Constantin Meunier and the horseback shrimpers: temporal dialectics of obsolete labor in fin-de-siecle Belgian art

Johnsson, Alec Calder

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129953 Copy

Description

Title

Constantin Meunier and the horseback shrimpers: temporal dialectics of obsolete labor in fin-de-siecle Belgian art

Author(s)

Johnsson, Alec Calder

Issue Date

2025-07-21

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

O'Brien, David

Department of Study

Art & Design

Discipline

Art History

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

M.A.

Degree Level

Thesis

Keyword(s)

• Constantin Meunier
• horseback shrimping
• Belgium
• Brussels
• heritage
• obsolescence
• bronze
• sculpture
• material
• labor
• miniature
• figurine
• monument
• (historical-temporal) dialectical discourse
• duplicability
• Formgefühl
• skeuomorph.

Abstract

This thesis is a material study of Constantin Meunier’s 1891 bronze figurine Horseback Shrimper and its role as a counterpoint in the Belgian sculptor-painter’s pantheon of sympathetic working-class imagery. Representing an occupation that was fast becoming obsolete in Meunier’s lifetime (and that survives today mainly as a UNESCO-protected tourist attraction), the statuette is almost anomalous in an oeuvre dominated by laborers whose professions, while far from glamorous, were sustained by persistent demand and/or associated to the developing industrial technology that all but outmoded the shrimper and his horse, consigning them to a narrow strip of the western Flemish coastline. The little-known bronze is retrenched within the context of the era’s Belgian sculpture, defined as it was by federally backed campaigns for public statuary that overlapped concerns of modern aesthetics and the young nation’s industrial and labor heritage, and that were epitomized by the Monument to Labor in which Meunier’s career culminated. These considerations, along with those of the ineluctable absorption of water by outdoors sculpture, open a theoretical question as to why the horseback shrimper would be excluded from this dialogue, much less omitted from the Belgian monumental canon, where it might have been productive of such dialogue. To that end, I conduct a historical-temporal dialectical discourse of the bronze, after Hilde van Gelder, to examine its formal engagement of past, present and future temporalities. This discourse marshals visual evidence from the roles played by planarity, allegory and duplicability (including across media) across Meunier’s oeuvre, and reads it in the lenses of contemporary material-perceptual theories of sculpture (in relief and in the round) from Adolf von Hildebrand, and the analogous present-day theories of Rosalind Krauss and Alina Payne. Particular attention is paid here to the contemporary European discourse on the authorship of duplicable sculptures, especially bronzes, and on the aesthetic-material representation of labor in the tools of the sculpted laborer’s trade, to which the laborer becomes corporeally and ontologically affixed through adaptation by iterative, rhythmic use (Formgefühl). The ultimate argument is that the horseback shrimper’s Formgefühl—besides conforming him to regional, obsolete labor and isolating him from any of the promises of industrial capitalism (and socialism)—would have frustrated any pragmatic monumental tribute of him during Meunier’s career and makes his bronzed miniature form more apropos. In such form, the shrimper better evokes a poignant connotation of emancipation from time, from any ready attachment to a given historical period as well as from the impermanent sociocultural zeitgeist of any such period’s working class. At the close, the idea of the shrimper as a skeuomorph is posited so as to reflect on his continued utility as a living aesthetic marvel to Belgian heritage.

Graduation Semester

2025-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129953

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2025 Alec Johnsson

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