La Tête et la queue du serpent 1886

Félix Bracquemond created "La Tête et la queue du serpent," or "The Head and Tail of the Serpent," using etching and aquatint. Bracquemond was working in a France deeply divided by class and political upheaval. The print depicts a scene of both horror and perverse delight. The snake looms large with a hellish landscape opening behind it. The eye is drawn beyond the monstrous reptile toward the women, a mass of pale flesh, who are cavorting in the distance. Bracquemond makes the viewer complicit in the act of looking at the women and the snake. The darkness of the figures is set against the whiteness of the women, conjuring the ways in which the aesthetic category of beauty is used to reinforce power structures of gender and race. The artist’s vision can be read as a commentary on societal anxieties and the dynamics of power during a period of great social change. What does this tell us about the cultural construction of monstrosity, desire, and who gets to be seen, or unseen?