is a small wooden h ead decorated with human hair and wearing a hat and sitting peacefully in an animal horn. The figure seems to be smiling.

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“The Art of Hair” continues until July 14, 2013; an audio guide for the exhibition can be downloaded at www.quaibanly.fr.