From Old Masters to Old Buttons: Kitsch, Class, and the Imagined Medieval of the Clothilde Missal

On June 20, 1906, a young woman named Clothilde Coulaux scrawled the last elegant pen strokes of a colophon. From her home in German-occupied Alsace, she painstakingly planned, calligraphed, and illuminated her own French Missal. Created at a time of uncertainty between wars and regimes, it is a work of escapism that conjures a medieval life of luxury and decadence--an anachronistic fantasy that is as much about Clothilde’s present as it is the past. Painted in pastel watercolors in her own unique style, her sense of whimsy evokes the airiness of fairy tales. Her images are done with a wink and a nod, slipping effortlessly between carefully studied medieval iconography and contemporary kitsch. Saints and madonnas share their sacred space with quasi-nude mermaids and peg-legged pirates. A variety of recognizable masterpieces by Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci lend her work artistic gravitas, only to be slyly subverted by imagery drawn from contemporary postcards, picture buttons, and romance novels. The idealized past of Alsace glows warmly on the page as lovers snuggle and revelers guzzle wine, yet hovering Habsburg eagles and a defiant Joan of Arc serve as sobering references to the contemporary anxieties of a French woman living under German rule. Her distinctive style serves to unify it all, disguising the disparate sources of her imagery, and forging it into a new and unique work of self-expression, longing, and hope.