Art Historian Allison Leigh on Dating, Dumping and Loving Misogynist Masters

By Elena Vasquez

Art historian Allison Leigh spent years imaginatively "dating" Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Renoir and Gustave Courbet — and her account of that process is now published in her book The Misogynists: A Reckoning with Modern Art, available from Abrams Books.

Leigh, who has taught at her university for the last decade, traces the method to a question from a student about her working process. "I find the tools of the method actor useful," she told the student. Her aim: to develop an understanding of past artists so thorough "that the men I study start to feel like real people I'm interacting with in my daily life."

The idea, she writes, had been forming since graduate school. Her first book examined nineteenth-century Russian painting for insight into the hidden anxieties and evolving identities of men of the period. Its opening chapter dealt with Karl Briullov, the Romantic painter whose tense relationship with his father and volatile temper — he once threw a boot at a canvas so hard that it ripped through the fabric — made him feel like a man she actually knew.

When did the research start to feel like a relationship?

Leigh writes that her immersion in Briullov became so close that "at some point, it started to feel like we were dating." Briullov was handsome and produced dreamy self-portraits in the prevailing Romantic style. But when she finished his chapter, she became morose and could not begin the next artist's file. Her conclusion: "it felt like I'd broken up with Briullov. Like I'd lost him. And I missed him terribly."

She notes that no other scholar, to her knowledge, has reported similar experiences. The feeling returned, in far darker form, during her next project on what she calls "some of the most awful misogynists of the modern art canon." To write about them, she gathered exhaustive detail: waking hours, eating habits in the studio, height, friendships, relationships with their mothers, visits to brothels, pressure on models for sex.

Her stated goal was documentary. "My goal was to make the nasty things they said about women leap off the page, to make the abuse they inflicted on their models and wives and girlfriends come to life for my readers."

How bad were these artists?

Leigh's catalogue is specific:

• Eugène Delacroix enjoyed painting women being stabbed to death, and called women "monkeys," "toys" and "monsters" in his journal and letters.
• Auguste Renoir believed women never evolve beyond the condition of childhood.
• Paul Gauguin cheated on his wives with thirteen-year-old girls.
• Pablo Picasso slapped his girlfriends if they went out without permission.
• Edgar Degas, beloved today for his ballerinas, made models hold grueling poses and threatened them with a hammer.
• Gustave Courbet sank into alcoholism; Degas became blind and increasingly miserable.

"I was terrified of each of them, but in different ways," Leigh writes, and that fear grew with each chapter.

What did the research do to the author?

The process altered her behavior. Degas disliked models wearing their hair up; Leigh began growing hers out and styling it loosely. Renoir painted women with their mouths open to make them look, in Leigh's words, "more immature and brainless"; she became hyper-vigilant about never letting her own mouth hang open while writing or reading.

Leigh could not shake her crush on Delacroix in particular. His journal worries — about his height, his inability to afford the latest cut of a jacket, his tendency to be lured "by foolish distractions" — broke her heart, even as his writings on women disgusted her. "I know so many men like this, and I've loved some of them deeply," she writes. Degas, in turn, reminded her of men she had dated who refused therapy though depression was costing them jobs.

She drew explicit connections between these artists and contemporary toxic masculinity — "the thousands of men and boys who haunt incel forums or find solace in emulating manosphere influencers today." The life stories sometimes made her cry, she writes, something that had never happened in all her years as a scholar.

Her summary of the bond: "I knew what I felt for them was a weird kind of love—the kind born of pure captivation and a commitment to doing the extent of their perversities justice as a historian." It was, she writes, twisted and damaging — but the pages she sent her editor kept getting a thumbs up, so she continued.

Does she regret it?

Even after final corrections, Leigh writes, she felt any of the artists might call her up, "like they were a bunch of exes I never had the heart to block on my phone (though all my friends said I should)." She hopes the book's release will finally let her say "we're done" to each of them and let the thousands of sketches she pored over fade from memory.

She ends with a defense of the method, shame and all: "We historians should love the subjects we write about—our empathy is what makes us good professors and it might just be what makes our books worth reading."

Whether readers agree with that claim or not, The Misogynists documents a research process that pushed archival immersion to the edge of self-harm — and a scholar willing to describe the cost in public.