Deborah Turbeville:
Metamorphosis and the École des Beaux-Arts

By Denise Birkhofer

A curator and art historian based in Toronto, Birkhofer is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. She is the curator of the exhibition Deborah Turbeville: Otherworldly (The Image Centre, 2024).

In her 2009 book Past Imperfect, Deborah Turbeville revisited her previous body of work created between 1974—more or less the beginning of her artistic practice—and 1998.[1] A significant number of the volume’s pages are dedicated to a thematically ambitious project that she undertook at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1977, which represented a significant milestone in her career. In one spread, a grainy black and white photograph of the head of a woman, wrapped in fabric and with an unfixed dreamy gaze, is juxtaposed with an image of a hand covered in white plaster dust, a darker-coloured substance punctuating the fingertips. Inscribed above the image on the righthand page is the descriptive title “Metamorphosis of Ella M., ‘77,” in the artist’s own distinctive handwriting. On the opposite page is a typewritten excerpt from a seminal essay on Leonardo da Vinci by the 19th-century English art critic Walter Pater, which describes the Renaissance master’s lifelong quest for finding beauty in the everyday. This purposefully composed juxtaposition of text and image exemplifies how Turbeville centralized the concepts of metamorphosis and ecstasy in the realization of one of her most iconic series, broadly known as the École des Beaux-Arts.

Her first major project after relocating to Paris in the late 1970s, Turbeville selected as her stage set the iconic École des Beaux-Arts, a neo-classical complex of 19th-century buildings dedicated to the study of fine arts. Sporting headwraps and with bodies covered in a chalky-white substance, models Isabelle Weingarten and Ella Milewicz are posed amid classical sculptural and architectural elements like living sculptures, recalling the traditional academic practice of creating formal studies from the live human figure. The series of images which Turbeville referred to as The Metamorphosis of Ella M. appear to document the model’s body in the process of transforming from soft human flesh to something inanimate and hard.

After twenty years of working in the New York fashion industry, the École des Beaux-Arts series marks Turbeville’s turn toward projects of a more personal nature, most notably in the format of published books. The École des Beaux-Arts series features prominently in Turbeville’s influential first book, Wallflower (1978), both within its pages and on its cover.[2] Revisiting her own archive of previous projects—not only the recent École des Beaux-Arts series but also earlier work made in New York—in Wallflower, Turbeville orchestrated a purposeful sequence of images that suggest an atmospheric, yet enigmatic, visual narrative. Here, the models Isabelle and Ella become part of a larger cast of characters populating Turbeville’s pictorial universe.

True to her custom of utilizing multiple types of film on set, Turbeville used black and white 35mm film as well as color slide film for the Beaux-Arts shoot, which took place at the academic complex on January 15, 1977. In addition, she used Polaroids as immediate tools for assessing staging and composition, resulting in an extensive array of images in a variety of media. Throughout the images, the models Ella and Isabelle share space with various sculptural elements and tools of the trade, their bodies conforming to their surrounding atmosphere. Their wardrobe varies from contemporary yet nondescript clothing, to humble sheets of plastic simply gathered around their bodies, like statues prepared for storage. Their hair remains visible in some images, and wrapped up in fabric in others: this occlusion of any references to modern styling contributes to the images’ sense of timelessness. The women languidly pose on top of tarps, in front of or draped over plinths, occupying spaces normally reserved for sculpture. Scattered cans of paint and turpentine intermingle with crumbling plaster debris. As though originating from one of the spilling-over cans, a plaster-like white substance covers the models’ skin, transforming their soft flesh into something hard and strange. Turbeville’s compositions emphasize the chalky texture of the powdered plaster, and how it interacts with and transforms the human body, with a particular focus on the hands and feet. Flesh appears transformed; organic matter becomes inert and petrified. This suggestion of the models’ material transfiguration into works of sculpture is reinforced by the headwraps they wear, which recall the preparations necessary to ready the live figure for casting in plaster, a foundational practice in academic fine arts training.

Turbeville’s use of the term “metamorphosis” in describing this series confirms the obscure narrative of transformation suggested by her progression of imagery in the numerous collages and page spreads that she subsequently created. An avid reader and cinephile, Turbeville was no doubt aware of the many literary and filmic approaches to the theme of metamorphosis, and expressed admiration for the work of authors including Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust. Direct parallels can likewise be drawn to the iconography of transfiguration prevalent in European art history. An obvious point of reference is St. Teresa of Avila in ecstasy, perhaps most famously represented in marble by the master of Baroque sculpture, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, in the Cornaro Chapel of the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome (1647–1652). The model Ella’s posture, head thrown back with trance-like expression, and the suggestion of dramatic folds of drapery, evoke depictions of the Spanish nun in the midst of experiencing religious rapture.

Turbeville’s reference to the writings of Walter Pater, whom she quoted in the pages of her book Past Imperfect alongside images from the École des Beaux-Arts, further supports her interest in the concept of ecstasy. In his famed 1873 volume of collected essays Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Pater concludes that artistic genius can be realized only through an acute awareness of one’s inner life: “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”[3] Pater, whose ideas greatly influenced the subsequent Aesthetic movement, advocated that life is best lived intensely and in the pursuit of beauty. His belief in the transcendent power of an intense inner life resonates with the philosophical concept of “ecstasis” as a state of total immersion in being in order to achieve peak experience. Pater’s theoretical approach resonates throughout Turbeville’s oeuvre in her atmospheric evocation of an “intense inner life,” and perhaps most poignantly in the École des Beaux-Arts series through its direct reference to the theme of ecstasy.

Turbeville engaged with another iconic example of religious transfiguration in a series of colour positives from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts shoot, from which she later produced an edition of prints under the title Stigmata. In the best known image from this photo shoot, which was later produced as an edition of largescale, color inkjet prints, Ella is photographed through a pane of glass, her open palm stained with blood-red paint. The model’s pose, the image’s composition, and the given title clearly reference depictions of St. Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata, his outstretched hands bearing the wounds of Christ at the crucifixion. Perhaps even more relevant are comparisons to depictions of St. Catherine of Siena, one of the few historical pious women said to have borne the stigmata. Affinities with representations of the 14th-century mystic can be noted in Ella’s covered head, sober-toned garments, outstretched hand, and transfixed expression. Turbeville further explores this iconography in a work which juxtaposes the iconic bust-length portrait of Ella M. (now printed in black and white) with the image of a chalky hand punctuated by presumably blood-red fingertips. That the two prints form a diptych—a common format for the Catholic altarpiece—deepens their religious connotations.

In the École des Beaux-Arts series, as well as in Turbeville’s wider artistic practice, metamorphosis is not just a visual theme, but also an aesthetic strategy. She routinely experimented with alternative processes and materials, and transformed her photographs through multiple physical interventions including scratching negatives, distressing or tearing prints, and adding inscriptions or other marks. In defiance of the assumed mechanical reproducibility of the photographic object, Turbeville’s unique works reveal the presence of the artist’s hand and conceptualization. In the Stigmata diptych, for example, she altered the orientation and crop of the image of the hand, which she also utilized elsewhere in other orientations and contexts, such as the Past Imperfect page spread discussed above. The portrait of Ella on the right has been converted to black and white, and given new meaning by being placed in juxtaposition to the opposing image in the diptych format. Turbeville often suggests narratives through pairing, sequencing, or even cutting up prints and contact sheets and collaging them back together in a new order.

This is the case for the Metamorphosis of Ella M. collage, in which the frames have been composed in a purposefully sequential order; the individual prints feature a variety of tonalities and treatments, including torn edges and editorial markings. The prints are affixed to an irregular sheet of brown craft paper, some with additional textured papers layered underneath as a framing device. Turbeville experimented widely with the aesthetic possibilities offered by numerous material supports, ranging from humble craft paper—one of her favorites—to sheets of metal. She was similarly inclusive in the materials she used to adhere her prints to their supports, utilizing a variety of adhesives not usually found in the fine arts. Masking tape appears frequently in her work, for example, which she used not only as a functional adhesive, but also as an aesthetic element. Likewise wavering between aesthetic and utilitarian are the metal T-pins found in the Metamorphosis collage and elsewhere throughout Turbeville’s work; most commonly used in the production of clothing, the T-pins serve as a thematic link between her arts and fashion careers. Paralleling her interest in the representations of the stigmata, the technique of puncturing her prints with metal pins could be likened to the piercing of Christ’s crucified flesh with nails.

In Turbeville’s prolific body of work, the École des Beaux-Arts series perhaps best exemplifies her experimental approach to the physical fabrication of the object as well as to the conceptual staging of the photograph. Through her many creative mediations, Turbeville transforms her photographs from images to estranged, tactile objects. With each layer of calculated intervention, the metamorphosed image becomes further removed from material reality, and instead enters the otherworldly space of Turbeville’s intense inner life. And what setting could have been more appropriately chosen to situate her inquiries into material transformation and the art historical iconography of metamorphosis, ecstasy, and transfiguration, than one of Europe’s most iconic academies of fine arts?